Former Navy pilot and Americans for Safe Aerospace (ASA) co-founder Ryan Graves praised Congress for introducing a landmark bill that would allow pilots to provide information on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in an interview with Fox News Digital.
Graves, who also made history as the first active duty pilot to testify to Congress about unidentified aerial phenomena UAPs, said the legislation is a tremendous step forward in giving civilian pilots a way to provide evidence of their experiences with craft that some whistleblowers have described as moving unnaturally fast and behaving in ways that would seem to defy the laws of physics.
The new bill, called the "Safe Airspace for Americans Act," was introduced by Reps. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., and Glenn Grothman, R-Wis. It is the first bill that would allow civilian pilots to report on UFO sightings and receive legal protections from professional reprisal.
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"Our new bipartisan UAP bill, the Safe Airspace for Americans Act, ensures aviation personnel can report UAP encounters or sightings safely to the FAA without fear of retaliation," Garcia wrote in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter. "It’s a big step forward for transparency and disclosure."
Garcia's language closely echoed that of Graves, who started his own campaign in July "to support commercial aircrew and military UAP witnesses who want to share their accounts." ASA started its own website to build a safe "pipeline" for pilots who have witnessed or encountered UAPs directly within their careers to attest to their experience.
"Right now, there is very little formalized support for UAP aircrew witnesses, and Americans for Safe Aerospace has the expertise to mobilize and fill that gap," Graves said when announcing the initiative, shared exclusively with Fox News Digital. "From my own experience, I know firsthand the stigma around the UAP topic and the very real fear of professional consequences, so I want to help others navigate the process of coming forward."
This new bill, filed on Thursday, aims at solving the same problem of encouraging pilots to testify to what they have seen in their careers. The proposed legislation utilizes a previously established "publicly accessible database" that pilots are already familiar with in aviation safety reporting," Graves said. The database "can be accessed through scientists, engineers, aviation safety professionals, news reporters and the general public," all of whom will be able to analyze and talk about the information, should the bill pass.
"For the general public, it's going to lead to a better understanding of the situation and the situation is… and what pilots are seeing," he added.
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Another important problem that the bill would help fix, Graves said, was longtime difficulties of pilots in "being able to get their reports into the responsible hands" at the FAA.
"A lot of this friction seems to be coming from the FAA itself and their lack of ability to gather information around the data of these reports and transfer it in a consistent manner," he said. "So this legislation is filling a gap that, unfortunately, the FAA wasn't willing to step forward and take care of itself."
Referencing the Chinese spy balloon that penetrated American airspace last year, the former Navy pilot said that "commercial pilots are sometimes our best sensors that we have available to us in the sky, and we need to make sure that we're listening to what they say, both for national security reasons and for whatever UAP turn out to be."
"I think I would say to pilots that this legislation doesn't force you to report anything, but it now provides the means for you to take that information and forces the FAA to accept it and channel it to the proper places. So for the first time, we really have an opportunity to take advantage of that," he said.
He continued, "I know there's hesitation, there's been stigma around this conversation, but there's a responsibility to national security and to the aircraft that you're responsible for in order to report issues that could be a problem now or in the future. So now we have the means to close the gap that has been present."
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When asked about general interest from members of Congress on UAPs, Graves said that the people he spoke to on Capitol Hill "are smart about this bill."
"They've been working and looking [for] something like this since the hearing, so I think we're going to see a lot of support for this bill, at least in the House," adding that he also expects support in the Senate.
Clips of Graves and two other whistleblowers — David Fravor, former commanding officer in the Navy, and David Grusch, Air Force officer and former intelligence official — went viral online after they gave sworn testimony in front of Congress as to personal experiences with what many Americans would describe as UFOs back in July.
"Congress wasn’t fully aware of how big of an aviation safety issue this was," Graves said at the time.
