"The East Coast UAP Pilot" · b. 1986
Ryan Graves is a former United States Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot with over 1,400 flight hours who served in Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-11 "Red Rippers" and VFA-106 "Gladiators." His naval career included deployments to the Middle East and extensive training operations off the U.S. East Coast. After leaving the Navy, he earned a Masters in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT and founded Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA), a non-profit organisation advocating for pilot safety and systematic UAP reporting mechanisms.
Graves became one of the most important current-era UAP witnesses due to his account of sustained, repeated, documented encounters with UAP by his squadron over the U.S. East Coast between approximately 2014 and 2015. His testimony, first reported in the New York Times in 2019 and expanded in his 2023 congressional testimony, describes a systematic operational hazard that the Navy initially dismissed and then formally acknowledged.
Beginning in 2014, Graves and his colleagues in VFA-11 began encountering dark, spherical objects operating in their training airspace off the Virginia and North Carolina coast. The encounters were daily — sometimes multiple times per day — and the objects were tracked on the upgraded APG-79 AESA radar system that had recently been installed in the squadron's F/A-18s. The objects appeared to station-keep in the restricted airspace, held at altitude in high winds (sometimes 120 knot headwinds) with no visible means of propulsion, and at times came within dangerously close proximity to Navy aircraft.
Graves reported the encounters up his chain of command. The initial response was scepticism followed by an internal investigation that ultimately confirmed the radar data as showing real, physical objects — not sensor artefacts. At least one of Graves' colleagues had a near-miss, with the object passing within approximately 50 feet of his aircraft. Despite this, no action was taken and no investigation of the objects themselves was mounted — the Navy's response was to ask pilots to file safety reports rather than to attempt to identify what the objects were.
Graves testified that the attitude within the Navy was to treat the encounters as potentially classified U.S. technology — advanced drones or other secret programmes — and to discourage discussion. He argues this represents a systemic failure: if they are U.S. technology operating in military airspace without coordination, that is a massive safety and security failure; if they are not U.S. technology, that is an even larger national security problem. Either way, the institutional response of ignoring the issue was indefensible.
Graves founded ASA specifically to address the gap he experienced: a mechanism for military and commercial pilots to report UAP encounters without fear of career consequences, professional ridicule, or medical grounding. ASA has collected testimony from dozens of current and former pilots and has advocated for formal reporting protocols within the FAA and DoD. Graves has appeared before Congress, the UN, and international aviation safety bodies, and has positioned the UAP issue squarely within an aviation safety framework that is independent of and complementary to the broader disclosure argument.