Nick Allen
Sat, April 8, 2023
Lieutenant Ryan Graves is leading an effort to encourage reporting of sightings of what the military calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena - Science Photo Library RF
A former US Navy fighter pilot has told how his squadron encountered UFOs almost daily for months while training off the American coast.
The sightings included a near collision with an object that appeared like a cube inside a sphere, and a close encounter with a fleet of objects moving at 120 knots into the wind.
Lieutenant Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot, is now leading an effort to encourage reporting of sightings, and advocating for scientific study of what the military calls Unidentified Aerial Phenomena [UAPs].
Last year, Congress held its first hearing into UAPs for 50 years, and the Pentagon has received 350 new reports in the last two years, 171 of which remain unexplained.
Sealed-off block of airspace
Lt Graves told the Telegraph how in 2014 his squadron - the VFA-11 “Red Rippers” - was based on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, preparing for a deployment to the Persian Gulf.
The pilots trained in a sealed-off block of airspace called W-72 off the coast of Virginia, where nothing else was allowed to fly.
After the planes’ radar was upgraded pilots began picking up objects in the training area.
They were initially dismissed as radar errors, but then they flew closer and started seeing them on their FLIR systems, which are infrared cameras that detect heat.
“It was almost as if the sun was shining a flashlight [on the UAPs],” said Lt Graves. “We would have them on a radar, and then we’d have a FLIR. We’d fly by them as low as we could trying to see them.
“We were trying to figure out what the heck these things were. We were seeing them pretty much daily. We’d go out there and they’d be out there in the morning, they’d be out there in the evening.
“These things were pretty much always out there. That would range from two to three of them, to six or seven.”
Then, the near collision happened when an object passed right between two jets, within 50ft of the lead aircraft.
Lt Graves said the pilot involved was shaken up after landing back on the carrier.
Black cube inside of a clear sphere
“He said ‘I almost hit one of those damn things!’ and we all knew what he was talking about,” he said.
“It was completely stationary and he described it as a dark grey or black cube inside of a clear sphere.
“He cancelled the flight, not trusting his ability to clear his airspace in front of him.”
The pilots began operating in different parts of their training area to avoid hitting the unidentified objects.
In early 2015 the USS Theodore Roosevelt relocated, as scheduled, from Virginia to Jacksonville, Florida.
But the sightings of UAPs continued near the ship even though it had moved 600 miles south.
That was when an F/A-18 pilot filmed one of the most famous of all UFO videos, showing an object looking like a “spinning top” or “gimbal”.
“It was a unique object that we recorded on one particular night only,” said Lt Graves.
Video grab image shows part of an unclassified video taken by Navy pilots showing interactions with unidentified aerial phenomena - AFP
“One aircraft from my squadron, they were returning to the boat, they were east of the ship, about three or four miles off the shore. That’s when they saw the gimbal.”
On the video, which was later declassified, the pilots can be heard shouting “Oh my gosh!” and “Look at that thing dude!” and “It’s rotating!”
Lt Graves was in the post-flight briefing with other pilots and a sizeable group of “intelligence folks”.
He said: “No one thought this was benign. It was very clear that this was unusual and outside the normal.
“What you don’t see [on the declassified footage] is the radar information, which shows a formation of four to six objects that were operating kind of outward of the gimbal.
“They turned very quickly, and they all kind of got jumbled up, and then they rolled out and reformed in the opposite direction. They turned, it was a sharp turn.”
He added: “I don’t know 100 per cent if they were the same objects we were seeing before [off Virginia].”
Since leaving the Navy, Lt Graves has launched Americans for Safe Aerospace, which is aimed at promoting reporting of UAPs, aiming to help coordination between the public and private sectors.
He said: “I think it’s moving in the right direction. I think a lot of the cultural baggage that had prevented the reporting has gone away, at least in the Navy, I can’t speak for other branches.
“I’ve been getting reports from people that are still flying out there, that are still seeing these objects.
“Some of them were describing cubes and spheres. I’ve 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 added: “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.”
In terms of what they could be - foreign drones, extraterrestrial - he doesn’t know.
“An F/A 18 is not a proper scientific tool for understanding what we’re seeing,” said Lt Graves.
“So we need to gather more data. There’s a lot of things on the table, but we need more data.
“We’re just not at a point where we can draw conclusions.”
Looking for Orthon: The Story of George Adamski, the First Flying Saucer Contactee, and How He Changed the World
Paperback – September 1, 2008
by Colin Bennett (Author)
On November 20, 1952, George Adamski first made contact with extraterrestrials-including a long-haired youth from Venus named Orthon-in the California desert. or so he claimed. He offered photographic proof. He wrote books about his encounters, including the sensational bestseller Flying Saucers Have Landed. He never stopped advocating the truth of his claims even as he came under extraordinary ridicule. And in the process, however inadvertently, Adamski invented the modern mass counterculture. This new edition of Colin Bennett's modern classic posits, in the author's uniquely engaging style, Adamski as a kind of unwitting performance artist who "structured one of the most blatant acts of visionary cheek of the twentieth century," introducing the jittery postwar Western world to the image of the UFO, which confounded and tweaked authority while also fully embodying Cold War neuroses. Whether Adamski was telling the truth or not is almost irrelevant-though Bennett has his own ideas about Adamski's veracity. What remains compelling about Adamski's bizarre and compelling tale of alien visitations is the transformative power of stories, even if they're false, to warp our culture on a grand scale.
Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953)
In 1953, Desmond Leslie and George Adamski wrote and published Flying Saucers Have Landed. This book became a bestseller with its combination of a historic look at UFO sightings dating from the 1290 AD and a first-hand account of a sighting from the 1940s. This book and a second title by Adamski sold over 200,000 copies in the 1950s.
George Adamski was involved in the California occult scene in the early 20th century. Prior to his interest in flying saucers, he created the religious movement Royal Order of Tibet in which he served as the philosopher-guru. During his time over this group, he received permission from the United States government to make wine for "religious purposes," which ended up being financially lucrative as he sold much of the wine.
By the 1950s, Adamski had moved beyond the Royal Order of Tibet to focus on the burgeoning UFO movement. In the 1940s, he claimed to have seen a flying saucer, which is famously known because of its cigar shape. Even though Adamski became quite the UFO celebrity, his sightings have been proven to be hoaxes.
For the book, Desmond Leslie was tasked with writing a history of UFO sightings and general information about flying saucers and aliens. Unlike Adamski, Leslie's fame wasn't based on the sightings of unidentified flying objects. Leslie was a close cousin of Winston Churchill and the heir to Castle Leslie, an impressive Irish estate famously known as the wedding venue for Sir Paul McCartney and his second wife Heather Mills who wed in the Leslie family church.
Leslie's fame came from when he punched theatre critic Bernard Levin on the BBC1 show That Was the Week It Was in front of 11 million viewers. Levin had written a critical review of the performance of Leslie's wife prompting the altercation. In addition, Leslie is often credited with being an early adopter of electronic music with some of his soundscapes being used in early Dr. Who episodes.
Special Collections' copy of Flying Saucers Have Landed has a one-of-a-kind aluminum foil wrapper around the book. Foil hats are often used by UFO aficionados and conspiracy theorists to repel electromagnetic radiation and prevent mindreading. This foil cover references the belief that aliens can employ mind control techniques.
For more information about this item or any of the materials in Special Collections, contact Jennifer Brannock at Jennifer.Brannock@usm.edu or 601-266-4347.
Text by Jennifer Brannock, Curator of Rare Books & Mississippiana.
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