Graves, Ryan
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Graves opens with a technical discussion of fighter aviation prompted by Top Gun: Maverick — describing integrated air defense systems, why modern dogfighting is tactically rare given long-range weapons (making the F-35 valuable less as a dogfighter than as an electronic-warfare and mission-command platform), and the physical experience of supersonic flight and carrier landings, including the extraordinarily precise and stressful process of the "ball" glideslope indicator, the dangerous "burble" of turbulent air near the ship's tower, and "zero-zero" landings in weather so poor the landing signals officer talks a nearly blind pilot down by voice alone. He describes formation flying as entirely manual (maintaining relative position via visual triangulation off a lead aircraft, with vertigo risk when losing that visual reference in clouds) and reflects on his own path into the Navy as driven less by a romantic love of flying than by a desire to work at what he saw as the edge of technology.
The core of the conversation covers his and his squadron's (VFA-11, "Red Rippers") repeated 2014-2015 radar and visual detections of anomalous objects in restricted training airspace off the coast of Virginia Beach, beginning after an upgrade from the APG-73 to the more sensitive APG-79 radar revealed stationary or erratically moving track returns that didn't match wind conditions (objects reportedly holding position at various altitudes despite significant wind, then later capable of odd, non-mechanical movement patterns unlike autopilot-controlled aircraft). He describes eventually seeing thermal/IR signatures from the same radar locations (rather than only unexplained radar returns), a close pass where two of his squadron's jets flew directly through an area where an object had been tracked without seeing anything on radar (leading them to abort the flight), and a separate direct visual sighting by other aircrew of "a dark gray or black cube inside a clear translucent sphere," with the cube's corners touching the inside of the sphere. He estimates 80-90% of his squadron ultimately observed these objects on radar, and says the incidents prompted internal hazard reports treating the matter primarily as a flight-safety issue rather than a UFO mystery per se — while also raising real concern that a foreign adversary could be using such objects for reconnaissance on U.S. radar signatures and tactics.
He is careful throughout to avoid asserting an explanation, explicitly declining to jump to "aliens," and lays out several hypotheses he considers plausible in varying degrees: misattributed or misidentified U.S. technology tested without cross-service coordination; multi-domain surveillance by a foreign or non-state actor (which he considers less likely mainly because he'd expect commercially valuable spinoff technology to have surfaced elsewhere in the economy by now); natural phenomena (which he thinks could explain some, but not all, sightings); and pilot perceptual/illusion effects, which he says he actively tried to find evidence for given his own training in aviation vertigo and illusions, but ultimately doesn't think accounts for what was observed. Discussing publicly released Navy videos, he says he was personally airborne during the "Gimbal" incident and knows the aircrew who recorded it, describing the object as a featureless, engine-less thermal signature moving alongside what appeared (on later analysis, per outside researchers) to be a formation of four to six similar objects executing an apparent instantaneous direction change that was actually a vertical climbing maneuver — a flight profile, he notes, that would be fuel-inefficient for any advantage-seeking surveillance platform if performed as it first appeared. On the separately reported "Tic Tac" (Nimitz) incident involving David Fravor (whom he calls a friend), he says he cannot construct a plausible mundane explanation for it. He criticizes a congressional hearing on the topic as "disingenuous" given Congress's institutional mismatch with rigorous scientific investigation, is cautiously more optimistic about the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (successor to a since-renamed earlier office) as a genuine, if constrained, good-faith step, and pushes back on "skeptic/debunker" analysts (naming Mick West) for what he sees as starting from a predetermined conclusion and discounting firsthand aircrew testimony.
On extraterrestrial life generally, Graves says he considers it "statistically silly" to assume humanity is alone, while cautioning against anthropomorphizing what alien intelligence or technology might look like; he speculates that any sufficiently advanced civilization would likely have mastered "manipulating matter the way we manipulate information" (citing his own current work at a company doing AI-assisted quantum chemistry simulation of materials, plus a planned hyperspectral-sensor satellite launch, as an early, human-scale analog of that kind of capability), and offers a personal, explicitly speculative view that advanced civilizations might be characterized more by large-scale cooperation than by conflict.
On military AI and autonomy — an area of his professional research — Graves discusses the tactical value of AI-driven unpredictability (making friendly force behavior effectively stochastic and harder for an adversary to model or train against) and argues that autonomous weapons should be commanded at the highest possible level of human judgment (mission-objective targeting rather than micromanaging individual assets), framing increased precision-enabled autonomy as ethically preferable given trustworthy, moral civilian leadership — while acknowledging this is contingent on that leadership actually existing. Drawing on observations from the war in Ukraine (commercial drones repurposed for reconnaissance and strikes, the civilian-funded volunteer drone-war effort), he discusses the risk that consumer autonomous technology could be turned into a security vulnerability at scale, and reflects that combat, in his limited direct experience of it from the air, felt driven by pragmatic necessity and a kind of professional respect for a well-trained adversary rather than hatred — while acknowledging this is a view available to him partly because he experienced war from high altitude, at a remove from its ground-level human cost, and voicing concern that people without a public voice (rural populations, the poor) are most often forgotten in these calculations.
He closes with reflections on struggling with an unexpected identity crisis after leaving the Navy (attributing it to how completely the job had absorbed his sense of purpose), on finding personal peace in owning rural land near Boston, and on his tentative answer to the meaning of life: that his role is simply to stay curious about the world in a way that expands understanding, framing the human mind's capacity to imagine and then realize things that would never occur in nature as itself something remarkable worth encouraging.
Excerpts
On the first visual sighting reported by fellow squadron aircrew:
“They described it just as a dark gray or black cube inside a clear translucent sphere, and the apex of the cube were touching the inside of that sphere... they came back and they're talking to the front desk, talking to skipper, like 'hey, we almost hit one of those damn things out there' — this was one of those kind of slight watershed moments where we were all kind of like, alright, this is a serious deal now.”
On why he resists jumping to any single explanation for what his squadron observed:
“I try to not categorize it under anything and just say, hey, is this demonstrating intelligence, and start from there... as a single object, what can we learn about it kinematically, how it's performing, what does that mean for its energy source... a lot of interestingness comes from the duration, or the time it's been out there, how they're interacting relative to other objects — you don't get that information when you just look at a frame for a second.”
On why he believes autonomy-driven unpredictability could be a powerful tactical advantage:
“My expectation would be... the tactical environment around that jet, the war space that it goes into, will almost be at a stochastic level from the enemy's perspective, where it'll almost seem like every tactical environment they go in will be random and yet very deadly... if knowledge is no longer a factor, it's gonna make things a lot different.”