The First Navy Pilot To Testify Before Congress On The Daily UAP Near Misses, Carrier Tracking, And Why This Is Becoming The Next Challenger | Ryan Graves

Former U. S. Navy F/A-18F pilot Ryan Graves reveals what REALLY happened behind the Pentagon’s UFO disclosures, and whether the newly released UAP files are hiding something even bigger. As one of the most credible voices in the UFO/UAP conversation, Graves breaks down shocking encounters military pilots experienced firsthand, including near mid-air collisions with unexplained objects described as “a cube inside a sphere,” mysterious black triangles, and even a bizarre “15-foot disco ball” spotted in restricted airspace. On this episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, he explains why elite military radar systems suddenly started detecting anomalies pilots couldn’t even see with their own eyes, and why many aviators feared they might crash into these unidentified objects during missions. Ryan also dives into the infamous Tic Tac UFO and Gimbal UFO incidents involving David Fravor, how military leadership allegedly kept the phenomenon quiet for years, and the terrifying realization among pilots that these encounters were happening far more often than anyone knew. The biggest unanswered questions: - Where are these objects coming from? - How are they operating? - Why do they appear to defy physics? - And why does the government still seem unable (or unwilling) to explain them? Graves explains how highly trained military pilots are uniquely qualified witnesses due to their professionalism, emotional control, and advanced observational training, making their testimonies impossible to casually dismiss. He also reveals why so many commercial and military pilots are still afraid to report UAP sightings despite the fact that commercial pilots reportedly witness unexplained phenomena up to 5 times per day. Ryan shares disturbing patterns involving UAP activity near nuclear sites, reports of craft moving seamlessly from air to water, and accounts of objects seemingly reacting intelligently to pilot maneuvers. He opens up about the personal and professional consequences of speaking publicly about UAPs, what finally pushed him to come forward, and why he founded Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA) to create a secure environment for pilots and military personnel to report encounters safely. Ryan also explains how investigators separate credible data from misinformation, rumors, and internet hoaxes while building serious scientific and national security frameworks around the UAP issue. If even a fraction of these encounters are real, the implications are massive... Go to https://bioptimizers.com/breaker and use code BREAKER for 15% off PLUS FREE MassZymes (30 caps) with any order. Use code BREAKER at checkout! For a limited time, get $250 off Cove Pure water filtration at http://www.covepure.com/breakdown Text BREAKDOWN to 64000 to get 20% off all IQBAR products, plus FREE shipping. Message and data rates may apply. Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/break/ #rulapod Go to https://tidd.ly/4uVltMe and use the code MAYIM50 to get $50 off your Elastique order. Visit Americans for Safe Aerospace where you can report UAP and learn more about their work: https://www.safeaerospace.org/ Visit Americans for Safe Aerospace where you can report UAP and learn more about their work: https://www.safeaerospace.org/ https://www.safeaerospace.org/%C2%A0 Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The Department of War released UAP evidence that had been previously withheld.

• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  This is the biggest cover up that we've seen.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  We start to upgrade our radar systems in our jets. We immediately start to notice that there were objects that shouldn't have been there. These things weren't behaving like a normal platform. They were often completely stationary in very high winds. We can no longer just dismiss it as a radar error. Everything is telling us it's real and it's there. Where did they come from? What are they doing? Why are we not tracking this?

• 0:28Mayim Bialik?

  Ryan Graves is the first active duty military pilot to testify before Congress about UAP sightings. His alarming encounters led him to found Americans for Safe Aerospace to encourage the government to disclose information about UAPs.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  People are seeing these Cuban spheres. We're seeing metallic spheres, elongated spheres. They are reporting higher speeds now, 0.8, 0.9 Mach while maneuvering. They seem to be able to traverse water, air, space seamlessly. One of these objects went in between the two aircraft, about 50 feet from the lead aircraft. This is now a documentable near miss. Four other near misses had occurred, all of which went unreported. That was shocking to know that eight people essentially collectively gone silent and allowed this issue to percolate. This is a problem.

• 1:21Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 1:22Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 1:23Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to our breakdown. Today, we're going to be speaking to Ryan Graves. He's the first active duty pilot to testify before the government regarding UAP sightings in controlled airspace. He's a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, and he started seeing things on his flights that he and his colleagues could no longer explain. And when they took it to the higher ups, what they discovered is that these sightings were nothing new. He embarked on an investigation that eventually led him to start safel airspace.org, where UAPs can be discussed and where we can learn more about what the government knows, what

• 2:06Mayim Bialik?

  the government doesn't know, and the possibility that sightings might be increasing and might become a danger to more Americans.

• 2:14Jonathan Cohen?

  We happen to speak to him hours after the government releases previously classified and withheld documents with many more to come. And Ryan gives us a window into An increase in UAP sightings and a breakdown of the characteristics, the movement patterns that defy our understanding of our current technology.

• 2:38Mayim Bialik?

  Most importantly, Ryan's going to explain to us what we know and what we still don't know in an attempt to have us all on the same page. What a pleasure and an honor to welcome to the Breakdown, Ryan Graves.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  Break it down.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Happy to be here. Thanks.

• 2:54Mayim Bialik?

  Before we get started with all of the incredible things that we want you to explain to us and tell us and walk us through, we can't help but notice that something came out in the news literally as we slept before we got to speak to you. I mean, the timing could not have been more perfect for us. And we were wondering if you can kind of explain, like, what is going on? Is this the age of disclosure? What is happening?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, great questions. Yeah, very exciting timing right now. Just earlier this morning at 8:00 a.m. Eastern, the Department of War released what I believe to be the first tranche of UAP evidence that had been previously withheld from the public. It includes records from NASA, from the Department of War, some from the FBI. We'll see what else comes. Notably, that does not include information across the vast intelligence community. And from what I hear from congressional members, I have, I think, seen the full briefing

• 4:07Speaker 00

  is that it will likely get progressively more interesting as we go.

• 4:11Mayim Bialik?

  Why can't they just release the most interesting stuff right off the bat? Like, this is like a weird reality show we're in.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  I know. It does seem a bit scripted. It does seem a bit according to schedule. You know, it's been a long time coming to get to this point. I got involved with this back in 2017. But just a few months ago, for those that recall, there was some back and forth between former President Obama and current President Trump about...

• 4:44Speaker 00

  What the US might have in regards to UAP slash UFO and Trump ended that that that exchange by making a declaration on social media that he would be releasing quote unquote all the files.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  I don't, you know, there's a lot to unpack as far as what that might mean. However, I have been following this topic closely as one might imagine, and I am aware that there has been a lot of effort within the government, within different agencies, the FBI, the intelligence communities writ large, specifically ODNI. And there has been infrastructure that has been stood up, governance boards, if you will, in order to collect the large amount of information that has been coming in from pilots, from other military members, et cetera, et cetera, as well as, of course, some historical files, perhaps some that have already been released, perhaps some that have not.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  But there is, of course, you know, a scale of how good the sensors are. I think we're seeing some of the the poor quality ones now. And like I said, if the indications that various congresspeople are putting forward, that the best is is yet to come.

• 6:01Mayim Bialik?

  I don't ask this from a partisan, you know, position because I don't really care what the, you know, political party is of a president who's releasing this kind of information. I think it's it's an incredible moment in history, no matter what it turns out to be and what the motivation is. But is there anything that you feel we should be concerned about in terms of the timing, in terms of the other things going on in the world? Is this a distraction? You know, is this some sort of entertainment or theater? Because I want it to be real information, but not all information is created equal or presented equally, right?

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I think people are always going to bring up the the concept of this being a distraction. And perhaps it might serve that in a secondary fashion. But for all intents and purposes, from my vantage point, it does seem like there is an honest effort that has been invested into in order to gather and bring forward this information. Now, there are two, I think, categories of information that could be released here. There is perhaps deep programs and information related to that as far as what the government has.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  Known about UAP and how long and you know, the real, the real goods of what the government may know, are we exploiting these technologies for our benefit in any technological domains? These are what people will consider, you know, hard disclosure questions and the person sitting to my left when I testified before Congress, David Grush, that was the area of expertise that he investigated during his time at the UAP Task Force. On the other side of the coin, outside of what those programs may be, since about 2017, 2018, the normal military apparatus has, as it always has, been detecting these types

• 7:55Speaker 00

  of incursions, these close calls, these UAP. But now there was a reduction in stigma. Now the, the climate had changed. Now there was perhaps something important that this information represented, whether it be aliens or China or something else. And so people started to save that information instead of either dismissing it or deleting it. They started to save it and with some of the apparatus that has been stood up, such as the all the main anomaly resolution office at the Pentagon, such as a UAP working group at the FBI and many other places, that information is getting captured and brought forward and collated and starting to be understood.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  And I suspect a lot of what we're seeing right now is some of that perhaps more ambiguous, lower quality data that comes from those sources. I do have an expectation that there are more convincing, I'll say, higher quality imagery that will fall out of that bucket and perhaps we'll see that soon. But that says nothing, of course, to what might already exist and what we've learned from it thus far. And I'm, I'm eager to see if we do get into those, those nitty gritty details as well.

• 9:09Jonathan Cohen?

  It sounds like the apparatus is also helping agencies share information across agencies where the pockets could have been siloed before, where now, especially if there's an encouragement to capture stuff that may have been thrown away, it's likely now a lot easier to find patterns and to share information even across organizations within the government.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Well, that's exactly right. And you know, that's exactly the the Yeoman's work, as we say in the Navy, that my organization, Americans for Safe Aerospace, has been doing over the past four years. We've been connecting with these different agencies across the executive branch, working with Congress, working with the airlines and other organizations in order to collect all this data from disparate sources, identify the problems in the past forward and start those groups to actually talk to each other. And we've been very successful in that. And you know, a lot of these started as people that were just earnestly interested within these agencies wanting to get to an answer, much like many of us do, but they had the means to actually push it forward.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  And I think today is, I think, the first major public milestone in the work that those folks have been achieving over the past few years. And there's, there's a lot of them. And you know, I think many of them are the unsung heroes in this whole conversation.

• 10:32Jonathan Cohen?

  The one thing that the public is not fantastic about is making sense of things on their own. So the headline I read, I read this morning was like, here's all this information, go ahead and make sense of it.

• 10:44Mayim Bialik?

  No, it was like, it was like the public, the public will have to draw their own conclusions. And I'm thinking, you don't want me drawing my own conclusions. I'm not an expert. What's with the body bag? Like, what's happening? Someone just tell me what's happening.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  I get that, you know, and that's something I've thought about as well, right? And I think we've all probably have a social model, you know, mental model, what that's supposed to look like as far as a president getting in front of a podium and making an extremely declarative statement.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  You know, I think we first probably all imagined that, you know, watching movies as kids and whatnot. You know, I don't know if we still exist in that same political environment.

• 11:21Jonathan Cohen?

  If not the president, someone who understands aerospace better than me.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  But you know, you're absolutely right. And I can't help thinking that, you know, what I just suggested is that maybe it's not someone telling us, it's giving us enough information to make those assessments ourself. And this, this is, like I said, is likely the more ambiguous phase, right? And I think it is going to be a process. I think the data that can be presented can be much less ambiguous, which is going to allow people to draw conclusions faster. But I see, like I said, I see ourselves on a timeline now for these drops. They are going to be incremental and on a schedule. And it's like I said, my expectation that they'll get less ambiguous as it goes.

• 12:07Mayim Bialik?

  Well, you are clearly the person that we wanted to talk to about this. So there's so much more that we want to cover, but we really appreciate you weighing in on this literally breaking news. My MB Alex Breakdown is supported by Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you reach for over and over again? That sweater that somehow works with everything, the jeans you know will always fit just right, the bag you carry everywhere? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe, and that's what Quince does so well. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, premium stretch denim. The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need to round out your wardrobe, from warm, responsibly-sourced

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• 14:20Mayim Bialik?

  Let's give people a bit of a framework of who you are. I wonder if you can tell us sort of a little bit about your history and your credentials, as it were, and why you are the name on so many people's tongues when we talk about UAPs, UFOs, and the government's knowledge or misinformation or disinformation about what actually might be happening when people see incredible things in the sky?

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Sure. So, you know, started off growing up in central Massachusetts, got a degree in aerospace engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I made a decision during college that flying fighter jets, perhaps for the Air Force, perhaps for the Navy, would be the thing that really excited me. It was a bit of a departure and a sudden shift in my life, but definitely in the top two decisions so far in my life. I decided to go with the Navy. They had a higher jet to non-jet ratio, and so that, I thought, increased my odds of getting what I wanted. And I thought it'd be pretty cool to land on an aircraft carrier as well, of course.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  I had success during training. I started in Rhode Island, down to Pensacola, Florida, over to Corpus Christi, Texas, where I first flew in the primary flight training for a year. Out of that, out of 13 people that were looking for jets, I was the only person in my class to get selected for it. It's good to learn early in the Navy that the needs of the Navy supersede your own desires. And unfortunately, that was a stark and early example of that in the training pipeline for a lot of folks. But that sent me off to Meridian, Mississippi for another year to go into the intermediate

• 16:11Speaker 00

  advanced strike fighter training pipeline where I flew the T-45 Goshawk in Meridian, Mississippi for a year. That's where we learned the basics of what it is to be at a fighter aircraft, dropping fake bombs, dogfighting for the first time, and going to the aircraft carrier during the day for the first time. Out of that, I went to Virginia Beach, Virginia for a year, now learning the F-18 as an officially winged aviator, learning how to employ that weapon system. I finished that after a year and finished what's called priority alpha, which meant I was immediately deployable. So two weeks after I finished my training, I found myself in the

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Middle East on the USS Enterprise. I flew my first combat mission about a week after that.

• 16:59Mayim Bialik?

  How old were you at that time?

• 17:01Speaker 00

  I was about 26.

• 17:04Mayim Bialik?

  Okay.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  We came back from that deployment, settled into our routine, really did what else are the bulk of our training to be a pilot. We're really learning how to be a combat follower, a combat lead of aircraft, both two aircraft and four aircraft and employ in all sorts of environments. And we got ready for our second deployment in 2015, where we deployed to Iraq and Syria aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt to conduct operations against ISIS when that was kicking off. I came back from that deployment and became a advanced strike fighter instructor back in Mississippi. And I did that for three years before I got out in 2019. But it was

• 17:50Speaker 00

  right after our first deployment when we start to upgrade our radar systems in our jets to a much more sophisticated system. And when we did that, we immediately started to notice that out in the working areas over the ocean, off the coast of Virginia Beach where we train, that there were objects that we were detecting with the new radars that shouldn't have been there.

• 18:15Mayim Bialik?

  Tell us about the precision shift in detection, because I think that's an important component of this, right? What was different about this equipment, let's say?

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were flying the APG 73, which is a mechanically-scanned array radar system, basically a very large dish out front, a single radar emitter that's high-powered, and it more or less physically moves around in order to point that sensor where it needs to go. We upgraded from that to the APG 79, an actively electronically-scanned array radar system, and this is several orders of magnitude increase in capability. It's now many, many hundreds, I'll say, individual computer chip-sized radars that are fixed, that allow us to scan

• 19:07Speaker 00

  the sky much faster, detect much smaller objects, and have much more confidence in what we're doing, as well as all the fancy stuff like electronic warfare and jamming and all that stuff. So this was a, this was a real big capability, and I kind of liken it from going from a black and white TV to an OLED, as far as situational awareness goes. And not only that, but our jets are linked. So when I, we fly out there with other aircraft and their radars are receiving information, we all bring that together and see what other people can see, share what we can see. And so you get a good sense out there when you're flying with a wingman who has an older radar, and you can tell he cannot

• 19:50Speaker 00

  see that radar track, and yet you can. With your newer radar, you can kind of see that unfold in real time. But you know, these things weren't behaving like a normal platform. They were often completely stationary in very high winds, 120, 130 knots. We'd see them at speeds we might be expected to be at 0.6 to 0.8 Mach, about 250, 350 knots. And we see them supersonic as well, 1.1, 1.2 Mach. I only saw them heading due east when going at those speeds.

• 20:26Mayim Bialik?

  What are they when you say that you see them? What are they? And to your pilot's brain, what do you think is happening? Right? Like, what's your first initial thought?

• 20:39Speaker 00

  So right now, we don't know. You know, what we are thinking when we're seeing this just on the radar, hey, it's a new radar. They come with errors, maybe it's software, maybe the radar is reflecting off of something. This is perhaps just an error. So what we did was ignore it. We just assumed that, even though, like I said, the kinematics were very unusual. You know, it wasn't just something very spotty. And oh, by the way, we have very sophisticated systems that give us a confidence in the quality of the track file we have, right? Of our detection, because, you know, we only carry so many missiles. You don't necessarily have to blow us out of the sky to defeat us, right? If we waste all our missiles, then we're pretty much useless up there. So it's very important to know what we're shooting at.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  And these are all what we call high quality track files or weapons quality track files. But still, just kind of

• 21:30Speaker 00

  even with all the data pointing against it, we still made the assumption it was a radar error.

• 21:35Mayim Bialik?

  Do they look like lights? Do they read as physical objects?

• 21:40Speaker 00

  On the radar, all we can see, it's like a computer screen, right? So it just gives us an icon. And it's like, hey, it's moving in this direction, it's going this fast, it's at this altitude. And so it's just a total fake representation, artificial representation. But as we got closer, some of our other sensors, such as our AT FLIR system, or Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared System, which is a camera system and an infrared, basically a thermal camera. We got close enough where this is that's slaved to our radar. So as our radar is locked onto it, it's now looking there. It's out of range, but as we get closer, all of a sudden, oh, we can see, we can see that there is a physical object there. It's emitting higher

• 22:25Speaker 00

  energy. We couldn't switch to the camera because we're really only seeing it on higher energy at this point. And then our other systems, electronic warfare, et cetera, et cetera, start correlating. So now we have multimodal detections of this object, right? And we can't, we can no longer just dismiss it as a radar error. Everything is telling us it's real and it's there. And so the next step for us was like, all right, let's go fly up to it and try to see one of these things. And so we'd pick one that was stationary or slow. We stepped down about 1,000 feet below it. We slowed down to about 200 knots. So a very easy pass, you know, we're used to crossing with another fighter at 1,200

• 23:05Speaker 00

  knots relative velocity. So 200 knot relative velocity pass, basically stationary. Yeah. So, and oh, by the way, as we're coming to what we call this merge, we have an augmented reality helmet system that is fusing with all our sensor data and drawing a box in the sky to tell us where to look for our radar contact that we're tracking, right? So we have all the fun tools, or as we like to say, the Gucci tools in the cockpit. And we'd fly up to this and we wouldn't be able to see it with our eyeballs. We'd have good radar, we'd have good FLIR footage the entire time and we'd fly by it and there'd be nothing.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  We turn back around, we reacquire on all our sensors, it would be displaced, but still there. And yeah, we didn't, we didn't know what to make of that.

• 23:59Jonathan Cohen?

  I just want to clarify, because I, it's like hard to even imagine. So you're seeing it on all the mechanical equipment, all the sensors, everything in this sophisticated machine you're flying is saying something is there and yet you go up to it where it's supposed to be and it's not there.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  That's correct.

• 24:19Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, the place that I go is like, what's the, and I know that, you know, you are an elite pilot and you are taught to understand kind of emotional regulation in ways that like, if you put me in that jet, I would have a very different reaction. But I am curious and I wonder if you can give us a window into kind of like who you guys are. Is there fear? Like when you see something like that and you say, let's fly up to it. Is there any moment of like, could this be an enemy? You know, ship like, like is there fear? Is there, you know, does it enter your mind that this might be scary? And then when you fly up to an object that is detectable and it's not there,

• 25:04Mayim Bialik?

  does your stomach drop? Like, does your brain try and make sense of that? Like, what's, what's the emotional experience?

• 25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we are all very regulated, as you can imagine, especially in the cockpit.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  You know, we're not expecting adversaries up there or not expecting to get shot down or anything like that. At worst case, in our mind, I think someone could be flying sensors in our areas that are trying to monitor what we're doing and we inadvertently hit one. You know, I think that was probably like the worst case scenario that we had in our mind. And it still is a risk, you know, we'll talk about that more later.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  And so whenever you're going to approach something that you're unsure what it is, right? And it's not talking to anyone, it's not transmitting anything. That's a pretty big risk, right? And so that, you know, I said, we stepped down a thousand feet. Our normal separate safe, you know, minimum separation to see something is about 500 feet. If we really wanted to get close, you know, so we're giving it a bit of buffer, being respectful of the purposeful risk that we're putting ourselves in the platform into, right? Except then at the day, you know, we're sitting on a, you know, $60 million of equipment. You know, our decisions are based on executing our mission and our training and, you know, preserving that aircraft. Everything else is like a tertiary concern, especially if we can't.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Do anything. So, you know, when you have everything on your sensors, you trust those sensors with your life. So coming to that merge, having everything, we join on aircraft and clouds with those sensors, right? And so to have them all working perfectly and then not be able to see something with your eyes, it is immediately that stomach drop because you've now put yourself, you were three steps ahead of the jet before that moment and now you're behind it because you put yourself purposely into this tiny piece of the sky with an unknown object. And now you can't even see it. You've lost visual of it at the merge. So, you know, now your, your SA bucket just went way down.

• 27:06Jonathan Cohen?

  And to clarify for anyone listening who might have missed that, like you use these sensors to merge in the sky, like where two planes are connecting to one another. It's like refueling. Is that?

• 27:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I've had to join on refuelers and thunderstorms with my radar. You know, you get close enough to visually see, but you know, these are things we literally trust our life with every day. Right. And so to have it suddenly fail in such a shocking way, you can only presume that either your eyesight failed or the thing is exhibiting some type of optical signal management that we're not familiar with.

• 27:40Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and I think also the reason that I wanted to, you know, have you kind of explain the emotional state is that so many conversations about what we're talking about are emotional. And many people go down all sorts of rabbit holes. And there's definitely a type of personality that many of us can associate with people who want to believe, right? That UAPs are alien intelligence, but I think it's important for people to remember you are a professional and you are trained to handle a tremendous amount of complexity and confusion in real time. So your initial assumption is not, I found a UFO. It's there's something going on here and we have a certain amount of data

• 28:22Mayim Bialik?

  and the data needs to line up with what all of us would assume is a logical approach to a confusing situation.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Well, that's exactly right. You know, for us, you know, we like to say we bucket information. We compartmentalize information often, right? You can't go out and drop a bomb on a wrong target and hurt people that you shouldn't have. Then be so distraught, you can't land on aircraft carrier in three hours. Right? And so we're very used to kind of, you know, putting things into their appropriate corner. I'll say during flight, and that's exactly what I did, and I know others did as well with this. They said, okay, you know, is this a risk to the mission that I'm trying to execute upon now? If I happen to have this small amount of agency at some point in my flight, which sometimes we do, then we'll go up and expect it. But, you know, when you come away from that excursion

• 29:13Speaker 00

  with more questions instead of answers, you know, you've kind of just put yourself in a bad spot. And so then you just, you know, you try to leave it alone. But, you know, it kind of came to a head about two weeks later. We're trying to see these things. We can't see them, but then two aircraft on just normal, nice sunny day. We're flying out to that working area and they were in formation, but 150 feet apart, flying right into the entry point of all those working areas at a very specific altitude and GPS location. And as soon as they crossed that threshold, one of these objects went in between the two aircraft, about 50 feet from the lead aircraft is cockpit, which is basically just chance that they didn't hit at that point.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Again, we use a 500 foot safety bubble.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  He immediately canceled the flight, came back home.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  He was in the ready room with a look of shock on his face when he saw it. He's just like, I almost hit one of those fucking things. And we didn't have a name for them, you know, but we all kind of were hushly talking about it after the debriefs.

• 30:21Mayim Bialik?

  Did you report it at this point to anyone or y'all are just talking among yourselves?

• 30:26Speaker 00

  It's not coming up in any official debriefs. It's kind of like, all right, flight's done, debrief's done. You know, maybe we're having a beer in the ready room. It's like, well, so hey, what was that thing that we were seeing out there? Right? It wasn't incorporated into the official debrief in any sense.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  And so, you know, I was, I was like, I said, I was the one that saw him in the ready room. I'm like, well, what did it look like? He just described as a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere. With the points of the cube touching the inner circumference of that sphere.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  And to your point, this is now a documentable near miss, right? We need to file hazard report. The squadron safety officer needs to do the report. And as he did that, he heard the murmuring is that this wasn't the first time something like this might have happened. And as it turned out, there were four other near misses that had occurred just in the previous five or six weeks, all of which went unreported.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  And so that, that there is like the big, I think, kind of psychological issue, right? Because to your point, we're, we're highly trained. And not only that, we're highly motivated to be the best that we possibly can and not just dropping bombs and flying formation, but in all the little administrative things that make those tactical things actually happen, right? Those are just as important, just not as sexy. And safety incidences are absolutely one of those things.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Some of these assets we fly are considered strategic assets, you know?

• 32:02Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, you're, you're listing all the reasons why people like me and Jonathan do not become Navy fighter pilots. Like, you know that image of Kermit the Frog, like freaking out on stage and flailing about? That's kind of, yeah, exactly. That would be me in the plane, like at the briefing. That's why we don't get those jobs. We do other things.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  We all feel like that somewhere inside, I think, you know? I think even just the little kids saying, I can't believe I get to do this. But, you know, for me, that was kind of shocking to know that four other incidences, each with two aircrew in them, eight people essentially collectively gone silent on this and allowed this issue to percolate, this one weird side issue. And that was kind of my first brush, like, whoa, this is a problem. We don't, I don't know what it is, but regardless, you know, that's a problem, right? Because now, what about the squadron right down the hall from us? You know, that flies in the same area with the same jet? Do they know about this? Are they having near misses? Who knows? We're not, we're not talking about this.

• 32:58Mayim Bialik?

  You kind of very casually talked about like a cube and a sphere.

• 33:02Jonathan Cohen?

  This is the first time it's visible, right? On the pass where it's 50 feet away. This is the first time you're hearing a someone visually describe it because when you tried to look for it, it wasn't there.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  That's correct. Yeah. So that was kind of a weird moment for us and we're not sure why it was visible that time. I have some theories. His radar wasn't working at the time. So perhaps they surprised each other. You know, if you're not sending your radar down range, it's harder to know you're there, right? So that's kind of how fighter employments work. Active radars versus passive detection. And so he is basically all passive at that time as he's flying out there. And like I said, perhaps they surprised each other a bit. So that, you know, that was kind of an interesting, you know, kind of moment in the squadron. We all kind of collectively, you know, kind of looked around. Not really

• 33:56Speaker 00

  sure what to do, but now that it was a documented safety issue, there was no more, well, let's go fly up to it and check it out. Right? Because I was just all risk. And so that's what we did. We avoided them from that point out. They would be there pretty much every day, three to five to eight of them in the in the areas, kind of all doing their own thing. Sometimes they would be blocking areas that we needed to work in and we had to cancel training. And that went on without really me having any organized understanding of how much it was going on happening for the next couple of years.

• 34:31Mayim Bialik?

  Years? Years? You feel good about years?

• 34:37Speaker 00

  No, I don't. But that, yeah, that's exactly right. And of course, we're very busy, you know, we're going through some of the hardest training in our life.

• 34:45Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, but like you're basically trying not to freak the fuck out about things in the sky that we can't explain that also can't be really detected reliably.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Now, we weren't expecting anything back from the safety report, but you know, it was passed up the chain. And I think everyone had this general expectation that perhaps it was China or someone else that was. Doing something, right? Either confusing us to think it was doing something that was superior or truly was doing something superior, but either way, they were there. And that because it was passed up the chain, you know, perhaps counterintelligence would get involved or Coast Guard or whoever it is. It's not our responsibility to hunt those types of things down. We're there, we're an expedition. Our combat is out somewhere else as the Air Force and National Guard and National Guard. So, so that was kind

• 35:35Speaker 00

  of the expectation, but that never happened and it kept coming. We never heard anything back. And then we left in 2015 to get ready for our next deployment and we went off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt for about a month for training. And unbeknownst to me at the time, but we had dozens of incidences down there. They were either already there or they followed us down. But I, there was a notable incident that I was aware of. There was a flight that we were on, large air-to-air mission. The way it works is you kind of all go out there together and then as you fight, people run out of fuel at different times and people go back by themselves, but they have to wait for the carrier to open up for landing. So you hang out at

• 36:20Speaker 00

  a very fuel-efficient fuel flow speed and you just kind of hang out for a bit, maybe 15 minutes. And so while they were doing that, and these two very good friends of mine, one of them was at my wedding party, we went through training together, we ended up in the same fleet squadron together, we did specialized training together. Very good friends and, and one of them actually won top fighter pilot on the East Coast one of these years as well. A pretty, pretty good honor. They were, they detected numerous objects east of the aircraft carrier. We're already 350 miles out to sea right now off the coast of Jacksonville. Now they're detecting these objects and they decided essentially

• 37:02Speaker 00

  go spin over and take a look. They crossed one group that was four objects in a, in a wall with about a mile, when I say a wall, like side by side, but a mile in between. They captured one of the objects on their flere. This, this footage was later released under the title of the Go Fast video. And then they continued their trek over to the main group, which was one large gimbal-like object, which was later released under the name Gimbal in a 2017 New York Times article. And behind that Gimbal object was another small fleet of aircraft or vehicles or objects, five to eight of them, if I recall, in a V formation.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  And they all turned direction 180 degrees. They all broke apart, no like clean turn, then reformed the other direction. The Gimbal object just kind of bounced and followed that group.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  We hadn't seen an object like the Gimbal. It was bigger, it was more defined with the energy it was putting out, that infrared energy that it twisted and rotated in strange ways. And after reconstruction, learned that the twisting actually represented a vertical turn to change its direction 180 degrees to follow those other craft.

• 38:23Mayim Bialik?

  Do we have craft that can do that?

• 38:25Speaker 00

  F-18 certainly can do a vertical turn, but it takes about 6,000 feet of turn radius to do it. And then we can certainly, you know, have a small drone, of course, make a small, you know, 100-foot turn. But the question necessarily is, is it exhibiting technology? Like, nothing I described there is something we can't replicate. The question is, why are these within a controlled airspace, almost 400 miles off the coast of Jacksonville? Where did they come from? What are they doing? Why, how are they flying in formation, right? Why, why are we not tracking this? And, you know, what is ultimately their intent?

• 39:03Mayim Bialik?

  The word "following" is haunting me. I don't know if it's haunted you, but the notion that something might follow you, right? From one base to another, across hundreds and hundreds of miles? Without kind of revealing anything that you don't want to reveal, was there anything about the work that you were doing as a pilot, the work that you were doing in terms of preparation for war, that someone might be interested in for any particular reason?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I'll actually push back and say it's not unusual and the Russians love to follow us around and particularly during that workup cycle, we were aware and briefed on threats, right? So we were briefed on all these types of threats. This is very common, even up in Virginia Beach off the coast, right? It's international waters and there's really nothing we can do. So briefed in on all that type of activity, but of course, you know, this, this isn't included and we're not, you know, like I said, you know, we could talk more about the kinematics of what was happening over Virginia Beach, but at least what was just recorded over, you know, Jack's off the coast of Jackville, Florida, the technology isn't, you know, exceeding the capabilities other than time on station or point of origin,

• 40:17Speaker 00

  right? And these are terms I'm using specifically because when we are doing our internal math on whether we were going to shoot somebody or not, these are considerations that we think about when we start to define whether they're hostile or not. All right. So where do these things come from? Are they being launched from a ship? Are they coming from, are they submarine launched? Are they dropping down from space? Is it China? You know, what lot more questions than answers right now, right? And so, you know, I saw, I'm describing this whole scenario to you because the crew came back and I was called down to the intel space because again, I was good friends with the crew. Someone told me he caught something cool. So I went down there to watch. And that's, you know, I watched all their displays

• 41:02Speaker 00

  being recorded and, and those, like I said, videos ultimately came out in 2017 in a New York Times article. But before I get to that, you know, when I was down in that classified space, watching those videos, I heard the Admiral was coming down and I was very keen to see what his reaction was to the videos. And so I watched him come in, I kind of slinked back to the back of the room so I didn't get kicked out. And he Came in, watched the videos for about six seconds, made a sound and walked out. And I was immediately like, hmm, he's seen these before. I don't even think he watched the full video.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  And as I indicated earlier, you know, we had been having dozens of incidences during this period, but I was only aware of what our squadron had. As it turned out, the Admiral left the room, went upstairs and sent an urgent email with the subject line, urgent safety of flight issue to all the major commands on the east coast, including my now friend's command, Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, who was the chief meteorologist in the Navy at the time out of Jacksonville, Florida. He received that email and also advises one of my organizations now,

• 42:17Speaker 00

  directly from the Admiral stating that we are having these dozens of near misses with unknown objects over the aircraft carrier during this training exercise and that they were at risk of canceling the entire exercise due to these incidences. And this is a major exercise to prepare us to relieve the currently deployed aircraft carrier. So this has, you know, massive downrange ramifications.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  And, you know, so this, this was something that our airway had to deal with quite a bit. But, you know, we finished that classified debrief. We went back to the ready room and we're chatting about it and essentially told the, stop talking about it and get back to work. And that's what we did.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  For the next few weeks until we got ready and deployed out back to the Middle East a couple of months later.

• 43:11Mayim Bialik?

  Based on that reaction, based on what happened from it, if you had to guess, how long do you think things like this have been going on that had gone undetected or unreported?

• 43:24Speaker 00

  Well, I will say this, we started, you know, I guess I didn't even mention the dates, but, you know, we started seeing these when we upgraded our radar late 2012. And this is now a workup cycle in 2015.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  So at least that time period, but that's when we upgraded our radars. I have high confidence this was happening much earlier and you know, I've talked to many pilots, both while I was in Navy and now who had their, you know, their ghost stories about things that they had, they saw either because, you know, another controller told them to zoom in with their older radars in this spot, or they happened to be close enough. So I do think it was going on before. I just don't think we had sophisticated enough tools to detect them like we can now.

• 44:10Mayim Bialik?

  It's kind of unbelievable, right? It's like, uh, you know, when we talk about the rise in reports of anything, whether it's rates of autism, or you know, whatever it is, you have to know that there's a shift in our ability to report, our ability to identify. But I mean, I think that's what's so unique and special about this time in history and the time that we're living through, literally even this morning. We're at a place where we can finally say, there's something here and an increased incidence doesn't mean that people are getting more crazy. It means that we're able to detect things more, people are less afraid, and we're pulling back that veil, right?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  It's happening whether we can see it or not. That is the nature of the reality we live in, right? And the more we can see and observe reality, the more insight we're going to have in the understanding it. And not everything exists in the extreme macro or extreme micro scales, you know, there are phenomena, we don't exist right here at our scale.

• 45:07Jonathan Cohen?

  Has the stigma reduced for pilots coming forward with experiences that are somewhat unexplainable or unusual from the time back in 2012, 13, 14, 15?

• 45:21Speaker 00

  Absolutely, 100%. It's been night and day, but we're not all the way there. And you know, that's, that was kind of the big thing I had to fight when I decided that I was going to speak out about this, you know, how that was going to reflect on me personally and professionally, and where that ended, right? You know, I think most of those decision tree paths led probably into a place that was...

• 45:47Speaker 00

  More chaotic, I'll say, brought more chaos into my life than peace, right? So, you know, in 2017, I was still in the Navy. I was back in Meridian, Mississippi as a flight instructor. I left that last deployment on deployment.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  And I was sitting on the couch when I got a news alert on my phone from Apple News Alert, about a New York Times article stating that Navy pilots were seeing UAP. A task force was stood up to investigate it. Something major was going on and that they couldn't get it up the chain due to stigma and other reasons, et cetera, related to stigma. And one of them was quitting in protest that this was happening. And there was three videos released, two of which were the ones that I shared with you, the Go Fast and the Gimbal video. And I had a massive moment of deja vu because I just kind of had all completely left my mind. I just, again, assumed it was going to get addressed at some level at some point,

• 46:47Speaker 00

  even though it hadn't been yet.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  But I realized when I saw that article that the same issues were happening up chain as well. The same effects of stigma.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  And so I call, after reading the article, I called some of my colleagues back on the East Coast and asked them if they were still having these encounters, which they were regularly. Was there any fix? No, absolutely nothing. They just put out a basic notice to airmen that stated, hey, unknown objects in the area. Please use caution. That was the only thing they did.

• 47:22Mayim Bialik?

  It feels like it's like, you know, when you walk into a mall and there's like a wet floor, do not walk here sign. Like, I feel like that's kind of what you got.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  But it's a puddle of blood instead, right? It's like, well, maybe we should address this some other way, right?

• 47:40Mayim Bialik?

  We're going to hit pause here on our conversation with Ryan Graves. There is so much more to talk about in part two. We're going to talk about his personal anecdotes, what he has seen, what colleagues have reported, and how do we piece together truth from false information and AI-generated images of the kinds of things that Ryan himself has experienced.

• 48:01Jonathan Cohen?

  We're also going to talk about how UAPs defy physics and how it's unlikely are adversaries observing us, but something much more interesting.

• 48:11Mayim Bialik?

  In addition, why are UAPs so frequently seen interacting with nuclear sites? Ryan is going to explain what he thinks is going on. All of that in part two of our conversation with Ryan Graves, from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.