Ryan Graves: UFOs, Fighter Jets, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #308

How are these interacting with our fighters, if they are? How are they interacting with the weather and their environment? How are they interacting with each other? So can we look at these and how they're interacting perhaps as a swarm? Especially off the East Coast where this is happening all the time with multiple objects. The following is a conversation with Lieutenant Ryan Graves, former Navy fighter pilot, including roles as a combat lead, landing signals officer, and rescue mission commander. He and people in his squadron detected UFOs on multiple occasions and he has been one of the few people willing to speak publicly about these experiences, and about the importance of investigating these sightings, especially for national security reasons. Ryan has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from WPI, and an interest in career roles in advanced technology development, including multi-agent collaborative autonomy, machine learning-assisted air-to-air combat, manned and unmanned teaming technologies, and most recently, development of materials through quantum simulation. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Ryan Graves. What did you think of the new Top Gun movie? How accurate was it? Let's start there. I thought the flying was really accurate. I thought the, the type of flying they did and how they approached the actual mission, um, of course had a lot of liberties, but one thing that seems to be hard to capture on these types of things are the, the chess game that's going on while that type of flying is happening.

The chess game between, like in a dogfight between the, the, the pilots and the enemy, or between the different pilots?

I'll even speak to just that particular mission they flew there, and for that particular mission, it's kind of a chess game with yourself to, to get everything in place. So what kind of flight they flew is called a high threat scenario, which means they, uh, have to ingress low due to, uh, the surface-to-air threats, the integrated air defense systems that are nearby, and they have to ingress low and pop up like we see in the movie. And in that particular movie, that was a preplanned strike. They knew exactly where they were going. But there's a scenario where we have to operate in that type of environment and we don't know exactly where we're gonna strike or we're gonna be adapting to real-time targets. And so, in that scenario, you would have one of those fighters down low like that operating as a mission commander, as a forward air controller, and he's out there calling shots, joining on those other players in order to ensure they're pointed at the right target, so, so that's a bit of the chess game that he'll be playing.

Can you actually describe for people who haven't seen the movie, uh, what the mission actually is?

Yeah.

What's involved in the mission?