Scott Bray

Scott W. Bray rose through the senior career-civilian and uniformed ranks of the United States Navy intelligence enterprise to the position of Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence. The Office of Naval Intelligence, headquartered at the National Maritime Intelligence Center in Suitland, Maryland, is the senior intelligence body within the Department of the Navy and is responsible for maritime intelligence collection, analysis and reporting across the operational fleet and the broader maritime domain.

Bray's role placed him at the institutional centre of the Navy's response to the post-2014 East Coast UAP encounter pattern Ryan Graves and the wider F/A-18 community had reported, the November 2004 USS Nimitz Tic Tac encounter documented by David Fravor and Chad Underwood's wingman, the March 2019 USS Omaha Strike Group trans-medium observations subsequently described by Tim Gallaudet, and the broader inter-agency UAP reporting framework that took shape across the 2017 to 2022 period.

From 2019 the Navy formalised its internal UAP reporting structure through revisions to OPNAV Instruction 3820.5, the standing instruction on classified incident reporting. The April 2019 revision established the modern Hazard Reporting System framework that Ryan Graves has subsequently testified was triggered in part by reports from his Strike Fighter Squadron VFA-11 and the other Hornet squadrons in Carrier Air Wing One. Bray's office was the institutional recipient of those reports.

On 17 May 2022 Bray provided sworn testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation, chaired by Representative André Carson. He appeared alongside Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie. The hearing was the first US congressional open UAP testimony since the 17 July 1968 Roush symposium, a fifty-four-year institutional silence.

Bray's testimony included the public viewing of a multi-sensor UAP encounter video captured by US Navy aviators. The video footage, which had not been previously released, showed a series of unidentified objects observed by Navy F/A-18 aircrew on multiple sensor systems. Bray narrated the video in the open session, identifying the platform, the sensor configuration, and the operational context. The public viewing of the unreleased multi-sensor footage was the most substantive Navy institutional disclosure on UAP since the April 2020 Department of Defense authentication of the FLIR1, GIMBAL and GOFAST videos.

The 17 May 2022 hearing established the institutional template the Department of Defense subsequently used in the 26 July 2023 House Oversight hearing with David Grusch, David Fravor and Ryan Graves, and the 13 November 2024 House Task Force hearing with Grusch, Luis Elizondo, Tim Gallaudet and Michael Shellenberger. Bray's testimony, alongside Moultrie's, was the procedural opening of the modern US congressional UAP record.

Bray's public position throughout the 17 May 2022 testimony was the official institutional position of the Department of the Navy and the broader Department of Defense. He testified to the existence of UAP observations by US naval aircrew, the technical capacity of the Navy's sensor systems to record those observations, the inter-agency reporting frameworks that fed into the AOIMSG and subsequently AARO analysis chain, and the institutional commitment to systematic study within the constraints of operational security.

He did not extend his public testimony into substantive claims about the origin of the observed phenomena. The framing he used was the framing the Department subsequently maintained: that UAP represented a flight safety, counter-intelligence and operational-security question requiring sustained institutional response, that the Department was developing the analytic capacity to address that question through AOIMSG and AARO, and that public disclosure would proceed within the standard sources-and-methods framework.

The publicly available record of Bray's federal service:

• Career across the United States Navy intelligence enterprise.
• Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, post-2020 institutional UAP-response period.
• April 2019. OPNAV Instruction 3820.5 revision establishes modern Navy UAP Hazard Reporting System framework.
• 17 May 2022. Sworn testimony, House Intelligence Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation. First US congressional open UAP testimony since 1968.
• Public narration of previously unreleased multi-sensor UAP video at the 17 May 2022 hearing.

This biography is built from publicly available material:

• House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence · Subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation · Hearing of 17 May 2022, sworn statement
• Multi-sensor UAP video presented and narrated at the 17 May 2022 hearing (publicly released)
• Department of the Navy · OPNAV Instruction 3820.5, April 2019 revision
• Office of Naval Intelligence public communications, 2020 to present
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence · Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, June 2021
• Department of Defense AOIMSG establishment memorandum, 23 November 2021

The archive takes no position on the substance of the Department of the Navy's institutional UAP framing during Bray's tenure, only documents that he was the senior Navy intelligence official who provided sworn testimony at the first US congressional open UAP hearing since 1968 and who narrated the previously unreleased multi-sensor video at that hearing. If anything on this biography needs correcting, please get in touch.