On 1 June 2023, Ryan Graves launched Americans for Safe Aerospace from Washington, DC. Graves had served ten years as a US Navy F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot in Fighter Attack Squadron 11, the Red Rippers, based at NAS Oceana in Virginia Beach. He deployed aboard the USS Enterprise and the USS Theodore Roosevelt, flew combat missions in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Inherent Resolve, and expended over four thousand pounds of ordnance in support of coalition operations. He went public in the New York Times in May 2019 because his squadron had been encountering unidentified objects in their operating airspace nearly every day, and nothing was being done about it.
He told NBC News at the launch: “Unidentified objects in our airspace present an urgent and critical safety and national security issue, but pilots are not getting the support they need and the respect they deserve.” The Federal Aviation Administration had no formal mechanism for pilots to report UAP. ASA was created to fill that gap: a confidential reporting channel, run by pilots, for pilots.
The Encounters
In 2014, VFA-11’s radar systems were upgraded from the legacy APG-73 to the APG-79 Active Electronically Scanned Array. The squadron immediately began detecting unknown objects operating in the airspace off the Virginia coast. At first the contacts were attributed to radar errors. Then they correlated across multiple onboard sensors, including infrared targeting systems, and were confirmed by visual identification.
During a training mission in Warning Area W-72, ten miles off Virginia Beach, two F/A-18 Super Hornets were split by an unidentified object that passed within fifty feet of the lead aircraft. The pilot described it as a dark grey or black cube inside a clear sphere, estimated at five to fifteen feet in diameter. The mission commander terminated the flight and returned to base. The squadron filed an aviation safety report. There was no official acknowledgement and no further mechanism to report the sightings. The encounters continued daily.
Graves told CBS 60 Minutes in May 2021, when asked whether he saw them every day: “Every day. Every day for at least a couple years.” Veterans who subsequently contacted him confirmed the encounters “continued all the way to 2019, 2020, and beyond,” making it, in Graves’s words to Congress, “a generational issue for naval aviators on the Eastern Seaboard.”
The Congressional Testimony
On 26 July 2023, Graves testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s Subcommittee on National Security, alongside David Grusch (former intelligence officer) and Commander David Fravor (retired Navy pilot). It was the first congressional hearing on unidentified aerial phenomena in over fifty years.
Graves presented three issues. The first was under-reporting: “These sightings are not rare or isolated. They are routine. Military aircrew and commercial pilots, trained observers whose lives depend on accurate identification, are frequently witnessing these phenomena.” The second was stigma: pilots feared professional repercussions, including the FAA’s authority to classify an unsupported sighting as a hallucination, triggering psychiatric evaluation and months of grounding without pay. The third was excessive classification: “Since 2021 all UAP videos are classified as secret or above.”
He closed with a statement that framed the issue in operational terms: “If UAP are foreign drones, it is an urgent national security problem. If it is something else, it is an issue for science. In either case, unidentified objects are a concern for flight safety. The American people deserve to know what is happening in our skies.”
The Witness Campaign
Eight days before the hearing, on 18 July 2023, ASA launched its formal Witness Campaign. The process is confidential: pilots and veterans submit accounts through the ASA website, meet with ASA for an interview, and are connected with advisors who have relevant expertise. Witnesses may choose to meet with members of Congress or AARO, but only at their own explicit permission.
At launch, more than thirty witnesses had already approached ASA. By August 2025, over 850 reports had been submitted by aircrew and civilians. By early 2026, the count exceeded a thousand. ASA’s own survey data found that 45 per cent of pilots have observed UAP but only 10 per cent reported what they saw.
The organisation’s primary legislative priority is the Safe Airspace for Americans Act, bipartisan legislation introduced by the chairman and ranking member of the House Oversight National Security Subcommittee. The act would allow civilian pilots to report UAP through NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System, protect them against retaliation, and make reports publicly available. It was recommended by the NASA UAP Independent Study Team.
ASA’s advisory network extends across the military, scientific, and policy landscape. Its advisors include former Navy pilots Alex Dietrich and David Fravor (both witnesses to the 2004 Nimitz incident), former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet (retired), former UAP Task Force Director Jay Stratton, former Senate Armed Services Committee staff Kirk McConnell, former NASA officials Mike Gold and David Radzanowski, and professors at Harvard (Avi Loeb), Stanford (Garry Nolan), and Carnegie Mellon (Ravi Starzl). In January 2026, New Jersey became the first US state to appropriate public funding for university-based UAP research, in legislation ASA supported.
Graves also chairs the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ UAP Integration and Outreach Committee, the first such body within the country’s professional aerospace engineering society.
From the Archive
Graves’s congressional testimony connects directly to the archive’s coverage of the US disclosure process:
- “After PURSUE: scientists, witnesses and Congress weigh in on the first UAP tranche” (11 May 2026): the broader community response to government UAP data releases that ASA’s witness reports helped catalyse
- The Sol Foundation: Graves spoke at Sol’s 2024 symposium; ASA advisors Gallaudet, Mellon, McConnell, and Loeb serve on the Sol Foundation advisory board
- The Galileo Project: Loeb’s scientific instrumentation programme and Graves’s pilot reporting operation represent complementary approaches to the same question, what is in the airspace?
- GEIPAN: France’s Government UAP Investigation Programme: France’s integrated pilot-reporting pipeline through the Gendarmerie provides the institutional model that ASA argues the United States lacks
