Once known as UFOs, sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena present a thorny issue for the aviation community. Former F/A-18 pilot Ryan Graves who leads Americans for Safe Aerospace joins to discuss the risks UAP pose and shares progress made on destigmatizing reporting among pilots.
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Transcript
Guy Norris:
Hello and welcome to this edition of Aviation Week's Check 6 podcast. I'm Senior Editor, Guy Norris. With me is Garrett Reim, our space and emerging technologies editor. So today we're delighted to welcome Ryan Graves. He's executive director for Americans for Safe Aerospace, the first military pilot-led nonprofit dedicated to unidentified anomalous phenomena as a matter of national security, aerospace safety and science.
So just to put you in the picture, Ryan, is a former U.S. Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot and a combat veteran. He is also the first U.S. active duty pilot to come forward publicly about regular sightings of UAPs or UFOs as they were once and sometimes better known. And he's even testified before Congress on the subject. So one of the great reasons we're talking with Ryan today is that he also serves as the first chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Integration and Outreach Committee whose goal is to serve as a neutral, scientifically focused group, which to enable safer commercial and military air and space operations and critically, to destigmatize the topic. So with all of that said, welcome Ryan. Thank you for joining us.
Ryan Graves:
It's my pleasure to be here, Guy.
Guy Norris:
Thank you again. Before we get to the big questions and about air safety and obviously to Garrett's questions, I wondered if you could just tell our listeners about your UAP experiences during your time in the Navy, and particularly from your first encounter, which I guess was April 2014.
Ryan Graves:
Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I was assigned to VFA-11, the Red Rippers, in Virginia Beach, which is an F-18F Squadron in the United States Navy. And we had deployed aboard the USS Enterprise in 2012. And when we came home from that deployment, we began to upgrade various systems in our jet, including our radar system from the APG-73 to the APG-79 radar system, which was quite a big jump in capabilities. It took about eight months or so for that upgrade process to percolate across all the jets in our squadron. So on some days we might be flying, say, in the morning with the older radar and then later in the evening perhaps with the newer radar. And what we consistently discovered was that the newer radar was picking up a multitude of objects in our working areas off the coast of Virginia Beach that we weren't seeing just on, say, the previous flight with the older radar.
At first we assumed these were radar errors of some type, but eventually we would get close enough to the objects for other sensors on board to correlate with the radar and be able to detect these objects. One of those sensors was our ATFLIR system, an electro-optical targeting pod, as well as our AIM-9X which is a short-range air-to-air missile. All of these sensors would be cued by our radar system, and when close enough, we would notice that they were indeed picking up objects in the same point that our radar was dropping us off on. And that's what really cued us in that these objects we were observing weren't just radar errors themselves, but were potentially real physical objects that we could potentially run into and have some type of midair. And these objects were not behaving the way we would expect. They were very often completely stationary over a point in the ground, anywhere from the surface to upwards of 30, 40,000 feet.
We'd see them at 0.6 to 0.8 Mach, sometimes in circular or racetrack holding patterns. And we'd also see them flying supersonic, 1.1, 1.2 Mach, typically heading east in those particular scenarios. We would often try to guide ourselves in with the radar, with the FLIR, in order to have a close aboard pass emerge
with these objects in order to try to visually identify them. But very often this was a futile effort. We would set ourselves up, typically on a stationary object about 500 feet below or so, and all our sensors, our radar, our FLIR, our missiles, our electronic systems, would be telling us exactly where the object is, even be pumping that information into our augmented reality headset or helmet. And so we knew exactly where to look. This was a pretty benign maneuver for us. We should have been able to break out the objects, but we weren't able to see anything.
We turned back around. Our sensors would reacquire the target, and once again, it would still be there on all the sensors, perhaps slightly displaced. It wasn't until several weeks later after this had become a regular occurrence, that two aircraft from my squadron were flying into the entry point of those working areas, a fixed location at about 12,000 feet at a particular GPS location, where one of these objects split the section. Went right between the two aircraft that were about 150 feet apart. The object described as a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere, went within about 50 feet of the cockpit of the leading aircraft. He immediately canceled the flight, had lost confidence in his ability to safely clear the area in front of his aircraft and returned to the squadron space where he reported that I almost hit one of those darn things that we had been seeing. And that was our first visual sighting of what these objects were.
Since then, we've had a numerous amount of reports from that area, from other F-18 operating areas on the West Coast, over the Gulf of Mexico and over land where they have been seeing similar objects, often described as metallic spheres with the same performance characteristics that I've described to you. And they're typically between about five to 15 feet in diameter is the best estimate that we have right now. And that was really my introduction to this issue. And at the time, there was no talk of UAP. That wasn't something that was even in our lingo. There were some chuckles about UFOs, but we were very pragmatic. We had a lot to do, a lot of training requirements and getting ready for our next deployment. And so at least for myself, the assumption was that this issue would get resolved through normal channels, whatever those were, as time progressed.
And as a quick ending point, I learned that that wasn't true, that this wasn't getting resolved within normal channels, when I saw in 2017, a New York Times article released various footages from Virginia Beach, and in fact from my squadron, from flights that I was involved with, where it was clear to me that this had not gone up the chain to a significant degree to lead to any type of resolution. And that's when I decided to speak out about this topic.
Guy Norris:
Right. And of course, I suppose I've got to ask you, obviously as a pilot, what was your gut reaction really, as a professionally trained pilot? What was the sort of process you went through afterwards, after experiencing it and in deciding what to say?
Ryan Graves:
Well, for us, we're simple fighter pilots. We like to put things into categories and into buckets. So for us, having these objects out there, they either really fit into two buckets, either an adversarial system or some type of benign system. And either of those buckets for us was a safety of flight concern. I think we kind of overlooked as a group the seriousness of the national security concern that this might imply. And for us, we were really just treating it as a potential mid-air hazard that we had to avoid. So once we were all in agreement that these are real, these are physical, we could potentially hit them, we simply treated them like any other mid-air hazard that one might have out there. So we would avoid the objects. We stopped merging with them, and we would often reschedule or even cancel training missions if these objects were in the areas that we were limited to.
Guy Norris:
And you mentioned the New York Times report in 2017 and the video clips that emerged from the Nimitz and Roosevelt, USS Theodore Roosevelt in Kansas as well. And more pilots slowly beginning to speak out about what you've described as advanced objects demonstrating cutting edge technology that we cannot explain, that are routinely flying over our military bases or entering restricted airspace. So I know it's pretty obvious, we're gathered talking about this to probably a bunch of aviation people who are listening to this, our audience, we in aerospace collectively realize that these days, if you have a culture in which pilots are not reporting, then you have a safety issue automatically. Whatever they see might be completely explicable depending on the circumstances, but if they don't get reported in the first place, then it's a safety issue.
And even the basic mythology surrounding UAP, UFO events, appears to create an environment in which the reaction of a pilot or crew might itself become a safety issue. So I think we can agree sharing is a fundamental aviation safety culture. And we've got countless examples haven't we, of where sharing helps identify patterns of behavior or events such as the infamy of unstable approaches or controlled flight into terrain where danger lurks?
Garrett, could we bring you in here at this point? Because I know you're trying to look at really what the next steps are and how we could help destigmatize, I suppose, this subject.
Garrett Reim:
Yeah, I wanted to dive in a little bit on the safety aspect some more to maybe give people a little bit more color on some of those visual sightings. And in particular, that one instance where you mentioned the object flew between, I think you were talking about two F-18s. Did those pilots feel any turbulence or besides the visual sighting, did it rock the aircraft or anything like that?
Ryan Graves:
None that was reported at the time. That could very well be the case, but none that was particularly reported. I believe the object was actually stationary at that entry point. And the aircraft itself were providing the relative motion. So although it appeared as if it zipped past the two jets, I believe it was actually stationary there. And the two aircraft, which were probably about 300 knots, 350 knots at that time, zipped right past it.
Garrett Reim:
And have there have been other close calls or close passes with objects like this. It hasn't all been visual but far off in the distance?
Ryan Graves:
When we had that near midair, we kind of came together as a squadron and said, "Okay, there's been some chatter about these objects. It hasn't been very well promulgated, but this issue, this instance, represents a true hazard report that we now need to file with the Naval Aviation Safety Center." And when we did that, we took a census of the squadron to speak with really all the pilots say, "Okay, we have to report this. Let's really think back to instances that we may have had with this." And as it turned out, we didn't just file the one safety report at that time. We backdated and filed about five hazard reports all at the same time, because other pilots came forward saying that they had near misses with these objects as well that went unreported due to the stigma. And this is, and Guy touched on it a moment ago, trained aviators are very cognizant of the fact that communication crew, resource
management, operational risk management, these are key things, key tools that we have in our toolbox, issues avoid promulgating small issues in the larger issues as they compile up on each other.
And when I started speaking to commercial pilots about this back in 2019 or so, if say the guy in the left seat, the pilot saw something inexplicable, he would often not even report it to the guy in the right seat. He was too afraid to, especially if it was a junior/senior type situation where he didn't want to come out potentially and be highlighted as incompetent or wacky or whatever the stigma is going to lead for the conclusion there. But one of my great prides in advancing this conversation is that not only are pilots starting to share within the cockpit to enhance their operational awareness, they're also now going out to FAA controllers, which was another big hurdle where they didn't want to share that information because now that tags their aircraft and themselves to that issue.
But now I have countless examples of pilots that not only in one aircraft, but they're reporting to FAA or the air traffic controllers and other airliners are radioing and saying, "Yeah, we see that too. We don't know what that is." There are some major airlines that have started collecting these reports within their operational centers and have been proactive with funneling that information to upcoming traffic to areas where pilots have reported these instances. And so we have seen some massive progress in pilot's awareness and communication on this topic, which I think is very key to being able to not only just understand this, but at least have the acknowledgement and tracking capability for where these are and to mitigate any type of safety issues that might arise because of it.
Garrett Reim:
I think that lays it out well and leads into my next question is, how do you scientifically investigate this? You as a military pilot have procedures for investigating whether it might be an adversary aircraft or something benign. And you went through that when you were talking about using your radar and your FLIR and doing a pass and so forth. But commercial pilots, their procedure's a little different. They're not flying off course to go investigate things. Air traffic controls got its own thing. So how do you bring all these people together, establish a scientific procedure for collecting information and sharing it, especially, how do you do it in a way that, so you're not getting a lot of false positives or collecting a lot of junk. Because there's a lot of drones out there, there's just a lot more stuff in the air and you're going to get a lot of noise. So how do you establish a scientific procedure and what are you guys doing as an organization to do that?
Ryan Graves:
Yeah, that's a great question. And to your point in F-18, we have a lot of tools that help us identify both within visual range and beyond visual range, what the platforms may be. But of course, the commercial aviation community doesn't have access to those tools. And so we're not there to have a complete solution quite yet. In the opinion of my nonprofit Americans for Safe Aerospace as well as the UAP Integration and Outreach Committee, we believe an increase in reporting on this topic is one of the first key steps that we can do. And tied to that is a reduction in stigma.
And I'll push back slightly about the junk piece as well. I think we need to collect all this information, and there's some very powerful tools out there now that can be used after the fact, to be able to parse through the various data points to be able to identify, okay, is this something truly exceptional? Is this potentially new phenomenon we're seeing due to the proliferation of satellites in low earth orbit and in orbit? Or is this, to your point, a drone, which is very much a safety issue as well that needs to be reported. If there is, say, a drone that is exhibiting capabilities that may fool the pilot in some sense to think it's exceptional when it's not, it still very much poses a aviation safety risk. And if those are going unreported due to the stigma, that's very much a problem as well.
So what we're doing at my nonprofit is serving as a neutral, trusted resource for professionals, commercial pilots and veterans to be able to report their particular instances. And by gathering that database, we're partnering with scientific organizations, especially those associated with engineering specialties that are related to aviation safety, cognitive scientists, human factors, engineers, and the like.
And we're allowing them access to a portion of that data so that they can put forward papers and recommendations for future reporting systems within, say, the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System, or perhaps custom solutions that are going to have a centralized database where the scientific community more broadly can evaluate these cases before recommendations. And then once we have those recommendations, I think we can go forward with potential solutions for not just detecting these objects, but for characterizing them further through their performance characteristics using machine learning, perhaps combining that with algorithms that provide situational awareness to satellites in orbit to be able to dismiss them. So the pilot says, "Hey, this isn't an aircraft off my nose. This is a far away satellite that just happens to be as bright as a landing light." And so that's the type of analysis that I think we'll get to as we continue to reduce the stigma, we build up the number of reports we have and then we implement those other tools. That's work that we're doing both at the UAP Integration and Outreach Committee as well as Americans for Safe Aerospace.
Guy Norris:
Ryan, can I just jump in here with a question on terms of the, or looking at what has been officially established already. I'm just thinking about in 2022 the Pentagon created the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which works with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to attribute these reports that it's been getting in. And apparently RO worked with military services and NOAA and the Coast Guard and Department of Energy to streamline ways of reporting incidents. And I think this was a reported by one of our colleagues, Brian Everstine, last year, are you able to work at all with RO or any of the official government organizations like this, or do you feel like it's time to take a different tack on this whole subject?
Ryan Graves:
So there's really two avenues there. There's working with Aero, which I do in a number of areas to be able to provide them with information they might not be receiving through their channels as well as to help them provide them with better tools to understand the cases that they do have. But the cases that they're receiving at Aero are, at least on the aviation side, primarily from military aviators who now have official reporting mechanisms that have been promulgated down for them to report. And there's some very interesting stories that military pilots have had, that they've had experiences. And even just the other day I saw a new podcast with an F-18 pilot who thought this was all a bit nonsense until he had his own experience, learned that there was a form, and then the squadron received a briefing from that office as well.
And so I think there are still some severe limitations to the awareness within the military aviation community about both the aviation safety and national security risk of this and what they actually do with that information. I was at Tailhook, it's a conference for naval aviators that land on aircraft carriers about a month and a half ago. And I got the opportunity to speak with a lot of people that have had issues and instances with UAP in the course of their normal operations. And I would say it was about 50/50. 50% of them knew that there was a reporting mechanism and did so, and the other 50% were either unaware or chose not to report it because they didn't want to put their credibility at risk.
Guy Norris:
Right. And it's interesting you mentioned that. I think I probably heard the same interview, but what was interesting to me about one of the comments he made was, you're quite right, he went through the normal reporting channels and he said the gist of the briefing that they got back was, we just don't know what on Earth it was. I thought it was interesting that obviously people are coming at it from different directions. The answer always seems to be, we just don't know at this point, which is another, basically back to Garrett's question about where do we go with this? How do we scientifically investigate it? And perhaps one of the ways through is to broaden the community, which is part of what the AIAA involvement is involved in too, isn't it?
Ryan Graves:
Yeah, absolutely. We work in two main segments. We have a hardware factors and a human factors subcommittees, and those are aviation safety terms that a lot of people might be familiar with. Our hardware factors group is primarily focused on how do we detect these things, right? So how do we detect, characterize and evaluate these objects? And the two groups very much work hand-in-hand because once we have a better understanding and buy-in on how much this is happening within the military and commercial aviation communities, that's going to help inform our decision making going forward on what tools that we need in order to be able to do that detection, characterization and evaluation.
And we've talked a lot about aviation safety, but the next massive concern after that is as a national security concern. Having objects that are operating within close vicinity of our training ranges, our military bases, and we're hearing more of that now on the Eastern Seaboard. We've seen the effects of small form factor UAVs in Ukraine, and we cannot ignore the fact that we are having this large issue with unidentified objects that have interesting performance characteristics that are seemingly operating near our sensitive air spaces and our bases, especially on the East Coast, but on the West Coast as well. To your point, we don't know what they are. That was the gist of their briefing. But that puts us at a pretty significant strategic disadvantage here in the homeland, and we need to invest the resources into the capabilities that are going to allow us to identify and mitigate these situations before we start losing assets potentially.
Garrett Reim:
Yeah, you were talking about lowering the stigma, so we just get more information flowing. But yeah, in terms of formalized reporting, how are you going to present your findings? What's the plan going forward to quantifying all of this?
Ryan Graves:
So the work that's being conducted at the UAP Integration and Outreach Committee within the AIAA, we participate in two conferences a year, the Aviation and ASCEND Conference. At the Aviation Conference, we have a paper session where we invite academia as well as our own organization to be able to present papers on this topic. And so the work that I've discussed about, especially within the human factors engineer, but the hardware factors as well, that's where we'll be entering that into the corpus of knowledge within the AIAA community. But more broadly speaking, American Safe Aerospace never intended to be a reporting organization per se. We just were filling a need that was presented to us. We started receiving reports via email from pilots who didn't feel comfortable reporting it elsewhere. We had their trust. But ultimately, this should be held by the government. This should be held within normal aviation safety channels.
And so Americans for Safe Aerospace has advised on and Congressman Grothman and Congressman Garcia in the House have introduced legislation that requires FAA to accept these reports, requires them to gather additional evidence that may be available such as communication data or radar information. And it requires NASA to modify the aviation safety reporting system to be able to accept these types of reports or create a separate system specifically for this issue.
And so moving forward, we hope that that legislation ultimately gets passed, hopefully in 2025, and we have a official channel that is not classified, that there will be a wide corpus of knowledge that will be available to the scientific community for analysis. And that the stigma reduction is such that pilots will understand this system exists and will use it to gather this information going forward. And I think that's going to be key to both understanding the scope and the severity of this problem and for enabling the scientific and engineering community to think up solutions for what we're seeing.
Guy Norris:
And Ryan, you had some thoughts on the, for example, that the Chinese spy balloon incident, which I think brought a lot of, actually, weirdly, a lot of attention to this whole subject, didn't it? I know one of our colleagues, Steve Trimble broke our website, I think, with a story, with one of the stories on the Chinese balloon incident, but do you think it's a hindrance or a help really when this sort of thing happens? Are we talking about the same thing or is it really confusing the issue?
Ryan Graves:
No, I don't think it's confusing the issue at all. The reality is that these things were overflying the continental United States, and the reason that we were able to detect them in the future is because of the reports that were made to suggest that they were very slow speed moving objects that were operating in our working areas. And because of that, and this was stated by the defense press secretary during a news conference, that they had lowered their speedgates on their radar systems in order to try to identify these objects. And what popped out of that was adversarial platforms that were overflying the United States. And so this, I think, it very much helps the overall conversation because it, I think, showed the American people just the type of risks that we're talking about when we say that we can't be comfortable thinking that just because they're objects out there, we can't just dismiss them as something that they think is silly or stigmatized, that our adversaries will take advantage of that, they might already be. And there was evidence that they might have been.
Guy Norris:
Right. And of course, the other thing that I'm always curious about is the fact that the number of reports certainly that have been released by the ODNI say that the numbers have increased, at least for example, compared to previous. And I'm kind of wondering whether that is that more a recognition of A, the phenomena or B, the fact that our sensors are getting better, as you mentioned, with the upgrade on the Super Hornet radar, for example. Is it a combination of that or do you think there really is perhaps a gradual reduction in the stigma surrounding reporting on this? Perhaps a bit of all of that?
Ryan Graves:
Yeah, I think it's a bit of all of it. I think our sensors are getting better. I think the reduction of stigma has opened this conversation to more professionals to be able to report it instead of just ignoring it. I mean, anyone that's been in a Navy squadron, especially one that utilizes sensor systems like we do, the stories of strange objects and things that are inexplicable are always talked about a bit in hushed voices. But the amount of information that we have coming in now, appears to have increased. Now my overall
sense is that yes, perhaps it's happening more, but it's very hard to suss out how much of that is based off of the sensors, the stigma reduction and the like, and how much of it is an actual increase in activity. But it certainly does appear to, at least a certain degree, there has been an increase in activity.
Garrett Reim:
What is your end goal for all of this?
Ryan Graves:
We are filling the gaps that are being left unfilled because of the stigma and the lack of government involvement in this topic. We've introduced legislation Americans for Safe Aerospace, that would theoretically put our reporting system out of business because it's the right thing to do, and it's the right way to introduce more people and more data into the conversation. The UAP Integration Outreach Committee, now, I don't think that will necessarily go out of business per se, because this conversation extends very much into space and space domain awareness as well. But we're neutral to what the output of this is. We're not necessarily looking for the UAP. We're dealing with the unidentified objects that are slipping under the radar due to the way this conversation has been held back in the public and within professional circles. And so we're more than happy to be able to stop particular activities if the rest of the community steps up to the plate and starts paying attention to this from an aviation safety and national security concern concern.
Now, with that being said, with the amount of data that we have, I truly don't believe that this is going to flush out as drones and Starlink. Some of the cases are quite inexplainable, and I think we'll be trying to figure this out for quite some time.
Guy Norris:
Yes, indeed. And it's probably a great place to stop. I know we could continue chatting about this for a long time. But Ryan, thank you so much for coming on with us today. And that's a wrap really for today's Check 6. Thanks to our editor in London, Guy Ferneyhough and don't forget to follow us in your podcast app of choice. One last request. If you're listening to us in Apple Podcasts and want to support this podcast, please leave us a star rating or write a review. Goodbye for now.
Speaker 4:
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