UFOs have been spotted in restricted US airspace “every day for years,” a former Navy pilot has claimed.
Lieutenant Ryan Graves said his then F/A-18F squadron began seeing UAPs – unidentified aerial phenomena, or UFOs – hovering over restricted airspace southeast of Virginia Beach in 2014.
With the introduction of new radar they were able to zero in with infrared targeting cameras.
He told CBS News UFOs were seen “every day for a couple of years”.
Photographs were taken in 2019 in the same area showing mysterious objects in the sky.
The Pentagon has confirmed these are images of objects it can't identify.
Another image taken off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, in 2015, was captured on a targeting camera by members of Graves' squadron.
The pilots can be heard saying: “Look at that thing, it's rotating! My gosh! They're all going against the wind, the wind's 120 knots to the west. Look at that thing dude.”
Graves admitted he wasn’t sure just what it was he saw.
He said: “This is a difficult one to explain. You have rotation, you have high altitudes.
“You have propulsion, right? I don't know. I don't know what it is, frankly.”
While nothing has been confirmed Graves said pilots speculate as to what the images could be – secret US technology, an adversary's spy vehicle, or something otherworldly.
Graves said that he was worried as whatever the objects were they could pose a threat to US security.
'I AM WORRIED'
“I am worried, frankly. You know, if these were tactical jets from another country that were hangin' out up there, it would be a massive issue,” Graves said. “But because it looks slightly different, we're not willing to actually look at the problem in the face. We're happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there, watching us every day.”
Graves’s claims appear to be backed up by Luis Elizondo, who spent 20 years running military intelligence operations worldwide: in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Guantanamo.
In 2008 he joined something at the Pentagon called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
It was the AATIP’s job to collect and analyze information involving UFOs.
When Elizondo took over in 2010 he focused on the national security implications of unidentified aerial phenomena documented by US service members.
Elizondo said: “Imagine a technology that can do 6-to-700 g-forces, that can fly at 13,000 miles an hour, that can evade radar and that can fly through air and water and possibly space.
“And oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth's gravity. That's precisely what we're seeing.”
Asked if there could be other, simple explanations to what people thought they saw, such as refracted light or a weather balloon, Elizondo admitted that could be the case in some examples but didn’t explain away every case.
“In some cases there are simple explanations for what people are witnessing. But there are some that, that are not. We're not just simply jumping to a conclusion that's saying, ‘Oh, that's a UAP out there’. We're going through our due diligence,” he said. “Is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that China has developed? Is it some sort of high-altitude balloon that's conducting reconnaissance?
'PROBLEMATIC'
"Ultimately when you have exhausted all those what ifs and you're still left with the fact that this is in our airspace and it's real, that's when it becomes compelling, and that's when it becomes problematic.”
In a well-documented incident off Southern California on November 14, 2004, a mysterious object was picked up by radar, camera, and seen by four naval aviators.
David Fravor, commander of the F/A-18F squadron on the USS Nimitz and flying at his wing, Lieutenant Alex Dietrich, were two of the four people who saw the object.
Fravor said: “We saw this little white Tic Tac-looking object. And it's just kind of moving above the whitewater area.
“The Tic Tac's still pointing north-south, it goes, click, and just turns abruptly. And starts mirroring me. So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up… It was aware we were there.”
He said the object was about the size of his F/A-18F, with no markings, no wings and no exhaust plumes.
Then as he moved in for a closer look it just disappeared.
Fravor added: “I don't know who's building it, who's got the technology, who's got the brains. But there's, there's something out there that was better than our airplane.”
The warnings come after the director of national intelligence and secretary of defense released an unclassified report on UFOs.
It acknowledged 144 mysterious sightings documented by the US military after years of denials.
The Pentagon has admitted it just doesn’t know what these objects are or if they pose a threat to national security.
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