UAPs and Balloons: What's Happening in our Airspace and Why We Need Answers with Ryan Graves, former Navy F/A-18F pilot and CEO of Merged Point

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Ryan Graves about his experience with UAPs and what the world is doing about them. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:14) To get started, I did have a question for you. Do we use the term UAP or UFO?

(Ryan Graves at 00:00:20) Well, UAP is the proper nomenclature as been communicated in various legal documents in the US government now. And UAP is defined as unidentified anomalous phenomena now, not aerial or aerospace. It's meant to be domain agnostic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) Oh, really? See, everyone I've heard says aerial. So it's anomalous?

(Ryan Graves at 00:00:46) Yes. There was a point where the consideration would be aerospace, but anomalous better fully encapsulates the breadth of where these objects could be located.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:58) That's right, because didn't—in one of the interviews, I watched all your interviews. I think one of them somebody was talking about them going under the water or into the water. Is that correct?

(Ryan Graves at 00:01:07) It is. And, you know, there's been some conversation about whether there's been difficulty in getting certain players within the government or Department of Defense to play ball due to some of the semantics around the domain terminology. Everything in the US government is kind of domain specific, for better or worse, to a large degree anyways. And so it's Space Force and the Air Force and the Navy. And so when you are assigning your name to a specific domain, it gives ability for people to say that either is or isn't my problem in a way that anomalous doesn't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:41) And then how did you become a part of the UAP conversation?

(Ryan Graves at 00:01:46) Well, accidentally, essentially. So this isn't an area that I have any, or had any, real expertise in, I'll say. When I was younger, you know, I think like anyone else that grows up in the United States, they worry about UFOs and aliens and have that cultural baggage as they grow up. But it wasn't something that preoccupied my thought, you know, in college or professionally in any sense. And I ended up joining the Navy to fly F-18 Super Hornets.

(Ryan Graves at 00:02:17) I did that for about eleven years total. I did a couple combat deployments. But when I came back from the first one, we upgraded our equipment on our jets. We upgraded from the APG-73 radar to the APG-79, which is a magnitude better radar, and it's kind of a digital radar compared to a mechanically scanned array radar. And so just, you know, everything's better on it, just as a general statement.

(Ryan Graves at 00:02:45) And we did that. We were noticing objects that we hadn't seen before. We first thought they were just some type of radar blip or something, or, you know, some kind of error in the radar. And there are physical errors that can occur, such as, you know, weather inversions or weird things that cause radar returns to not actually represent something physical, or where they say it is. And that was mostly a problem on the older radars.

(Ryan Graves at 00:03:11) The new ones, they weren't supposed to have that problem. However, that was our first inclination. Eventually, we got close enough to see them on our optical sensors, and then we eventually saw them with our eyeballs. I think it's important to denote here because people don't quite understand how complicated these systems are. But the jets are really like nodes in a network, in a sense, and our sensors and our data gets communicated across. So whenever there's one or two or more aircraft getting their sensors on one of these objects, it increases our fidelity, increases our confidence level in those tracks.

(Ryan Graves at 00:03:45) And on any daily basis, there's multiple aircraft, multiple jets out in the areas, and these objects are being correlated across this whole sensor network, essentially. And so that's the kind of information we're talking about when we talk about multiple sensors, radar contacts that are unexplainable, which I think in the last report there was about 80 of them. And so these were the objects we were running into, to answer your question in the longest possible way. I apologize.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:10) It's a talk show. You're good.

(Ryan Graves at 00:04:12) Yeah. I'm sorry. But we were seeing things we couldn't explain, and they continue to not be explained even as we gathered more data about them. And that's where we are today. And we didn't consider them UFOs or UAP at the time, but that's where the conversation has developed to because they are still unidentified.

(Ryan Graves at 00:04:32) And we've had to change the terminology a little bit to get our minds better around it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:36) That is pretty cool. I did not know about the connection of them like nodes. Is that happening basically in real time?

(Ryan Graves at 00:04:44) As close to as you can expect to. I mean, with latency and everything else. But, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:49) That's so cool. My dad—I'm slightly close to it. So my dad was in the Air Force, and in the late eighties, early nineties, they put the GPS system into the B-2 stealth bomber. That was his big project, and it didn't become declassified for, like, fifteen years after.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:06) So he didn't tell us until it became declassified. And it's so cool to see how quickly, because, you know, that was the most advanced thing ever, right, putting it into the bomber. And to see how quickly it's advanced is kind of awesome, given that we consider government typically pretty slow.

(Ryan Graves at 00:05:24) Yeah. We, you know, we do consider them pretty slow, and I wonder—I would consider them increasingly slow compared to the free market, at least in the United States. So although historically that has been the case, I think more and more, the only way the government, US government, can keep pace technologically with our adversaries is through greater access through the innovation ecosystems, startups, smaller businesses, such as we see with the Defense Innovation Unit and those other entities within the government trying to harness that innovation that we're so special in. But it's, you know, a little bit wilder and harder to manage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:01) So I'm curious to know. When I was preparing for the interview, I was trying to figure out, what topics of conversation were you covering on different shows that it wasn't just the same interview over and over. And one of the questions I have, I don't know if you touched on it or not, but I guess I'll start like this. Here's just a general question about when you were flying. Correct?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:20) So let's say you're just flying, doing basic routine flight training in your special airspace, correct? And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you look over, you know, your right wing, and there's a Chinese aircraft, right? And it's not responsive. So you try to radio in, talk to them. I'm assuming even if you're training, if you encounter an enemy craft while training, there's procedures for that, right? You would try to maybe talk with them, and then if they're nonresponsive, like, what would that engagement look like if you see them, they're next to you, they shouldn't be there, you try to talk with them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:50) You're clearly, let's say, Midwest US or very clearly in the US, so it's not like an accident on the edge of international airspace or anything like that. What would that exchange look like?

(Ryan Graves at 00:07:01) Yeah. That's a great question. So there's two parts to that answer, and I'm gonna tell you what my personal experience with that answer is and then what the real, like, what the book answer is for that. So my experience is in the Navy, and in the Navy we're training off the Eastern Seaboard. We're preparing for our forward deployments, so we're not carrying weapons. And believe it or not, we don't really have any, like, set-in-stone procedures when we're in that operation point and it falls on when we were rolled up on by, you know, a bunch of other aircraft. What that would probably look like—well, I don't want to get too much into that, but generally speaking, there's not a whole lot spelled out because, you know, we've never had that as a point of contention in our history, right?

(Ryan Graves at 00:07:47) We've never really been challenged. I mean, since colonial times off our coastal waters. And so I think there's a little bit of complacency there, but we just don't have those mechanisms. Well, if there really was something that was clearly like, alright, this is an enemy aircraft, we would probably, in reality, probably pull up an emergency frequency, like a guard frequency, and make a call on that guard frequency, which every air crew should be monitoring according to international law. And we would basically say, hey, unknown aircraft, call them out, see if we could join on them, rock a wing, you know, see if they can communicate in some fashion. So there would be, you know, some intercept of some fashion. We would call to the air traffic control that we were talking to, to let them know that there was potentially combative aircraft in the area, and to alert Air National Guard.

(Ryan Graves at 00:08:34) Because we don't, in the Navy, carry weapons when we're operating off the Eastern Seaboard like that. We're in a training mode. So we don't have, like, missiles strapped to our jet ready to go. So the second part of my answer to you is what, you know, what should happen, which is the book answer, which is the Air National Guard and the Air Force. They're the ones responsible for executing those type of procedures, and they're the ones that do have very clear and specific rules of engagement for this Northcom, right? This command area here that they're in charge of. We, just in the Navy, operate here. We go work in the CentCom or wherever else we go with the aircraft carrier. And their procedures would look, you know, probably very similar.

(Ryan Graves at 00:09:10) They would try to contact the aircraft on emergency frequency. They would try to visually get the attention of the aircraft by rocking their wings. And eventually, if they were in, you know, very tightly controlled space, they might be fired upon, especially around DC, if they continue to ignore any of those commands to turn around or respond.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:29) So the Air National Guard, they maintain the strict rules of engagement?

(Ryan Graves at 00:09:34) Correct. Yeah. They're the ones that essentially are those enforcers for our local, local turf here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:39) Now I live in Tennessee, and I love this place because as long as you're 18 and can legally own a firearm, it's open or concealed carry without any sort of additional licensing. It's a constitutional carry state, right?

(Ryan Graves at 00:09:52) I live in New Hampshire.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:53) Okay. Is it pretty strict over there or not?

(Ryan Graves at 00:09:55) No. It's open carry. You don't need a license to open carry here either.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:00) I don't carry my gun around without ammunition in it. Why do you fly the planes without any—I get not having a full load, right, because of fuel and all of that. But it's completely dry? There's no munitions on board when you're training?

(Ryan Graves at 00:10:14) We do carry munitions that have sensors but not explosives. So we train exactly like we fight, but we don't actually carry the explosives because we practice like we play. We're pulling triggers up there on these, what we call, captive missiles and things of that nature, so we can go back and debrief as if it was a real, real fight.

(Ryan Graves at 00:10:33) And so it would actually increase the risk and actually likely lead to mishaps from accidental fire if we were to carry them around. And there has been no historical precedence for actually needing that. So the risk to reward ratio would be skewed, in my opinion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:49) No. That makes complete sense. I didn't know that you had munitions on there that were digital in that sense where you—so you guys are actually, when you're training, you're dogfighting. You're not just doing, like, boring observation drills. Like, you're actually engaging with each other?

(Ryan Graves at 00:11:03) So what it looks like is, we have several different types of missiles, and say we're gonna do an air-to-air engagement. We have various air-to-air missiles. We have a long-range air-to-air missile called the AIM-120, and that, you know, loosely—they're not as big as telephone poles, the Enemies' ones typically—but they're a little bit small. But they're pretty big, you know, missiles for long range.

(Ryan Graves at 00:11:24) Then we have IR, you know, like, closer range missiles for, like, your heat-seeking ones that you kind of see, the Sidewinders. And that's what they recently shot those balloons down with just recently. And then we have the gun. And those are, you know, primary, kind of air-to-air weaponry. Air-to-surface, there's a larger number of weapons for more specific purposes, such as, like, a bunker buster versus air-surface missile for hitting something on a motorcycle, for example. But the air-to-air, there's not that high of variety: in close or far away or really close, which is the guns.

(Ryan Graves at 00:12:02) And so all of those systems utilize, you know, various detection mechanisms to do their job, and those can all be simulated without explosives in their bodies themselves. And so all that, you know, gets pumped into the jet, and we can operate the radar and cue the weapons and do all that and pull the trigger and get the muscle memory and do all that. And we see the cues. Just nothing flies off the jet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:25) That is so cool. I love hearing about this stuff. That was, like, one of my paths not taken, following my dad into the Air Force when I went into just, you know, commercial technology. I want to go back—

(Ryan Graves at 00:12:37) I did it because I like the technology. You know? I mean, I thought all that stuff was just so cool, the systems and working it and being in control of it and, you know, learning about it. And yeah, that's why I liked it. It wasn't necessarily like a love of flying per se. It was more of just the interaction with that environment, in a sense, if that makes sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:53) You had gone to college for engineering, correct?

(Ryan Graves at 00:12:56) Mhmm. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:57) What were you planning on doing at that time, or were you already planning on the Navy?

(Ryan Graves at 00:13:01) No. I went in as a mechanical and actual fire protection engineering five-year master's bachelor program, and I did an internship in the summer before my senior year. And I basically hated it and quit after, like, a week. Drove back home. I was like, what? You know? I know what I like. I don't know how to study the thing I like in college, you know, or get a career doing the thing I like necessarily. I don't really know how to speak it, but I did think that flying jets would get me at least closer to it. And perhaps that was the thing, just being exposed to, you know, that technology and those systems and those experiences and challenges and failures.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:43) Yeah. How often were you and your crewmates seeing these UAPs when you were actively flying?

(Ryan Graves at 00:13:51) Yeah. So we were basically seeing them every day. And, you know, I don't want to sound too wishy-washy, but we weren't cataloging these on a regular basis or even talking to people too widely. So that's a very loose statement. But generally speaking, it was so prevalent that we were briefing them before flights, letting everyone know to be cautious.

(Ryan Graves at 00:14:10) We even had them put into the local air systems warning systems, the Notice to Airmen, or NOTAMs, that all air crew check before they go flying, specifically for that working space to say, hey, caution, there's unknown objects working out here. We don't know what to do about them or their origins, but the point was they're an air safety hazard for us, for our air operations. So they were prevalent, is maybe a way of saying it.

(Ryan Graves at 00:14:33) And we were seeing them through a variety of methods. We were seeing them on our radar. If we happen to get close enough, we'd see them with our FLIR. And then very often, at least initially, when we were trying to see them for the first times, really, we would merge with them, which means we would basically fly right up to them as slow as we can, really. We're not looking to zip by them, but still, it's still, like, 200 knots or so.

(Ryan Graves at 00:14:57) We have it on the radar, and we use that to get close enough for our cameras to see. And then, you know, we continue to use the radar to get all the way in. And we have a HMCS helmet, which is a $100,000 system that links all my sensors to my eyeballs and my head and projects that information on the visor. And so as my radar is pumping all this information, I'm coming to the merge. I'm consummating the merge with my jet.

(Ryan Graves at 00:15:23) I start transitioning outside. Now I'm looking through the visor, which is showing a box where I should look so that I can see the object that all of my systems are telling me are there, and then I can't see it. You know? And it's like, well, I don't know. Like, was I in the wrong spot?

(Ryan Graves at 00:15:39) Like, all my systems are telling me that was the right spot. And we turn around, which, you know, takes us several thousand feet to do. It's not an immediate thing in a fighter jet. And the objects are still there. You know, we're seeing it on the FLIR.

(Ryan Graves at 00:15:51) We're seeing it on the radar still. So that was the case for a while. I don't know. You know? Again, it's hard to quantify, but for a period of time, that was kind of the status quo until someone from my squadron—there were two aircraft, as we typically operate, flying in formation like this, lead aircraft and wingman.

(Ryan Graves at 00:16:13) They're flying out to the working areas just like we do every day. And we enter those working areas at a very specific altitude and GPS location. 12,000 feet at a GPS point when you go in, 11,000 feet, same GPS point when you're departing. Just a transition point. And as soon as they entered that point, transitioned past that point, an object went right between the two aircraft that were flying like this.

(Ryan Graves at 00:16:39) And it went closer to the flight lead, basically split them, but slightly more to the flight lead. So they estimated it was within about 50 feet of the aircraft or so, and they described it as a black cube inside of a clear sphere. It was completely stationary at that location. There was no propulsion, no wings. You know?

(Ryan Graves at 00:17:00) There's no propulsion, no wings. That kind of sounds like a balloon. But when you're in the air, it's like being in the sea. Everything's moving with the current. So when we see things up there that are stationary over GPS locations, that gathers our attention. That's like a red flag for us that something is wacky. It's almost like déjà vu in a sense. But, anyways, that's what they almost hit. They knocked the flight off, and they came back to land.

(Ryan Graves at 00:17:24) And I was in the ready room. They came back. They had their gear on still, and they're like, we almost hit one of those damn things. And we all, of course, knew what they were talking about because they were so prevalent. But this was the first time someone had got so close to say, wow. We almost hit it, and here's what it looked like. And that's how they described it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:39) It surprises me. Well, I'm not a pilot. Right? But if I were a pilot, on sighting one, I would imagine in a movie-esque cinematic way that we would be freaking out about it and then deploying a number of other aircraft and treating it as some sort of foreign threat, at least until we understood what it was. Why is the reaction not that?

(Ryan Graves at 00:18:06) It's a good question. You know, that's the question I've asked, and I've said the same thing. I said, if this looked like a Chinese aircraft or some kind of Russian MiG, had a Russian flag on it, it would be exactly that. Right? It would be holy smokes. We need to launch X, Y, or Z and shoot this down or call the president or something. But these objects don't look like what we'd expect them to look like. And so because of that, we, for some reason, have this weird mental block where we're just like, well, that's not our problem. That's not what we've been trained to be ready for, so, therefore, that's not our problem. That sounds—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:42) That sounds crazy.

(Ryan Graves at 00:18:43) I'm not saying that's, like, the direct—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:45) I know.

(Ryan Graves at 00:18:46) I know. Mental process, but I think that there's maybe some subconscious level that's happening. Right? Because that's where we spend our whole careers training to fight other aircraft that move at high speeds doing certain things. So it's just like, well, this can't be—you know, that's not what I'm trained to do.

(Ryan Graves at 00:19:02) This is so far removed from what I would expect to have to deal with. This mustn't—this must be something else. This must be a classified program. This must be—and that's where we kind of were at this point when we almost hit it is that we didn't think they were UAP or UFO. We thought they were some kind of classified project at this point that had gone in the wrong spot. You know? And so we filed a safety report to bring attention to this issue without necessarily spilling the beans on this potentially classified project. And, oh, by the way, that was also the only means we had of really bringing light to it anyways. But those safety reports aren't proactive measures. They're kind of more of a data collection to see how trends over time go.

(Ryan Graves at 00:19:43) So we submit a safety report. Nothing happens, which not that we initially expected it to. And that was the status quo. We just—okay. Well, we've got to be careful for these things because we might hit them.

(Ryan Graves at 00:19:52) So what did we do? We stopped getting close to them. We'd see them on the radar. We'd leave that area and go to a different one. And so the data kind of slows down a little bit because we were just kind of stiff-arming them and treating them like any other safety of flight hazard so we could continue our training because we're about to go on deployment too.

(Ryan Graves at 00:20:09) So, again, we're not there to do scientific research, and there's only so much—so not to say that's the right answer, but that was the reality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:17) Who is the person that would be responsible for making this urgent or reacting to it? Earlier, you said something about the National Guard has rules of engagement. But if I were to want to get to the bottom of it—I'm a very curious person. Right? I'm incredibly curious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:35) If that happened, I wouldn't let it go, and I would follow it as far as I could to just figure out what it is. And I'm curious, who is the person I could walk up to and say, you're the one responsible for responding to threats in the airspace that are foreign or unknown. Why are you not deploying a response equal to the urgency in which you should deploy a response for a foreign object in our airspace that moves like we can't move?

(Ryan Graves at 00:21:04) Well, I think we've seen who's responsible for that in real time just a couple weeks ago as we've started to shoot down objects in our airspace for the first time in the history of that organization, which is NORAD. So they're the ones that are responsible for maintaining situational awareness of the airspace that we have concern of as it relates to North America and then securing our airspace and our borders from intrusion if necessary. And we saw a little of that play out a couple weeks ago when we had a public sighting of a Chinese spy balloon, of course, just a balloon at the time. My understanding of how those events evolved is that NORAD did have situational awareness of that object for some period of time or maybe not.

(Ryan Graves at 00:21:56) It's a little back and forth. Or maybe they had situational awareness in their records, but they weren't bringing that attention to the forefront of their operators because they were looking for higher-speed objects. So whether or not their system started or not is irrelevant. Whether it was actually considered actual data is really the more important question, and it was clearly not actual data because the first person that brought it to attention was someone in Montana when they took a photo of it, I believe. So that's my interpretation up to that point.

(Ryan Graves at 00:22:24) So then what happens, of course? Right? Let's start paying attention to all the objects that, you know—let's see what else we can find. So they lower the speed gates, and this is public knowledge. They've publicly said this, Department of Defense. And so what happens when they lowered their speed gates, they started finding other objects. We were experiencing low-speed objects off the Eastern Seaboard, you may recall, 0.0, 0.1 Mach, stationary against the wind. That's a little different than what they described as shooting down following the Chinese balloon.

(Ryan Graves at 00:22:59) So they did clearly bifurcate the Chinese balloon and these other three objects. That doesn't necessarily mean they're the same objects you saw off the East Coast. Doesn't mean they're prosaic either. It just means it's not a Chinese spy balloon, and they're pretty clear about that. Regardless of what those end up being, the important point is that there are things above our heads that we're not exactly sure what they are, as we've been saying, and a lot of the dismissal of this topic has been—I've been just saying, hey.

(Ryan Graves at 00:23:29) There's something here that we don't know what it is. Let's figure it out. And the skeptics are saying, aliens are so unlikely. How dare you think that? And I'm like, well, hold on here.

(Ryan Graves at 00:23:38) You know? We're just talking about uncertainty here in something anomalous. We're not assigning any type of conclusion to what we're seeing right now. And guess what? Our adversaries are going to take advantage of these gaps if we don't plug them.

(Ryan Graves at 00:23:52) And so what are we seeing? We're seeing more low-speed objects being detected, and I imagine we're going to continue to do that around our airspace, although I imagine it would be less highly publicized as the initial shootdowns.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:06) There's one thing that I've learned in business and growing—incompetence of people.

(Ryan Graves at 00:24:14) Don't assign—was it, don't assign malice before incompetence or something like that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:19) Yeah. Well, you would think that with all the media people we have, all the PR people in the world, that we wouldn't advertise this gap in our system. And then they say, well, these things have been up there for a long time. And you just would think that from a tactic—maybe there's some better argument for it, and they did it on purpose. But I've got a question about the—I think it—Josh, you can fact-check me on this. I think it was a senator from Kentucky.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:45) This guy had a sweet accent, older dude, and it was after they were doing some of the knowledge sharing with Congress on these three objects and what they know. And he gave this really nice explanation, sounded like old trusty grandfather. And then right as the interview ended, he goes, lock your doors tonight. Lock your doors. It blew my mind, so I'm assuming you saw this clip.

(Ryan Graves at 00:25:06) Yeah. I did. That made me laugh. What do you think of that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:09) What do you think of that?

(Ryan Graves at 00:25:10) I don't read too much into the whole lock your doors thing. I feel like maybe he was just trying to be funny or add a little into what he thought was maybe an over-serious conversation, but it backfired as those things often do. And now it was like, what the—but here's, I think, the important point. Again, regardless of what those three objects end up being, it did provide the opportunity for the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office or AARO within the Department of Defense, who is charged through Congress of investigating these anomalous objects.

(Ryan Graves at 00:25:43) It provided them an opportunity to provide a wide brief on the activities that have been occurring under their purview and under their context to all those sitting senators. And so, again, whatever those three objects are, I don't think the senators were necessarily reacting to those three objects, but I think they were reacting more so to the more general brief that they received from AARO. Because, again, I don't think they necessarily know what those balloons are or what those objects are, but they did probably get read into the wider context around how prevalent this is and what we've been dealing with since 2017 and before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:16) I'm sorry. My mind's still having a hard time processing this. If there were a strange vehicle on my street, right, and it was there for a little bit and we didn't understand it, I'd go get the neighbor guys and we'd, you know, go and check it out together. It would not be something we would just let sit there. The idea that we're not—I mean, are we doing stuff?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:34) Are we trying to go capture them or see them and they're evading us? What's the deal? Are we not doing anything about it?

(Ryan Graves at 00:26:41) You would think we are doing something. My—I don't know if hope's the right word, but I hope something is happening. I hope that's happening in a place that we can't see it happening. Right? But it's not happening at the operational level that, you know, I was exposed to.

(Ryan Graves at 00:26:57) So, you know, as we, I think, learn more about this conversation, I think that, hopefully, we're going to find the answers to that piece that we just talked about, what has been going on in the past and more recently from the government's perspective, if anything. And more so, not only that, but, you know, what exactly is the thing that we are concerned about?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) Let's give a little love to your—what's your new program that you're doing?

(Ryan Graves at 00:27:23) Yeah. I've often been asked, like, why are you the only pilot talking about this? You know? And my answer is typically, well, a lot of guys stayed in the Navy for one. And second answer is, you know, who wants to risk their career by going on really anywhere and just talking about such a controversial topic typically?

(Ryan Graves at 00:27:42) And so I said, hey, there needs to be a platform where pilots who, you know, are very reliable observers feel like they are willing to come out and talk about this in a way that doesn't jeopardize your career, doesn't get pulled into the mud in any way. There's no gotcha-ness, which is not necessarily unique. But we can talk at a pilot level and ask questions, you know, at a pilot level that you can't necessarily get anywhere else on this topic. And so I created the Merge Podcast, and I talk with pilots and scientists and innovators, and it's focused around UAP and bringing it to a wider audience and sharing those experiences.

(Ryan Graves at 00:28:18) It's really anchored on sharing those experiences from those pilots. And these aren't, you know, necessarily pilots that are telling their stories from the sixties. These are, you know, things that are happening today, you know, above our heads right now and over the past year. And some of these pilots have had experiences like that for, you know, large portions of their career going back to the nineties and before. And so we're sharing those stories for the first time because, you know, we're doing it in a serious manner.

(Ryan Graves at 00:28:44) I highly encourage any of your listeners to join us on YouTube at Merge Podcast. We're aiming to upload biweekly at this time. Thank you. Yeah. Looks great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:53) Is it going well?

(Ryan Graves at 00:28:54) Yeah. It's going great. I mean, it's going great. We've got a lot of positive feedback about the conversation. It's, you know, it's bland. It's not like anything, like, overly exciting. It's just a conversation between two subject matter experts, and we're just delving into the details, and they're sharing their experiences. Some of these people are talking about this, you know—or most of them, I should say, or probably all of them—are talking about this publicly for the first time. And some of these experiences are very moving to these people. It changed their outlook on life.

(Ryan Graves at 00:29:25) I mean, if you've had an experience with something that is so uniquely, you know, foreign in some of these cases that there's only one conclusion you can draw. I haven't had an experience that powerful, frankly. But some of these pilots have, and it's changed their perspective on life. And they've kept in touch with the people they've shared those experiences with. And to have that bottled up, you know, must not be easy.

(Ryan Graves at 00:29:48) But we're getting a lot of great feedback, and we're touching on some really powerful stories. So check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:54) Merge Podcast or how do they get to it?

(Ryan Graves at 00:29:56) MergePodcast.com or on YouTube, Merge Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:01) Last night we were watching—I do a church men's group thing once a month, right? And they said that, hey, we're gonna do this next couple weeks based off of this movie, Black Hawk Down. So everybody go watch Black Hawk Down if you haven't, because it's, I think, 20 plus years old.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:15) So I told my wife, and we were watching it last night, and then I hit pause because you could hear the pilots talking to each other in one of the scenes. And I said, oh, I'm talking to this guy tomorrow, Ryan, and he was on the Joe Rogan podcast. And I gave her the brief of what, you know, the whole thing about we're gonna try to destigmatize, you know, make it a safety concern and not an alien concern and actually, you know, progress the conversation. And so I was telling her about the objects that they were seeing, and she was asking me. She said, well, to your point, you said—in my head, it was like a plexiglass thing with a black something inside of it.

(Ryan Graves at 00:30:48) Black cube and a clear sphere?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:50) Yes. She asked me what types there were. Like, do we catalog, or in the community, is it cataloged? Do we see, like, 20% or that type of shape, 30% or the Tic Tac?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:02) Like, do we have a—

(Ryan Graves at 00:31:03) Good question. So, I'll speak specifically to the reporting that's happened within the Navy since basically 2018-ish or so. But my anecdotal data as a pilot, we were out there and we were seeing these things. Everyone I talked to saw a cube and sphere. That was what everyone saw.

(Ryan Graves at 00:31:21) And again, we weren't broadly talking about it, you know, because we were ashamed or embarrassed or whatever the emotion was. But a few years later, actually in 2017 when the New York Times article came out and I saw it, and I said, hey, do I really wanna go down this road? I was in the ready room with a bunch of people, pilots, instructor pilots now. We finished our time in the fleet on various coasts and are in Mississippi teaching students how to fly, essentially, right? So some people from the West Coast, some from the East. Some people I've known for years. Some people I kinda knew for a little bit. Some I haven't met for, you know, a year or more.

(Ryan Graves at 00:31:47) Anyways, I was like, hey, guys, remember that stuff we used to see off the Eastern Seaboard? You know, the weird stuff on radar. And everyone's like, oh, yeah, yeah. And then, you know, a few guys look, yeah, the cubes and the spheres, right? So, I mean, even, you know, just my anecdotal data, everyone was describing it in the same way. After doing more research and, you know, with now at where we are today, I've learned that there have been other shapes that have been reported in the area such as basically just smaller white cylinders and things of that nature.

(Ryan Graves at 00:32:28) I'll also add that the UAP task force that was responsible for reporting on the 144 cases that they had submitted through the Navy reporting protocols that were put in place, that reporting sheet that the military was working with, and this is FOIA'd information, it's from a security classification guideline, and most of it was blacked out. But what was available showed that there was a reporting section for various shapes of UAP, some number of them, but they were blacked out. And it was a, you know, decent size of the page. So maybe like 12 or something or eight or, you know, some block of numbers. But what the shapes are were redacted.

(Ryan Graves at 00:33:12) So it does seem like they do have some idea of some shapes that they could ask pilots to identify, but I don't have any idea of what the ratio or numbers percentages are. And that's just, again, from that 2018-ish on time frame. Historically, the shapes, you know, that's a much broader conversation that I'm not an expert on, but a quick Google will show you that there's all sorts of different shapes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) Who decides the classification, right? They have this document. It's come out. Who's the one that has the authority to say this part gets blacked out?

(Ryan Graves at 00:33:44) I forget the name of the exact person or the officer that does it, but it's done through a security classification guideline. And the assigning authority on the security classification level is only done through Department of Defense and government offices. It's not something you can do on the commercial side. So there is a specific office that is responsible for putting that out, and that's a system, the classification system. And that's kind of a third party in this conversation. It's not, you know, a tool of one side or the other, I think. It's more of just kind of a beast that is difficult to work with that needs modernization, and there's a lot of talk on that and a lot of effort, I think, being done to modernize that system so that we can en masse, you know, declassify the appropriate documents and get them out into the market, into, you know, into society, so they're not just buried away. But it's an old system, and it's, you know, paper based and all that, so it needs to be fixed. But to answer your question, I don't know the exact office per se, but there is a process that it goes through.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:46) I follow—I forget his name and maybe Josh remembers, but I think, like, Nick Chaillan or something. He was the former chief software officer of, I think, the Air Force, and he would regularly post. Like, I watched him while he was in his role and then watched him leave his role, and he started a podcast and all of that. But it was interesting to see how I work in, you know, the commercial world, and we can adopt technologies as they come out. But if you're working on government contracts and engineering, there are so many restrictions and red tape of tools you can use and procedures that what you end up doing, in my opinion, is you starve yourself of the best talent because the best talent that's doing the most interesting creative hard things, they tend to stay away from the bureaucracy and the red tape. And so then when you go to modernize these systems, especially ones that require the highest levels of classification, because you would have to have the highest level of classification if you were managing a database of classified information, right?

(Ryan Graves at 00:35:52) So there are—you're absolutely right. We are, you know, kind of choking ourselves out. That regulation is a known issue. I think it is recognized within defense acquisitions, and there are some processes and offices that have been put in place to help mitigate that, such as Defense Innovation Unit and some of the programs associated with that, which is essentially a direct interface from operator needs to the startup community or the small business market that's supported financially through very fast other transaction authority contracts, which enable, you know, quick funding for projects. So there are some processes in place. There are also some examples of how you can do things better, right? So Anduril, SpaceX. And really, I think what it comes down to is firm fixed pricing if we're gonna get real technical. But, you know, Anduril, SpaceX, they're saying to the government, we'll do the service for X dollars, and we either pass or fail. Traditional defense contractor models basically promise a certain price and then say you pay us for any overages, and it goes over, you know, 110% of the time.

(Ryan Graves at 00:36:57) And so there are models that work, but we're still piecing it there. And it's not just a government problem either because there's a pretty big incumbent of that old system that works, you know, well for them. But we're seeing the tech side of things, I think, push past that stagnation on that side, and the examples I mentioned are a couple of them. And they're good examples to follow, and I think the tech industry should be working much closer with the defense industry to help even with that red tape. And don't only help with the technology, but help with the process and the meta process because I think the government's willing to listen to that as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) I'm watching the time. So I wanna talk a little bit about you for a minute. How are you handling this? I mean, you went from pilot, you knew your close inner circle of friends, and now you're thrown on the national stage.

(Ryan Graves at 00:37:43) Yeah. You know, I guess I am, but it doesn't feel like the national stage. It feels like I'm working from home to have been. But, yeah, you know, I feel like I've handled it okay. We're just—you know, for me, this just seems to be a continuation of the same process of just asking the same questions and just seeing obvious needs that need to get filled and trying to just set an example of what can be done. I've done that with the podcast and showing that, hey, we can have a serious conversation about this and do it in a respectful way, and it can be of value to people. I have set up the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics UAP Integration Outreach Committee, which is a subset of the aerospace professional organization, the largest professional organization in the world. And we have, you know, career NASA industry, startup, government research lab, engineers and scientists who are coming together to work on this in a technical and engineering manner to move the conversation forward.

(Ryan Graves at 00:38:43) And that's just another need that was needed. Just recently again, Americans for Safe Aerospace. I just started this organization about two days ago, but this is an issue focused advocacy group where we're gonna be targeting legislative action in Congress and Capitol Hill in order to protect pilots so they can talk about this and provide other recommendations to ensure that funding is available for these government offices to do the work that they need to do. And so these—you know, how am I doing? I feel like I haven't stopped in a sense because I'm just filling gaps, and we're trying to move the conversation forward because we have not figured this out yet.

(Ryan Graves at 00:39:20) And so in a sense, you know, I feel like we're in the same spot knowledge-wise, but we're in a much better place in our society and with our systems to understand this process, and we're going to see the fruits of that labor soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:33) Well, let's wrap up with if we were to get out any information to the technology leadership community, people everywhere from startups to mid-levels to working in the military industrial complexes, the highest level of technology leaders listening to the show, right? What would we say to them? How could we use this platform to help move what you're trying to move forward?

(Ryan Graves at 00:39:55) Yeah. You know, I would just push the message that you might be on the side of the wave where it's I don't know if this is believable or not or true or not, but there is a large and growing cohort of people on the other side of the wave that are saying, how can we build systems to process this and to learn about it and take advantage of it, not just from a scientific perspective, but how can we change our tools and our processes at an engineering level so we can learn more about this? There are people that are working this problem at an engineering level, working to put out solutions so that we can grow this budding industry and to learn more about this. And so you can be on one side of the wave or not, but eventually you're gonna get there. It doesn't matter if you're gonna be first or not.

(Ryan Graves at 00:40:39) So whether you need to suspend disbelief or adjust your assumptions a little bit or do more homework, I would encourage it, because I think there's some fascinating things to look into, and we're gonna need everyone's help.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:51) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.