Former US Fighter Pilot Who Saw UFOs Calls on Witnesses to 'Break Fog of Secrecy', Report Incidents
17:28 GMT 06.02.2023 (Updated: 12:44 GMT 13.04.2023)
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After the US Congress passed a law requiring the Pentagon to produce annual reports on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), which were formerly called UFOs, an ex-US fighter pilot is calling on his colleagues to come forward with their stories.
Ryan Graves, a former US Navy fighter pilot who is now chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) UAP Integration & Outreach Committee (UAPIOC), was the first pilot to go public about his UAP sightings. In a Sunday op-ed in The Hill, a federal government-focused newspaper, he urged others to do the same.
“I have seen for myself on radar and talked with the pilots who have experienced near misses with mysterious objects off the Eastern Seaboard that have triggered unsafe evasive actions and mandatory safety reports,” Graves wrote. “There were 50 or 60 people who flew with me in 2014-2015 and could tell you they saw UAP every day. Yet only one other pilot has confirmed this publicly. I spoke out publicly in 2019, at great risk personally and professionally, because nothing was being done.”
Last month, the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its first report in what will become an annual series of summaries on the Pentagon’s efforts to find, track, investigate and explain UAPs. The Pentagon set up its new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) last summer, which has taken up these tasks.
An earlier document from 2020 attempted to compile all UAP reports made over the previous decades, and the document published last month - which had data current in August 2022 - noted a massive increase in reports, especially from fighter pilots like Graves.
Graves followed the concerns of the Pentagon and national security-connected lawmakers in framing the issue as one of potential dangers posed by US rivals, not as potential visits by extraterrestrial beings.
“Mysteriously, no UAP reports have been confirmed to be foreign so far. However, just this past week, a Chinese surveillance balloon shut down air traffic across the United States. How are we supposed to make sense of hundreds of reports of UAP that violate restricted airspace uncontested and interfere with both civilian and military pilots?” he asked. “Here is the hard truth. We don’t know. UAP are a national security problem, and we urgently need more data.”
On Sunday, the US Air Force shot down the unmanned Chinese high-altitude balloon over the southeastern US that Washington claimed was surveilling sensitive military sites. Beijing has denied the balloon is of military use, saying it’s a scientific balloon that blew off course. Such airships are commonly mistaken for UFOs due to their large size and white sunlight-reflecting color.
Noting that since he went public in 2019, some others have also come forward, leading to a Congressional investigation and the creation of the AARO, Graves urged others “to keep up the momentum to end the stigma and get the data. We should encourage pilots and other witnesses to come forward and keep the pressure on Congress to prioritize UAP as a matter of national security. Only one thing is clear about UAP: The fog of secrecy serves no one.”
Before the AARO was created, the US had mounted several investigations of UAPs and UFOs, the most notorious of which was Project Blue Book from 1952 to 1969, when the phenomenon of UFO sightings became an international sensation. Other programs followed, but each reached the same conclusion: the unexplained phenomena had either natural or terrestrial origin, and none of the evidence pointed toward them being spacecraft bringing visitors from other worlds.
