Ryan Graves

Ryan Graves is a former U.S. Navy F/A-18F pilot and flight instructor who served a decade in uniform, including deployments aboard the USS Enterprise and USS Theodore Roosevelt supporting operations over Iraq and Syria, during which his squadron began repeatedly encountering unidentified objects in training airspace off the U.S. East Coast starting around 2014 — the same wave of incidents that later produced the released 'Gimbal' and 'GoFast' videos. In July 2023 Graves became the first active-duty-era Navy pilot to testify before Congress specifically about routine, ongoing UAP sightings in controlled military airspace, framing the issue explicitly around aviation safety rather than extraterrestrial speculation: unidentified objects sharing airspace with fast-moving military aircraft represent a genuine collision and identification-failure risk regardless of their ultimate origin. He founded Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA) in 2023, a nonprofit providing confidential UAP reporting channels for military and commercial pilots and advocating for formal reporting infrastructure within the FAA and Department of Defense, and became the first chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' UAP Integration & Outreach Committee, representing over 30,000 aerospace professionals. Graves's safety-first framing, distinct from the more dramatic government-secrecy claims of other disclosure figures, has proven influential in giving UAP advocacy institutional traction within mainstream aviation bodies.