Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1883 - Ryan Graves
Uploaded: 2022-10-18T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1883 - Ryan Graves' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1883 - Ryan Graves' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-10-18. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1883 - Ryan Graves

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Nice to meet you, Brian.
Nice to meet you, Joe. Pleasure to be here.
You're one of four or five people that I've talked to that have seen something
that might be from somewhere else.
It's always weird when you talk to someone that may have seen something that...
Let's just first, before we even get started, please tell people your
credentials, what your background is.
Sure. So, you know, my name is 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 an earlier radar called the APG-73.
And we had come back from deployment.
We entered 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,
though 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 areas and 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,
which is essentially a band of airspace that surrounds our entire country,
if you are – if your flight path originates out over the water, outside of
the ATIS,
and you proceed into that ATIS, into our controlled airspace,
then you do have to essentially have permission to enter that airspace.
It's not a restricted airspace like a traditional bombing range, but it is
protected airspace.
It's our coastal air.
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 essentially little circle, we'll have a tail coming off of
it,
and 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 seemed 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?
Mm-hmm.
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 per 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 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, 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's stuff out there, but maybe next time
we'll take a look.
But the way our systems work, when we have 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 at this point, just on the FLIR system.
The FLIR system.
And so that'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, 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 on 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, however small ribbon of tinfoil, right?
Like, that sucked down the engine and could 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 airspeeds,
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?
No, they have, actually.
So although...
But 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 the past
couple weeks where people have also been observing object flying in racetrack
patterns high at altitude with lights.
So I do recognize that behavior, but I don't necessarily think that means we
have to attribute it to normal behavior necessarily.
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 any time you're turning in an aircraft, you're using more energy than
if you were just flying straight and level.
And so by having that racetrack pattern, it's an efficient way of holding in a
position by maximizing straight and 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 g