Navy Pilot Says the Chinese Balloon Story Was a Lie

The Chinese balloon that drifted across the United States in 2023 was stated to be a closed case. It was tracked, it was shot down, and the public moved on. But former Navy F/A-18 pilot Ryan Graves is now suggesting the story was never that simple. In a recent interview with Mayim Bialik, Graves said that some of the air traffic controllers who tracked those so-called balloons watched the objects accelerate to rapid speeds and perform aggressive maneuvers, behavior that a drifting balloon does not produce. He said he intends to put that account on the record soon.

According to public statements made by the defense press secretary at the time, NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, recalibrated its radar after the 2023 incident to detect slower-moving objects. That part is on the record. What is not on the record, and what Graves is claiming, is that the people watching those tracks saw movement that does not fit a balloon at all. He has not produced proof yet, but as the man whose squadron filmed the well-known Gimbal video and who testified to Congress in 2023, his account can be viewed as credible.

Graves, who founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, says he now has pilots, air traffic controllers, and fighter pilots ready to come forward and describe what they witnessed. He stresses these are not new stories pulled from nowhere. They are the same cases his group already brought to the FBI and to Congress, now being told on camera by the people who lived them. For years, the central obstacle in this subject has not been a shortage of sightings but the stigma that kept trained observers quiet, so naming names would mark a real shift.

The behavior he describes today is more active than what he reported a decade ago. Where objects once held still or drifted, Graves says they now come up behind jets, stop instantly, wait for the aircraft to approach, then shoot off at near-instant speeds. Drawing on his post-Navy work in advanced research and development on autonomy and drone programs, he reasons it is most likely not American, since flying a secret program off our own coast and risking collisions with uncleared pilots would make little sense and break the law. He doubts it is China or Russia for similar reasons. He does not say the word alien, only that the objects are real, the sensor data is solid, and we do not yet have enough to say what they are. He also notes the recurring transmedium trait, the ability to move between water, air, and space without slowing.

Graves says these objects now turn up beside passenger planes, sometimes riding along a wing for as long as ninety minutes, and references an average of four to five passes within 1,000 feet of commercial traffic about five times per day in the United States. He points to a sighting reported by the pilots flying country singer Kacey Musgraves as one example of how far this has spread. He recounts a South African 737 crew at 29,000 feet who reported a black triangle larger than their aircraft passing about 200 feet overhead with a golden, plasma-like glow, an encounter so unsettling the pilots drug-tested themselves after landing. He also repeats a secondhand claim that efforts to draw these objects in using nuclear material have worked.

Kacey Musgraves

Graves says his group is building deployable hardware, from small home units to advanced stations, paired with a system that checks each report against satellite data, air traffic data, and military test-range data in real time. If even partly successful, that approach would move the conversation from belief to records, which raises a fair question about whether AARO and the new White House UAP Science Advisory Council are pursuing the same capability.

Sources

Dr. Mayim Bialik. (2026, June 16). UFO Cover-UP Exposed: Navy pilot forces government to admit UFOs are real | Ryan Graves [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6F-TWyrbyU

Vincent, B. (2023, February 14). NORAD adjusts radar ‘gates’ to sharpen detection of anomalous objects as UFO recovery intensifies. DefenseScoop. https://defensescoop.com/2023/02/13/norad-adjusts-radar-gates-to-sharpen-detection-of-anomalous-objects-as-ufo-recovery-intensifies/