Spy balloons, drones and advanced UAP pose a clear and present danger

Last year, the nation’s attention was riveted by a Chinese spy balloon that maneuvered across the United States before it was shot down by an F-22 off the coast of South Carolina. 

The mistaken identification of an enemy drone as an American drone in Jordan led to the death of three U.S. service members last month. Retaliatory strikes against Iranian proxies risk escalation and war with Iran.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, American military planners are witnessing the transformation of modern warfare with the use of low cost FPV drones, which make battle tanks look obsolete. The rise of autonomous artificial intelligence only raises the stakes. 

Unidentified objects in defended airspace represent a domain awareness gap. This gap poses a clear and present danger to pilots and our soldiers that is more acute than ever. 

Whereas the Chinese spy balloon was visible to civilians from the ground, the three other objects shot down by American fighters over Alaska, Canada, and Michigan the following weekend were only detected after the North American Aerospace Defense Command removed Cold War-era filters from its radar. Previously, filters excluded anything too small, too high, too slow, or too fast to be a Soviet bomber or ballistic missile. For decades, despite radical advances by adversaries in balloons, drones and hypersonic capabilities, we have been stuck in a Cold War psychology, blind to much of what was overhead.

This is not the first time that upgrades to our sensor capabilities revealed unidentified phenomena in our skies. In 2014, when I served in the U.S. Navy, my F/A-18 squadron and I were operating in a military training range off the coast of Virginia and began witnessing unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) on radar and infrared after a generational upgrade to our systems. My squadron then started seeing them with their own eyes, including a dramatic near-miss.

The UAP displayed anomalous performance, holding stationary in hurricane force-winds. They appeared to travel at supersonic speeds and outlasted our fighters by hours, despite no visible engines or infrared exhaust. I testified about these experiences to Congress last July, along with Cmdr. David Fravor, a fellow former U.S. Navy pilot who had a well documented close encounter with an advanced UAP in 2004. 

The shootdowns last February marked the first time in the 50-year history of NORAD that fighters destroyed objects in our airspace. President Biden did not mince words: “if any object presents a threat to the safety and security of the American people, I will take it down.” 

Yet, in this new era of aerial threats, I continue to hear from military pilots about sightings of UAP in restricted airspace. I also hear from commercial pilots with accounts of hard-to-explain sightings and the challenges they encounter in reporting them to the government.

UAP reporting from the Air Force is anemic; reporting from the Army and Space Force is non-existent. Data-sharing between the intelligence community and the Defense Department remains a major challenge. For commercial pilots, there is no direct, confidential reporting channel at all.

This ongoing gap in UAP data collection invites the question of whether we are doing everything we can to protect our national security. Could it be possible that a decades-old stigma around UFOs is getting in the way?

The inspector general of the Department of Defense recently released an unclassified report which found that the department “has no overarching UAP policy and, as a result, it lacks assurance that national security and flight safety threats to the United States from UAP have been identified and mitigated.” 

One bright spot is that Congress is finally getting involved. The recent introduction of the bipartisan Safe Airspace for Americans Act, by Reps. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), would allow commercial pilots, who have a clear view of hard-to-track objects above 40,000 feet, to safely report UAP without fear of retaliation. It would also require the Federal Aviation Administration to share data with the Pentagon. 

There is much to be done. It is unacceptable that we cannot identify UAP that may be adversarial platforms and a threat to the safety of our military and civilian pilots. Let’s identify what’s in our skies.

Ryan Graves, a former Navy fighter pilot, is founder of Americans for Safe Aerospace. He testified to Congress last year about the national security challenge posed by UAPs.