OAN Roy Francis
UPDATED 11:38 AM – Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Ryan Graves, a former United States Navy pilot, has called on Congress to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) in the skies above the United States. He spoke about his first-hand experiences in an interview with Fox News.
Graves was a flight instructor and spent around 11 years in the Navy as a pilot flying F-18s. However, he and other members of his squadron have yet to receive any answer in relation to a phenomenon they experienced while flying.
Describing his experience, Graves said that the objects had showed up as “contacts on our radar” until eventually “we were seeing these with our eyeballs.”
“While I was in the Navy, myself and others in my squadron had an experience that continues to this day and at first was something that we didn’t have a name for,” Graves said. “Two aircraft from my squadron were flying side by side and one of these objects went right between their aircraft.”
He went on to say that his squad members described the object as a “dark gray or black cube inside of a clear sphere.” He also said that the object were strangely stationary at time but did not behave like “tethered balloons” because they could move at extremely high speeds.
“Eventually we would see these objects proceeding about 0.6 to 0.8 Mach on average, which is about 250 to 350 knots at those altitudes,” he explained. “And they would be either in some type of holding pattern or seemingly just proceeding in a single direction.”
Graves said that the American people with preconceived notions about UAPs need to approach the issue with a “first principles” approach.
“We need to be able to agnostically, as a media, accept that there is uncertainty and look at it from a first principles approach,” he said. “Because if we wrap it into all that context about little green men, we’re going to be barking up the wrong tree.”
He gave two possible explanations for what the objects could be.
“It’s either going to be some type of adversarial platform, and it’s a matter for national security, or we don’t know what it is,” he said. “And it’s a matter for scientific inquiry and curiosity. We’ve been stymied to not have that scientific curiosity as of late, but that’s the biggest thing that needs to change and is changing right now.”
“For our military and our national security, our ability to know what’s over our heads is of critical importance. And if we don’t know what it is, we need to be curious about it. Because we may have national security issues fall out of that anomalous bucket,” Graves went on. “Once we start looking a little bit more closely into our airspace some things are going to pop out that [we] weren’t expecting to see.”
The former Navy pilot said that the media coverage of these incidents still “leaves a lot to be desired.”
Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), among other government officials, has acknowledged the unexplained incidents and the risks that they potentially pose to national security.
“Advanced objects demonstrating advanced technology are routinely flying over our restricted or sensitive airspace posing a risk to both flight safety & national security,” Rubio tweeted in February.
Graves went on to explain that a lot of pilots have had similar experiences that have shaken them up, but they have no safe environment to talk about their experience. He also called on government agencies to begin “sharing their information and offering it forward.”
“I’ve talked to a lot of pilots who have had some pretty powerful experiences that have really shaken them. They don’t want to go and share that on what you would loosely consider your talking head media set up,” he said. “They just don’t feel safe still doing it.”
In February, Graves had written an article detailing his experiences with UAPs in the military which sent shockwaves through the media and online platforms.
“These were no mere balloons. The unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) accelerated at speeds up to Mach 1, the speed of sound. They could hold their position, appearing motionless, despite Category 4 hurricane-force winds of 120 knots. They did not have any visible means of lift, control surfaces or propulsion — in other words nothing that resembled normal aircraft with wings, flaps or engines,” he wrote. “I am a formally trained engineer, but the technology they demonstrated defied my understanding.”