Name: Former Navy Pilot Ryan Graves on His UFO Encounter
Uploaded: 2022-10-18T22:21:11.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Former Navy Pilot Ryan Graves on His UFO Encounter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Former Navy Pilot Ryan Graves on His UFO Encounter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-18. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Please tell people your credentials,
what your background is.
- Sure, so, you know, my name's Ryan Graves.
I have an engineering degree,
mechanical and aerospace engineering.
I promptly left doing that to go fly F-18s for the Navy
as soon as I graduated college.
Did that for about a decade,
both operationally in combat,
as well as in an instructor role,
teaching the new students.
And, you know, we did witness something
while we were flying in our jets,
but, you know, we were doing it under,
we witnessed it in the context
of our just everyday flying in our missions.
- And what year was it that you witnessed this?
- So we started seeing these in 2014
was the earliest that I know, 2013, late 2013, early 2014.
- And could you describe,
what was the very first experience?
- Yeah, so for me personally,
the experience was simply just flying out to the area
like I would any other day.
- And instead of seeing an empty airspace
with just my wing person or another squadron
doing something a different block,
there were all of a sudden a lot of different radar contacts,
which is immediately a problem because, you know,
we could be hitting one of those,
or someone working in our area.
And this was happening because we upgraded our radar,
the best we could tell.
We were in a earlier radar called the APG-73 and we had come back from
deployment.
We ended up a maintenance phase, it's called.
We kind of do a little bit less flying, upgrade the jets if we need to,
do any long lasting maintenance, and we upgraded to the APG-79, which was a
much better radar.
- And what is the difference in the capabilities of the upgraded radar system
versus the original system?
- So, you know, kind of practically speaking, it's like going from an analog TV
essentially to like an OLED.
It's, you know, a digital modern tool compared to more of like an analog
classical radar
that has more limited range and has less ability to track multiple targets and
things of that nature.
So just generally speaking, we would expect to see, you know, more objects if
there were any out there
or smaller objects, but there shouldn't have been any objects out there.
- And so how far offshore are you when this is all going down?
- Our working areas start about 10 miles off the coast, and then it goes out,
you know,
100 or 250 miles or so that we don't usually use those far eastern areas, but
we would only see them over the water.
So they would really only be in our working areas, maybe slightly, you know, in
between the working area of the land,
but never over the land, sometimes over the bays that are in the area that are
quite large,
but never just kind of zoom in west over land or anything like that.
- And is this restricted airspace?
- It's not. So that's a tricky question. For us operating in a military
operating area,
it is not restricted in the sense that you have to be, there's only one person
allowed in there.
You could have these little Cessnas kind of bumbling in there, but they would
get called out pretty quick,
both from the kind of air traffic control agency that's working out there, as
well as F-18s and the other aircraft that may be working out there.
But in a broader sense, when we look at it in relation to our air defense
identification zone,
our air defense identification zone, which is essentially a band of air space
that surrounds our entire country,
So if you are, if your flight path originates out over the water,
outside of the ATAS, and you proceed into that ATAS, into our controlled air
space,
then you do have to essentially have permission to enter that air space.
It's not a restricted air space like a traditional bombing range, but it is
protected air space.
So you have this upgraded radar system. And what are you detecting?
So on the radar, really what we can learn from that is essentially the kinematics
of the object.
So where is it essentially? And you know, what direction is it going? How fast
is it going? Things of that nature.
We can't necessarily make up the shape or things of that nature. So it's a
representation. It's like a block on our screen to show that information.
And so when we see that on our radar, we can tell, you know, where it's located,
you know,
perhaps what's located around it. If there's other objects we're detecting, how
fast it's going,
what direction it's pointed in, what direction it's traveling in. So we call
that velocity vector.
So if we see this, this essentially little circle, have a tail coming off of it.
And that, that tail kind
of represents the nose of the vehicle, at least as its flight path is going.
And so with that, you know,
we would typically see an aircraft just kind of trudging along with a straight
line, taking occasional
turns. But these objects had a little bit more of a, I don't want to say random,
but more less
controlled flight path. That velocity vector would kind of jump around a bit
more. They would not proceed
in like a perfectly straight line, as you would imagine, like a flight
navigation computer would
take you right. It takes you from A to B in the straightest line possible.
These objects seem to
kind of be moving in a direction that was not a straight line, but generally
proceeding in that
direction. And so they would kind of be meandering slightly, but moving in that
general direction,
both three-dimensionally and horizontally.
So winding around, going up, going down. So they're not on a flat plane, and
they're not going in a
straight line. So I don't want to draw too many firm statements like that,
because we would see them
being flat too. We'd see them perfectly stationary up there, regardless of the
wind.
Really? Yep. Wow. So what kind of wind are you talking about?
Oh, gosh. I mean, at altitude, you can have anywhere up to 100, 120 knots of
airspeed.
Which is, what is that in miles per hour? It's about 130, 140 miles an hour.
So they're completely stationary with 140 mile an hour wind.
Correct. How would something do that?
It's confusing to me as well. Even if we had something that could just burn
that much energy,
right? Like if you had a sphere surrounded by little rockets, right? Just
imagining something
right now. Okay. And if you wanted to keep that perfectly stationary, right,
against gravity,
you could just fire all the rockets at the bottom really fast and hopefully
keep it flat, right?
Right. It's going to have tiny little variations. And then if you have wind
hitting it and all this,
you could potentially have those rockets try to counter it, but it would never
be perfectly
still in winds like that. Because the wind's not perfectly still either, right?
Exactly.
It changes and varies. It does. So it's almost like it's the wind. It's not
even really fighting the
wind, it seems, you know, it just seems like it's, it's just there in a way.
Wow. So the first
time you see these things, what are your thoughts? Yeah. The first time really
was, well, you know,
what is this, right? It's not a UFO or something mysterious at this point. It's
at what we're
thinking at this point, we see on the radar, it's just, well, our radar is
broken, right?
These perhaps don't represent physical objects yet because we hadn't, you know,
visually seen
these or seen them on our camera yet. And so, you know, we kind of like, Hey,
you know,
what's going on here? You know, is anyone else seeing this kind of thing, but
not really like
investigating it, right? It's just kind of like, all right, there was stuff out
there, but
maybe next time we'll take a look. But the way our systems work, when we have
all this,
all these contacts on our radar, and if we kind of just select one out with our
little cursor there,
all our sensors go to it, our FLIR goes to it, which is our camera system,
all our weapons, they have like their own little eyes in some sense, and they
all look in that
direction. And so eventually, you know, someone had one of these selected and
flew close enough so that
as they look at their FLIR system, their camera, they could see something that
was at the spot
represented on the radar, right? So there was something there.
So they were seeing it visually with their own eyes?
Not this point, just on the FLIR system.
The FLIR system.
And so that's a, it's a regular camera and also an infrared camera. And so,
typically, we'll roll around in infrared just because it returns a better image,
typically. So,
so yeah, you know, it didn't look like an object they were seeing on the FLIR,
it just looked like a source of IR energy in a sense, almost as if someone was
shining a flashlight.
But something had to be there to be reflecting that energy or creating it. So
at this point,
to answer your question, now we're like, okay, this isn't just an error in our
radar. This is
perhaps, you know, we're thinking this is real, we have to really respect this
as like a safety hazard
now. Even if it's just a small, you know, I, you know, however, a small ribbon
of tinfoil,
right? Like that sucked down the engine and still take out an aircraft, right?
So we have to be very
respectful of that.
Like a Mylar balloon type thing?
Potentially, right? Yeah. But how fast are these things going?
So sometimes stationary, right? Sometimes they would be going around 0.6 to 0.8
Mach,
which is at altitude about, you know, 240 to maybe 330 knots, you know, around
there.
So somewhere in the range of an airplane.
Yeah. And a fighter aircraft would be kind of flying around at those air speeds,
except sometimes they would be perfectly stationary as well.
Right. So it's not exhibiting any sort of patterns that you've recognized in
the past?
Uh, no, they have actually. So although...
With the stationary, no, right?
Correct. With the stationary, no. With the meandering kind of flight path, no.
But I would
also see them essentially fly what we call a racetrack pattern. And essentially
what that means is they fly
in a straight path and then they do like a 180 degree turn in a certain
direction. Then they fly
a straight path, then turn again. You know, so that's what we call a racetrack
pattern as opposed
to a circular holding pattern. We did witness racetrack patterns. In fact, I
think there's been some cases
off the West Coast just past couple of weeks where people have also been
observing object flying in
racetrack patterns, high at altitude with lights. Um, so I do recognize that
behavior, but I don't
necessarily that mean, I don't necessarily think that means we have to
attribute it to normal behavior
necessarily. Um, that type of flight path is important because it's a very
efficient way to fly,
right? If you have to maintain the position in a certain area, you want to
minimize how much you're
turning because anytime you're turning in an aircraft, you're using more energy
than if you were just
flying straight and level. And so by having a racetrack pattern, it's an
efficient way of holding in a
position by maximizing straight level time and minimizing your turn time. And
how long would these
things stay up there for? So from my experience, from our experience, and again,
we weren't studying these,
but they were always out there, you know, they were out there when we took off,
we'd see them,
and then we'd go to land, they would still be out there. Like every day? Every
day. Every day. Every day.
So you guys go from not having any idea that these things are out there to an
upgraded radar system to
seeing them every day. Yep. What is the thought? Like, how are you feeling when
these, like, is there an
evolution of the thought pattern of how you're addressing these things and
thinking about them?
Initially, you're thinking they're errors. When do you start getting a thought
to like, what the
fuck is this thing? Yeah. So that happened when we visually saw one. And the
first time we visually
saw one, uh, the object was directly at what we call the entry point of the
area. So, you know,
that box that I told you about in the sky that starts 10 miles off the coast,
uh, there's a particular
GPS, you know, location and altitude where incoming traffic will fly in and outbound
traffic will fly
in the exact same spot, but, uh, we'll fly out a thousand feet lower. Um, there
were two aircraft
from my squadron, VFA 11, and we flew, or excuse me, they flew, took off as a
flight of two. Uh,
that means they're essentially flying in a formation like this. Um, and as they
hit the area, one of these
objects went right between the aircraft. Um, the lead, uh, aircrew saw the
object. Um, the, uh, dash two aircraft
crew did not, which is not surprising because they're usually, you know, you're
very focused on, uh,
flying formation. You're just staring right at that aircraft. The lead really
has actual leeway to look
around. So, uh, he saw it and, you know, he immediately came back. Uh, I have
to assume he
didn't have it on his radar because he wouldn't have flown through this object
at the working,
at the entrance point. Um, he flew, he turned around, flew back, landed, and,
uh, I was in the
ready room when he'd come back and, you know, he had all his gear on, which
typically is not a good
thing, uh, because you want to get that stuff off as fast as possible. So
usually means, you know,
there's a problem of some nature. Uh, and, you know, he was just sitting there
saying,
Hey, you know, I was hit with those damn things. Um, and we all knew what he
was referring to,
even though we didn't necessarily have a name for it just because we were
seeing these so much.
Um, and he described it, you know, he described it just as a black or dark gray
cube. And that cube
was inside of a clear translucent sphere. Uh, and essentially the apex or the
corners of that cube,
best he could tell, uh, we're touching, uh, that inside of that sphere.
And that description mirrors many of the descriptions that people have had of
these,
whatever you want to call them, whether they're calling them UAPs now for some
strange reason.
Uh, UFOs, I don't know, does it have a dirty connotation to it? And is it tainted
because of
so many crazy people talk about UFOs? Is that what it is?
It does come with a lot of assumptions baked in.
Yeah. It did baked in. That's yeah. So that's something, but whatever it is,
that is a design that people have reported seeing before that this, uh,
translucent sphere and this cube. Can you see through the cube?
Not to my understanding. No.
So it's some sort of solid black cube that's inside this translucent sphere and
it's just
floating around and flying around the sky.
So, you know, that's, that's a good point. Is it floating around? Is it flying
around?
It's doing both, which is strange, right? Cause you could think of that
description and be okay,
that's kind of some kind of weird balloon maybe with stuff in it. And that's,
that's certainly,
you know, one way, if you just view that angle of it, then it, it seems explainable.
But when that,
you know, the balloon-like object starts cruising down at, you know, 0.8 Mach,
you know, that, that nullifies that particular, um, idea and you'll see, you'll
see that a lot where
it's not just like that one picture, that one behavior. It's really kind of to
zoom out a bit
and look at everything in relation to each other and say, okay, why is this
weird? You know? Okay.
It was hanging out in a racetrack pattern. That's not exotic, but when you, you
learned it was doing
it for, you know, perhaps 13 hours, 13 hours, you know, perhaps they were out
there all the time,
you know? So, you know, I land and I go back and we weren't on a, a, um, Intel
mission to analyze
these, right? We're going to do our training. It's very expensive, 30 K an hour
to fly these things,
right? So, uh, really the only time we can put energy into looking at these
things when we're kind of
transiting back and forth or waiting for a fight to start. Uh, and so, you know,
it's never like a
dedicated analysis.

Former Navy Pilot Ryan Graves on His UFO Encounter

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Please tell people your credentials,
what your background is.
- Sure, so, you know, my name's Ryan Graves.
I have an engineering degree,
mechanical and aerospace engineering.
I promptly left doing that to go fly F-18s for the Navy
as soon as I graduated college.
Did that for about a decade,
both operationally in combat,
as well as in an instructor role,
teaching the new students.
And, you know, we did witness something
while we were flying in our jets,
but, you know, we were doing it under,
we witnessed it in the context
of our just everyday flying in our missions.
- And what year was it that you witnessed this?
- So we started seeing these in 2014
was the earliest that I know, 2013, late 2013, early 2014.
- And could you describe,
what was the very first experience?
- Yeah, so for me personally,
the experience was simply just flying out to the area
like I would any other day.
- And instead of seeing an empty airspace
with just my wing person or another squadron
doing something a different block,
there were all of a sudden a lot of different radar contacts,
which is immediately a problem because, you know,
we could be hitting one of those,
or someone working in our area.
And this was happening because we upgraded our radar,
the best we could tell.
We were in a earlier radar called the APG-73 and we had come back from
deployment.
We ended up a maintenance phase, it's called.
We kind of do a little bit less flying, upgrade the jets if we need to,
do any long lasting maintenance, and we upgraded to the APG-79, which was a
much better radar.
- And what is the difference in the capabilities of the upgraded radar system
versus the original system?
- So, you know, kind of practically speaking, it's like going from an analog TV
essentially to like an OLED.
It's, you know, a digital modern tool compared to more of like an analog
classical radar
that has more limited range and has less ability to track multiple targets and
things of that nature.
So just generally speaking, we would expect to see, you know, more objects if
there were any out there
or smaller objects, but there shouldn't have been any objects out there.
- And so how far offshore are you when this is all going down?
- Our working areas start about 10 miles off the coast, and then it goes out,
you know,
100 or 250 miles or so that we don't usually use those far eastern areas, but
we would only see them over the water.
So they would really only be in our working areas, maybe slightly, you know, in
between the working area of the land,
but never over the land, sometimes over the bays that are in the area that are
quite large,
but never just kind of zoom in west over land or anything like that.
- And is this restricted airspace?
- It's not. So that's a tricky question. For us operating in a military
operating area,
it is not restricted in the sense that you have to be, there's only one person
allowed in there.
You could have these little Cessnas kind of bumbling in there, but they would
get called out pretty quick,
both from the kind of air traffic control agency that's working out there, as
well as F-18s and the other aircraft that may be working out there.
But in a broader sense, when we look at it in relation to our air defense
identification zone,
our air defense identification zone, which is essentially a band of air space
that surrounds our entire country,
So if you are, if your flight path originates out over the water,
outside of the ATAS, and you proceed into that ATAS, into our controlled air
space,
then you do have to essentially have permission to enter that air space.
It's not a restricted air space like a traditional bombing range, but it is
protected air space.
So you have this upgraded radar system. And what are you detecting?
So on the radar, really what we can learn from that is essentially the kinematics
of the object.
So where is it essentially? And you know, what direction is it going? How fast
is it going? Things of that nature.
We can't necessarily make up the shape or things of that nature. So it's a
representation. It's like a block on our screen to show that information.
And so when we see that on our radar, we can tell, you know, where it's located,
you know,
perhaps what's located around it. If there's other objects we're detecting, how
fast it's going,
what direction it's pointed in, what direction it's traveling in. So we call
that velocity vector.
So if we see this, this essentially little circle, have a tail coming off of it.
And that, that tail kind
of represents the nose of the vehicle, at least as its flight path is going.
And so with that, you know,
we would typically see an aircraft just kind of trudging along with a straight
line, taking occasional
turns. But these objects had a little bit more of a, I don't want to say random,
but more less
controlled flight path. That velocity vector would kind of jump around a bit
more. They would not proceed
in like a perfectly straight line, as you would imagine, like a flight
navigation computer would
take you right. It takes you from A to B in the straightest line possible.
These objects seem to
kind of be moving in a direction that was not a straight line, but generally
proceeding in that
direction. And so they would kind of be meandering slightly, but moving in that
general direction,
both three-dimensionally and horizontally.
So winding around, going up, going down. So they're not on a flat plane, and
they're not going in a
straight line. So I don't want to draw too many firm statements like that,
because we would see them
being flat too. We'd see them perfectly stationary up there, regardless of the
wind.
Really? Yep. Wow. So what kind of wind are you talking about?
Oh, gosh. I mean, at altitude, you can have anywhere up to 100, 120 knots of
airspeed.
Which is, what is that in miles per hour? It's about 130, 140 miles an hour.
So they're completely stationary with 140 mile an hour wind.
Correct. How would something do that?
It's confusing to me as well. Even if we had something that could just burn
that much energy,
right? Like if you had a sphere surrounded by little rockets, right? Just
imagining something
right now. Okay. And if you wanted to keep that perfectly stationary, right,
against gravity,
you could just fire all the rockets at the bottom really fast and hopefully
keep it flat, right?
Right. It's going to have tiny little variations. And then if you have wind
hitting it and all this,
you could potentially have those rockets try to counter it, but it would never
be perfectly
still in winds like that. Because the wind's not perfectly still either, right?
Exactly.
It changes and varies. It does. So it's almost like it's the wind. It's not
even really fighting the
wind, it seems, you know, it just seems like it's, it's just there in a way.
Wow. So the first
time you see these things, what are your thoughts? Yeah. The first time really
was, well, you know,
what is this, right? It's not a UFO or something mysterious at this point. It's
at what we're
thinking at this point, we see on the radar, it's just, well, our radar is
broken, right?
These perhaps don't represent physical objects yet because we hadn't, you know,
visually seen
these or seen them on our camera yet. And so, you know, we kind of like, Hey,
you know,
what's going on here? You know, is anyone else seeing this kind of thing, but
not really like
investigating it, right? It's just kind of like, all right, there was stuff out
there, but
maybe next time we'll take a look. But the way our systems work, when we have
all this,
all these contacts on our radar, and if we kind of just select one out with our
little cursor there,
all our sensors go to it, our FLIR goes to it, which is our camera system,
all our weapons, they have like their own little eyes in some sense, and they
all look in that
direction. And so eventually, you know, someone had one of these selected and
flew close enough so that
as they look at their FLIR system, their camera, they could see something that
was at the spot
represented on the radar, right? So there was something there.
So they were seeing it visually with their own eyes?
Not this point, just on the FLIR system.
The FLIR system.
And so that's a, it's a regular camera and also an infrared camera. And so,
typically, we'll roll around in infrared just because it returns a better image,
typically. So,
so yeah, you know, it didn't look like an object they were seeing on the FLIR,
it just looked like a source of IR energy in a sense, almost as if someone was
shining a flashlight.
But something had to be there to be reflecting that energy or creating it. So
at this point,
to answer your question, now we're like, okay, this isn't just an error in our
radar. This is
perhaps, you know, we're thinking this is real, we have to really respect this
as like a safety hazard
now. Even if it's just a small, you know, I, you know, however, a small ribbon
of tinfoil,
right? Like that sucked down the engine and still take out an aircraft, right?
So we have to be very
respectful of that.
Like a Mylar balloon type thing?
Potentially, right? Yeah. But how fast are these things going?
So sometimes stationary, right? Sometimes they would be going around 0.6 to 0.8
Mach,
which is at altitude about, you know, 240 to maybe 330 knots, you know, around
there.
So somewhere in the range of an airplane.
Yeah. And a fighter aircraft would be kind of flying around at those air speeds,
except sometimes they would be perfectly stationary as well.
Right. So it's not exhibiting any sort of patterns that you've recognized in
the past?
Uh, no, they have actually. So although...
With the stationary, no, right?
Correct. With the stationary, no. With the meandering kind of flight path, no.
But I would
also see them essentially fly what we call a racetrack pattern. And essentially
what that means is they fly
in a straight path and then they do like a 180 degree turn in a certain
direction. Then they fly
a straight path, then turn again. You know, so that's what we call a racetrack
pattern as opposed
to a circular holding pattern. We did witness racetrack patterns. In fact, I
think there's been some cases
off the West Coast just past couple of weeks where people have also been
observing object flying in
racetrack patterns, high at altitude with lights. Um, so I do recognize that
behavior, but I don't
necessarily that mean, I don't necessarily think that means we have to
attribute it to normal behavior
necessarily. Um, that type of flight path is important because it's a very
efficient way to fly,
right? If you have to maintain the position in a certain area, you want to
minimize how much you're
turning because anytime you're turning in an aircraft, you're using more energy
than if you were just
flying straight and level. And so by having a racetrack pattern, it's an
efficient way of holding in a
position by maximizing straight level time and minimizing your turn time. And
how long would these
things stay up there for? So from my experience, from our experience, and again,
we weren't studying these,
but they were always out there, you know, they were out there when we took off,
we'd see them,
and then we'd go to land, they would still be out there. Like every day? Every
day. Every day. Every day.
So you guys go from not having any idea that these things are out there to an
upgraded radar system to
seeing them every day. Yep. What is the thought? Like, how are you feeling when
these, like, is there an
evolution of the thought pattern of how you're addressing these things and
thinking about them?
Initially, you're thinking they're errors. When do you start getting a thought
to like, what the
fuck is this thing? Yeah. So that happened when we visually saw one. And the
first time we visually
saw one, uh, the object was directly at what we call the entry point of the
area. So, you know,
that box that I told you about in the sky that starts 10 miles off the coast,
uh, th