Joe Rogan Experience #1883 - Ryan Graves

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Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Nice to meet you, Ryan.

Nice to meet you, Joe. Pleasure to be here.

You're, uh, 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... Well, let's just first, before we even get started, please tell people what your credentials, what your background is.

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

And what year was it that you witnessed this?

So we started seeing these in 2014, was the earliest that I know. 2013, late 2013, early 2014.

And could you describe, what was the very first experience?

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

And what is the difference in the capabilities of the upgraded radar system versus the, uh, r-original system?

Mm-hmm. So, you know, kind of practically speaking, it's like going from an analog TV essentially to like an OLED. It's, you know, a digital modern tool, uh, compared to more of like an analog, uh, classical radar that, um, has more limited range and has, uh, less ability to track multiple targets and things of that nature. So just generally speaking, we would exect- expect to see, you know, more objects, if there were any out there, or smaller objects, but, um, there shouldn't have been any objects out there.