Ryan "FOBS" Graves is a former U.S. Navy lieutenant and F/A-18F pilot whose House witness biography says he served for a decade, including deployments in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Inherent Resolve.1 He became a prominent public UAP witness after describing recurring 2014-2015 encounters by pilots in Navy Fighter Attack Squadron 11 near Virginia Beach, and his central argument is that unidentified objects in controlled airspace should be treated first as an aviation-safety, national-security, and data-quality problem.23
Navy Service and Roosevelt Encounters
Graves testified that he joined the Navy in 2009 and was flying F/A-18F Super Hornets with VFA-11, the Red Rippers, at Naval Air Station Oceana in 2014.2 In his written testimony, he said the squadron began detecting unknown objects after radar upgrades, first considered software or radar errors, and later correlated some tracks with infrared sensors and visual observation.2
In the House transcript, Graves described a Warning Area W-72 training incident about 10 miles off Virginia Beach in which two F/A-18 Super Hornets encountered a dark gray or black cube inside a clear sphere that he said came within 50 feet of the lead aircraft.3 He told the subcommittee that the mission commander terminated the flight, the squadron submitted a safety report, and there was no official acknowledgement or further reporting mechanism for the sightings.3 Graves' account says the incidents became frequent enough to enter preflight risk discussions, but the public record available in the hearing does not identify the objects or establish their origin.23
Congressional Testimony
On July 26, 2023, the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs held a public hearing on UAP in room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building, with Graves, David Grusch, and retired Commander David Fravor as witnesses.3 Graves appeared as executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace, and the witnesses were sworn before giving public testimony.3 In his opening statement, Graves said UAP reports were underreported, that stigma discouraged commercial pilots and other witnesses, and that overclassification limited public understanding of the issue.3
Graves told members that more than 30 commercial aircrew and military veterans had shared similar encounters with him, and he said Americans for Safe Aerospace had nearly 5,000 members at the time of the hearing.23 When asked how pilot reporting should improve, he said pilots needed a secure process to report without fear of losing employment or facing medical or professional repercussions.3 The testimony was significant because it framed UAP as a hazard-reporting and oversight problem, but it remained witness testimony supported by descriptions of sensor data rather than public release of the raw squadron radar and infrared records.23
Americans for Safe Aerospace
Graves founded Americans for Safe Aerospace to support, research, and educate around aircrew affected by UAP encounters.2 ASA describes itself as a military pilot-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides a trusted channel for pilots to confidentially report UAP encounters and says it focuses on pilot support, aerospace safety, data-driven research, and analysis.4 The organization's current site lists Graves as founder and executive director, and his House biography also identifies him as the first chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics UAP Integration and Outreach Committee.14
The pilot-safety framing later appeared in proposed legislation called the Safe Airspace for Americans Act.5 The introduced 119th Congress bill text would require the FAA to standardize civilian UAP incident collection, preserve relevant pilot-controller and radar data, evaluate national-airspace safety risks, share reports with AARO, protect reporters from enforcement or reprisals in defined circumstances, and consider whether reports should flow through the Aviation Safety Reporting Program or a similar system.5
Public Videos and What They Show
The Department of Defense formally released three historical Navy videos on April 27, 2020, including one from November 2004 and two from January 2015, after earlier unauthorized public circulation.6 DoD stated that the Navy had acknowledged the videos were Navy videos and that the aerial phenomena in them remained characterized as unidentified.6 The official release confirms the authenticity of those short clips, but it does not identify the objects shown in them or provide the broader classified context that Graves says should be reviewed through a better reporting and analysis process.236
Evidentiary Limits
The public evidentiary record around Graves is strongest on biography, congressional testimony, advocacy activity, and the existence of official concern about UAP reporting; it is weaker on object identification because the detailed sensor records he references have not been publicly released in a way that permits independent reconstruction.1234 ODNI's 2021 preliminary assessment said limited high-quality reporting hampered firm conclusions, that the dataset included 144 U.S. government reports, that 80 involved multiple sensors, and that 11 documented pilot-reported near misses.7 The same assessment said UAP clearly posed a flight-safety issue and might pose a national-security challenge, while also noting possible explanations ranging from clutter and atmospheric phenomena to U.S. programs, foreign systems, and an unresolved "other" category.7
NASA's 2023 independent study report similarly emphasized that limited high-quality observations and inconsistent, non-reproducible eyewitness reports prevent definitive scientific conclusions about UAP provenance.8 AARO's FY2024 annual report said it received 757 reports for the covered period and earlier backlogged incidents, resolved many cases to prosaic objects, placed 444 cases in active archive for insufficient data, and had found no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology as of that report.9 Those official limitations do not disprove Graves' safety concerns, but they mean his public claims should be read as pilot testimony and reporting-system advocacy rather than proof of a specific extraordinary origin.789