While a trio of objects downed by the US military in the aftermath of the "Chinese balloon affair" turned out to be terrestrial in origin, dashing hopes for "close encounters of the third kind," a former US Navy pilot has insisted that the truth is still out there.
Lieutenant Ryan Graves is an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who previously shared how his squadron encountered UFOs – or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon), as they are referred to nowadays – during training flights in restricted airspace off the coast of Virginia. Now, he has told a British newspaper that people who are "still flying out there" keep encountering these strange things.
"Some of them were describing cubes and spheres. I have heard it described over the course of eight or nine years, basically the same object being reported. Also, nondescript, white objects are reported as well,” he said. “We have to be aware that there are objects in our airspace and we are not fully aware of what they are. Uncertainty in our airspace is a national security threat."
Meanwhile, Graves launched an advocacy organization called Americans for Safe Aerospace, which aims to "provide public education on unidentified anomalous phenomena and support pilots and other aerospace workers impacted by UAP," according to the description on their website.
"If UAP are foreign drones, they pose an urgent threat to national security and airspace safety. If they are something else, it must be a scientific priority to find out,” the organization postulates.
Graves also observed that the type of fighter aircraft he was flying when he encountered UAPs is "not a proper scientific tool" for understanding the phenomena in question.
As such, "we need to gather more data,” he said, as quoted by the newspaper. “We’re just not at a point where we can draw conclusions."