Ryan Graves

Ryan Graves flew F/A-18F Super Hornets with Strike Fighter Squadron 11 off the US east coast. He has said that after his squadron's radars were upgraded to active electronically scanned arrays around 2014, aircrews began tracking objects daily at altitudes and speeds they could not account for, sometimes stationary in high winds and sometimes moving at hundreds of knots; one crew reported a near-miss with a dark cube inside a translucent sphere. He was the first active pilot of that period to speak publicly, to the New York Times in 2019, and testified before the House Oversight subcommittee in July 2023.

His squadron's reports are corroborated by the Gimbal and GoFast videos released in 2017, which were taken from USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft in 2015, and by hazard reports filed at the time. The Navy has confirmed the videos are authentic and unresolved. Skeptical analysts have proposed that Gimbal shows a distant jet's glare and GoFast a slow object seen against parallax; Graves disputes both readings. He founded Americans for Safe Aerospace to collect pilot reports and argues the matter as an aviation-safety question.

The corpus interviews Graves once, in an episode on fighter-pilot sightings, and cites him elsewhere when discussing the 2023 hearing. He speaks carefully about what radar and eyes recorded and declines to say what the objects were. The knowledge base records his sightings as documented military testimony and the nature of the objects as unknown.