#1883 - Ryan Graves

**Joe Rogan** (0:04)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Ryan Graves** (0:13)
Nice to meet you, Joe. Pleasure to be here.

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
You're one of four or five people that I've talked to that have seen something that might be from somewhere else. It's always weird when you talk to someone that may have seen something that, let's just, first, before we even get started, please tell people your credentials, what your background is.

**Ryan Graves** (0:34)
Sure. So, you know, my name is Ryan Graves. I have an engineering degree, mechanical and aerospace engineering. I promptly left doing that to go fly F-18s for the Navy as soon as I graduated college. Did that for about a decade, both operationally in combat as well as an instructor role, teaching the new students.
And, you know, we did witness something while we were flying in our jets, but, you know, we were doing it under, we witnessed it in the context of our just everyday flying in our missions.

**Joe Rogan** (1:07)
And what year was it that you witnessed this?

**Ryan Graves** (1:10)
So we started seeing these in 2014 was the earliest that I know, 2013, late 2013, early 2014

**Joe Rogan** (1:17)
And could you describe, what was the very first experience?

**Ryan Graves** (1:20)
Yeah, so for me personally, the experience was simply just flying out to the area like I would any other day. And instead of seeing an empty airspace with just my wing person or another squadron doing something a different block, there were all of a sudden a lot of different radar contacts, which is immediately a problem because, you know, we could be hitting one of those, or someone working in our area.
And this was happening because we upgraded our radar, the best we could tell. We were in a earlier radar called the APG-73, and we had come back from deployment. We entered a maintenance phase, as it's called. We kind of do a little bit less flying, upgrade the jets if we need to, do any long-lasting maintenance. And we upgraded to the APG-79, which was a much better radar.

**Joe Rogan** (2:06)
And what is the difference in the capabilities of the upgraded radar system versus the original system?

**Ryan Graves** (2:12)
So, you know, kind of, frankly speaking, it's like going from an analog TV, essentially, to like an OLED. It's, you know, a digital modern tool compared to more of, like, an analog classical radar that has more limited range and has less ability to track multiple targets and things of that nature. So, just generally speaking, we would expect to see, you know, more objects if there were any out there or smaller objects, but there shouldn't have been any objects out there.

**Joe Rogan** (2:41)
And so how far offshore are you when this is all going down?

**Ryan Graves** (2:45)
Our working areas start about 10 miles off the coast, and then it goes out, you know, 100 or 250 miles or so, though we don't usually use those far eastern areas.
But we would only see them over the water. So they would really only be in our working areas, maybe slightly, you know, in between the working areas and land, but never over the land, sometimes over the bays that are in the area that are quite large, but never just kind of zooming west over land or anything like that.

**Joe Rogan** (3:12)
And is this restricted airspace?

**Ryan Graves** (3:14)
It's not. So that's a tricky question. For us operating in a military operating area, it is not restricted in the sense that you have to be there's only one person allowed in there. You could have these little Cessnas kind of bumbling in there, but they would get called out pretty quick, both from the kind of air traffic control agency that's working out there, as well as F-18s and the other aircraft that may be working out there.
But in a broader sense, when we look at it in relation to our air defense identification zone, which is essentially a band of airspace that surrounds our entire country, if your flight path originates over the water outside of the ATIS, and you proceed into that ATIS, into our controlled airspace, then you do have to essentially have permission to enter that airspace. It's not a restricted airspace, like a traditional bombing range, but it is protected airspace. It's our coastal air.

**Joe Rogan** (4:11)
So, you have this upgraded radar system, and what are you detecting?

**Ryan Graves** (4:17)
So, on the radar, really what we can learn from that is essentially the kinematics of the object. So, where is it essentially, and what direction is it going, how fast is it going, things of that nature. We can't necessarily make up the shape or things of that nature, so it's a representation. It's like a block on our screen to show that information. So, when we see that on our radar, we can tell where it's located, perhaps what's located around it, if there's other objects we're detecting, how fast it's going, what direction it's pointed in, what direction it's traveling in.