Ryan Graves and the “Cube Inside a Sphere” UFO
Ryan Graves is a former Navy fighter pilot who has urged officials to take unexplained sightings seriously as a flight-safety issue. In 2023, he told Congress about a colleague's close encounter with a strange object: a dark-gray cube inside a clear sphere.
Graves was not in either of the two jets involved. He heard the account from a pilot who returned to base. His own experience concerned unexplained readings on aircraft sensors. Keeping those two parts separate helps explain what he reported and how he knew it.
A Fighter Pilot Before a Public Witness
Graves's biography submitted to Congress describes about a decade in the Navy, two deployments and service as an F/A-18F fighter pilot. He left the service as a lieutenant.
It also describes engineering and research work, including a role on a committee studying unidentified sightings at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. That connected his concerns with the wider field of aerospace research.
By the time he appeared before lawmakers in 2023, Graves had founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, an organization that collects reports from other pilots.
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Strange Tracks Off Virginia Beach
In his prepared testimony, Graves described flying with squadron VFA-11 near Virginia Beach in 2014. After a radar upgrade, crews began seeing tracks they could not identify. He said infrared sensors later picked up objects too.
Radar uses radio waves to track objects. Infrared sensors detect heat. The crews were getting unexplained readings from two different kinds of equipment.
Then two other jets entered Warning Area W-72, roughly ten miles offshore. One pilot reported seeing a cube inside a sphere.
According to Graves, the jets were about 100 feet apart when they took action to avoid the object. The crews stopped the training flight, returned to base and filed a safety report.
The reported close encounter made the concern immediate. Whatever the object was, the pilots said it was in the path of their flight.
Hear Ryan Graves Testify to Congress
The Exchange That Clarified the Story
At the July 2023 hearing, Representative Jamie Raskin asked whether Graves had been in either aircraft. Graves said no. He explained that he met the pilot afterward in the squadron's ready room, where crews gather. The official transcript records the exchange.
Graves put the reported distance between a jet and the object at about 50 feet. That is a different measurement from the roughly 100 feet between the two jets.
He said his reason for speaking out was safety. He had trained as a Navy aviation safety officer and wanted to help colleagues reduce risks. An unidentified object can be a hazard before anyone knows its origin.
Graves appeared at the hearing with David Grusch, whose claims about hidden recovery programs concerned different events. Being at the same hearing did not make their accounts part of one incident.
A Shape With an Earthly Comparison
There is a human-made design that offers a comparison with the reported shape. A 1959 patent for a floating radar reflector describes flat panels inside an inflatable, roughly spherical balloon.
The panels meet at right angles and reflect radar signals toward their source. The device was intended to make people or equipment floating in water easier to locate during a rescue.
The patent describes the outer balloon as transparent to radar. That means radar waves can pass through it; it does not mean a person can see through it. The design allowed bright colors to make it easier to spot and suggested a convenient size of about three feet across.
This is a possible comparison to investigate. Nothing in the patent connects the device to the flight off Virginia Beach.
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The Name Leaves the Door Open
UAP stands for unidentified anomalous phenomena. NASA uses the term for observations that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.
The word unidentified describes what is still unknown. It does not establish who made an object, where it came from or even whether it was a machine.
The cube-and-sphere description gives investigators a detail to check. More evidence is needed to identify the object behind that description.
Ryan Graves and Fellow Navy Pilots Speak Out
Giving Pilots Somewhere to Report
As of November 2026, Americans for Safe Aerospace lists Graves as its founder and executive director. It offers a confidential way to submit reports and says it reviews them, sometimes interviewing witnesses.
Its published process says identifying details are removed from public reports and information is not shared without the witness's permission. Those protections may matter to pilots deciding whether to report an unusual experience.
The organization also seeks more research and less stigma around reporting. A submitted account gives investigators something to examine. It does not automatically establish what a witness saw.
NASA's 2023 UAP study called for better data too, including instruments checked for accuracy and useful background details. Those measurements could help answer the safety question in Graves's account: what was in the jets' path, and how could crews avoid it in the future?
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