A former Navy pilot has recounted a chilling encounter he had with an UFO in 2014 as he flew an F/A-18 Hornet off the coast of Virginia Beach, saying the unknown object was so jarring his flight commander called off the mission “immediately” and they “returned to base.” Ryan Graves, the first witness to testify in Congress’ highly anticipated UFO hearings on Wednesday, recalled seeing “a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere” that got within 50 feet of his squadron’s lead aircraft. Graves said the UAP—unidentified aerial phenomena, another term for UFOs—was between five to 15 feet in diameter. He said his commander filed a report but no official mention of the encounter ever surfaced. “Our squadron submitted a safety report but there was no official acknowledgement of the incident and no further mechanism to report the sightings,” he said. Other former pilots backed up Graves’ eerie account with similar stories of their own. Retired Navy Commander David Fravor told the hearing that he believed UFOs were a threat to national security, saying their movements appeared to be doing things human technology isn’t yet capable of achieving. In his own sighting, Fravor recalled seeing a “perfectly white” object that was “smooth” with “no windows” as it flew by. He said it moved in ways that a human could never move. Graves said the UFOs would make “inexplainable maneuvers,” like “right hand turns and retrograde orbits or J hooks.” “These objects were staying completely stationary in Category Four hurricane winds,” Graves said. “The same objects would then accelerate to supersonic speeds, 1.1, 1.2 Mach, and they would do so in very erratic and quick behaviors that we don’t—I don’t have an explanation for… (READ MORE)

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