US fighter pilots witness UFO: Ryan Graves (American Alchemy, 2024)

0:00 You're sitting there and you're sitting with David Fravor and with David Gresh and you and David Fravor have these amazing eyewitness accounts. As we convene here, UAP are in our airspace. These sightings are not rare or isolated, they are routine. There's a long history of fighter pilots like yourself having seen these things. What happened when you were there? Our assumption at first was that these were just great or rare, but they weren't behaving like false tracks. They were steady, they were solid, they were consistent. And some of these objects were even going over the speed of sound. As soon as they cross that threshold, boom, object shoots down, came within about 50 feet of the cockpit. And he described it as a dark gray or black cube inside of a clear sphere. Half the room raised their hand, like, oh yeah, the cubes and spheres, you know, we saw those, yeah. About 5 to 15 feet in diameter. Oh, by the way, they're out there all day. Do you believe that? Do you think that the U.S. government is reverse engineering UFOs? Flow state is a popular word in, you know, pop psychology, that sort of thing. I have to think, you know, and it's described as like, you know, you're purely present and you're just

1:01 focused on that. You have to think that that experience flying a fighter jet like that has to be peak flow state, right? A hundred percent. And, you know, honestly, it really even starts before we get in, you know, we'll, we have a brief that we have to prepare and, you know, you're joshing around. Once that brief starts, it's very serious. Uh, you finish a brief, maybe you have time for a coffee and then you're, you're walking to the jet, you're walking to maintenance, signing it out, signing out the maintenance forms, reviewing the aircraft, strapping in all the gear, you know, 60 pounds of gear or so and hopping in the jet. You know, we do what we call building our nest, you know, like for unloading contents from our new board, we're strapping in, we're placing things on our legs that we need for information. Um, but then once you get airborne, it's, it is, it's just like, it's like being constantly in the moment, but you are planning ahead and you're always thinking about your fuel state, where you're going, what you need to do, what the contingencies are. And I would say the greatest example of that, the penultimate presence moment, if you will, is landing on

2:03 the aircraft carrier, especially at night. It's a very trippy experience. It can be almost meditative when you're out at range and you're just flying towards this singular little light that's in a sea of blackness and literally a sea as well. Uh, and you know, you kind of have this very like slow and gradual perspective change. And then all of a sudden you start to notice it's getting faster and faster, this perspective change, the light getting brighter and bigger. And all of a sudden you almost have to kind of snap out of the state and remind yourself that you're about to go through this very intense evolution. It almost feels like, um, does the jet become like an appendage of your body? A hundred percent. Yeah. A hundred percent. Uh, you're strapped in there. I mean, there's, it's not the jet and you, it's just, you know, you think and the aircraft moves, you know what I mean? Become so, uh, synchronized and, and part of, part of kind of your subconscious, you know, cause you train so much on it. You're constantly making corrections. Uh, you're constantly doing things and just all those mechanisms are just so well rehearsed that it just

3:05 feels like you're, you're just part of the jet and you're just moving it around. You did an amazing podcast actually with Dr. Ea Whiteley, who deals with the psychology of, uh, both fighter pilots and astronauts. What did you learn from her? I mean, I imagine she was sort of putting words and analysis and names to things that you've experienced firsthand, but what was that conversation like? Well, you know, we get a lot of what we call ground training where they bring in folks not like herself and teach it to us at a certain level. And we go through different reviews, you know, like every six months or a year where we rediscuss these different issues. Um, but I think what was like most impactful to me, like as, as the operator, as a guy on the leading edge, we don't always, you know, get to see behind the curtain to like the countless people that like it takes to get us there and to make this mission successful. So to really talk and engage with someone who's devoted her career to this or life to this, it was just really rewarding to kind of have that perspective from someone that is ultimately always on the outside of the actual operation, but is

4:06 so critical to what we do. Yeah. And I imagine you learn so much kind of in the abstract before you get into the cockpit and then everything probably goes away at some point. Like there's a great book called the art of learning by a guy named Josh Waitzkin. He was actually the inspiration for, uh, searching for Bobby Fisher. So he's this prodigious, amazing chess player as a kid. And then he became, I think a, a champion in like Tai Chi push hands or whatever, uh, martial arts. So he's one of the few people who've like been at the top of two different disciplines. And he writes this book about how to best learn. And it's called, it's a great book. It's called the art of learning. And he says that you have to, you can learn a bunch of mental models, but ultimately when you're like doing the thing, all of the mental models just go away and you have to kind of integrate. It's like a dog catching a frisbee is not doing vector calculus when he's catching it. He might be using it, but you know. Yeah. I mean, those models too are based on assumptions, right? And building that model so that you can have some type of, you know, pre-knowledge

5:07 of what you're getting yourself into. So you can hopefully meet the expectations. But, you know, I was on flight instructor for three and a half years and called us advanced strike fighter instructor. And so I was working with students who were flying their first tactical jet, uh, for the first time. Uh, and I told them all the time, you know, there's guys that, and girls that are incredibly, incredibly studious, you know, memorizing the book, know the procedures inside and out, know exactly what to do. And they get up in the air and it all falls apart, you know, because they're trying to almost kind of reach back to what they learned on the ground instead of just kind of being in the moment and like physically learning it, you know, which is a totally different mechanism than just memorizing something. And, you know, you have to go in with, with the right knowledge into those briefs, into those missions, but the people that succeeded the best, you know, weren't trying to necessarily prove themselves in the jet. They were there to like actually take it in as a learning experience. You know, uh, James McDonnell of McDonnell

6:08 Douglas, you know, famous American aerospace corporation. He, uh, got really interested in this side because a lot of his early planes, he would have fighter pilots fly them and they would kind of freeze up at times. And he had a word for this. He would call them gremlins. And so he spent a lot of his research career looking for ghosts in the machine. And when I imagine when you're working with F-18s, you know, these incredibly complex instruments, you know, maybe your mind leaps to the conclusion that like, there's something at play here that's almost like magical or mystical or something. Did you experience anything like that when you were, when you were flying or? Gosh, that's an interesting question. I'd say, you know, I'd say the instances where that was, you know, maybe part of my, my assessment of the situation, if you will, was during the abnormal times during emergencies where there was uncertainty about how things were going to go, go down. Right.

7:08 You know, one example is I was about 80 miles west of the boat, 30,000 feet or so, um, nighttime. And all of a sudden, my canopy starts leaking. Uh, and I don't know if it's cracked. I don't know if a seal blew. Um, but you know what, we essentially just inverted the jet and pulled down as fast as we could so that we didn't have a hypoxic situation if it did burst. Uh, and you know, those are the times when you kind of start maybe fitting the pieces together a bit as far as, you know, am I going to get through this? Am I going to get back to the boat in time? Is this going to get worse? Um, I've had multiple issues like that. And, you know, in fact, maybe even a better story is a time we were going to drop a training round in, uh, Saudi Arabia. Wow. And I was flying on the way out and I just, I, it was very hard to describe the stick just didn't feel right. And I had been on this boat. I just got to the squadron, my first fleet

8:10 squadron, operational squadron. And, you know, as a new guy, it's like, last thing you want to do is be like, my stick feels funny, you know, like, yeah, this is not, that's not a diagnosis. It's just maybe it's in my head. Right. And, you know, we're getting out there and I'm noticing it more and more. Uh huh. And then we get to the point where we're going to drop the bomb. We roll in, you know, 40 degrees nose down and I'm in the dive for about two out of the six seconds. I pull up and I abort and, uh, my commanding officer who was leading the flight was like, you know, what happened? And I'm like, sir, I don't know what to tell you, but my, my stick is just not performing the way I would expect. Uh, like it feels tough to move in certain directions and I have no warnings, no cautions, no advisories. Um, and so there's not a whole lot we can do other than just kind of hang on. Uh, and we're progressing back to the boat. It's probably about a hundred miles or so. And it's getting worse and it's getting worse. And it's getting to the point as I'm like, 10 miles from the ship where if I want to move the jet to the right, I have to take both hands and forced to stick to the right. And if I

9:12 tap it lightly to the left, the aircraft would essentially overbank 120 degrees immediately. Um, still no warnings, no cautions. And you know, there's a lot of lessons learned from that, from that situation, but came back, boarded uneventfully on the carrier. Um, and it turns out there's one of our bleed lines, we call it, they take air in the intake and they siphon some of it off to power generators and do other things. One of those had broken and it was essentially like a plasma beam, just cutting things inside the jet. Oh my God. Uh, and it was cutting through the control feedback lines, uh, that attached to the stick and they ended up having to like crane the jet off of it. But, you know, that was certainly a moment where it was, you know, and it wasn't a doubt of the aircraft at first. You doubt yourself first before you kind of jump to, to the aircraft and you don't have any indications, but that was certainly a time where, you know, you're really questioning what's going on, you know, where does this go? And, you know, is there a ghost in this machine that I'm, I'm battling? And what did you experience per a lot of the

10:14 listeners of this show that care about the UFO and UAP phenomena, which you've played a massive role in both public advocacy wise, um, but also just in relaying this experience, what happened when you were there? Yeah. So when we came back from that deployment, we began, we entered what we call a maintenance phase where we just were not flying as much. We're upgrading some systems. We're even sending some jets to forward deployed squadrons. And, um, one of the, we were slated for a major upgrade of our radar system, which is our primary detection tool and, uh, what we use for a lot of the weapon systems. Um, and we were going from something called the APG 73, uh, it's considered a mechanically scanned array radar. So basically a big dish in front that's moving around, sending trons down range, receiving them back and giving us a picture of what's out there. Uh, and we were upgrading to like a very new technology, very capable technology called, uh, actively electronically scanned array radar, uh, APG 79. And so this system, uh, it's fixed and it's much, much more precise

11:18 and a lot more energy in and smaller packets with wherever it wants. And, and it took about eight months for this process to occur, you know, maybe like a month per jet. And so you might be flying one mission in the morning with the older radar and you might be flying later in the evening with the newer radar system. And immediately we noticed that when we were flying, we're flying in this big cube off the coast of Virginia beach, um, that there were objects in a working area that we were detecting with the newer radars. Um, and the older radars could have errors, um, not software errors per se, but they might pick up reflections of radar energy from say a moving car or a thick cloud or something of that nature. So, you know, these kinds of false tracks as we would call them weren't, were something we were used to. This system wasn't supposed to have those errors. It was supposed to essentially filter them out. But our, our assumption at first were that these were just simply radar errors, uh, not non-existent objects, just kind of a bug, a bug, a ghost in the machine, if you will. Um, but

12:20 they weren't behaving like false tracks, right? They were steady, they were solid, they were consistent, and they were behaving in ways that didn't really make sense for a false track. They were sometimes completely stationary, 0.0 Mach over a piece of the ground, very high winds, category three hurricane type winds. And even in an F-18, you're working in winds like that. You have to like maybe plan your turn, you know, like three miles earlier, because you're going to get blown three, five miles as you're making that turn. Um, and these things would just be perfectly stationary. Uh, not even like vibrating, right? Not like kind of like being moved around and propulsed back into a position, but perfectly stationary. Uh, we'd see them at 0.6 or 0.8 Mach, around 250 to 350 knots. Um, and that's, those are speeds that we typically operate at. Um, and they would be doing that in a, in a holding pattern and a circular pattern and racetrack. And this is not consistent with what we would expect to see from radar errors, but it's what we were

13:21 seeing. Um, we'd see them meandering sometimes. So, um, non-consistent heading and non-consistent altitudes, kind of just moving in a general direction, but doing it very sloppy way, which is not, again, not how we operate. You're just wasting fuel. There's no real reason to do that. And this is you and roughly how many other people in your squadron are kind of noticing. Yeah. Well, at this time we didn't really know. Okay. Um, we, we weren't really discussing it. Um, and I think a lot of guys that were seeing it just, you know, either maybe I didn't hear them talk about it or they just weren't talking about it. Yeah. Um, but even some of these objects were even going over the speed of sound. Yep. 1.1, 1.2. So you're kind of at this point personally noticing this and like kind of keeping it to yourself. Pretty much. Yeah. We're talking a little bit cause there's a guy in my back seat. Yeah. So there's a little bit of chatter, but it's not something we're like debriefing. Yep. It's not something we're, we're going to the commanding officer with, but you know, when we're out there, you know, with this radar system, whatnot, and we see targets or tracks, we're not just like looking at them. We're,

14:21 we're basically fly with the track pad on our throttle and we're moving it around like a computer mouse and we're selecting these targets. We're categorizing them and organizing them and switching between them. And it just so happened that, um, some folks started flying with the AT FLIR. It's a infrared and electro optical, uh, targeting system. And as they happen to be within a relatively close range of these, these radar errors, Yeah. They noticed that the FLIR, which is looking where the radar is looking, is seeing something at these locations. There, there's higher energy coming back from it. And typically it almost just looked like someone was shining a flashlight into the sensor. It wasn't, you know, the skid of an aircraft and we're seeing propulsion come out the back. Um, and at that same range, our, our AIM-9X missile systems that we're carrying are also detecting and locking onto these objects. And so now we're having correlation across three different sensors, uh, telling us that there's a physical object here. And that was kind of the moment we were, you know, at least those that were aware were like, okay, this is like,

15:22 these are probably physical objects. Like you can't assume that they're just errors in the radar. It's, you know, it'd be irresponsible. It could lead to a safety risk because we were essentially just flying through these, ignoring them. Um, and so that, that's really kind of started at least for me and a few others, the process of trying to fly up and visually seeing one of these objects. Uh, and so we get on our radar, we get on our FLIR, detect one that's slow. And, um, you know, we stepped down about 800 feet outside of our 500 foot safety bubble, getting look up so we can see it against the blue sky. Um, all our sensor data would get pumped into our helmet, like an augmented reality system. And so it's telling us exactly where to look and we come by this very manageable merge. I'll say we're not doing it 1200 knots like we use usually do. Um, and we couldn't see anything, um, nothing there. We would turn back around and our sensors would be reacquire it. Um, there it is again. And yet it seemed to be displaced a bit, but it was generally in the same location

16:23 and that, you know, just led to more confusion because we had to trust our sensors. Um, and we didn't know really what else to do at that point. And that was kind of the status quo for a few weeks. Uh, but eventually a few of my buddies in the squadron, they were flying out two aircraft taking off together. Um, they're probably about 150 feet apart as they approach this kind of entry point at a fixed GPS location altitude where they enter that working area. And as soon as they cross that threshold, boom, object shoots down the left or the right wing of the lead aircraft, uh, came within about 50 feet of the cockpit, which is extremely close, uh, and anything splitting a section is a problem. Um, they canceled the flight, turned back around and I met, I saw him in the ready room. He still had all his gear on, had his, you know, mouth gaped open a bit, you know, kind of just looking like, you know, what the heck? He's like, I almost hit one of those fucking things. And, you know, we didn't know, I mean,

17:25 we knew what he was talking about. We didn't have a name for it, but, um, well, like, well, you know what it looked like. Um, cause this was the first time we had really ever seen one, as far as we knew at this point, at least I did. And he described it as a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere. Um, about five to 15 feet in diameter was the best estimate he could give it. Um, and that really triggered a pretty big reaction to squadron because now we had to file paperwork, a safety report, a HAZREP, a hazard report. Uh, and, and so we did that and the safety officer took the time to kind of survey the rest of the squadron to see, you know, okay, what other experiences that we had around this. Yeah. And as it turned out, there were like four other near mid airs that our squadron had had over the past, you know, few months with this issue that went unreported. What was, so you're taking all this in, what was your first instinct as to what this thing might've been? You know, at the time, I really, I, I didn't speculate on what, what it could be.

18:25 UAP wasn't a term I was familiar with. You know, there were some jokes about UFOs. Um, but you know, I think the general assumption was that this must've been something that blew in. It must've been some kind of civilian tack. It must've been maybe even worst case and adversarial capability. But you know, the more that we kind of talked about the various experiences, what people had and what they were seeing, it just those, it didn't fit any of those categories, even though like we didn't really have anything, any other label to give it, you know, or any other category to put it in. You know, there's no propellers, there's no propulsion. It seems to be masking its IR signature. So it can't even break out to see what it looks like. Uh, and they're traveling at speeds and oh, by the way, they're out there all day. What were the, what were the top speeds that you detected? 1.2 Mach was the fastest I detected one of them. Wow. Yeah. Uh, which as I told you, my top speed was 1.32. So I mean, that's fast even for a super Hornet. Yep. Um, especially for something with no exhaust blue. Totally.

19:25 Yeah. So the main anomalies you'd say would be, yeah, low observability and masking signatures. It would be being able to withstand extreme amounts of wind and stay stationary. That's not obviously normal. The shape, the geometric shape. Yeah. Um, anything else? I imagine speed combined with those factors is anomalous, but maybe speed alone would not be considered anomalous. Anything else that you'd consider anomalous? Well, there were, there would typically be like a handful of them out in the areas. Um, it wasn't just like one that we might see. It was like three to five, seven of them. They're only over water. Uh, they're only going fast when they're hitting like due East essentially. Um, did any of them go? Cause obviously, you know, your friend, commander David Fravor, who testified with you before, uh, in front of Congress. And I want to talk about that. He had an experience at Nimitz in 2004 with their carrier strike group. And he mentions that the craft that he saw was hovering right above the water. And then it almost seemed to, you know, go in and out of the water, like this, be this kind of transmedium object,

20:26 which is another observable when it comes to UAPs. Did you experience anything like that or? So I haven't heard of us in that timeframe experiencing that, you know, our, we can see down to the ocean, you know, the ocean with our radar system, although it gets a little worse as we get really close. We really don't have the system to tell us that something's entering the water unless we're like up on it and we can visually see it. Yeah. Um, but these things would be climbing and descending various altitudes. Um, we kind of cap our radar at around, you know, 30,000 feet or so. So if they were coming from higher than that, we weren't really observing it, but very likely that they were operating even higher than that. Uh, and they weren't respecting the boundaries of our area at all, which was a big clue, right? I mean, if it was some test, they would not be flying through the international commercial channel, that's to the north of our area, but these wouldn't be almost hitting one of the pilots. Yeah. Like that seems pretty unsafe. Even if you're, it's funny because we did this great talk last night. It was a lot of fun. And, uh, I was telling you, one of the guys in the audience was NRO and NASA, and he came

21:26 up to me afterwards and was like, I do think some of these things might be red teaming our systems, our detection capabilities in our airspace, which may be true in certain cases, but he wouldn't try to hit a pilot. You know, if that were the case, I don't know what your take is on that. Yeah. You know, I, it's hard for me to imagine that they would unwittingly expose us to what would very likely be what's considered like special access program type tech SAP. Um, that would, data in itself would be a massive security flaw, almost equivalent of telling someone that doesn't even have security clearance. Yeah. And oh, the, by the way, we have, you know, very secure ranges that are in the middle of the country to test these types of things. They have engineers, they have pilots, they have whole squadrons that can do that type of work. Um, and so to take that type of tech, basically doing a legal activity to expose us to something we're not read into. And oh, by the way, doing it over international waters, where it's very well documented that there are, you know, adversaries that

22:28 are hanging out down there. They're trying to see what we're doing. It just doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. I think that's, uh, that's right. And then also just the shape as well, because the final, um, sensor is the, the human eye, right? And so you guys saw these things and, uh, that, that's incredibly important as well. How many eyewitnesses were there to the actual physical object? God, that's a good question. There was probably, I mean, I would say probably, uh, let's see, there was five safety reports. There's two people in each air or each jet. I mean, so at least 10 out of the 25 pilots or so that we have, but I imagine it's much higher than that. Okay. And then it wasn't just our squadron. I, I later learned to talk to, uh, other squadrons that were operating out of the same area and even other areas later. But, um, you know, when the New York times article came out and I saw that, I started asking people back on the east coast cause I was in a different area. I was asking people in my ready room and you know, half, half the room raised their

23:29 hand like, oh yeah, the cubes and spheres, you know, we saw those. Yeah. And I know no prompting, you know, like, and I didn't even realize these people had had their experience. I'd known for a few years. That's just not something they talked about. Have you met fighter pilots stationed elsewhere who've experienced that shape? Cause that shape, when I first heard about your testimony, I was like, that's so not even what you hear kind of in the history of UFO lore. It's like, you know, discs and saucers and that sort of thing. Have you heard of other fighter pilots seeing that shape? Yeah. Um, and I'll, I've heard that one and spheres very common as well. Ones that are like outpacing jets, but, um, you know, I mean, basically every base that we have in the U S I mean, uh, Norfolk, Virginia beach area, of course, uh, in California on the West coast. Yes. Um, further inland, L'Amour, Fallon. These are other, you know, big Navy training ranges. They're seeing them there. Uh, Pax river, where we do our test pilot training. Uh, they're having incidents up there. So,

24:29 you know, I think where these centers are guys are seeing them. Hmm. It's so fascinating. And we're on the heels of, uh, very interesting reports that last year at Langley Hampton air force base for 17 days, you had quote unquote drones swarming the base and there was nothing that the U S could do about this. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible. Right. I mean, Langley provides air response to DC. I mean, that's a major, major, uh, you know, piece of the puzzle here. Yeah. Houses F 22s. They had to move the F 22s to a new base cause they were afraid of potentially losing those assets. Uh, they had similar incursions at, uh, Norfolk, um, the Norfolk naval base, which is the largest naval base on East coast, if not the country, uh, basically where our carriers are stationed. Um, and there's other reports of similar objects that have been further in like actually over DC itself. So, I mean, these are all adjacent to the areas that we were having our experiences. And now we're having this

25:31 influx of other issues that are occurring, you know, further North and further North. And if only someone told them that this could potentially be an issue. Yeah. If you were to pull, you know, people on the street at this point, we're in pretty interesting times. I think probably 50%, maybe over 50% of the American population now believes in the reality of UFOs. You know, this is obviously going to be sort of a guesstimate on your part, but you speak, I'm sure with a lot of other fighter pilots, you advocate for, you know, all these safety initiatives around the UAP topic. What percentage of fighter pilots in and around, you know, military circles do you think are bought into UAP's existence? Yeah. That's a tough question. Um, I'll tell you what, 100% of people that have had their own experiences about it. Yeah. Um, you know, I've, I've heard from some of the staunchest critics on this topic. They think I'm embarrassing the community by having this conversation. Uh, and then they have their own experience and they're just, you know, like, holy shit, you know, I guess I was the guy

26:31 that was wrong here. So, you know, it's tough to say, I don't know if I can quantify it with any precision, but, um, you know, in my experience, guys that are flying that radar, they are seeing these objects and whether they've had the agency to go check it out and gain a visual, I couldn't put a number on that, but it's definitely a topic, at least within the Navy, maybe not the air force that, uh, guys are, are smart on. They're briefing it in their flights. They're, um, they're debriefing it afterwards or submitting reports. In some cases, uh, I've talked to guys who are still not comfortable reporting it either because they just don't want to put the time in or they don't think anything's going to happen or they don't want it to affect their career in some way. Um, and so I still think it's under-reported regardless. It's fascinating. I, I, I think the Navy angle to all of this is extremely underrated. I think the Navy has experienced a lot of this stuff for a very long time. And one anecdote is, you know, I did this show on this, you know, mid-century inventor named Thomas Townsend Brown, who I'm fascinated with because I think maybe he

27:32 made some interesting updates in topological physics and the world of gravity that have not met the eye. And there's this story actually, um, you know, he's being written about by this historian, Paul LaViolette and Townsend Brown goes to Hyman Rick, Rickover, who is the head of the nuclear Navy, basically started the American nuclear Navy. And Hyman Rickover says, uh, Townsend, you know, stop wasting your time. Like we've already figured this stuff out. Yeah. So, and then there's another guy named Robert Sarbacher who David Grush mentions as having set up UFO secrecy along with Robert J. Oppenheimer at, you know, the atomic energy commission of 1954. And Sarbacher actually worked at the Harvard undersea observatory. Oh, did he? Yeah. Wow. And so I, I think there's a lot going on underwater and I think that the Navy's gotta be, you know, have experienced this stuff for a very long time would be my guess. Yeah. You know, that's interesting. You know, underwater world is, is interesting. You know, they call them USOs or, um, unidentified

28:34 submersed, submersed objects, I believe. Um, and you know, uh, I'll just say from my experience, talking to the guys on subs and whatnot, all is very cagey, very secretive. Um, but think about it, you know, you don't have the, the type of like air traffic that you have, you know, on our radar, we're always seeing all these different contacts, a lot of civilian air, but underwater, there's much less of that. And so if you're seeing something bizarre, it's probably a very high likelihood that it truly is bizarre versus some type of misinterpretation. Um, and I know going back to, gosh, even, you know, Columbus and even before that, most likely that they were, you know, seeing things under the water that they didn't understand what they were. And, uh, I know Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, uh, who used to run, uh, NOAA, Natural Oceanic and Atmospheric Association is highly interested in these underwater anomalies. I know he's, he's working on on, uh, pursuing that as a, as a research topic. Mm-hmm. Yeah. There's, um, the little brother to the NRO, which is, is now public,

29:35 so I can talk about it, but I, there's not much known about it as neuro and it's the underwater version of the NRO. And one gets the sense that, yeah, we probably detected a lot of these things on underwater. And do you, do you think, you know, per what you described as the kind of the observables of what you saw at Oceana, do you think these things have their own almost like inertial reference frames? Because one of the observables is they seem to be able to break conservation of momentum, right? Like you're flying Mach, you know, one or two or whatever, and then you stop on a dime. Mm-hmm. And it's like, that's just impossible, like with a, you know, a gas propulsion fighter jet. And so, and then plasma is also coming off the craft, which can reduce, uh, I guess, G-force, you know, you know, inertial drag. Mm-hmm. And so do you think they've figured something out in that, in that realm? Obviously we're in extremely speculative territory here. Yeah, no, I mean, then I think it's a natural question though, because based off of the flight mechanics, I mean, if you have something that's going supersonic or even, you know, even 0.8 Mach or so, and you

30:35 immediately stop it. I mean, it's no different than just slamming into the ground, right? I mean, in fact, it's probably a faster stop than if you were to crush an aircraft in the ground. So you have to ask yourself, you know, how is it doing that? And I don't understand a physical mechanism that would allow it to do it without having to speculate about some type of ability to, you know, control or manipulate inertia. Yeah. So FLIR, uh, which, you know, you guys picked it up with FLIR, also seems to be this important kind of sensor modality. FLIR had just been installed in 2004 in the Nimitz case with David Fravor. Um, and so it was like this new Raytheon FLIR system and Raytheon's like, we're not in charge of what you detect. What you detect is, you know, it's on you guys or whatever. Um, and so I find that very interesting as well, especially given, you know, how put off who actually lives in Austin out here, he's one of the deepest, you know, on some of the scientific theories around this stuff. And I think one of the questions, you know, average people will ask, which is a fair question is like, why aren't we drowning in high

31:36 resolution photo of, of this stuff? And I think it's because of these blue shifts and red shifts. And so if you were actually manipulating space time in these ways that would comport with all these observables that you're mentioning, uh, you'd experience probably, you know, it would be, it would be things at the ends of the electromagnetic wave spectrum, not in the RBG spectrum that we sort of see. And so it makes sense that FLIR would pick this stuff up. Yeah. You know, well, our systems too, you know, they're designed for very specific purposes and the way our systems work is that, you know, we have two giant or one giant, you know, propulsion system and aircraft and they expel a lot of heat and the rest of the aircraft kind of absorbs energy from the friction of the air and things of that nature. Um, and so the system is calibrated because that's the expectation where you're going to see. And so you can break out rivets on a jet. You can see the cockpit, um, and you can very clearly see, um, you know, the, the flames and the exhaust, if you will. Uh, but if you had something

32:38 that was propulsing itself an entirely different mechanism that was putting energy out equally across the skin of its body, it might just look like a blur of a, um, yeah, just a blur essentially because, um, it's, you know, we're kind of getting the worst part of the image and it's, that's what's being, um, that's the type of energy that's putting out across the entire surface of the object. And so the FLIR, although it might be effective for detecting that there's energy coming from there, it's essentially masking itself so that we can't see, and it might not be doing that. Potentially it could be a byproduct propulsion or it could just be a clever, uh, a masking system. It's fascinating. One of the things that always stood out to me about the Fravor testimony was he would say it almost felt like the craft detected him, like knew that, you know, he was sort of looking at it. And is that something that comports with any of what your squadron saw? No, it doesn't. Not in my experience. Well, I've heard some stories after the fact, but, you know, they would be doing their own thing. They'd be in the area. Uh, so it

33:38 seemed like they were focused there, but they weren't like, if we showed up, they weren't like coming over to us or going away. They just continued to do their own thing. Um, so we certainly didn't have that type of experience. Uh, but you know, I, I have heard, you know, multiple cases of these maneuvering around aircraft, um, up in Pax rivers, fascinating case with one of my good friends who had basically a sphere pull up about 15 feet from his cockpit while he's, you know, maneuvering pretty quickly and hang out there for about 20 seconds and then dart off in front of them. Um, there's another incidents down in New Orleans where, uh, an object with the same description shot past the cockpit, initially thought it was a balloon until his wingman noticed that it turned and chased the jet and basically shot up in front of it and, and overtook it. Um, and so they, I think they definitely have the capability to maneuver around us to detect us, know we're there. But, um, my personal experience at the time wasn't to expect these to be reacting to us in the way that they were with Fravor's case.

34:38 So you testify before Congress. My name is Ryan Fobbs Graves, and I'm a former F-18 pilot with a decade of service in the U.S. Navy. I have experienced advanced UAP firsthand, and I'm here to voice the concerns of more than 30 commercial air crew and military veterans who have confided their similar encounters with me. It was a historic day. It was incredible. I mean, I couldn't believe it. I was lucky enough to be in the room and we talked to each other for a bit afterwards. And it was just like, I never thought this topic would ever get that sort of air time on that level. And so how'd you feel about that? Yeah. Man. I mean, just what an incredible experience and day, you know, it was really powerful for me when I went there. I mean, I know where I was going to like show up, right? So it's like, I got to find the room. And it just happened to be walking in the same direction as everyone else. And, um, you know, we see the line of people and we're like, oh, okay, well, this must be a spot. Interesting. You know, it's cool. There's a line. And we kind of get to the front line, realize it was a corner and take the corner and there's, you know, another 500 people

35:40 lined up on that side. And it was just, I mean, it was really, uh, powerful to, to just see all the support and the interest, you know, in person instead of just kind of the random comments on Twitter or X, excuse me. Um, but you know, in a sense, it's almost like, almost like landing on the boat. At least it was for me where you're just kind of locked in and trying to push away all the, you know, all the doubts and other thoughts that you might have, just kind of get into the zone, be very present. Like, you know, we mentioned earlier, um, I met Dave for the first time there, got to speak to his lawyer and some of the other folks out back. Um, it was kind of, you know, funny anecdote. We were kind of getting ready to line up to walk out and, uh, it was like Dave was, well, Dave brush was standing there and then Fravor, they both just kind of like, grabbed my shoulders and pushed me to the front. That's pretty wild. Yeah. And I was like, here we go. You know? Yeah. I mean, cameras clicking, you could, you almost feel them. I mean, it's almost like you can't even hear them in some

36:42 sense. Yeah. I mean, it's just really powerful, but you know, what was so fascinating, you know, what are so rewarding? I think for me was that, you know, you see hearings on the news and it's usually like, you know, uh, members are maybe attacking the witness or whomever is testifying, or maybe it's a partisan issue and there's just a lot of back and forth on, on the sides of the aisle. But I've never seen a hearing that was quite like that, where it just seemed like everyone was working together. Right. We were all trying to figure this out. It wasn't partisan. It wasn't, um, adversarial. Uh, and I think it's, you know, strange that this is an issue that's starting to bring out at least politically, like some of the best of us where we can have like a normal adult conversation and maybe move the ball forward. Yeah. It was wild to see AOC and Matt Gaetz just completely simpatico, you know, just in total agreement over this issue. Yeah. It's, uh, I think that this might be the only issue in which they agree on everything. Um, so you're, you're sitting there and you're sitting with, uh, you know, David Fravor and

37:45 with David Grush and you and David Fravor have these amazing kind of eyewitness accounts. And then you have David Grush sitting next to you saying that there's been a covert reverse engineering program. We've actually had a crash retrieval program for, you know, 70 plus years around this stuff. Yeah. Do you believe that? Do you think that the U S government is reverse engineering UFOs? Oh, that's a tough one. You know, um, I, you know, I, in my job as Navy pilot, I was not exposed to any type of technology like that or any type of programs like that. And so the only information that I have to go off of is the same information that basically everyone else has that's in the public sphere. You know, I respect David Grush. Yep. I, he was tasked to do a job with the UAP task force. And that was the job to understand and uncover this information. And he did it to the best of his ability and he reported his findings. Uh, and so there's, there's nothing, you know, in his background or in his professional experience that would lead me to believe

38:46 that he's lying or making it up or being facetious in any sense. Yeah. Um, now how do I integrate that into like a wider belief system? It's tough. It's tough for everybody. Um, it's one of those things I think that, you know, the only satisfying, um, resolution is to have it essentially be admitted and pulled out to some degree by the government itself. Yeah. Um, and although I think people are, you know, they have their scales of probability and I think, you know, he moved the needle quite a bit closer to certainty than, than before. And, um, you know, it's, it, it, you know, I, I listened to a little bit of his story before the hearing, but you know, a lot of that was new information for me as well. And, um, it was very surreal experience me sitting next to someone testifying to that type of information. Um, so yeah, I mean, I, I, I believe what he said, I believe he did it in earnest and unless he was being manipulated, you know, I think that the, the statements that he made are, you

39:48 know, the first line of attack for a representative to further understand this and hopefully uncover what's going on. Totally. And he gave over a thousand pages to the inspector general, the ICIG, Thomas Monheim, who the quote from Monheim was, this is urgent and credible. And so I, yeah, I don't know, unless it's like something where the tip of the iceberg doesn't resemble the rest of the iceberg or something. And so, um, we're jumping to conclusions around exotic material falling from the sky, but it like has to do with something that we're not even thinking of. There are things you can fathom like that, but on the surface you have a guy I've gotten to know him personally. I think he's in extremely high integrity, really, really smart has literally an autistic attention to detail. And, uh, yeah, I think it's, it's hard to argue with. And it's so near term falsifiable where it's like he brought 40 people who claim to have worked on this stuff firsthand to the IC inspector general. If something doesn't pop in the next 20

40:52 years, I think you, you know, it's, it's kind of falsifiable, right? So it's like going to inflect one way or the other where people will be like, that was a psyop or they'll be like, like, this was real and just incentive or motivation-wise. It doesn't make sense for him to, you know, do that if he doesn't actually believe it. Yeah. I mean, he was being very specific. He wasn't just kind of saying, oh, I know we've heard rumors of this on the other thing. I mean, you know, I mean, I heard him say, he's like, I can tell you the location. Let's get in a scale. So, I mean, you don't say that unless you're highly confident about what you're saying, because I mean, you're just setting yourself up for failure. Yep. And more and more of has come out around like possible past gatekeepers and politics. You hear Dick Cheney's name, you know, around, uh, you hear George W. Bush might've contemplated UFO disclosure and a part of me. And then you, you know, we talked about it last night, John Podesta, who's, you know, you could say Clinton's chief political operative, you know, is the white house chief of staff under Bill Clinton, basically ran Hillary's campaign extremely into this topic. I, I sort of want to

41:53 question some of these public figures and be like, what do you know about this stuff? I mean, it's fascinating. I mean, a lot of these people are alive, you know, let's have the conversation. And I certainly understand why they would be hesitant to do that, but you know, I, I agree with it. I think more attention should be put on these folks and have them at least provide a statement about what they know. And, you know, there's always a fear, not fear, but you know, the expectation that they're just simply going to deny it. Cause I mean, if they are read into these details, they would be breaking the law and would very likely face consequences. Totally. Yeah. No, it's a, it's understandable that it would move in this sort of step function way where it's like a little more comes out and then, you know, you, you get regulatory action and then a little more can come out and that you wouldn't get this kind of catastrophic blow up. Is that, do you think that's part of an intentional strategy or is that just kind of what's happening through a outside group? I think it's, I think it's probably somewhat both. So like, I don't think we talked about this last night. Think

42:54 about the psychology of a whistleblower, right? Like you're this like patriotic guy with a military or intel background. Maybe you bump into this stuff. There was, you know, this new AP task force that was created that rush kind of came out of this guy, David Grush, who testified with Ryan and there are other kind of, you know, high level officials who came out of that, you know, task force. If you bump into any of these programs, maybe these people have intersected with your career in the past, as David Grush has said in himself, you're probably going to want to coordinate somewhat with people on the inside to do this in a safe way that makes sense for American national security. So yeah, I don't think, uh, any of the people at the forefront of disclosure, by the way, myself included, want everything all out all at once. Having said that as an academic feel, I mean, it's like, it's like new, it's like the nuclear thing is a great example, right? So you have like nuclear trade secrets that like should never get out, but like nuclear science, like nuclear physics is a program at every elite

43:55 university. And the idea that, you know, I, I think we're kind of stuck in these physics cul-de-sacs, you know, string theory and some other stuff. Uh, that, that's really travesty because it's just like, we have this like massive brain drain going on, uh, on this like really, really big level where, not to insult any string theorists out there, I think they're very smart string theorists. But, um, if, if we don't have access to kind of greater ontological truth, like your, your physics theories are going to be like weighing off, but yeah, I don't, I don't think there is, there are very many proponents of quote of book catastrophic disclosure on the inside, but I don't think most people on the inside want everything out. I don't think they want trade secrets that will give China or Russia an advantage over the U S you know, they don't want those things out. Um, but I do think, and then I also think there's probably something around softening the blow for the ontological shock or whatever, where it's like, if you have some top of the pyramid view of this, it's probably pretty expansive and deviates a lot from the average person's

44:56 worldview. And so maybe some sort of conditioning thing is happening. I, I think, uh, more likely though it's emergent. And so like, it's like one person makes a move here. There are these like game theory dynamics around disclosure. Like this person wants this stuff to come out. And then this person over here is like, wait, I've been sitting on this stuff and they're getting the glory here. And there's like stuff like that happening. That's like, doesn't seem that coordinated. It seems like human. Yeah. And then in the world in which there are NHI, which I, I am pretty sympathetic to. I think, you know, we're not apex, you know, consciousness. Uh, I think more likely than not, if it's coordinated, it's not being coordinated by us in the world in which they exist. Yeah. Right. We always talk about what's happening, uh, within our community, if you could say, but yeah, I mean, if, if that's true, then, you know, there's other calculus that we're totally not taking into account. Yeah. It's, it's fascinating. Yeah. I, I, I'm really curious to see where it goes.

45:57 Do you feel like you have a, any sort of prognosis or yeah, prediction for the next few years? I'm not playing that game. That's good on you. Yeah. I mean, I see, I see the change that's happening right now. I don't know necessarily where it comes to culmination. I don't know when it ends, but there certainly is an acceleration of the process. You know, there seems to be more cases, there seems to be more people that want to talk about it. And, you know, I, I think there's this kind of interplay between this disclosure process where the government's willing to share information and release stuff, whether, you know, the government or whether factions within the government are doing that and the process of people out in the civilian world and the commercial world that are saying, Hey, you know, like, well, I guess I'll investigate this. I could put resources here. I might be able to detect these objects. I might be able to understand this. And the more the disclosure process moves forward and information comes out, it motivates the outside. And the more work that happens on the outside, the more pressure that's exerted to release information and on the government. And I think we've been seeing this kind of interplay

46:57 and buildup between those two groups and you know, what's going to, what's going to be the end result. Where's the, where's the big reveal going to come from? I guess is to be seen. Totally. I, it's this beautiful crowdsourced effort. And I think there can sometimes be ego in the space of like, I want to be the one or whatever, but it's, it's this amazing thing where if you, if you push it, you know, a little farther, you often get something back. It's a social movement in a lot of ways, right? I mean, the more information that comes out, the more people understand it's okay to talk about. And they stop dismissing the things that they maybe have as far as information or maybe that they've experienced. And, you know, I've been privileged to talk to a ton of people on this topic and, you know, the amount of people that have had their own personal experiences are, I mean, pretty close to 50%, right? That's wild, yeah. And maybe that's even higher once people feel more comfortable. I mean, even last night, you know, the question was asked and, you know, maybe like 30% of the crowd raised their hands.

47:58 And so, yeah, I mean, the more, you know, even if you do an action in this, in this space, and it doesn't lead to the government releasing a new video or something, you're, you're educating the populace on why this matters, why it's important. And, you know, once I've met a lot of naysayers as well, and it's easy to tell that they haven't done any research into this because they would see the connections and at least have some interest in it instead of being completely dismissive. And so more information that gets out there, you know, we're changing minds, making people understand the serious issue, and all that's going to just lead to greater understanding. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more. You're doing work with that. I mean, you're doing, you're doing that job, you know, with this podcast. So thank you. Oh, man. Well, doing my small part, but I appreciate that. Something we share is an interest in the private sector applications of this stuff. And despite conspiracy theories about, you know, I work with Peter Thiel. People think he's reverse engineering a UFO. I wish

48:58 it's not happening. It's not happening. I wish you were more interested in doing things like that. But I think the, um, the trouble with some of this stuff in the private sector world is it's just long time horizons. It's their moonshots. They're really like, you know, low probability, but extremely important, you know, work. And so we were talking about this last night. There's a part of me that thinks like the bell labs model of like quasi public private funding just needs to come back. If we are in, you know, some sort of arms race vis-a-vis the Russians and the Chinese, and you know, what Carl Nell says is right. He's a, you know, has set up army futures command, and he was on the UAP task force with David Grush. If we're in this arms race, I think we'd need sort of more nationalized support towards some of these technology efforts. And I don't know what your experience is, but mine is that a lot of our best and brightest talent aren't working at the big primes anymore, or in government positions,

49:58 they're working at, you know, private sector companies. And so what do you see? Do you think there's opportunity here? I know you're doing some interesting work in this area. Yeah. I, you know, I think I consider this part of the kind of discovery process. How can we motivate the government to release information because there's a pressure coming from the outside to move the conversation forward? And I think it takes, you know, it takes place in kind of two categories. There are, there are companies and people that are working on tech that is inspired by this topic. Um, some very interesting technologies by some very, you know, intelligent people and mainstream people, uh, advanced propulsion, advanced materials, uh, energy production, uh, and integrating that into unique ways that would be consistent with some of the things that we're observing. And, you know, I think some of these capabilities are capabilities that can come online, say like in a normal five to six year timeline, uh, without having to be a 10 or 15 year type project, I think they could be broken down. And I

50:59 think really the key to doing that is finding opportunities that have wide applicability, right? So of course, if you can, uh, say generate energy in the skin of an aircraft, that would be highly applicable to many different industries, but it also might validate or invalidate something that we're seeing in the UAP topic. On the other side of that coin, it's not just about trying to put forward these different technologies. It's about, you know, how do we better understand what we're seeing? How do we sense these better? And that's an area I've spent a lot of time thinking on what technologies can we put forward, uh, that will provide us, you know, the ability to detect these objects, to characterize them, and then further evaluate, you know, exactly what they are, what their intent are and, you know, where they came from. Um, I've started a small company that is building, uh, what we believe to be the next generation of space situational awareness cameras that will be able to provide a highly detailed information around non-traditional orbital, uh, trajectories. Uh, these can go on satellites and it has a great use case where, you know, it can provide awareness to the satellite

51:59 operator so they can choose or not choose to maneuver their, their, uh, space vehicle and, uh, extend the lifespan. But this would also be a source of, uh, uh, UAP detection that could be, uh, commercialized and sold as potentially intelligence product or, uh, whether within DOD or within the commercial markets. Um, and so I think, you know, the way that commercial space is evolving and being deregulated or at least not deregulated, but it's loosening up quite a bit. Uh, I think the time is now for companies and, um, other folks to look to how they can contribute to this project through open source technology, through commercial projects. And, you know, that's an area that I've talked to a number of people that are interested in funding. Uh, if anyone's interested in learning more about that, be happy to, to share that information and, and help them on their, on their journey. Cause that's the, I think the path that's going to move us into understanding this and not having to just simply sit back and wait for the government to share with us. And I think also unconstraining or opening

53:02 up some of these like prior, uh, biases that we have, especially in physics. Carl Nell just, uh, did a great interview for Danny Sheehan's New Paradigm Institute. And he was talking about not only the preponderance of, of life in the universe and how, you know, it's probably much older than we think it is. And, you know, all sorts of things there, but also when it comes to physics, faster than light travel, you know, uh, Miguel Alcubierre figured out this sort of theoretical model and NASA has been studying this for years. You have Sonny White at NASA, you know, doing interesting work in this area and it involves, I guess, negative mass or negative energy, but we actually detected negative energy, you know, with the Casimir effect. And so there are all these ways in which if you talk to an average scientist at, you know, any sort of university, they'll say these things are just impossible. And then you'll talk to like somebody doing interesting work at, in, at the frontier of R and D at aerospace. Like I just met this, uh, former head of revolutionary tech at Skunk Works. And it's

54:04 like, he agrees with all this kind of ostensibly wacky stuff that I believe way more than, you know, any of these like prestigious professors. And it's this weird thing where it feels like aerospace has the real science and academia just doesn't. Yeah. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, I agree with you. It seems kind of like a zero sum game in academia where everyone's competing for the same grants. The standards are extremely high, uh, and no one wants to screw with their career path. So then get tenure and then kind of settle into whatever they actually really want to do. Uh, but you know, that's different than how the startup world works in the technology world. You know, guys are, they're pushing the edge of the boundaries and they, the only limitations they have are their resources and, um, and what's capable. So I, yeah, I agree with you a hundred percent. I think a lot of the real interesting work is happening out there. And that's why, again, I think it's such an interesting time now where that, that type of environment, this, you know, the startup community that we have could be leveraged to be able to push this conversation forward. I don't think we can rely on academia to do that. Absolutely. It would be awesome if young,

55:06 talented STEM students watch content like this and they get opened up to these frameworks and they can work on things. And we were talking about it last night. As important is the process of discovery, right? What can we do in the private sector? What can we do in a commercial world in order to bring forward capabilities, technology, and understanding that's going to allow us to decipher this without waiting for the government to throw us scraps, essentially. And so there's multiple organizations out there. Some of them are attacking it from a technology side. Can we potentially create technology that replicates some of the, uh, kinematics that we're seeing? If we can imagine perhaps they have capabilities in the skin of their vehicle there to generate power versus having the engine in the back. And so there are companies working on very interesting energy and materials, propulsion technologies. Um, on the other side, there's how do we better understand this scientifically? It's like SpaceX is an amazing company, but it's an earth-based space company. And it'll take a human on a chemical

56:06 combustion rocket, 80,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri B, uh, which is not viable, obviously. And so we need some sort of space-time metric engineering. You know, just to kind of speculate a little bit, one of the things that fascinates me about the UAP topic is if, you know, if we can make the assumption that these are from somewhere else, they're observable, they're studyable, you know, are we one or two like breakthroughs away from having the same capabilities? You know, that would, you know, immediately lock potentially close to our lifetimes, access to the rest of the galaxy in a lot of ways. And I can't think of a grander vision for focusing our energy on something. Oh yeah. It'd be amazing. And that was actually probably when I interviewed David Grush, uh, right after your guys' amazing testimony, that was probably the most thing. The thing he said that was seared the most in my mind, which is he said, if I were a betting man, I think that this represents tech that is not a stepwise leap ahead of humanity, but it's almost an alternative timeline in which they went

57:09 some civil propulsion route and we went this destructive catastrophic nuclear route. And I just, I was like, holy shit, that's amazing. Yeah. I thought of similar things, right? Like, I mean, again, making the assumption they're from elsewhere. I mean, what if they evolved on a highly, uh, a large planet that had very high gravity, right? And perhaps the economics didn't work out such that, you know, chemical rockets were a solution that was ever viable. Right. And so they, maybe it took them longer to get to space, but then when they did, they did it by developing a technology that either we haven't got to or never considered because there was more economic option on the table. That's fascinating. Yeah. So like mass ejection wouldn't even work because the gravity was so intense. Yeah. You need some sort of space-time warping. Wow. That's cool. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. There's so many, there's a plethora of options when it comes to this stuff. And I, yeah, I think per our conversation on, you know, kind of academia, aerospace in the forties and fifties, you were telling me earlier that, um, you live in New Hampshire and you live pretty close to this pub that is, uh,

58:12 dedicated to the gravity, gravity research foundation. I believe, uh, you know, it's work of Roger Babson. They're doing all sorts of gravity research. And this is a time when military and academia were extremely entangled. And then you had these things called the Mansfield amendments, which disentangled them. And you have the the invention secrecy act of 1952 as well, where it felt like, you know, physics became dangerous. You had, you know, uh, atom bomb up until their thermonuclear bomb. And you have to think, you know, that like physics itself needs to be treated in this sort of more careful way. And so, yeah, I think we're in this weird time now where a lot of people feel very kind of duped by a lot of the frameworks that are public string theory, quantum gravity, that sort of thing. And yeah, they, they, they, they want tech to reaccelerate because we live in this, we live in this horrible multipolar world that's on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Like if there's ever time to get better, exciting civil side use cases and explore the stars, it would be

59:13 now. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, when I think about that, I kind of go back to your, your comment earlier about, you know, we can't release things that are going to damage our national security, right? We're not suicidal. It doesn't make sense to do that. We certainly can't rely on something else that may be out there to stop us from wronging ourselves. But you know, nuclear physics is a known quantity. It exists and people share that. We don't share the secrets to our nuclear weapons. And I think, you know, I think that's a fair model for how this can be understood, right? We don't have to maybe give away the secrets of the material science or the repulsion system of how it's integrated in other tech, but the base reality that exists, I think that's my hope for, you know, people talk about disclosure, what does that really mean? But I think ultimately, that's what it needs to be just an acknowledgement of the reality of the situation and allowing them to share hopefully, you know, an assessment of maybe not the star system they're from, but you know, to understand that they're not from here. It's not an adversary system. It's not trickery. And

1:00:15 yeah, and I think the public would be very accepting and understanding of the fact that, of course, not everything is going to be shared. But I think it's really just basically a crime against humanity to just withhold such important information about the reality of it from the world populace. - Couldn't agree more. So right now in government, you have the all domain anomaly resolution office, right? - Yes. - Arrow. And there's kind of a split in our world of people who are advocating for UFO disclosure. Some people support Arrow. Others say that, you know, they are somehow co-opted or they're not doing their job in good faith in collecting this data. They've recently had a change of the guard. So from this guy, Kirkpatrick to, I think you told me who the new leader is. - John Koloski. - John Koloski. What do you think of Arrow as an organization? - Yeah. You know, as an organization, I think that, you know, one, they've been given a very challenging task and it's something that

1:01:16 requires them to interface with essentially the whole of the government to be able to resolve. So just right off the bat, understanding that they have a very colossal task on their hands. But, you know, I know they've received a lot of criticism as well from people online that have suggested they're not doing their job earnestly. And, you know, I think the individuals within the office themselves are, you know, doing the best work that they can do with the resources they have. But ultimately, you know, they need to be properly funded, which I believe has occurred and they need to have access to the right information. And ultimately it's a DOD organization, right? They're not there to succumb to the needs and desires of the American people necessarily that are looking for particular answers to questions they have. And so we, you know, I think we need to understand that, you know, they're doing it within the confines of answering to a customer that isn't

1:02:16 necessarily the American people. And I think that's why the legislation such as the UAP Disclosure Act is so important, right? Because it created that mechanism that does answer the mail for the American people, specifically with the suggestion of a review panel, which essentially would receive the output from Aero and others and be able to do a security assessment or risk assessment of the threat to national security of the information and have the authority to declassify information for public consumption. I think that was my biggest disappointment that that was removed from the first version of the UAP Disclosure Act. And we're dwindling on our options for this year's version. But I think that is really going to be the key piece that, you know, Aero just simply can't fulfill, right? They're not designed to do that. They don't have the authority to be able to share and declassify information for the most part. And so, yeah, I think, you know, I think there's other components that are needed outside of just Aero. Yeah, it would be amazing if we got that

1:03:18 executive panel of interdisciplinary experts to sort of, you know, help with this process. You have worked a lot on kind of aviation safety initiatives around this. I guess I'm somewhat of a split mind where I'm like, my take is going to be very armchair compared to somebody like yours when it comes to aviation safety. So I'll sort of like be deferential to like you and other fighter pilots. And then at the same time, I'm like, this stuff has probably been going on for a long time if it's the UAP phenomena. And so I don't know of too many incidents. There's I think one from like 1979 that James Fox covers where this Iranian pilot like shoots at the UAP. And then there's, you know, this sort of dogfight and then he starts going down. And so there clearly are safety implications, but how kind of near term important is the safety component of this? Yeah. You know, so, you know, it's a sliding scale, right? So people that don't fly, you

1:04:21 know, think safety issues, you hit something in the air and you lose your aircraft. And, you that's obviously the worst case scenario. And I think for a military pilot that is not treating this seriously, that's a much higher probability than say a commercial airliner that they're just sitting there in the chair, you know, they're looking outside, they get all the time in the world. Their cognitive loading, as we call it, is pretty low. They don't have the agency to maneuver, so they're on a very strict path. And, you know, I think the risk is lessened in that particular scenario. As a military pilot, we are often operating at the edge of your cognitive ability, you know, and starting to maybe shed things. That's when you have a much higher risk of having an incident. When you're, you work as hard as you can, you're doing, you know, mental math, you're targeting into all these different groups, you're getting blown with the wind, you're flying next to your lead, all these things compound. And then that's when you have an issue. So, um, there's, there's a gentleman that sends me, um, several times a month stories

1:05:23 that he's pulled up about aircraft that have mysteriously gone missing. Um, wow. And so there, you know, some of them are, hey, he, he, he saw an object and he chased it. And then, you know, five minutes later he flamed out or he crashed. Um, there's a number of cases where it's just, you know, on an aircraft hits an airborne object and it crashes and there's no knowledge or understanding of what the object was they hit. And I'm not necessarily attributing to UAP specifically, but I think there's a lot more research that can be done to validate some, some issues that have occurred in the past that may or may not be related to that. Yeah. What was considered a national security issue in the context of Foo fighters, 1942 and 1945, and specifically in Bavaria, Southern Germany, you had these, like, what looked like controlled, controlled balls of lightning kind of showing up and, but messing with allied fighter flight paths and fighter pilot flight paths. And it was, it seemed like, you know, there was some sort of intentionality on the

1:06:24 part of these objects. And the, the pilots were definitely kind of, they felt like they're, they were being kind of obstructed in their abilities to fly. Safety is one thing. National security, however, I think it's a very clear and present danger, right? So when we're flying around in our jet, we're being very cautious about what aircraft are out there. And if this was a, a tactical scenario, I mean, we have to know 100% what each one of those aircraft are. Are they a threat? Are they a commercial airliner? And we're going to, you know, start world war three by shooting down, you know, a hundred people in an aircraft. And so we have so much technology and so much training into that. And so when you just, you take this very complex scenario and then you just kind of sprinkle in all these unknowns, right? It becomes a massive issue. Yeah. Even if the conclusion is, we know the signatures of these things, there's not much you can do, but like when you detect it, you know, what's going on, you know, maybe don't be aggressive and kind of do your thing or something, even if that's the takeaway, like it's good to

1:07:24 have that. Right. And look what's happening, you know, in Ukraine, of course. I mean, having unidentified, non-responsive, unknown origin type vehicles that are operating near our military bases. I mean, you can see the devastating effects that that could potentially lead to. And, you know, I think one of the big things we see is that guys say, oh, you know, someone that might be a bit incredulous on this topic is saying, oh yeah, I don't believe in UFOs. That's nothing. Or I don't even want to report this. And what if it is an adversary that is observing our bases and doing something, you know, that there's just this massive flaw. And we've learned these lessons in the past, but it seems like we're repeating this error by just the force of the stigma that is surrounding this topic. What do you think of, you know, Lou Elizondo has been out for a while now, you know, since 2017, he was kind of one of the first whistleblowers and he in the past has said, maybe UFOs are sort of prepping the battle space. Maybe they're doing recon or sort of a scouting job and

1:08:25 maybe they're, they are somewhat adversarial and they haven't stopped nuclear wars in the past. Do you think that that's a possibility? Well, that was one of my first assumptions when I, uh, we were seeing these on the eastern seaboard. We weren't assuming they were, uh, UFOs doing that, but we're like, hey, this could be an adversary that is soaking up our waveforms that is trying to decrypt our radios that is observing our tactics. And if we just ignore them, let that happen. You know, the next time we go into a major conflict, all of a sudden they know everything we're doing, they can jam us, they can break our radios. And so we were setting ourselves up for failure in that point. So I do get the sense that even just having them out there in the passive kind of nondescript way they were could very well just be a recon type mission. Hmm. There's a long history of fighter pilots like yourself having seen these things. Um, so you have Gordon Cooper who, uh, you know, was one of the first American astronauts who spent more time in space. I think he spent 36 hours in space or something for the Mercury mission. Ted Stevens, who is a Senator from Alaska

1:09:27 who actually helped start OSAP with, uh, Harry Reed, um, actually saw, saw a UFO, I think in world war two as well. And then recently, uh, I interviewed our mutual friend, James Fox. He talked about Buzz Aldrin sister, telling him that Buzz Aldrin as a fighter pilot in world war two saw a UFO, I think in Japan. I don't know where. So I think this is a very, it's probably a much more common occurrence. And I, I'm, uh, just, uh, very grateful for, uh, you to, uh, be the tip of the spear as far as coming out and de-stigmatizing it. Cause a lot of this stuff is going on water cooler conversations, hallway conversations, and you're really making it public. Yeah. I mean, for, before I spoke out, I mean, you'd hear the talks, right? Even just not just the historical ones, but guys, you know, kind of older guys been flying for a while. Like they all just seem to have that cool story. They tell you, you know, once they had a few drinks and, um, and so, yeah, I think this is, I think this is much more pervasive. I think it's been happening for a while and, and it's still happening. You know, I mean, I've

1:10:27 spoke to current astronauts that have had their own instances. Um, so it's, you know, it's strange how we tend to discount the past, even the recent past on this topic, but, um, it does seem to be very pervasive. And, you know, when I, when I spoke out about this, I did it simply because I was hearing that my colleagues were having no resolution to this issue. It was still a safety issue. It wasn't getting run up the chain. It wasn't getting resolved. Um, and you know, my motivation was simply to be able to provide some additional information so that this would hopefully get the attention it needed to get resolved. And of course, since then I've learned it's not usually resolvable, um, as, as arrow has learned, despite the name. Um, and, but, and then, you know, I kind of became a beacon for people to call and report their, their incidents for me, primarily aviators, but all sorts of people. And that, you know, that's what led me to believe that, you know, wow, this is, this isn't just military pilots, it's commercial pilots. And,

1:11:28 you know, that was my goal going back to the hearing was just simply to be able to do the same thing I was trying to do for the military guys is to be able to share just how prevalent this was and how this was something that was just going unmitigated and was, you know, a real issue. And, um, I'm, I'm eager to see where this conversation is in five years, whether there's full disclosure or, or not. I think that this topic and conversation is going to continue to grow in the public sphere. People are going to be more willing to share their experiences and stories. And I think we're going to learn a lot from that. I'm equally eager. I think you're going to play a big part in it. And, uh, before we wrap up, I want you mentioned something fascinating to me, which is, you know, one of the central characters whose voice we all know from one of the three videos that the New New York times released in 2017, that the Pentagon admitted was real in 2020. You want to talk about that? Um, yeah, I'll

1:12:55 talk about a little bit, you know? So, I mean, when I first saw the New York times pop a massive deja vu, right? I'm seeing this, what the heck, you know? And, um, my gosh, that's the video I saw in the classified space. My very good buddy, I'm not going to say his name, um, who recorded that video. And, uh, of course the pilot in the front seat as well. But this particular gentleman, I mean, he's in my wedding party. Wow. We went through training in Virginia when we first got on the F-18 together. We went to the boat for the first time at night together. We got sent to the same squadron after that together. Uh, and then as I was leaving that squadron, he actually put in a package to, um, transfer from a weapons system officer, the backseat guide to become a pilot. Then he got assigned to the same place I was instructing. We spent most of those 11 years or so hanging out together. We're very good friends. Um, and you know, we got to talk just recently and he actually shared something with me. Yeah. I, I, um, which we should specify which video. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. Um, but he, he, he shared something, uh, new on one of the, uh, now

1:13:56 famous videos in particular, the go fast video. Uh, and what this was, was that it wasn't just a little bit of fun. just a singular object when they detected that there were actually four objects that were in what we call line of breast or basically a straight line about a mile apart, which, you know, I'm flying formation that way, which, you know, makes you think they have to be connected to each other in some sense digitally, right? They have to know where they are in relation to each other, be able to fly that precise of a formation. But, you know, he's still very, um,

1:14:58 interested in this topic, at least in the context of his experiences. It's still something that he thinks about, and I think we'll be hearing some more from him. Can't wait and excited to see what you do too. And, uh, yeah, hopefully we can keep collabing and thanks for coming out to Austin, Ryan, and coming on the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Awesome, man.