Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena with Ex-Navy Pilot Ryan Graves 8/3/23

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

The House Oversight Committee on National Security was the latest to explore the mystifying claims of unidentified objects found in the air, formerly known as UFOs. Hearing testimony from three former U.S. military officials who advocate for more concrete policy in addressing these unexplained events. One witness, Ryan Graves, former Navy pilot & executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, joins Morgan to discuss his experience on the Hill, the potential safety implications of UAPs and declassifying a topic that has spurred decades of conspiracy theories.

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon, or UAP. That's the official government nomenclature for objects in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural events that defy easy explanation. Objects formerly known as UFOs. Hundreds of military and commercial pilots have reported UAP encounters. The Pentagon has released several videos in recent years showing some. NASA has compiled a team to study the phenomena. And lawmakers are even crafting more potential policy regarding them. Case in point, last week's hearing of the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, where three former U.S. military officials testified, including former Navy pilot

Ryan Graves. UAP are in our airspace, but they are grossly underreported. These sightings are not rare or isolated, they are routine. Military air crew and commercial pilots, trained observers whose lives depend on accurate identification, are frequently witnessing these phenomena. The stigma attached to UAP is real and powerful and challenges national security. It silences commercial pilots who fear professional repercussions, discourages witnesses, and is only compounded by recent government claims questioning the credibility of eyewitness testimony. Parts of our government are aware of more about UAP than they let on. Excessive classification practices keep crucial information hidden.

Since 2021, all UAP videos are classified as secret or above. This level of secrecy not only impedes our understanding, but fuels speculation and mistrust. Graves used to fly F-A-18 fighter jets and was the first active duty military pilot to come forward to Congress about his experience. He recently co-founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, an advocacy organization dedicated to supporting aviators who witness these unexplained events. The nonprofit already has membership in the thousands. On this episode, Graves shares his experience, breaks down the national security and safety implications,

and looks to demystify a topic that, at least until recently, has been very shrouded in secrecy, feeding conspiracy theories for decades. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. So essentially, I was, you know, part of the folks that were seeing these objects off the eastern seaboard. And I eventually left. And like a lot of people in 2017, I saw the New York Times article come out talking about how the government was seeing these objects. And the video they released was a video I was present for and I had seen in real time with the crew. And so when I saw that, I said, holy smokes, you know, this is still going on.

I called back to some of my colleagues and I, you know, them and they said yeah it's still a problem it hasn't been resolved um and that's essentially when i realized it wasn't going to be resolved within the normal channels and that's when i started essentially you know it wasn't like a a very firm mission at that point but that's when i decided that i would you know start to explore this topic to see what this was so I reached out to the people that released the film and I essentially asked them if they would like some additional context around, you know, what happened with that event since I was, I was present for it. And over time I learned more about the topic. I realized that there were some pretty obvious roadblocks to moving the

conversation forward. And a lot of that pertained to just the normal safety considerations that I was trained to in the military. The military trained me as an aviation safety officer. And so essentially, I just used those tools that they taught me to communicate this problem. And that's continued to grow and grow. It turns out we didn't know what they are, and they're more prevalent than we thought they were. And we're seeing them in more places. And so we're still working to figure out what they are.

We're still working to provide the proper reporting procedures so pilots can report this. And that's still a problem that is yet to be solved. And that's really how I got here. I continued to ask the question and identify the problem. And really that hearing was me continuing to ask the question and identify the problem. And really that hearing was me continuing to communicate the problems that we've identified. Yeah, there's a lot there that I want to unpack with you. But first, just to go back to the fact that the video in 2017 that we did see declassified, you yourself were there for it. I mean, what is the additional context?

Because I remember looking at that video and having really no idea what I was staring at and reading expert commentary where it seemed like there were many folks who have much more knowledge than me that had no idea what they were staring at. Sure. So the additional context in this video, it's called the gimbal video, you see essentially an object that does somewhat resemble a gimbal shaped object that appears to rotate on the screen. And you hear the air crew talking about, hey, what is this? You know, they clearly are shocked at what they are seeing. Some of the things you hear them say, such as there's a whole fleet of them, look at the essay. That was something I could add additional context to, because what they're referring to is

the situational awareness page. And that page records essentially a God's eye view of what's happening around the aircraft. And so that's where our radar data is presented, one of the places. And so that's what I was looking at when I was in the debrief room watching this be debriefed in front of the Intel folks, the radar is our primary sensor. And so that's primarily where we're going to be looking. And that's what I could see on the situational awareness page, a formation of four to six objects that were flying in a,

in a wedge formation. And they're flying in the close vicinity to the gimbal object. And then the gimbal seemed to follow these, these, this formation of objects that that was that was some of the additional context and so there have been more sightings and more spottings since then and there's still not necessarily an explanation at least a public one yeah so we we left we were seeing these in 2014, 2015 when we started reporting these.

We left for a workup cycle, went somewhere else on an aircraft carrier and I left from there. And that's when I kind of thought this was being resolved. As it turned out, it was continuing to happen in 2016. It was continuing to happen in 2017, 2018. Eventually, I actually had some students of mine, my former flight students, reach out to me who had now ended up on the eastern seaboard in F-18, all growing up in their career now. And they are reporting seeing the same objects off the eastern seaboard almost a decade later. And so they're still out there to this day. We're still having near misses with these objects. We're still seeing them on our radar.

So, yeah, it's still occurring and we still don't know what they are. And, of course, the implications of this are either that, and I know there's the whole UFO and there's a stigma attached to that or, you know, this idea of extraterrestrial, but then there's the more likely possibility that maybe these are some sort of aircraft or some sort of flying objects that have been developed by another nation state, in which case now you're talking about concerns around national security. And so I'll even counter that a little bit and say it's a national security issue first and foremost and an aviation safety issue. We don't have the ability, we don't have the data, we don't have, I would say, even the wherewithal to be able to say, okay, well, that's clearly a UFO from another planet just

by looking at something strange in the sky. So we have to treat everything just as an unidentified target that may have national security implications or aviation safety implications. And we process those through the tools of our national security apparatus that we have. But should we find out that they're not a foreign adversary or they're not something benign, then I think we do need to engage that with the scientific apparatus instead of the defense apparatus in the general public. What makes them a safety issue? Is it the fact that they're not being identified through sort of the traditional FAA or other air infrastructure networks? Is it something else? Sure. So strictly on aviation safety, not a national security

perspective, whenever we're, well, as pilots, as air crew, we're trained to mitigate risk. That's what we do. That's why we can do these things is because we are taking very risky things and we're mitigating them down and controlling them the best we can. And in the tactical aviation community, that's magnitude even further. And so we do that by identifying risk. In the commercial world, they identify solar winds even to say, hey, we might lose GPS at this particular location when we're crossing the Atlantic. We might hit weather at this particular point. So we might actually need to conserve our gas

earlier. As a pilot, you're always looking out and looking to mitigate risks and errors. There's this one particular risk, however, that it seems that we choose to ignore. And that's when we can identify what we're looking at. And that's a glaring gap in our safety protocols that we've created because we mitigate every other risk. And regardless if we're concerned about one of these slamming into our aircraft, if pilots are distracted in the cockpit and they're looking at objects outside because they're not sure what they are, that can lead to missed radio calls, missed descents, things of that nature. So even just pilot distraction, like we cannot ignore one particular, you know, potential safety issue, because regardless of whether it turned out to be a UFO or perhaps a plane that lights were in the wrong configuration and distracted the pilots,

they're distracted either way. What jumps out to me is the fact that it's not just military aviators who are, who seem to be based on your testimony and what you said in the past, seem to be, you know, coming in contact with or seeing these types of unidentified objects. It's also commercial. Absolutely. So in the tactical community, we operate often well beyond visual range, we call it, with our radar systems and sensors. And that allows us to see a lot of things over time. We can see things move over, you know, from one piece of the sky to another. In the commercial world, it's different because the tools that they have to identify objects

are their eyeballs. And they have a relatively limited window where they can look out to actually see things. So for a commercial air crew, if they actually gain sight of something, there's a decent probability it could be significantly closer to that commercial traffic and pose a safety risk. And so as air crew are potentially seeing these objects, paralleling them for 20, 30, 40 minutes with the FAA controllers not being able to see this on their radars, that's a cause for concern. That's air traffic that we don't know the origin of that is performing an unsafe maneuver that air traffic control is not monitoring. I mean, that's the definition of an unsafe situation in our airspace. So these are the things we're seeing. And we don't have a solution for pilots to be able to

report this information in a way that leads to any type of resolution right now. So can I ask a really basic question? Is that the radars aren't tuned to be able to identify what these objects are and thus are missing them from that standpoint, or just they seem to be invisible to what we have in place in some other form or fashion? I think the answer is generally unknown at this point. We can't necessarily say there's one particular type of object out there. So it's hard to say whether it's because they're not being seen or whether the radar is not tuned. And these are the questions that I've been asking. And I've formed an organization to help answer some of these questions in collaboration with stakeholders in the government, as well as work in the public sector.

And that work is being done at the UAP Integration Committee under the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. That organization is, you know, that's an industry-based organization that can make these recommendations, can write papers, can hold conferences to form educated opinions and promulgate them out to industry. So these are good questions you're asking. We don't necessarily have all the answers to them, but that's some of the sensing and detection work that's going on at that organization. And of course, you founded Americans for Safe Aerospace. And the implications there is that there are many pilots, it sounds like, or air crew that are having these types of interactions or these types of sightings, even if maybe they're not going in front of Congress like yourself and testifying about it.

Yeah, absolutely. And even since the hearing last week, it's just been even more of an outpouring of support and and others coming forward with their own stories. I've been working through working through. So, I mean, yes, absolutely. There are more. And, you know, very specifically to your point, when I first spoke to members of Congress on this issue back in the 2018 time period, there were other pilots that came forward to validate my story. They just did so privately as they were still serving and continue to serve. And why do they do so privately? Is it because there's a stigma attached to this? Well, certainly, but primarily I think it's because they are, they're still, they're still active duty in the military. And so they're not in a position to be making media

appearances on this topic, you could say. That's, of course, not the entire case. I can't speak for everyone. But they're certainly out there. I'm hoping that as this conversation matures, they'll be able to come forward more comfortably. And I think we're starting to see that happen now. I mean, you use the word mature. Why is it taking so long for this conversation to actually happen? I mean, and I realize that some of this material has had to be, for example, some of the video we were just, you know, started the conversation talking about, you know, had to be declassified. Why? Why is there so much secretiveness around this?

Is it because of the fact that there's a national security implication to all of it and there's more questions than answers? I think there's two ways a conversation needs to mature. To your latter point, it needs to mature legislatively and through the halls of Congress and through procedure and through reviews of security classification guidelines and process between the Department of Defense and other departments. And that is happening. We're seeing legislation come out. But I think more to the point, we're seeing that legislation come out because we've seen a very large reduction in the stigma that surrounded this topic. Pilots haven't wanted to come forward. People haven't wanted to speak out about this topic. And so when I say mature, I'm actually mostly thinking about a cultural maturity where we're now talking about this as the topic it deserves to be, a domain awareness gap,

a national security issue, and a science issue. When we start with pop culture references and images and music and discuss this topic. We're just hearkening back to the traditional assumption filled terminology such as UFO. We're just wrapping ourselves all around that. And so the conversation has matured. We've been able to now speak about this scientifically and strategically. And that's a process I think is still ongoing. How do you feel about the term UFO or the fact that, you know, yourself and others will testify in front of Congress and then it, you know, starts trending on Twitter, I guess the X, formerly Twitter, and the conversation does deviate to UFOs and, you know, conspiracy

theories about aliens and the like? I mean, how do you counter that? Yeah, it's a great question. Consistency, I guess, on my part, but it's really about, you know, being able to communicate the national security concerns and the aviation safety concerns to the people, to the proper stakeholders. I think over time, the general public's going to come to understand that, but I'm not necessarily here to convince the general public not to use the terminology UFO. I understand the power and the appeal of that term. I prefer to use UAP and I use it when I'm engaging this topic professionally on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. And I think it does remove a lot of the immediate negative reaction to the terminology,

to the conversation when you do use UAP. So what does all of this mean for this organization you founded, Americans for Safe Aerospace? What is the specific mission of the organization and how does that now evolve? Yeah, that's a great question. In a sense, our mission hasn't really changed at all. Our mission has been to identify what's in our skies. And that mission is still completely relevant. We don't have the tools for pilots to report. One of the things that we've established with members on Capitol Hill to be able to bring these witnesses forward in their cases. We're also going to be standing up a specific pilot reporting mechanism on our website where pilots can, their credentials and they can start sharing their experiences in a safe place with other pilots so they can start to figure out what's going on because they don't have the tools to be able to share these, these safety issues right now. And so we're looking to provide them for them. Those credentials, I'd imagine go a long way when you can sort of, when you can sort

of point to those and to different people's expertise as they share their experiences and encounter any negativity or any criticism or any folks that are saying, you know, you're just here sensationalizing something and, you know, and making something out of nothing. Have you had to deal with a lot of that or has it largely been supportive and you could just continue to gain traction? There's been, I would say some people on the outskirts that that's their first reaction is to think that I'm just making up some story. I think once they do a little homework, they realize that, you know, my particular story, if you want to call it, that is just my recollection of the data that was gathered by the sensor systems that I was trained to use.

And that wasn't just me. It was, you know, dozens of other highly trained pilots that were seeing this. So if people think that's me making that up, fine. But I would encourage them to realize that we're now in a world where we have verifiable data in large quantities that simply need to be moved from the classified world to the public sector. And that's part of the mission we have at ASA as well. How many members do you have? How many pilots have, have come to work with you? Oh gosh, that's a great question. Somewhere over probably 150 pilots have reached out at this point.

Probably closer to probably 200 at this. Honestly, I haven't even been able to get through all the emails since the hearing. But yeah, a lot and it keeps continuing to grow. We have over 7000 members right now as well, which I believe makes us the largest organization that's focused on this issue. And I think we're just getting started. Frankly, we have there's plenty more pilots out there interested and we're going to be again, formalizing that process to be able to support them. And that's how we're going to grow here in the immediate future. So 7,000 members,

those aren't all necessarily people that have had their own experiences, but those are people that maybe in some cases believe that there, that there's a there there and support this cause. Absolutely. Yes. Okay. These are people that are interested in this topic. A lot of them are pilots, a lot of them are professionals, a lot of them have their own experiences. A lot of people are, don't have their own experiences, but they are interested in this topic and they want to support it. What was your, I guess, what was your takeaways from

testifying on the Hill and from interacting with lawmakers? I guess, do you feel like there is an openness or a curiosity or an appetite to hold more of these types of hearings or take more steps on the congressional side? Absolutely. I think there's a few ways that some of the representatives are kind of focusing or channeling their energy on this topic. And it's not about talking about UFOs or UAPs necessarily, but it's about talking about fraud, waste and abuse. It's about talking about secrecy versus transparency and democracies. There are a lot of fundamental issues that I think our representatives can get behind in this conversation without focusing specifically on UFO or UAP. And that seems to be what I'm hearing from some such as AOC and others who are engaging this topic. I've been working with some representative sensitive hearings who have formalized some reporting procedures for pilots

and to ensure that they don't have any repercussions from their reporting. So I would say the general tone is that people are very interested, looking for the right way that they can engage that makes sense for them and their positions. And so I fully expect this conversation to continue to grow and to grow quite rapidly, frankly. Do you think the Chinese fire balloon that was shot down off the coast earlier this year after traversing the continental U.S. and then several other unidentified objects that were shot down pretty quickly behind that, do you think that has raised awareness for all of this or sort of, I guess, raises questions around just how much is actually in our airspace that is perhaps getting or missing detection by radars and the

like? Yeah, it just goes to show that we can't be complacent about what we think we know is in our airspace. And that's essentially the call that we've been making. If we're not paying attention to these domain awareness gaps, that's exactly where adversaries are going to butt their heads in. I think NASA has created a study team and is holding a public meeting or held a public meeting earlier this year. You have the DOD creating a UAP office last year that was required by Congress. Do these different entities actually help propel this conversation and the possibility of solutions forward, or does it just create more bureaucracy? That's a good question. I think that some of the, so the way it's structured right now is AERO is the all domain anomaly resolution office within the Department of Defense. And they essentially

have a whole government mandate to pursue this topic. There are some authorities and other restrictions that they have that makes them less than perfectly effective, I think, at that mission. But with that being said, they're intended to be the central point on it. So then, you know, when you look at what NASA is doing and others doing, I don't see that as additional bureaucracy that steps on the toes of Arrow, but I see that as a way of steps on the toes of Aero, but I see that as a way of engaging a different type of communication market in a sense. NASA, I believe, will likely coordinate with Aero, but being able to communicate from their perspective as the scientific arm, if you will, or face of the United States, I think is very powerful for its own reasons. Is there any

possibility that some of these UAPs, including what you yourself have come in contact with, that they could actually be American made and just highly classified? Yeah, you know, that's certainly been something that's been on the table for a while. I would say that if we're at a point where that is ours, I think it's come to the point of a constitutional crisis, if so, because it appears that none of our elected officials are aware of that technology existing. And that's not how our system is supposed to work. So, you know, this has been something we've been talking about. If we just look at my particular case for almost a decade now, and if that is our own technology and we

haven't been able to figure it out in that time period, I'd say we need to investigate and take a hard look at that as well. What does success look like for you and for the organization that you have set up? Success looks like us just being able to have an earnest scientific conversation about this, where pilots and air crew and other people that do witness this don't have to hide or fear like they can't report it, that there are proper mechanisms for it, and that we have processes to integrate this into the safety. We have processes to integrate this into the safety frameworks that we have within this country. And eventually within the world, this isn't necessarily a United States problem. These are being spotted elsewhere. And so we need to look to integrate these types of reporting procedures into Europe and elsewhere. And so what is the ultimate goal of all that? Well, having all this various data from Aircrew are going to be able to provide a unique ability to analyze this problem on a global scale that we

haven't seen before. Much of our data right now is potentially bias to detection bias. We're seeing these near military bases, near F-18s globally, but near these things. So if we have essentially a global grid of eyeballs looking out for these objects, and we can pull data from that data set, we can use that to pull, although it's not good data, it's not perfect data, if it's eyewitness, we can pull some interesting parameters out of there with a large enough data.

And so that can really help us provide a greater perspective on the scope of the problem and to see if there are any trends over time with how it might be changing. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.