EDITORIAL GUIDE
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Ryan Graves UAP Testimony — Navy Pilot's Decade of Encounters Explained
Lieutenant Commander Ryan Graves (USN, ret.) flew F/A-18 Super Hornets for over a decade and accumulated over 1,500 flight hours before departing the Navy. Unlike David Fravor's single 2004 encounter, Graves and his squadronmates reported near-daily UAP encounters in restricted U.S. airspace off the Atlantic coast for approximately two years starting in 2014 — a sustained pattern that he argued posed active safety risks to naval aviation and went officially unaddressed. His July 2023 congressional testimony was the first time a combat pilot described persistent, operationally disruptive UAP encounters before Congress under oath.
The 2014–2015 Atlantic Coast Encounters — Two Years of UAP in Restricted Airspace
Beginning in approximately 2014, F/A-18 Super Hornet pilots assigned to USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier air wing began reporting unidentified objects in restricted military airspace off the Atlantic coast of the United States — particularly in the Virginia Beach, North Carolina, and Florida operating areas. According to Graves, the objects were present in the airspace nearly every day, observed by multiple pilots simultaneously, detected on radar, and in some cases avoided via in-flight evasive maneuvering.
The objects reported by Graves and his squadronmates had characteristics consistent with UAP observed in other official cases: a cube-within-a-sphere configuration described by some pilots, persistence in high-wind conditions that would be impossible for balloons or drones of that era, radar returns consistent with a solid metallic object, and flight profiles that did not conform to any known aircraft. The encounters were persistent enough that they became routine briefing items, with pilots developing informal procedures for maneuvering around the objects. None of the individual encounter reports produced a formal investigation — Graves described the reporting as 'not structured to accept' information that didn't fit a known category.
Near-Miss Incident — What Graves Described to Congress
In his July 2023 congressional testimony, Graves described a specific near-miss incident in which a UAP flew directly between two F/A-18 aircraft flying in formation at approximately 100-foot separation. The object — which Graves described as a small, dark grey cube inside a translucent sphere — passed between the two aircraft without evasive action or any apparent awareness of the aircraft. The near-miss was reported through normal safety channels but received no formal safety investigation, which Graves characterized as emblematic of the broader institutional failure to treat UAP as an aviation safety concern.
The aviation safety framing was Graves's distinctive contribution to the July 2023 hearing. While Fravor and Grusch focused on the nature and origin of UAP, Graves framed his testimony primarily as a safety and airspace integrity issue. He argued that U.S. military airspace is being routinely penetrated by unidentified objects whose origin and intent are unknown, that pilots are discouraged from reporting encounters because of career stigma, and that the institutional response is inadequate given the operational implications. His testimony led directly to AARO opening a formal reporting channel for military aviation safety incidents involving UAP.
Americans for Safe Aerospace — Why Graves Founded It
Following his separation from the Navy, Graves founded Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA) — a nonprofit organization focused specifically on the aviation safety dimensions of UAP reporting. ASA's mandate is not UAP disclosure in the broad sense but specifically: improving reporting systems so that pilots can file UAP encounter reports without career risk, ensuring that aviation safety agencies (FAA, DoD, AARO) have the data they need to assess airspace integrity, and advocating for systematic data collection that treats UAP as an aviation safety issue rather than a fringe concern.
ASA has worked with former military and commercial pilots to collect encounter reports through a safety-focused framework rather than a disclosure-advocacy framework. Graves has argued that the two communities — safety-focused aviation professionals and disclosure-focused UAP researchers — have different needs and different appropriate channels, and that mixing the two has historically harmed the credibility of legitimate safety reporting. Under his leadership, ASA submitted formal comments to the FAA and AARO recommending specific changes to aviation safety reporting protocols and received some incorporation of those recommendations into AARO's official reporting guidelines.
Graves's Testimony in the Broader July 2023 Context
Ryan Graves, David Fravor, and David Grusch testified together before the House Oversight Committee's National Security Subcommittee on July 26, 2023. The three witnesses represented three distinct types of UAP testimony: Fravor as a single, multi-corroborated close-encounter witness (specific event, specific date, sensor data); Graves as a representative of a class of ongoing, operationally significant encounters by multiple pilots over an extended period; and Grusch as an intelligence insider making programmatic allegations about classified programs.
The distinction matters for how researchers should weight each account. Graves's testimony is the strongest evidence for the proposition that UAP are present in U.S. military airspace as a routine operational matter rather than as a rare anomalous event. The near-daily frequency of encounters he described, the multi-pilot corroboration, and the radar detection data — combined with the complete absence of any official finding about what these objects are — is a different class of evidence than the single 2004 Fravor encounter, and in some respects more alarming from an airspace integrity standpoint. His full testimony is in the public congressional record.