Lt. Ryan Graves is a former Navy fighter pilot, who has worked on advanced research and development programs for DARPA, Office of Naval Research, and Air Force Research Labs on topics of multi-agent collaborative autonomy, AI-assisted air-to-air combat, and manned-unmanned teaming technologies. Ryan and people in his squadron detected and engaged with UFOs on multiple occasions, and he has been one of the few people willing to speak publicly about these experiences. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:18 - Top Gun analysis
14:23 - Fighter jets
1:01:50 - UFO sightings
1:28:18 - Congressional hearing
1:36:19 - Tic Tac UFO & Gimbal UFO
1:50:45 - Alien life
2:04:07 - Autonomous weapon systems
2:21:15 - Advice for young people
2:29:30 - Meaning of life

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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 1 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.

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?

I thought the flying was really accurate.

I thought the type of flying they did and how they approached the actual mission, Of course, had a lot of liberties, but 1 thing that seems to be hard to capture on these types of things are the chess game that's going on while that type of flying is happening.

The chess game between, like in a dog fight, between 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 get everything in place.

So what kind of flight they flew is called a high threat scenario, which means they have to ingress low due to 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 pre-planned strike, they knew exactly where they're 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 1 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 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 what the mission actually is?

So in this particular mission, it's kind of what we would call a pre-planned strike.

So there's a known location that's in a heavily defended area.

And the air crew, in this case, I believe it was 4 F-18s on the initial package, their job was to ingress very low down a canyon to stay out of the radar window of the surf to air threats.

Ingress means that they're going to be pushing from a start location towards a target or the objective.

So there's an ingress portion of the mission and an egress portion of the mission.

Like the entrance and the exit type of thing.

But it changes our mindset tactically quite a bit, right?

Because when we're entering some place, we have the option to enter.

But when we go drop a bomb on location, we're exiting, we don't have that luxury, we don't have that option.

So it actually changes our tactics and our aggression level.

Got it, and so they were flying low to the ground and then there's surface to air missiles that force them to have to fly low, is that a realistic thing?

So driving those aircraft in the clutter, all radar systems, or most I should say, are essentially line of sight.

And so they're gonna be limited by the horizon or any clutter out there.

And even a number of radars, if they are located up high and looking down towards that aircraft, the clutter, all the objects such as trees and canyons can have effect on radar systems and so it can be a type of camouflage.

So that's the camouflage for the radar, but what about the surface-to-air missile?

Is that a legitimate way to avoid missiles as it flies so low, like fly, I guess, below their level?

As far as I know, you can fly under any radar right now.

We don't have necessarily radars that can look through anything.

So there is always gonna be the ability to mask yourself.

But with a larger number of assets and distributed communication networks, where those radars are looking makes all the difference.

And I said they're ingressing past an IADS and that's an integrated air defense system.

And that linking of air defense systems is what makes it so hard, so complicated, is that the sensors and the weapons are disassociated from each other.

So that if you took out the target that was shooting at you, it still has ability to intercept you from another radar location.

So it's distributed and it's stronger that way.

You mean the surface-to-air missiles, like it's a distributed system in that if you take out 1, they're still able to sort of integrate information about your location and strike at you.

And there's a lot of complication that can go, you know, once we start thinking about distributed systems like that and the ability to self-heal and repair and adapt to losses, it's an interesting area.

Are you responsible for thinking about that when you're flying an airplane?

When we ingress to an area like that, we're presented with information about targets, air to air or air to surface, or surface to air, I should say.

And we can essentially see where, essentially the danger zone, if you will, is located.

And so essentially we would stay out of that.

And so having a full picture of the environment is extremely important because at the end of the day if

we go in that circle we can die pretty quickly.

So there's regions that have higher and lower danger based on your understanding of the actual, whatever the surface to air missiles systems are.

I wonder how automated that could be too, especially when you don't know.

It seems like in the movie, they knew the location of everything.

I imagine that's less known in most cases.

And also, a lot of those systems might be a little bit more ghetto, if I can use that technical term.

Like, I've gotten ad hoc, maybe, is the, I don't know.

But having just recently visited Ukraine and seen a lot of aspects of the way that war is fought, there's a lot of improvised type of systems.

So you take high tech, like advanced technology, but the way you deploy it and the way you organize it is very improvised and ad hoc and is responding to the uncertainty in the dynamic environment.

And so from an enemy perspective or whoever's trying to deal with that kind of system, it's hard to figure it out.

Because it's like me, I played tennis for a long time, and it's always easier to play, this is true for all sports, play tennis against a good tennis player versus a crappy tennis

Because a crappy tennis player is full of uncertainty.

And that's really difficult to deal with.

It seemed like in the movie, the systems were really well organized.

And there was a very nice ravine that went right down the middle of them.

So, you know, what you say is a very good point.

And as, you know, if we were to take a chunk of airspace and break it up into little bits, you know, there'd be places that are better to fly or less good to fly.

And, you know, we are seeing that now with what they call manned, unmanned teaming.

We see tactical aircraft or, you know, some type of aircraft or platform that's being automated.

And it's not being automated in a traditional sense where people think aircrew are flying them around to conduct missions, but it's very high level, objective-orientated mission planning that allows the air crew to act more as a mission planner, mission commander, versus having to just pick the right assets or fly them around or manipulate them somewhat physically.

So actually going back to the chess thing, can you elaborate on what you mean playing a game of chess with yourself?

What's, when you're flying that mission, what exactly do you mean by that?

Well, there's a few people you're usually fighting against in the air.

You know, there's the bad guys, and then there's physics and Mother Nature, right?

So when we're down at about 100 feet, it's a chess game to stay alive for the pilot, and it's a chess game for the WIZO to process the information he needs and then communicate it to all those other aircraft that were flying around to ensure that they're putting their weapons on the right target.

He's a backseater who is not a pilot, but they're responsible for radar manipulation and communications and weapons deployments of certain natures.

So the chess game is against physics, against the enemy.

No, there's no time for that type of self-reflection while we're flying.

I want to get to that, but I don't want to forget the point that you made about increased randomness being a tactical advantage.

As you mentioned, you can introduce autonomy in there.

And when you, when you bring autonomy in there, and my expectation would be, as we bring different abilities and machine learning, as we gather more data, we're going to be able to bring the tactical environment around that jet, the war space that it goes into will almost be at a stochastic level from the enemy's perspective, where it'll almost seem like every tactical environment they go in will be random and yet very deadly because the system is providing a new tactical solution essentially for that particular scenario instead of just training to particular tactics that have to be repeatable and trainable and lethal, right?

But not necessarily the most lethal because they have to be trainable.

But if we can introduce AI into that and to have a level of randomness or at least the appearance of randomness due to the complexity, I would consider that like a stochastic tactical advantage because even our own blue fighters wouldn't be able to engage in that fight because it would be unsafe essentially for anything else.

And I think that's where we have to drive to because otherwise it's always this chicken and mouse, cat game about who's tactics and who knows what.

But if knowledge is no longer a factor, it's gonna make things a lot different.

So out of the many things that are part of your expertise, your journey.

You're also working on autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, the use of AI and machine learning and manned-on-man teaming, all that kind of stuff.

But you're saying, sort of when people think about the use of AI in war, in military systems, they think about like computer vision for perception or processing of sensor information in order to extract from it actionable knowledge kind of thing, but you're saying you could also use it to generate randomness that's difficult to work with in a game theoretic way.

Like it's difficult for human operators to respond

So dogfighting is kind of an interesting conversation because it's not the most tactically relevant skill set nowadays by traditional standards because the ranges with which we engage and employ weapons are very significant.

And so if we're in a scenario, we're in a dogfight like that, a lot of things have probably gone wrong, right?

And that's kind of how this mission was set up, right?

It was a, you know, a no wind type scenario, most likely.

And so for a dogfight, the aircraft size and the ranges and the turn radiuses make it so it's not very theatrical, right?

The aircraft looks small and while it's intense with the systems I have and the sensors and what I'm feeling and all that.

If I, you know, we've done it and we've done it, right?

We take video of that and it's just like a blue sky and you see a little dot out there.

And so anytime it really looks interesting in dogfight arena, that's most likely a fiction because we really only get close for a millisecond as we're zipping past each other at the merge.

go and have fun, but in a dogfight specifically.

Maybe that was more common in the earlier wars, the World War II and before that, where the, is it due to the sort of the range and the effectiveness of the weapon systems involved?

and the accuracy of the targeting systems that range, but there's also a train of thought that hasn't actually been tested out yet, which is with the advent of advanced electronic warfare, EW, and or unmanned assets, the battle space may get so complex and missiles may essentially just get dropped out of the sky or wasted such that you're gonna be in close with either IR missiles or guns if it's a no kidding, you know, must defend type scenario.

You know, it's basically trying to get control of electromagnetic spectrum for the interest of whatever operation is going on.

So in the tactical environment, a lot of that is trying to deceive the radar or can we deceive the missile or just stop their guidance, things of that nature.

Man, it's a battle in the space of information, of digital information.

F-22 is a big, expensive aircraft, and it was made to be a great fighter.

But the F-35 is not as great of a fighter, but it's an electronic warfare and mission commander platform of the future, where information is what's gonna win the war instead of the best dogfighter and so it's interesting dichotomy there.

What's the best airplane ever made, fighter jet ever made?

I know the aviators in the in the audience are gonna hate my answer because they're gonna want that sexy, you know, muscly F-14 Tomcat type fighter or maybe P-51 type aircraft, but the F-35 is maybe not the best dogfighter, but it doesn't have to get in a dogfight, right?

It's like how you'd be the best knife fighters, not getting a knife fight sometimes.

There's 2 real strengths you can have as a fighter.

You can have the ability to kind of out-muscle your fighter, your opponent, and beat him on Gs and power and raid around on them.

And then there's the other side of that, which is you can be overly maneuverable.

And that's what the F-18 was good at because it had to be heavier to land on aircraft carrier.

We had to give it extra bulk, but it also needs special mechanisms to slow down enough to land on aircraft carrier.

And what that leads to a lot of times, the ability to get maybe the first shot in a fight, which is very good, but if you do make that sharp turn, you're gonna bleed a lot of your energy away and be more susceptible for follow-on shots if that one's less susceptible.

And so there's just kind of aggression, non-aggression, game you can play depending on the type of aircraft you're fighting.

Where does the F-35 land on that spectrum?

The F-35 lands somewhere behind the F-22s.

So there'll probably be a row of F-22s or F-18s and F-35 will be out back, but it'll be enabling a lot of the warfare that's happening in front of it.

Is it 1 of the more expensive planes because of all the stuff on it?

movie, they have Tom Cruise fly it over Mach 10.

So maybe, can you say, what are the different speeds, accelerations feel like, Mach 1, 2, 3, or hypersonic?

I'm just gonna call out the BS of ejecting at Mach 10, just for the record, because in the movie, there's been, I think, at least 1 ejection that was supersonic.

And I'll just say, you know, it was not pretty, but he survived.

So there would have to be some interesting mechanisms to eject successfully at Mach 10, but I'll digress on that for the moment.

Okay, it's Tom Cruise, you don't, it's like Chuck Norris or something.

But anyway, so what's interesting to say about the experience as you go up?

In the end of the day, crossing the sound barrier is much like crossing the speed limit on the highway.

To cross that, at least in F-18, because we have a lot more weight than most fighters, is typically we'll do that in a descent.

And we'll do that full afterburner, just dumping gas into the engine.

And so that'll get us over the fastest I think I've gone with about 1.28.

But what's interesting people don't realize is that if I take that throttle and I'm an afterburner and I just bring it back and just bring it back to mil, which is full power, just not afterburner, the deacceleration is so strong due to the air friction that it throw you forward in your straps, almost, you know, I would say, you know, maybe like 70% as strong almost as trapping on the boat, it's pretty strong.

So it's almost like a reverse car crash just for the deceleration.

So the acceleration, you know, is usually kind of slow and you don't feel anything, of course, when you're crossing through it, but the deacceleration is pretty violent.

But is there a fundamental difference between Mach 1 and hypersonic, Mach

And is that something that's used often in warfare or is it not really that necessary?

No, so hypersonic human flight, if it exists, it's not something that's employed tactically in any sense right now that I'm aware of.

So, you know, when I think of hypersonic technology, I think of missiles and weapon systems and delivery platform.

I don't think of fighter aircraft necessarily.

I can think of bomber or reconnaissance aircraft perhaps, but those would be more efficient, very long, long range.

I imagine acceleration would be kind of gentle, honestly.

The thing you experience is the acceleration, not the actual speed.

There's been just a small tangent, a lot of discussion about hypersonic nuclear weapons, like missiles from Russia, bragging about that, is this something that's a significant concern or is it just a way to flex about different kinds of weapon systems?

Hypersonics, I do think, pose a challenge for our detection systems because there are design considerations in these sensor systems, as always, right?

When you build them and the technology progresses to a point where maybe it's not feasible to use that technology, there's a problem.

But with the all domain and kind of cross domain data linking capabilities we have, it's less of, it's more of a integrated picture, I'll say.

And so the hypersonics are really, what it is is how fast can we detect and destroy a problem?

You're just shortening the time available to do that.

We call something like that the kill chain, right?

It's from locating a target and identifying it and essentially authorizing its destruction by whatever means, employing, and then actually following up to ensure that you did what you said you were going to do in some sense, right?

Does it need another re-attack, something of that nature.

And so there's an old dogfighting framework you could call, and it's called the OODA loop, that kind of made its way in the engineering of business now but the old observe, orientate, decide, act was initially a fighter mechanism in order to get inside that kill chain of your opponent and break it up so that he can't process his kill chain on you.

And so hypersonics are a way of shortening those windows of opportunity to react to that.

I wonder how much do you have to shorten it in order for the defense systems not to work anymore?

It seems like It's very, you know, I'm both often horrified by the thought of nuclear war, but at the same time wonder what that looks like.

When I dream of extreme competence in defense systems, I imagine that not a single nuclear weapon can reach the United States by missile, with the defense systems.

But then again, I also understand that these are extremely complicated systems, the amount of integration required.

And because you're not using them, I mean, this is, there could be, you know, there's like an intern somewhere that like forgot to update the code, the Fortran code that like is going to be make the different, Because you don't have the opportunity to really thoroughly test, which is really scary.

Of course, the systems are probably incredible if they could be tested, but because they can't be really thoroughly tested in an actual attack, I wonder.

I guess 1 assumption there would be that these hypersonic missiles would only be launched in a case of attack.

It'd be interesting if there were other hypersonic objects that we could use to flex those systems.

Another thing that actually happened, I just have a million questions I wanna ask you, it's fascinating to me, is there's a bird strike on the plane.

And it damaged the engine, and they made it seem like it's a serious, exactly, a serious issue.

I know someone that took a turkey vulture to the face through the cockpit, right?

I think that, actually, I don't know him personally, but there's a story I know from the command I was at, and I believe the back seater had to punch out and punch them both out, because he was unconscious, you know, in the front seat from the bird.

It's, you know, it's like a bowling ball going 250 miles an hour.

Every airport I've flown at in the Navy, I've had to check the bird condition, if you will, to see how many birds.

We've had to cancel flights because there's too many of them around the airport.

Some airports even have bird radars, military airports.

Is there systems that monitor the bird condition?

There's actual radar systems, and you can go in the certain bases, you have to call up, and they'll tell you what it is for the day or for that hour, and other ones have it in their weather report that goes out over the radio.

What are some technological solutions to this, or is this just because it's a low probability event there's no real solution for it?

I would say it's not a low probability event.

I mean, although the hits themselves aren't necessarily that common or I'll say a catastrophic hit either a near miss or a hit, or the pilot having to actively maneuver to avoid it is pretty common.

It's so common in fact that we know that you never wanna try to go over, or you never wanna go under a bird if you see it in front of you.

You always wanna try to go over it because what they'll do immediately if they see you is, and you startle them, is they'll bring their wings in and just drop straight down to try to get out of the path.

It's interesting, I didn't know they did that.

But so if you try to go under them, they're gonna be dropping into you.

So you typically want to try to go above them.

Is this something you can train for or no?

Is this 1 of those things you have to really experience?

It's a skill set that you somewhat train for in the duties of being a fighter pilot in a sense, right?

Being able to react to your environment very quickly and make decisions quickly, so.

Is that 1 of the more absurd things, challenges you have to deal with in flying?

Is there other things, sort of, maybe weather conditions, like harsh weather conditions, is there something that we maybe don't often think about in terms of the challenges of flying?

Birds, in a way, aren't a ridiculous threat for us.

It's a safety threat that, you know, anything physical in the air is something that we really have to be careful about.

Whether we're flying formation off of the aircraft right next to us, or whether it's a turkey vulture at 2000 feet or a flock of 5,000 birds like at the runway and we have to wave off, you know.

And although they're low probability, a lot of bases will have like actual environmental protecting agency employees that are responsible for safely removing migratory birds or different animals that may be in the runways or flying about.

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