Ryan Graves

Ryan Graves is a former U.S. Navy F/A-18F pilot whose squadron encountered unidentified objects almost daily off the U.S. East Coast beginning in 2014. He was the first pilot from the modern encounter wave to go public under his own name, and he has repositioned the UAP question as an aviation safety and data problem rather than a belief question.

Graves flew with Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-11 out of Naval Air Station Oceana, deploying aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt and later the Enterprise. His squadron's encounters followed a 2014 radar upgrade, and included a near-collision that produced a formal safety report.

Graves appeared in the 2019 New York Times story on Navy pilot sightings and the 2021 60 Minutes segment that mainstreamed the subject. On July 26, 2023, he testified under oath before the House Oversight subcommittee that UAP sightings by military and commercial pilots are dramatically underreported due to stigma. He founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, a nonprofit that collects pilot reports, and has become the aviation community's channel into the issue. He also chaired a UAP integration effort within the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Graves describes objects detected by radar, infrared, and eyes: dark cubes inside translucent spheres, objects stationary in hurricane-force winds or maneuvering beyond known endurance. He testified that if UAP are foreign drones they are an urgent security problem, and if they are something else, a scientific one. His contribution is the reframing: pilots as sensor operators filing safety data, not believers telling stories.

Official UAP reporting has attributed many incursions of that era to drones, balloons, and clutter without resolving every case. Graves responds that correlated multi-sensor and visual detections are not artifacts, and that hundreds of pilots have since reported through his organization.

Graves leads Americans for Safe Aerospace and remains one of the most quoted voices in the congressional and PURSUE-era UAP debate.