The Cube Inside a Sphere: Navy Near Miss off Virginia Beach

Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia Beach. Home of VFA-11, the "Red Rippers." In 2014 the squadron's Super Hornets received a radar upgrade. Soon the crews were tracking strange returns over the Atlantic. At first these were written off as software glitches. Then the infrared cameras matched them. According to The New York Times, the sightings came almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015. "These things would be out there all day," Lt. Ryan Graves told the paper.

Late 2014. Two F/A-18F Super Hornets head for Warning Area W-72, the training airspace east of Virginia Beach. They fly in tandem, about 100 feet apart. Something is already there, "motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point."

"It looked to the pilot like a sphere encasing a cube." Later, under oath, Graves called it "a dark gray or a black cube inside of a clear sphere," between five to 15 feet in diameter. The object flew between the jets, right past the cockpit. It came within 50 feet of the lead aircraft. The crews took evasive action and called off the mission immediately. On landing, the pilot put it plainly. "Hey, I almost hit one of those damn things."

Neither crew has ever been named. Graves was not in the flight. His squadron mates told him what happened, and he carried it up the chain of command.

The squadron filed a safety report. "Our squadron submitted a safety report but there was no official acknowledgement of the incident," Graves said. The report has never been released. According to the Times, the near miss angered the squadron. It also convinced them the objects were not part of a classified drone program.

May 26, 2019. The story broke in The New York Times, reported by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean. Graves and Lt. Danny Accoin spoke on the record. A month earlier the Navy had formalised its reporting procedures, warning that "These kinds of incursions can be both a security risk and pose a safety hazard."

July 26, 2023. Graves testified before a House Oversight subcommittee, alongside David Grusch and David Fravor. Once more he described the cube inside the sphere. He also spoke of objects "staying completely stationary in Category Four hurricane winds." No photograph or video of the near miss is known. The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office has made no public finding on it.

Sceptics proposed something simpler. Tyler Rogoway of The War Zone found a patent for a radar reflector inside a balloon. In June 2019 Mick West opened a Metabunk thread on the idea. Corner reflectors are built from intersecting metal planes. Inside a clear balloon, they could look like a cube in a sphere. The thread itself called the theory speculative, and the pilots' accounts of objects holding still against the wind push back against it. In 2024, former AARO chief Sean Kirkpatrick was reported as saying that "the next generation of drones that are being built are spherical." That was a general remark, not a verdict on this case.

The image stuck. The story reached History's Unidentified: Inside America's UFO Investigation, 60 Minutes, The Joe Rogan Experience and the floor of Congress. It is often told alongside the GIMBAL and GOFAST videos from the same squadron, and the 2004 Tic Tac encounter. Yet this one has no footage at all. There is only a pilot's account, passed on by a squadron mate, and a safety report that was never released.