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Case · C-078

Navy fighters off Virginia: encounters and near collisions (2013-14)

W-72 training area, Atlantic Ocean off Virginia Beach · United States · Jun 27, 2013 – Apr 27, 2014

In flight Pilots Radar Video

Unexplained

What happened
At FOIA request, the Navy's Naval Safety Center released in 2020 eight safety reports (2013-2019) on encounters of Navy aircraft with unidentified objects, seven of them in the W-72 training area off Virginia and North Carolina; four concern the VFA-11 squadron between June 2013 and April 2014 and one describes a near collision in flight with a balloon-like object. In 2023 the former VFA-11 pilot Ryan Graves testified under oath that in 2014, about 10 miles from Virginia Beach, an object passed between two F/A-18s, coming within about 15 meters of the lead aircraft, and that the squadron filed a safety report. According to The Black Vault, the Naval Safety Center stated that it has no official documentation of a late-2014 safety report cited by the New York Times. In May 2020 the New York Times linked the episode described by Graves to the report of June 27, 2013, which speaks of a white object the size of a drone or a missile that passed about 200 feet (60 meters) to the right of the aircraft: date, distance and description do not match those of the 2023 sworn testimony. According to a comment by the co-author Leslie Kean reported by The Black Vault, Graves confirmed that it was his episode and that the date could have been 2013.
Proposed explanation
There is no official explanation. According to the journalists of The War Zone, who published the reports, none of the objects described shows extreme performance: they were mostly stationary or slow, one is described as balloon-like, and only in one report (April 23, 2014) do two objects quickly cross the field of view of the infrared sensor; the journalists consider terrestrial explanations likely, such as electronic intelligence gathering by adversaries. As early as 2019, Tyler Rogoway (The War Zone) had put forward as a mere possibility, without direct evidence, balloons with a radar corner reflector inside, a device patented in the 1940s that recalls the cube inside a sphere described by the pilots, noting that according to Graves the object of the near collision was probably stationary. Ryan Graves, by contrast, maintains that he witnessed advanced UAP and testified under oath that the objects stayed still even in Category 4 hurricane-force winds and then accelerated to supersonic speeds (Mach 1.1-1.2).
Official investigation
U.S. Navy (Naval Safety Center)
Words of the document
a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere

Official documents

  1. Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency (hearing transcript) · U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Accountability · Jul 26, 2023

Sources

  1. The War Zone, the Navy pilots' reports on the encounters off the East Coast (May 12, 2020) (press)
  2. The Black Vault, “The NY Times and the Unreported UAP Encounters” (October 9, 2020) (analysis)
  3. The War Zone (Tyler Rogoway), “Are Some Of The UFOs Navy Pilots Are Encountering Actually Airborne Radar Reflectors?” (June 22, 2019, updated December 1, 2019) (press)

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