Good evening, or should I say good evening. I always wanted to say
that, I'm just excited about tonight's guests. Welcome to the show. I'm
Martin willsh your host, And like I said, I'm super excited about our
guest tonight, Professor Kevin Knuth. And you know when people in the UFO
community say, why aren't scientists taking the UFO subject seriously in looking into it?
Well, there you go. He has a well respected he's well respected
as an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Albany,
and he is the editor in chief of the Journal of Entropy. He's a
former NASA research scientist, having worked four years at NASA Aims Research Center,
an intelligent systems division designing artificial intelligence algorithms for astrophysical data analysis. Is that
science e enough for you all out there in the UFO community, I think
it is. Before we get started, I do want to thank everyone who
supports the show. I really do appreciate a lot, and without your help,
I could not go on. So I really appreciate that, and I
appreciate every single listener and if you're on the edge for supporting the show.
You can do that for less than a cup of coffee only two dollars a
month over at Patreon, and the links to that are on our website cast
UFO. While you're there, check out this week's great blog by our blogger.
He's done a great job for quite a while now, Charles Lear.
And the title of that one is called UFOs and Humanoids. In nineteen seventy
three, we got there was some strange cases that year, including the Pascagoula
case, and so do go and check that out next next week. I
do want to say it is all about you, the listener. It's a
call in show. We're making an experiment. We're going to try that out
and I know I can't talk for two hours. We are going to have
Race over here at KGr A doing the call screening. Thank you, Race,
and we hope to hear from if you listen to the show in other
ways over at the Dark Matter of Digital Network or on YouTube, or you
are a listener to the podcast, and of course are on YouTube all the
time, we'd love to hear from you. And that is next week starting
at six to eight pm Eastern Standard time, and now that is minus four
GMT instead of minus five because we had time change last Sunday. And without
further ado, I'm going to welcome our guests. Welcome to the show.
Kevin, thank you very much for having me, and you remembered on Mutual
Mike. That's great, thank you. That's about a fifty fifty on this
show. So I'm really really glad to have you on, Kevin for so
many reasons. I know that Alejandro interviewed you. I just found that out
a day or two ago. He was at that conference where you did your
talk. There was that about a year ago or something like that. Yeah,
I'm about last year this time. Yes, And how if you could
tell the listening audience what made you decide to tackle this interesting topic. I
think it's interesting. Oh that's a that's a good question. UM would maybe
decided to tackle it a moment of insanity perhaps, I know, but but
seriously I think UM. I was. I found the um the revelations of
the A TIP program quite compelling and quite interesting. And and I have long
felt that, you know, scientists ought to ought to study these things rather
than just joke about them. And UM, and so when I heard,
especially when I heard about the Um, the conference these that these Scientific Coalition
for UAP Studies was holding. Um, I thought, well, I would
really like to go to this and find out more. And so that's pretty
much what got me interested in this. Uh huh. And had you had
you yourself ever had any type of sighting or anything. That's hard to answer
because it's I had. I had seen something unusual that I really just thought
was a weather balloon. At one point I was, Um. It was
while I was in college working in my bachelor's degree, and I was working
as a computer scientist at Mercury Marine in Wisconsin, and I was coming out
of work. It was afternoon, probably around three or four in the afternoon,
and I saw a I saw on F sixteen flying and I got very
excited about that. And and that was not horribly unusual because I grew up
just south of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where they have the Experimental Aircraft Association fly
in, so the EAA fly in is there, and very often we'd see
war birds flying. But that really wasn't until near the end of July,
so this is probably early June. And I saw in A sixteen. I
thought wow, in F sixteen, I thought, what is it, What
is an F sixteen doing here? So I ran in my car and got
my binoculars. I'm a bird watcher, so I keep binoculars in my car
and grabbed the binoculars and I looked and realized there were two F sixteens and
they kind of split up and came back around. And as I watched,
I realized that they were basically flying around metallic sphere that was just just hovering
there in the air, and the sphere was about a third of the length
of an F sixteen. They were right next to each other for direct comparison,
and I assumed that I was watching a some kind of exercise, and
I just imagined it was a weather balloon and they were practicing taking out weather
balloons or something. I don't know. And so I watched. I watched
your binoculars. I had a very clear view. It was a clear sky,
a bright summer day. And I watched for about three minutes and I
and this is where I made my mistake. I thought, oh, my
brother has to see this. So this was before we had cell phones.
This would have been back around in nineteen eighty seven, and so I thought
my brother hasked to see this, so I hopped in the car and raced
home to get my younger brother. And by the time I got home,
which was about ten minutes later, I grabbed him and went outside and everything
was gone. The smoke trails were gone and so on. Oh, and
I forgot to add that while I was watching during those three minutes, two
more F sixteens came in from the west from another Air Force base and they
all four of them were buzzing around this thing like bees, and it was
it was very cool to watch, you But I really imagine that I was
watching an exercise and so but I don't know what happened to the sphere.
The sphere was gone and the F sixteens were gone, so by the time
I had gotten to my house, so I don't know how the thing concluded.
And for years I just imagined that there was an exercise with weather balloons.
And at one point I was talking to a friend in the Air Force
and I mentioned this this story, and they were they looked at me quite
surprised, and they said, well, first, they wouldn't have been conducting
exercises over a city. Um. And they also said, and also,
you don't fly at F sixteen or a jet aircraft like that anywhere near a
weather blown because you're going to suck it into the air intake and bring the
plane down. And and they noted that the fact that there were two F
sixteens from one direction and two from another sounds like a response to an urgent
threat. So so their assessment was that they were actually responding to a threat,
they what they determined to be a threat, and were actually engaging something.
So so looking back, I wish I would have known that, because
I would have watched for a longer with more enthusiasm. But but yeah,
it was. It was quite exciting that. Really that's a great story.
And there's there is so many, um similar stories of you know, fighter
pilots and the after burners you know, taking off after these things chasing you
know. I mean a guy in the I'm in the antiques world and an
antique dealer friend of mine in Canada was talking about, um, you know,
being at a party. Uh this is I think it's a great story.
Um when he found out that I did a show in UFOs. They
had a party at his house and they were all outside during the summer on
his deck and uh, someone you know, said what is that? And
they heard this this noise and they saw this perfectly shaped disc going really fast
and uh, two fighter jets with their after burners on chasing after it.
And then they saw it zig zig back and it was still being followed.
Um, but the thing had, you know, uh, got some space
in between them. So he um, wow, that's that sounds really exciting.
Yeah for me, the sphere was just sitting there motionless, so it
was it wasn't wasn't as exciting. That's still really interesting. But anyway,
the thing that um, he impressed him the most was first of all,
knowing at the part he wanted to talk about it. That was the first
thing. And the second thing is he scoured the newspapers and everything. He
said, he just couldn't believe there was no reports anywhere about it because it
was so fantastic. So wow. Yeah, but uh yeah, well I
mean that that being said, I never reported my encounter to anybody, and
I, like I said, for a long time, I really just thought
it was an exercise with the weather balloon, so there was no real compulsion
to report it, right, and in nineteen eighty seven, well, where
would you report something like that? I mean I wouldn't. You wouldn't.
I don't know I work online, you wouldn't think of and um, you
know I would have had no idea. I mean the only time I saw
something I called the Air Force base nearby. That's I didn't know what else
to do. Right that you can see that, right? And so what
has the road been like for you through NASA and all the other things that
you've done to where you are today? And what made you actually write the
paper you recently did. Um, let's see, I think that trying to
think of what the most important events were. I've always found the topic interesting
is since I was a kid, and and and of course your imagination runs
wild what if? What if? What if? Which is great fun as
a scientist. That's tempered by your knowledge of how things you know of how
we understand things to be in the universe, and how to understand physics and
engineering, the ability to travel between the stars. It's clearly is very very
hard for us to imagine how to do this, and so so that tempers
your enthusiasm a little bit. But um, but I always appreciated the fact
that science studies things that are controllable and reproducible, and that's really where the
power of science comes in. And when you are studying something that's not reproducible
or you don't have any control over, it's extremely hard to do. And
I think back to a time when I was at NASA Aims and I was
doing work research on studying planetary nebula, which are clouds of gas surrounding dying
stars. We had a local poster session of just presenting our research that was
funded by the center, and my poster was next to a poster from a
gentleman named Friedman Freund, and his poster was on earthquake lights, which I
at that point I had never had never heard of. And so so I,
you know, we're standing around showing talking to people about our research.
But you know, when your poster isn't busy, you went around and look
at other people. So I would remember I was looking at Freedman Freund's poster
and started asking him some questions and asking about earthquake lights, and you know,
he said, well, you know, when there's very often when there's
earthquakes, people see these orbs of light appear and um where you can see
jets coming out of the ground. Of light and um, and these things
aren't studied. In fact, most most people don't believe that they're real.
Um the at the time, the general belief was that people in earthquakes were
panicking and hallucinating UM, and I thought that was kind of amusing. I
thought, well, you can't have everybody hallucinating. Kind of silly. And
and his his whole take on this. His research was trying to understand where
these lights could come from, and he was proposing that um stress in the
Earth's crust would put um put hum huge pressures on quartz crystals that would then
act as piece of electric crystals, giving you large electric fields which could ionize
the air and create these lights. And I thought it very reasonable explanation.
You know, it hinges on the question as to whether rock can effectively conduct
current at those potentials, and that I just didn't know, and that's what
he was actually researching. So I thought it was pretty interesting. And so
I asked around some of the other some of the other scientists, and I
said, yeah, did you see the poster next to Mine's kind of interesting.
What do you make of that? And they and everybody really pooh pooed
it. They were all, oh, yeah, that's Friedman Freud. He
was He was, I think in maybe in his sixties or seventies at the
time, and everybody, everybody pretty much said, he's been going on and
on about earthquake lights for years, and he believes that they're you know,
created from stress in the Earth's crust and and and it's really all just nonsense.
And that was pretty much everybody's take and I and I was kind of
disturbed by this. I thought, but you know, he could be right.
You know that it's a plausible explanation. We just don't know much about
conductivity of the Earth's crust and you know, these sorts of things. And
then I pointed out, if it's true, then what that means is you
could probably detect earthquakes before they happened by measuring electric fields. And there he
goes, yeah, I suppose, but we all know that earthquakes aren't predictable
anyway, and blah blah blah. And I said, well, we've been
told that because nobody figured out how to predict them. But he might figure
it out. That's interesting. So so I always I always remembered that,
and I was always kind of disturbed by people's reactions to his work, and
it wasn't until oh maybe what it was it twenty fifteen, just a couple
of years ago. Now, I think there was an earthquake in Chile in
Japan where they captured earthquake lights on security cameras and um. And so now,
actually, if you google earthquake lights, you'll see articles about earthquake lights
and who are they interviewing, Well, they're interviewing the only expert in the
world on earthquake lights. Who was Friedman Freun? This one guy, this
one guy who had the gut, who had the guts to study it,
which I which I was really impressed by. I thought, that's that's really
interesting. So so when I did encounter in the possibility of studying UFOs,
I thought, well, you know, this is clearly this is going to
be risky and people are going to have mixed opinions, scientists especially, You're
going to have varying opinions on this, not all positive. But you know,
as long as I as long as I research this carefully like I would
any other scientific topic, and UM, then I don't see what I'm doing
wrong. I can't. I'm not doing anything wrong. It's hard for anybody
to really criticize me. I mean, they may try, and they may
succeed to some degree, you know, socially, But but there's I think
this is a good, good path and somebody has to study these things.
And and right now, you know, from a from a career perspective,
it's potentially damaging, you know, if I go on and on and start
spouting off things that I don't really have data for, which I'm very careful
not to do. But in the event that I do collect or you know,
we start to understand what these things are, I'll be one of the
only experts in the world who really understand these things scientifically. And that's a
good position to be in. So I don't see anything. I don't see
any reason not to study them. In fact, this is precisely the topic
that if I walked away from it, I can see myself kicking myself in
the future, you know, like, what were you doing walking away from
this? Who would walk away from it? Is potentially one of the biggest
discoveries in human history. You know, I don't I can't say what they
you know, what these things are. They appear to be structured craft,
you know, are they extraterrestrial or not, we don't know for sure.
And if they are, it's a huge discovery, and if they aren't,
it's still a huge discovery. So I don't see, I don't see any
way to lose here, right, And I would argue that it would be
the biggest discovery, you know, ever made by mankind. Oh I would
think so too. Yeah, yeah, you know it's And thank you for
for for doing this, actually taking the risk, because uh, you know,
like I mentioned in the intro, you know a lot of people would
not ever look into this or think it's a silly topic, just like the
earthquake lights, and you know, it's it's there. It seems to be
going in the direction where more people are taking this a little bit more seriously,
you know. I mean I had the sighting I had, I couldn't
explain what it was, and that's what made me curious, and that's what
makes me have the show today. And it's it's and I'm not saying I
know anything closer to what they actually are than I did when I started,
but it's still a fascinating topic and one with you know, so many possibilities.
And anyway, I'm really glad that you're taking this seriously. And one
of the arguments that I've heard people talk about when it comes to science and
taking this seriously is the fund money. Like, if you can't resolve something
within a certain period of time, then there's no such thing as funding for
it. And I do understand that. And it's not something that can be
replicated easily. It just either happens or it doesn't happen. It's fleeting.
So what are your thoughts on all that. My thoughts are we are trying
to get funding from private sources. I've done a lot of research without funding.
You kind of do it on the side in your spare time and do
the pusp you can. It means that you can't buy equipment usually, you
can't travel places to meet with other people who aren't studying it. You have
to pay for those things out of pocket, which I've done before and I
can. I'm doing that again now. So I think it's important to study
this. These you know, we've known culturally, we've known about these options
for you know, since the nineteen forties, but the sightings go back much
further than that. And and clearly this is important and the it's unfortunate that
the attitude of the scientific community is that this study of these objects is unscientific,
and it's ironic that that attitude inhibits scientific studies. So just declaring something
unscientific means that you don't study it, which makes it stay unscientific. But
what that also does is it perpetuates a state of ignorance. And at this
point, you know, now we have enough evidence from the US Navy where
these things are interfering with aircraft, military aircraft during military operations. That's a
serious issue. And so now what do we do. We've perpetuated the state
of ignorance for seventy years and that's incredly detrimental, and we don't know what
the situation is. The I don't I don't believe that these things are hostile.
Whatever they are, there doesn't appear to be much evidence that they're hostile.
But if they wanted to be hostile, we would be in big trouble.
And so so this is potentially one of the biggest safety or security issues
we've ever come across. And again, people aren't people aren't paying attention,
and I know people in the military are surprised that the Navy and the other
military branches aren't that interested. I mean, this is something that we should
all if if they had, if they had a you know, a sickle
and a hammer painted on the side of one of these craft, we'd all
be up in arms literally, I mean, we would be at war at
this point. Um. But that's not the case, and so people aren't
worried. But that's really pretty ridiculous, and so I don't. I think
it's this, you know, it's the belief that we this can't be possible,
which is no stopping us from understanding what the situation really is. And
I think that's a pretty silly, um, pretty silly response on our part.
Have you heard of Stanton Friedman? Oh yes, yes, Well he
never had but I've never had the pleasure to meet him, but I've watched
several of his talks on YouTube. Yeah, he was a real gentleman.
One of his things that he liked to say is about the skeptics out there,
Well, if it was out, if this was happening, I would
know about it, you know. I mean that's kind of you know,
the ego driven um uh, look at it. Unfortunately you know that that
you do here, not exactly in those words. But um that that kind
of sums it up. And it's kind of surprising that setti Is does not
even want to admit, um that there's a possibility that we're being visited.
You know, well, I think they're there there, um there. They,
like many areas and science, are worried about funding exactly for them,
they've they've been on the fringe for since their inception, and they try to,
you know, mitigate the degree to which they're on the fringe. And
I think that's why they stay away from it. And now at this point
it's just cultural um. But it's But it's for me, it's surprising because
I know of of serious scientific efforts in Citi to look for extraterrestrial artifacts in
the Solar System, on the Moon, on Mars, on asteroids, and
at the Earth associated the Grunge points. So there are active searches for artifacts
in the Solar System. But are they in our atmosphere? No, not
possible. That's kind of that's kind of ridiculous. You know, if somebody
is seeing something unusual, you're gonna want to check it out. Um.
On one hand, it's it's unfortunate, But on the other hand, I
see it as this is an opportunity for me and the other scientists now who
are getting into this because there are others and this leaves the field wide open
for us to make the discovery. So that's right now, it's fine.
Right now, it's fine with me. They can keep listening to radio radios,
listening for radio stations and I'm gonna I'm gonna track down some of these
craft that. All right, everyone, welcome back. This is Martin Willis
and my guest this evening is Kevin Canuth. And we were talking about SETTI
when we went into the break and I had seth shot Stack on this show,
um a few times and we always get into the debate of UFOs,
and oh boy, some listeners get really angry about because he's very good,
he's a he's very bright, he's he's funny, he's a nice guy.
UM, but um, you know, basically his argument is that, you
know, he needs physical evidence, lots and lots of physical evidence, enough
to fill At one time he told me he needed to fill a wing,
We needed to fill a wing in the Smithsonian before he would take this seriously.
And I said, well, what about dark matter? How much evidence
do you have of that, and he said, well, yeah, you
know, he had all kinds of evidence of that, and um, but
anyway, it's it's useless to argue with someone that already has their mind made
up, you know. Yeah, And I think I think the other problem
that you run into is that astronomers, especially are have a we each have
a personal history where we've had to argue against pseudoscience like astrology. Well yes,
and I think as as educators, we're trained to you know, we're
trained to not you know, not being tolerant of that kind of ignorance and
to you know, try to set people straight. And so I think that
a lot of times when you see, especially some of these prominent popular scientists
speaking about UFOs, they have in their minds that this is a pseudoscience,
and so there they really feel that it's their duty to set people straight.
Unfortunately, it's this hasn't been Unlike astrology, which which had been looked at
for a long time and you know, morphed into astronomy, this hasn't been
studied well. And that's really the big difference. And I think it's important
for them to keep that in mind. Now there is some evidence, and
I think there's enough evidence for us to look at it more closely. There's
not enough evidence for us to say, yes, they are definitely extraterrestrial,
Yes they're definitely aliens. But there is some evidence that these things do appear
to be structured craft. And that's concerning. And what about you know,
there there are claims. I don't know what I think about the claims,
but there are many claims going all the way back to Roswell that there's been
crashed vehicles. And you know, the argument often you hear about that is
how could they travel you know, light years away or whatever it is to
get here and then crash here. You know, it's a ridiculous that type
of thing. You know, there's and and I don't really know if that's
so, if you know, someone like Bob Lazarre actually did see you know,
a craft, if that the government has tucked away you know, I
don't I've said many times in the show that I don't really buy that,
and a lot of people really stand behind Bob Lazarre, so um expecting hate
mail already for saying that. But anyway, what are your thoughts, dude?
And I do believe that TTSA is saying that they they have some crashed
saucerer or crashed UFO material that's going to be expose soon. And also in
the movie Phenomenon, the Phenomenon that is supposedly there's going to be something revealed
in that as well. What's your thoughts on that whole topics. So I've
I've had to kind of adopt this degree of belief where I kind of rank
what I hear from people, because I know, in communication with people who
are you know, formerly with the with the Pentagon or former former Navy people
and other scientists. And if I hear something from one person or maybe you
know, two people, then and I consider it to be a rumor.
If I hear it from many people, you know, supported from many different
angles, with different pieces of evidence, then you know, I take it
more a little more strongly. So at this point, I guess I've I've
heard rumors from various people that we have crush craft in our possession, and
so I I suspect that we It's it's possible that we did. I don't
I don't know any of the details I've heard. I've heard some details,
but I don't know how true they are. And so I kind of take
that with a grain of salt, but I basically tuck this away is this
might be true. Um, And that's the I think the best I can
do in this kind of situation where you're hearing anecdotal evidence from various people who
do have access to these sorts of things, and it's a difficult um.
So this is a difficult subject to tread. Um. You know, is
it possible that craft could have come here? I think it's possible. And
you know, is it possible that you've had craft here and have crashed?
I think that's possible too. Earth is Earth is going to be a relatively
hostile place, and so you know, it's not like flying around Mars and
so um, and flying around Mars isn't that easy either. We've had we've
had crash craft on Mars. So I don't you know, I expect I
expect that, you know, somebody who's mastered interstellar travel to some cree is
going to be you know, better at this and probably have fewer crushes.
But the other, the other um in fact that we don't know is we
don't you know, if if these things are structured craft from somewhere else,
we don't know how many structured craft are present on Earth at any time.
I actually had the I was at the s at the SCU meeting in Huntsville
last year. Um, during lou Alisando's talk, I had the chance to
ask him that question. I asked if they if they had any estimates as
to how many crush I mean, how many craft were present on Earth at
any time, and um, they he didn't have an answer for me.
And in fact, um he wanted to ask that question himself. And so
we don't know. Are there ten of these things on Earth at present?
On Earth at any time? Are there a hundred of them or a thousand
of them? Ten thousand? We don't know. But if you have,
if you have a large number of them, you know, a thousand of
the things on Earth at any time, then the probabilities for a crash go
up. You know, So the probability of having a crash is going to
be proportional to the number of objects flying around, right and and especially especially
in the New in New Mexico at you know, at the time in New
Mexico that's you know, this is the nineteen forties, and so we were
developing nuclear weapons at the time we were doing missile tests. Um, we
were doing testing a lot of things, and from some of the government documents
that I've seen, you know, we knew that there were these unidentified objects
present and they had actually contracted, um, contracted people to look for them,
and so but we don't know. You know, it's possible they were
trying actively trying to shoot them down and or take them down in some way.
And if that's if that's, if that's the situation, then um,
then they might not have just just craft we crashed. We might have actually
brought some of these things down. So there's a lot of there's a lot
of questions here, but it's they really depend on, you know, what
we actually know about whether these things are really craft, whether how many are
present on Earth at any time, what they what these craft are up to.
They're often seen in sensitive areas we know about you know, incursions and
nuclear weapon sites are quite prevalent, and um, you know, so if
these things are coming to Earth and hanging out in sensitive military areas, well,
you might expect some of them to crash. That's going to happen.
I know there were speculation early on that you know, perhaps radar affected somehow
affected them, you know, I mean, of course this is all speculation.
Of course, yeah, it's all speculations. It's not it's not clear
what the situation. It's not clear. It's not clear what the situation is.
And it's not clear how many crashes they're actually have been either, you
know, if any. So it's it's it's all. This is all very
problematic because we don't have a lot of evidence. We have a lot of
anecdotal evidence, and um, you've got what I call a low low signal
in the noise ratio, where you've got a lot of noise that's coming from
misinformation, disinformation mistakes, um, people you know, promoting fraud and making
up stories and all sorts of things. So it's really it's a horrible mess
that you really can't begin to resolve by you know, looking at pass cases.
The only way to really get anywhere is to go out and try to
collect data on these things ourselves, you know, currently, I think that's
the only way to proceed at this point. If you try to go chase
pass cases and you know, interview witnesses and that, Yeah, it's fun
and interesting, but scientifically, it's not going to get you anywhere scientifically,
Yeah, the magic word. And you know, I never thought of the
numbers game when you're talking to how many are here? So now I'm going
to ask you a question I've asked a number of people on this show,
especially with your background. There is there are people that have speculated that are
the science has speculated that there could be you know, possibly millions of planets
out there in just this maybe even billions with intelligent life and just this galaxy.
And why why would they be coming here? That's the question I have.
What makes us so special? If we're just part of a chain of
up to you know, millions of planets that have intelligent life, you know,
perhaps beyond ours, why why not come here? How much money do
we spend studying things on Earth? Exactly? I I mean a lot.
I mean all of our scientific research happens on Earth, and we still are
finding things to look at. I don't I don't see any problem with coming
with Earth. Earth is fascinating. Earth is interesting, and it's interesting to
us who live here. Um. Somebody who doesn't live here is going to
find it equally and more fascinating than that. UM. Where we've been fascinated
with Mars. We've spent billions of dollars trying to get to Mars, and
um why Mars it's you know from the you know, photos from the surface
doesn't look that interesting, but we're still we're still fascinated by it. I
think that, you know, if we found life on another planet and in
another nearby solar system, we'd be working like crazy to get there, and
we'd be collecting all the data we could from that place. And if we
found life on ten sold different solar systems nearby, we'd be collect trying to
collect data on all ten of them. I don't I think that it's really
naive to assume that Earth is uninteresting. I remember there was there was Stanton
Freeman had complained about. I think one physicist had talked about a UFO sighting
where the where somebody saw beings walking around in a meadow, investigating doing something
in a meadow. And the scientist said, why would you come all this
way to walk to poke around in a meadow? I thought, where else
are you going to poke around? What an interesting place that would be if
you were from another world, I would I could spend I could spend hours
in an alien meadow if you put me there, So I don't. I
don't. I don't know why people's brains kind of go out the window when
they encounter this problem. Earth is interesting, and it's going to be more
interesting for somebody who isn't from here. I don't see a problem with on
Okay, that's that's really good point. I appreciate that. I would think
that, you know, possibly where they're from, what could be equally interesting
as well. Possibly, And yeah, you know what do we I forget
how many millions of species we have on Earth, But there's a lot,
and there's a lot going on, and it's and it's certainly by Earth is
very diverse, which is interesting. Now if if there is life on Mars,
which we haven't resolved that issue yet, it's very probably microbial, and
and the diversity there isn't clearly isn't as great as it is on Earth.
We know that much. So, so even though life may exist all over
the universe and maybe maybe um intelligent life all over UM, we don't know
how diverse, you know, many of the other planets are, We still
don't. We still wouldn't know how unique Earth is, you know, until
we have some idea of what life is like elsewhere, and what various things
can happen. It could turn out that Earth is a very still a very
unique place. Um, we run, we run between this this bipolar way
of looking at us and looking at humanity and looking at Earth. You know,
in one hand, we're the center of the universe, and then we
realize, oh, we're not, and we kind of flip over to how
we're probably not interesting at all, And the next minute we're we're the center
of the universe again. And I it's such a binary way of looking at
things, and it isn't binary. These places are all interesting. Speaking of
binary, since since you have your background, most most solar systems are aren't
aren't they? Um? And how would that how would you think that would
affect a life evolving differently? Oh, that's a good question. We don't.
UM. This is really an exciting era in human discovery because we are
as especially as an astronomer and an astrophysicist, I really feel that we are
for the first time, really beginning to get an understanding of what the universe
is actually like. And UM, the you know, the exploration of the
Solar system really happened during my lifetime. I was born in May of nineteen
sixty five, and the first mariner fly by of Jupiter, of Jupiter,
sorry of Mars happened in July July fifteenth, nineteen sixty five, I believe.
And then it was literally fifteen years later to the day that we had
new horizons fly past Pluto. So so the last fifty years we've explored our
solar system. That's phenomenal, and it's been a great pleasure and privilege to
be alive during that time and watch it happened. But now we're starting to
find out about planets around other stars and what are other star systems like,
And we're starting to be able to look at spectra from these planets and identify
chemical constituents, and we might be able to identify an oxygen atmosphere at some
point and say that that world's probably alive like Earth. And it's very exciting
and I and I think that it's important to realize that we really don't know
anything yet. We don't really have any you know, we have some ideas
of what it's like out there, but those ideas are really very naive,
and I think that's important to keep in mind. Exactly and do you think
that James Webb telescope is going to be able to have us discover more ways
to look for life out there. Yeah, certainly. Well, and you
know, each of these telescopes going up and new missions that are currently on
the drawing board are going to be be very very interesting and very exciting.
We're going to there's a lot to learn, and we're going to learn a
lot. It's going to be very very thrilling. Ride I was. I
was thrilled to actually get to see that being worked on with men in white
suits and you know, protective gear working on that at Goddard. I think
it was four years ago, now, yeah, that's about I was like
Goddard about four years ago too, and I got to see it as well.
It was really exciting. It was exciting missing and thinking, Wow,
that thing's going to be in space and I'm going to be analyzing data from
it at no time. That's really great. Yeah, yeah, that is
amazing. And you know, actually I was down there visiting a Ray Stanford
who listens to the show a lot, and his wife was working over at
Goddard, and I was surprised that a couple of people there actually are interested
in the UFO topic and talk about it openly. What was it like when
you were at NASA? Did that subject ever come up? No, it
didn't come up, And the few times I tried to bring it up,
it was really pretty much shot down as being ridiculous, and I and I
always felt kind of some bad about that. I had hoped that people would
be more open to that possibility and interested, but it didn't really didn't appear
to be the case. Yeah, I've I've I've read about Ray Stanford and
I would really like to meet him. He sounds like a very interesting person,
and I also have a past history of liking paleontology too, So thanks
even doubly more exciting. Oh that is? That is. I hope he's
listening tonight and he calls in. I'll give him a nudge when we get
to our second break. Oh, I'd love to I'd love to be in
contact with him. That would be grateful. I can definitely definitely arrange that.
I'm sure he'd love to be in contact with you as well. I
know his discoveries of those the footprints. I think there was unknown species he
discovered and just amazing and actually right near the grounds of Goddard, which is
really that's so remarkable. I know, what really amazes me about that is
that the rocks in that area were not thought to be able to have fossils.
And it really just shows how, you know, we can fall into
these traps of thinking that we know, we know the situation scientifically, where
we really don't. Um, if you don't look into these things, you
you know, if you don't study something, you aren't going to make the
discovery. And you know, and he, you know, when he stumbled
on, you know, some of these footprints and you know, had the
visual acuity to recognize that, wait a minute, that's a footprint and and
and wasn't concerned about the you know, the type of rocks and whether that
was you know, thought to be possible or not. And um, and
that allowed him to make the breakthrough, which is really fantastic. But I
and I think that's a it's a good lesson that we have to keep learning.
You we it's very easy to assume that we know everything already and the
fact as we don't. We've always thought that as a species, haven't we.
Yeah, it's very we're very egotistical, We're very egotistical. This way.
Yeah, like we are the center of the universe and the Sun goes
around us, and you know, it just keeps going on and on or
not and and and just just to think and only I don't know, was
just over one hundred years ago we didn't know there was such a thing as
other galaxies, you know, which is that's right exactly? Yeah, really
amazing dark matter and dark matter and dark energy or now on the you know,
on the forefront of discovery, you know, and the dark matter comprises
looks like it comprises about seventy percent of the universe. And what that means
is that we are ignorant as to what seventy percent of the universe is even
made of, which is mind boggling. So it's you know, it's this
is it's very humbling. Do you think, you know, not to take
too much of a jack from the topic that we're talking about, but do
you think there are possibilities that perhaps we don't know? Ray Stamford just wrote
he is listening wonderful hello, so hopefully he'll be one of the callers when
we take calls coming up. Do you think that there is a possibility that
we don't know something about gravity? Or something else that makes us think that
there is a dark matter and dark energy out there. I mean, do
you think it's could be a flaw in the way we're looking at things,
or do you think it's actually has to be something. I think the situation
is very delicate because we have a great deal of evidence that there's something amiss
with gravity, and that at the moment, it appears that the explanation that
there's other mass out there that we don't know anything about, invisible mass that
we don't know anything about, appears to be the most plausible explanation. Where
I would urge caution is the the fact that we have several different pieces of
evidence. You know, one is the you know, the bullet cluster and
the behavior of the invisible matter there, and you'll have other you have other
situations as well. It we have made the assumption that those are all representative
of the same phenomenon, and it's possible that they're not all the same phenomenon.
There could be there. We could be wrong on many points. There
could be a kind of matter out there that we don't know anything about,
dark matter. It could be that we are also wrong about gravity, and
you know, it's not again, it's not a binary situation, and I
think that that's something to keep in mind when you go forward in these directions.
Most people that have your background are pretty solid on the Big Bang theory,
and I would guess that you probably are too. Yeah, I am
pretty much Yeah, And there really can't be as far as we can figure
out, there can't be any other answer for how things begin. But it's
still if you really dissect that, it's how can something start from basically nothing
type of thing. It's it's a bizarre situation, and at one at that
level, it's a bizarre theory. You know, even even even as a
theorist looking at this, it's bizarre that you could have, you know,
this whole universe come out of a quantum fluctuation. You know, I would,
I guess I would worry that any other quantum fluctuation a being could create
another university of the time, you know what that might do to this one
or not. You know, you worry about these things. And because it
is bizarre, the the facts that you know, there's a lot of um
evidence that gives you faith in that theory though, and that's you know,
the fact that you know the galaxies are the universe is expanding. UM.
You run it backwards and it will contract, right, So it came from
something that was much more compact. That's clear. You know, you can
calculate the um. You can calculate the expected um um, the expected um
um mounts of hydrogen and helium and other elements in the universe, you know,
from the theory, and those those do agree UM. I was talking
to another UM another physicist today who's looking at data from LEGO and UM where
we found that there are a lot of black holes out there, which is
really surprising to me and UM these he It turns out that from you know,
from one of the phase transitions that you get from the Big Bang that
you can related to quantum chromo chromodynamics, you can actually estimate the masses of
these primordial black holes, and they come out the estimates come out to be
about twenty five solar masses, which is what we're finding, you know,
in the data from the new gravitational wave detectors from LEGO. So you know
that, so there's a lot of evidence that we've got a lot right about
the Big Bang. UM where it came from. You know, what happens
at the singularity is a is a big mystery, you know, is that
you know, is that a quantum fluctuation is at an act of creation?
Is that you know what nobody knows and we probably will never know, but
it's um. But you're right, you're right. It's a very interesting question.
And you know, did time begin then? I mean, that's one
of the things that's that's the idea. The idea is that time and space
both began then. So what asking what was before is kind of meaningless in
some sense, and things get very very complicated, you know. From that
perspective. We're going into breaking about one minute here. But since we're on
this topic, just one of the things that you just mentioned black holes,
And one of the I always like to talk to an astronomer about black holes
because I think they're fascinating. And one of the things that I realized only
like a year ago or maybe even less, was that a black hole can't
really be have any more gravity than what was there initially, like, for
instance, a collapse star. You can only have amount of gravity as a
collapse star. Generally speaking, these do these things move through space or there
are some that are moving through space? Well, well, you can't really
talk about anything being at rested space. So everything's moving relative to something else,
So things do move around. Yeah, okay, the stars are moving.
The stars are moving relative to one another, and so these black holes
are probably as well. Okay, so all right, let me just ask
it this way. Then, say that there was a black hole, Uh,
that this collapse of a star became a black hole. Would that there
was no reason for that to move any more than it would have when it
was the sun? Is would there be any reason for it to move?
Um, if you had a star that then went supernova and then collapsed into
a black hole, it would be continue to be moving relative to other things
at that same velocity. So yeah, that wouldn't That wouldn't change, It
wouldn't change. Okay, all right, Well, uh, that's that's probably
enough people want to hear about black holes and all that stuff anyway, So
we are We're going to go into the break, all right, and welcome
back. My guest tonight is Kevin Knuth, PhD. And we were talking
about the dreaded black holes. I hope they don't find our solar system and
wipe us out someday. You know, before we talking about other things,
just just one other thing. When we were talking about the Big Bang,
do you think it's a possibility that it could be a cycle that's happened before
and can happen again, like expansion and then maybe contraction, and you know,
I mean anything possible. I think yeah, in that sense, I
think everything's possible. Anything's possible. It's we just don't know, and and
that's been proposed, so it's it's it's an interesting question. We don't probably
won't ever really know. Well, yeah, one of the things that is
kind of depressing is to find out that everything might uh everything might completely fall
apart, you know, all all them all might just spread apart and everything.
Yeah, it's kind that's rather sad, right, Yeah, but I
don't care how many billion years it is from now, you know, it
would just be hard to uh, it's still could be depressing to think about.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, let's get into your I want
to get into a couple of things and this part of the show before we
take calls and a half hour, and that is the characteristics of these anomalous
vehicles. Can you get into that kind of in a nutshell and what you
came up within that white paper, right, So we looked at in that
paper. I looked at UM several cases. Two of the cases where there
was UM you know, where there was radar data or UM in the infrared
images from the Nimits encounters in two thousand and four and UM. We also
had a case from Graham Bethoon in nineteen fifty one where he was able to
UM. They were able to describe how fast the object came up at them
from from the c surface, which was then corroborated later because it as it
left by by radar from New So so I looked at these three cases to
get some idea of how fast these objects are accelerating. So the most striking
case was reported by UM by Kevin Day who was operating the radar radar on
the USS Princeton in the Nimitz Carrier group in two thousand and four, and
he was tracking UM tracking these objects operating at about twenty thousand feet and they
would periodically drop from round twenty eight or twenty thousand feet or so down to
sea level, and he was detecting them UM doing this in about point seven
eight seconds, about three quarters of a second. So you basically have an
object accelerating from vertical rest in the vertical direction to sea level in um in
three quarters of a second. So so then it's basically you know, elementary
kinematics or physics to figure out what the accelerations would have to be for that
to happen. And so we basically did those calculations carefully by estimating uncertainties as
well, and we found that in that situation we had, these objects were
had to you know, at minimum, they would have had to accelerate at
about five thousand, three hundred g's of acceleration to the halfway point and then
they'd have to decelerate five thousand, three hundred g to come to rest.
Now we don't know if that's the actual profile. We don't know if that's
how they performed the maneuver because we don't have detailed the detailed radar and information
on that. But that estimate gives you the minimum estimate for the acceleration.
If they did something else that, what that would imply is at some point
they would have had to accelerate greater than that. And so we do know
that that's the situation. So five thousand g, what is five thousand g
like? Well, that's what I mean by that, But I mean as
it's that acceleration is five thousand times the acceleration of gravity. So you know,
if you imagine a fighter pilot pulling five g's, you know they're experiencing
five times the acceleration of gravity. So if you weigh a one hundred pounds,
you're going to feel like you weigh five hundred pounds. And that's that's
hard to handle physiologically. Now, what about five thousand G? What would
you look like? What would I look like standing up in one of these
craft accelerating at five thousand G? Well, all right, I'll be kind
to myself. Let's say I weigh two hundred pounds, all right, and
the the so the upper half of my body you would then weigh about one
hundred pounds. So if I were to accelerate at five thousand G, five
thousand the times the acceleration of gravity, then that means that my upper half
of my body would feel like it weighed five thousand times one hundred pounds.
So so you're talking that's so that's all a lot of weight. Um,
you're talking about half a million pounds, So it would be it would be
as if the upper half of my body weighed half a million pounds, well
what happens to the lower half? Well, you can guess you put a
half a million pounds on top of me, and I'm going to be squished
into jelly. Um there's no way, there's no way I'm going to survive
that. And so that's that's that acceleration is more than shocking. UM.
Not not only would you not expect and and happened into biological and happen it
to be able to survive that, you also wouldn't expect equipment to handle and
be able to handle that acceleration. So, just to put that in perspective,
um our, you know, our missiles UM can typically only handle at
most UM fifty g of acceleration. And even even in those situations, they
UM they can't maneuver at fifty g's of acceleration. They can maintain their maneuverability
up to about thirty five g's, so that the best missiles we have UM
can really only withstand thirty five geese of acceleration and still operate properly. UM.
So five thousand geese is really shocking. UM. How did some of
the others compare well we found them the the infrared videos, so they they
released, Um, the Navy released three videos of these these objects, and
these are infrared videos, so they're they're infrared images, so they're blurry and
fuzzy, which is in some sense unfortunate because a lot of people looked at
them and said, well, I can't even tell what it is. It's
some blurry, fuzzy object. It could be anything. In fact, I've
heard several prominent scientists say that publicly it could be anything. Um, well,
it can't be anything. You know, you can rule things out.
It's not a bird because the object is flying. The object at that point
is flying in front of the airplane, in front of the ten the f
a teens, you know, going at something like two hundred and fifty knots.
So it's not a seagull, you know that. And it's not a
normal drone if it's a drone, because it's you know, it's not some
little propeller driven drone bosom guy with reboot control, because you're not going to
have that thing flying at two hundred fifty knots either. So in one particular
video, the Nimitz video, there is a it's unfortunately, because we only
got to see clips of these videos and the videos that were the pilots.
When they talked about these things moving, I think Commander Favor described them as
bouncing around as if it was a ping pong ball inside of a glass jar,
you know, So these things were really moving in very strange ways.
We didn't get to see any videos like that. Then maybe didn't release any
videos like that if if they have them, which is unfortunate because that would
have been really interesting. What you do see is you see this in the
Nimitz case. You see the object in front of the aircraft and then eventually
it moves off to the left um at you know, on the videos on
the video screen, it is not that impressive of a maneuver um but the
but of note, the missile, the the targeting systems do lose luck when
that happens, which is surprising because those targeting systems are designed to on target
missiles. So um, this thing clearly, it clearly was was an unusual
acceleration. So we we set about analyzing that acceleration and we found that acceleration
to be about seventy five g's, so about seventy five times the acceleration of
gravity, which is which is greater than the You know, many of our
missiles could withstand their airframes weren't capable of withstanding that kind of accelerations. So
that object was clearly interesting. Um So it was exciting because they they released
with what visually looked like, you know, a pretty tame video, and
we were able to show that no, it's not tame at all. This
is still an unusual craft and that's really around the low end of the scale
we looked at them. The j AL sixteen twenty eight encounter that happened in
nineteen eighty six. I actually remember that one being on the nightly news.
I remember watching Tom Brokaw talk about it, and I was very excited and
he basically, you had a pilot from this Japanese airliner they were flying and
this is where the chuckle factor comes. And they were flying Boujeli Noveau from
Paris to Tokyo. So so y hahaha, yeah, no, No,
the pilot isn't drunk. He doesn't drink the Boujeli nuva. Let's be serious,
it's in the cargo hold. So the pilots flying and they get they're
flying across Alaska, and he basically encounters several strange craft in Alaska, and
one of these objects flies up at the airplane and according to the pilot,
the object was so big he couldn't see out of the front windscreen without looking
at the object. So so when you have reports like that, you know,
very often, you know, people will try to blow them off.
Well, the pilot just didn't know what he was looking at. It was
misidentification, you know, he you know, blah blah blah. Well that's
it's not it's not nothing. If it fills your entire windscreen, then you
then have to take notice and pay some attention. And so he actually requested
to make maneuvers to avoid this object. And um, this object stayed some
distance away. I think it was something like was it seven kilometers away or
something. It actually stayed some distance away from the aircraft. Yes, point
five miles away. Actually, yeah, seven point five miles that's what it
was. And um, but basically it would go from on the radar reports.
The radar show is that going from something like one o'clock to six o'clock
in twelve seconds with every weight radar, the radar sweep was about twelve seconds.
And so this object is basically, you know, according to the radar,
bouncing around the air the aircraft, the ged airplane, the seven forty
seven. So how so then the question is, how do you get from
one o'clock to six o'clock in twelve seconds? You know when that when the
radius of this circle is seven point five miles, Well you can estimate the
accelerations there. So if you estimate it going straight across over either over the
airplane or under the airplane, then you get an acceleration something like sixty eight
g's of accelerations. So the thing would have to accelerate halfway and then decelerate
the other half. If it goes around on the circle, basically goes around
the airplane, you have to have an tangential acceleration of about eighty four g's.
So again this thing is moving dramatically. The pilot described it as being
about the size of it was the size of several several seven forty sevens there,
like a giant walnut. So so basically the size of three seven forty
sevens, you're talking about something the size of an aircraft carrier just flying around
a seven forty seven. And this went on for this went on for almost
an hour. It was one hundred miles or something like three hundred miles.
It wasn't a quick sighting. It was yeah, this this went on for
a long period of time, and you know, in the pilot and so
so the other issue that then comes up is the question of air safety.
You know that some of these encounters are not safe and the pilots don't feel
safe, and that's that's a problem if your pilot is not feeling safe.
And so there's another reason to study these as well, so that that acceleration,
you know, one of those accelerations, the sixty AG is actually at
the low scale, you know, So we've got these craft accelerating anywhere between
sixty eight g's up to five thousand geese of acceleration. And the problem is
we really don't know how. First, we don't know how these things are
flying in the first place, umps because they don't have flight surfaces, they
don't have obvious control surfaces, they don't have um an obvious power plant.
So it's not clear you know, where the where the thrust is coming from
to keep you know, to keep these things moving um and and that's especially
evidentto the infrared video. When you see that that um the tic TAC object
that they described as accelerating off to the left. You know, if it's
it's accelerating at seventy five G and you don't see flames coming out of the
thing. This is an infrared video. There's no extra heat being um dumped
into the environment. So how does this thing work? It's not clear at
all. And I've heard criticisms, you know, people have criticized the analysis
saying, oh, well, you didn't know that. You don't really know
that it was fifty feet across. That's what the pilots described. But the
pilots could have been wrong, you know, maybe it was only five feet
across. And my answer to that, so, well, right, do
the math, you know, don't just make the argument divert argument. You
know, let's let's test this. Do the math. So let's assume that
it's only five feet across. That would have put the object much closer,
and you basically get a factor of ten less accelerations. So okay, so
the thing accelerated at seven G instead of seventy five G. I'd still like
to know how you take a five foot long object and accelerated at seven seven
g of acceleration without any heat signature. You still have. This question is
still there. You know, it doesn't go away. Even if the thing,
even if they if they were off on its size, if they were
mistaken about its size by a factor of ten, the problem still exists.
So, wow, this is serious. It's not it's not a joke,
and it can't be anything um and you can determine that by by doing the
math, and and I can't. I find that disappointing when I hear some
of our prominent scientists, you know, coming on and saying it could be
anything. Well, none of them sat down and did the math. The
math isn't especially hard to do. It's you know, first year physics didn't
could do the math in some of these cases. And but we see these
prominent scientists making these blanket statements without having done the math, and that's professionally,
that's problematic. And I'm glad you. I'm glad you say that.
And I hope if you get a chance to call them out and feel comfortable
to call them out, that you do. And I don't know what type
of situation that would be, but I'm glad at least you are looking into
this and put the effort into it. A two times you said the word
we that. So what do you mean by we were? There are a
lot of people helping you with this situation. Oh, I did some of
this work with Robert Powell and Peter Really who are with these with the scientific
Coalition for you UAP studies. So well, that's great. Um. You
know, I had an email exchange a couple of days ago with PJ Use,
who was involved in the Nimit's case, and he basically said before that,
back when he was on the show, he was fifty fifty on whether
it was you know, special tech instead of you know, he's talking about
the tik taks. And now he says he's sixty sixty forty that he thinks
to tech. And so I contacted him, and you know, he told
me a couple of things to keep under my hat. But he said,
basically, you know, his thoughts of change, that it's more likely that
it was tech. But I want to argue this or many things. Actually,
I don't understand what tech we could possibly have today that could absorb the
type of geez you're talking about. I mean, even a rock would have
a problem then. Also, you talk about the j A L sixteen twenty
eight, is it. Yeah, And when that happened, there was also
g forces beyond what we could hand today, So that was back in nineteen
ninety six. I believe in nineteen eighty six, nineteen eighty six, well,
the Bethune cases from nineteen fifty one, and that those estimates come out
to about seventeen hundred G. That's nineteen fifty nineteen fifty one. Um,
I think then. Yeah, so if we had any tech like that back
then, we certainly there's no way we wouldn't be using it before now.
Yeah, that's my as my argument, You're gonna not gonna You're not gonna
sit on technology like this for fifty years. That's a lot, that's a
person's career. Nobody's gonna sit on that for fifty years. I find that
really pretty that's a difficult argument to swallow. Yeah, And and these things,
these things have been seen since before we could fly in airplanes, so
you've got that problem as well. Um, you can argue about the validity
of a lot of those observations, but I would argue that they're not they're
not all ridiculous. So you've and and then they and those, and there's
many of those observations sound a lot like the ones that we have you know,
that we've analyzed here. So so this is a really difficult situation.
Well, thank you for doing that work. That paper is pretty intense,
nineteen pages long. I'm going to try it for the listener out there.
I'm going to try to put that up in the show notes on this show,
which will be up for a week on podcast ufo dot com, So
wander over there. I'll try to do that this evening. It's a PDF,
and sometimes those are really hard to embed. I'm going to see if
I can do that on my website, so check it out. Probably starting
on Wednesday, the eleventh of this month, that's tomorrow, I might have
that up and running. So so that will be available. Now, let's
can I can I interject another another point, especially in the Bethoon case.
So that was the nineteen fifty one case. Um the pilots and passengers estimated
the thing left at a speed of about fifteen hundred miles an hour. That
was later confirmed by the Gander Center radar in Newfoundland to be eighteen hundred miles
an hour, and that's nineteen fifty nineteen fifty one. So one. I
did some research on this and found that in nineteen fifty two, two years
later, almost two years later, you had the air speed record UM from
General J. Slade Nash flying F eighty six D saber was was made at
six hundred ninety eight miles an hour. That was the air speed record in
nineteen fifty two. And radar and the pilot and passengers estimated this thing to
be going about fifteen to eighteen hundred miles an hour. So these things are
really anomalous, and it gets and there are numbalus to the point where it
it. As a physicist, I feel a lot of skepticism you have,
you know, for the for the one that um Kevin Day tract and saw
descend twenty thousand feet in point seven eight seconds, you're talking accelerations of about
five thousand g. What that means is that at the midpoint the object has
had to have been going about Mack sixty and so mark sixty is something like
forty five thousand miles an hour, which is which is faster than our fast
some of our fastest spacecraft. New horizons that went to Pluto's only going thirty
five thousand miles an hour. So this tic TAC in less than less than
a third of a second accelerated to a speed greater than the probe that we
sent to Pluto. And we got to also keep in mind, um of
the friction of the atmosphere. Oh, well, that's the biggest that's that.
As a physicist, that's the big worry. You expect there to be
a huge you know, you your first thought is sonic boom, but it's
going to be much more than a sonic boom. We estimated the amount of
energy release would have had to have been equivalent to about two hundred Tomahawk Missus
cruise missiles going off at the same time. Wow, that's like, that's
that's what you should have seen when that happened. But it didn't happen.
That's not what we saw. We did. The thing moved through the air
like the air wasn't there, which is really, you know, from a
physics and engineering perspective, really problematic and that and it leads you to question
the data, leads you to question these results. You think, how is
this even possible? But but you know, I'm going to I'm going to
contend as I always have, but this is the data we have, and
this is what people have been reporting for years, and I think it's time
for us to pay some attention. Yeah, and for you know, someone
out there pondering all this, think of the Chelibinsk meteor. What that caused,
blowing out windows everywhere and in Russia when that came through the atmosphere,
and that was you know, that was about that same speed forty thousand or
so, that's probably, Yeah, it couldn't. It couldn't have been much.
It couldn't be more much more more than sixty thousand miles an hour,
So you can't be much more than that. Once you get into the ninety
thousand mile an hour range, it's going to be interstellar. So it wouldn't
that wouldn't. It would have to be less than that, certainly, right.
Yeah, So that's probably on that order of speed. And that's what
you had happening, you know, And that's that meteor white was blowing out
windows and entering people, and that's really what should have happened in this case,
but that's not what's observed. And so so as I mean, I
like, I like how the British. The British, I'm told, calls
them those people because they of course we don't know who've created these craft and
who who they are. And so assuming that the assuming these are structured pete
craft, you know, you will call them those people. I like that
phrase. So, whoever those people are, those people are really good engineers.
They really know what they're doing, and I'd like I'd like to learn.
I'd like to know how to do this, and um, because it's
quite exciting. Yeah, there's the beam ahead. Have you ever heard of
that? Of that? I don't know if it's a theory of technology that's
supposed to supposed to do something. I think a Ray Stamford knows something about
that. Maybe when he calls in we can ask him. But we only
have, you know, a few minutes before we're going to be turning on
the phone line. So let's talk about your other work. Constraints on breakaway
societies engage in relativistic interstellar travel. We're going to have to kind of do
that in a nutshell if we possibly can't, we can try through that,
try to sum that up. Yeah, we can talk through the phone calls
on that. Go back to it you never know how many we may get
one or two phone calls, we may get more. We never know,
So why don't we get into that topic. Yeah, So one thing that
had struck me is that physicists are known for a long time that if you
could get a spacecraft up to relativistic speeds, and by that I mean some
reasonable percentage of the speed of light, something like you know, above above
thirty percent the speed of light um, then you can take advantage of the
time dilation that you get from special relativity where your clucks slow down. Right.
So, um, this is all related to the twin paradox. So
the traveler doesn't age when he comes back to Earth and in that problem,
So the idea is that once a spacecraft is going fast enough there their time
slows down, and so you can travel greater distances and for the traveler it
will be a shorter period of time. UM. The problem is that when
you turn around and you come back to Earth, it will have been a
long period of time for those people back on Earth and UM. So for
example, if I could if I could travel very close to the speed of
light, um, I could travel to Alpha Centauri in a very short period
of time, maybe a few hours if I was going ninety nine point nine
nine nine percent of the speed of light, so I could maybe do this
in a few hours and then turn around and explore Alpha century a little bit
and come right back. And for me, the total travel time would be
a couple of hours, maybe a day or so, depending on the numbers
we chose. But because Alpha Centuri is about four light years away, for
people on Earth, they'll they'll have seen my trip has taken took me four
years to get there and then four years back, so eight years will have
passed on Earth. And so while relativity works for you as the traveler,
it doesn't help everybody who has to stay at home. So the argument has
always been, well, yeah, you could do interestill or travel if you
went fast enough, but you know, what's the point, Because when you
come back home hunt, you know many years will have passed, and that's
just not You can't come home in time for dinner. So it doesn't work
in science fiction stories because you want your heroes to go blow up the Dusk
Star and then come back and be home in time for dinner. But so
that that wouldn't really work. Um, So the question has always been.
So let's say you have somebody who travels from you know, here to the
other side of the galaxy and then comes back again. And if you go
very fast, close to the speed of light, you know, the traveler
can actually do it within you know, a reasonably short period of time.
But for those left here back on Earth, the trip is going to take
you know, one hundred and fifty thousand years, you know. And so
the question then becomes, well, what society would do that? Why would
you bother? You know, you can't so so yeah, so it's physically
possible to perform interstellar travel this way, But what's the point? Um?
And and that I was thinking about that argument one day and and it occurred
to me. I thought, well, the point's really simple, because the
traveler gets to do the take the trip. Um. You know, if
the traveler doesn't care about anybody back home who you know, he still gets
to go on an adventure. He or she gets to still still see the
other side of the galaxy. And yeah, they don't get to share it
with anyone, but they got to do it, and so would would know
Is it really true that nobody would ever do that? And I thought,
now of course that's not true. People are humans are crazy humans would do
it. Yeah, I'm sure I could find somebody to take that trip,
and I'm sure I could, and and then it occurred to me, I
thought, but then, wait a minute. But if you had many people
who are willing to do that, then you could actually pull it off because
they could meet up and talk about their adventures, so they could form what
I would call a breakaway society, which is I don't buy that term.
I don't mean it the same way that Richard Dolan means it when he uses
that. So here it would be a society that is segregated from our society,
basically a society of travelers, and you could live that way. You
would just have to live on your spacecraft and be nomadic, so you basically
give up the idea of having a home world or a home planet. But
you could have meet up points where you arrange, either pre arrange or you
design your trips so that it just happens to work that you will periodically meet
up with fellow travelers, and then you could easily have, um, you
know, a civilization that travels across the universe regularly and goes great distances and
still still persists. So I think that it's it's a little if you think
out of the box a bit, you can come up with a solution where
somebody would do that, and you could have a society that behave that way.
And that doesn't mean that all interstellar societies would behave that way. You
could still have societies that basically colonize other worlds and just slowly expand, and
those those people might not be traveling back and forth between star systems regularly,
but so that would be a different situation. But you could have a society
where people were traveling back and forth regularly at very close to speed of light,
if you could pull that off. That's now, of course, there's
all sorts of engineering challenges in addition to the ones we've already discussed that would
be problematic. Now is there does physics allow for you to go back in
time? Ah, that's messy. It looks like it looks like according with
general relativity, it looks like you could have you could do that. However,
you so if you let's say you made a time machine where you went
back in time, you can show that that would only work. You could
only go back in time as far up until the point where you had made
the time machine, so you can't go back in time before there were time
machines that were traveling in time. So it's kind of a messy situation.
So the answers is potentially yes, but with a few caveats. So in
other words, if someone did do space travel and they they were so out
of whack with Earth, yet they had invented a time machine that they could
actually go back back to their time, I mean, this is all Yeah,
the time machine would have had to exist at the time that they go
back to. So yeah, So there's been the proposal that some of these
UFOs may or ups may be the result of craft traveling back into time as
far as we understand it, um, as far as I understand it at
this point, that would be possible. But it would also imply that we
would have if we were seeing that, then would imply that we have time
machines right now, and so I see. So that so there would be
some big implications here. Because your brain ever hurt all the time, it's
always it's always exploding, it's just exploding inside its skull all the time.
Yeah, pretty funny. Wow, Uh yeah, I mean you can get,
as they say, down the rabbit hole with a lot of this stuff
and and uh, you know, the paradoxes and and all that. It's
it's really fascinating. I'm really enjoying myself tonight, just just to let you
know that. And what I what I think is really exciting is even even
if none of these are extraterrestrial and they're and you know, even if they're
just even if they're just um high tech that we don't know about yet,
then we basically right now live in the Star Trek universe. We have the
we have the possibility of having space travel like they have in TV shows like
Star Trek or Star Wars. And I think that that also is exciting.
So even if these turn to be American special projects, um, that implies
that these these things are capable of interest dollar travel and that's that's interesting.
But I but I then would expect that there's going to be a lot of
really pissed off aeronautical engineers, thousands of them who are worked their whole lives
to develop the next generation aircraft or spacecraft and are going to be really mad
that this technology was kept from them, right, And that's gonna that's gonna
be a problem, and it's a huge you can also think of it.
You know, our government has this well, great, but it's a huge
waste of money. It's a huge waste of money to be throwing you know,
nineteen billion dollars a year at NASA so we can puts around, you
know, one hundred and twenty five miles above the air surface. That's kind
of silly, you know. So so so it's really hard for me to
believe that these are these are um tech that we possess. I really find
that difficult. Do you think the government is just as puzzled with you fos
as we are? That's my take on it. My take is they've they've
they've collected you know, there are some programs in the government that's collected a
good bit more information than any of us have seen. But my impression is
they don't know much more about these things than any of the rest of us.
Yeah, that's kind of been my take, um all along. Um,
I think I used to say that I believe that some part of the
government possibly has more of an idea about what's going on than we do.
But I really don't know, you know, Like I said, earlier.
It seems like the more I get into this, the less that I know
about it. So I would suspect I would have suspect if that, if
there was, you know, a programmer, a couple of programs even that
had a lot that had significant information, that we would be far more worried
about it. That would be my that would be my expectation. Now I
could I could be mistaken, and that may be, and the evidence of
being mistaken about that, you know, maybe may be that you've got a
lot of people from the Navy, Navy who are just flummox that nobody cares
about this. So so maybe, you know, maybe that is maybe it's
the incredulity of the whole topic is still problematic. I don't I don't know
what the situation is. Yeah, I was, I'm a fine arts appraiser.
I was at a home in um Down in Massachusetts, and I saw
Navy bumper stickers on the back of a car in the driveway and I said
to them, oh, so you have someone in the Navy, and they
said retired Navy And I said, oh, by the way, what do
you think of You know, I had the courage because it's always it's tricky
to talk about, but I had the courage that it really isn't to ask.
And she said, I know, my husband's been following that. He
can't believe it, and how interesting is that? And you know, I
it is. It's both baffling at the same time. It's it's it's great
that they're actually looking into this. And I believe it opens the door for
people like you a little wider, doesn't it. It really has. It's
made it's made it easier as a scientist to look at this because I really,
you know, when I have if I mentioned this to another scientists and
they, you know, cock their head and throw their brow a little bit
and say what, and I just have to point and say Navy, the
US Navy. The US Navy says, you know, and and that you
know, while they're not an authority on the topic it, they do,
you know, they do carry some credibility, which is, you know,
very different than Joe Schmo who came out of the bar at two am and
saw some lights in the sky. It's a very different situation, that's right,
And I think and that's and that's really helped, That's helped a lot.
And you know, people. Then people then give you and I found
other scientists then give you the benefit of the doubt. All right, you
got a few minutes to convince me. And and and that allows you to
present some of the evidence that they've not seen because because they haven't looked into
it. And you know, the typical responses is that, wow, I
didn't know all of that. That's amazing. And then and then it's usually
followed by, but I'm still skeptical because of the way that these things fly.
That's not physically possible. So how does this work? Are you sure
this isn't wrong? And um, and that leads to a whole other but
a more detailed discussion. And that's that's a discussion we should be having because
that's we need. That's how we're going to figure out what's going on.
As as someone like yourself, a scientist, you have much more of a
foot in the door to actually talk to someone about this the way you are.
Um, you know, it just it just works. Um, you
know, for someone like me or or anyone else out there, you know
us Joe Schmoso to speak. Um, you know, it's it's hard,
you know, we bring it up in a conversation and most people, not
all people these days, I feel more and more comfortable with it all the
time. Um, you know, but most people, uh we A scientist
isn't going to listen to but a scientist to a scientist, you know,
they pay more attention, for sure, I think, right, and I
think that, yeah, there's a there's a bit of a difference. We
speak the same language. We know, we have a better sense of what
information is relevant and what's not relevant. We have a better sense of what,
um, what's believable and what's not believable. Where we're you know,
we're trained not to jump to conclusions, and which I think a lot of
people are prone to do. Right, you get to talking to people just
casually, you know, before you know it, there's all sorts of theories
popping up that whoa, I think it's this and this and this and you
know what you know, I think it's you know, dogmen and bigfoot and
you know, coming out of spacecraft and blah blah blah. And you think,
oh, well, wait a minute, let's back up here, let's
back up. Do we have do we have actual data about it? Do
we have actual information? You know? And so as a scientist, it's
easier to do that and to keep in mind, what do I actually have?
Um, what can I what can I prove you know, based on
the data that I have. And that's and that's basically why I wrote this
paper. I realized that, well, we have enough information here we can
actually estimate some of these accelerations and speeds, and that would be an important
first and understanding what these things are and how they're moving and allow us to
rule out some hypotheses. You know, it's not a seat, it's not
a seagull accelerating at five house and gee, and I had somebody actually asked
me once do you think it could be a highly reflective seagull? And as
a birdwatcher myself, I had almost exploded. I was like, there is
no such thing. You think that's more probable than than aliens or anything else?
That's crazy. But yeah, no, it's not a it's not a
highly reflective seagull. We know that it can't they can't be anything. We
can hope we can rule out some of these things at this point, right
that is that's a riot. So the lines are open now for anyone out
there that would like to call in that's eighty five KGr A live or eight
five five four seven two five four eight three. We have Steve from Las
Vegas. Uh, Steve, welcome to the show. Thank you, Martin
Hi, Kevin, hello Steve. UM. Two quick questions. Maybe I'm
so intrigued and interesting on what you talking about here, and I'm thinking to
myself, Well, you're talking physics, and is this science that you're bringing
into you about because we need more scientists to look into it, like stand
Freeman instead and h some of your friends all the physics, uh, looking
into it and agreeing with your philogrophy. Yeah, So this is basically what
I'm trying to study these things scientifically. I want to know what they are,
I want to know how they work, and UM, I want to
know the details. And so that's what I'm trying to do. UM.
I have a number of colleagues who are also interested in studying things, and
we're these things and we're trying to do our best to UM. We're trying
to figure out how to collect data. That's the important job right now is
to collect our own data to use better instrumentation and and see what we can
what we can actually learn about these things, okay, And my second question
is I collect footage of UFOs I used to term your boat instead of UAP.
That's fine, that's that's fine, there's it's I think of them as
the same thing anyway as well. And most of the footage that I've been
collecting, even up to now, I would say about sixty orbs that seem
to appear, disappear and move around and uh patterns. That is unbelievable.
My quicking is to me, I've kind of figured out, well, I
seem like they're intelligence, these orbs, and light is energy is what it
could be behind Can it be some kind of intelligence light back of busy orbs?
That's hard. That's hard for me to imagine, um that you could
have light the intelligent see it's and and as to the nature of these orbs
either, I'm not I can't really speak to that, having not seen them
myself or or had footage that I could really do anything, you know,
with in terms of image analysis. So that's a difficult question intelligence in the
way I think about it. If you're you know, when intelligent things basically
create models of the world around them so they can interact with the world around
them. And so what you Basically, if you're an intelligent being or object,
then you have to be able to create such models. And I don't
see how light could just do that. Light basically you've got photons. They
travel from point A to point B and get absorbed somewhere. So it's hard
to imagine how how to have an intelligence that's just basically made of light.
So it's hard for me to imagine. But that doesn't you know, it
sounds like these you know a lot of these things would need to be studied
more carefully to be able to identify what they are. We have calls backing
up here, so Steve, yeah, thank you, thanks for the call.
Good welcome. All right, all right, look who we have here.
We have Dave Altman calling probably from Florida. You there these days,
Dave, Yes, I'm here and the sunny actually rainy, miserable Florida.
You know the guest, Yes, I do. We are both members of
the UAP Expedition Group. Oh you're involved in that too, Kevin, Yes,
I am, and I'm at this moment very very sorry that I hadn't
mentioned that yet. So thank you for calling Dave. That's exactly why I
called and I also just wanted to let everybody know that the website has gone
live. It's not done, but it is live and it is UAP Expedition
dot org. That is the website. Brilliant. Thank you, Dave.
When you get off the phone, why don't you go ahead and send me
that link and I'll put that in the show notes for everyone. But yeah,
I did. I did post it in the chat room, but I'll
send it to you as well. You know, this way you have it
for your show notes. And also just wanted to remind Kevin that we're all
going to be at Contact in the Deserts at the end of May beginning of
June. Yeah, that's right, that's right, and I'm slated to go
there too, so brilliant. That will be great to meet everyone there.
Yeah, so we'll all be able to have a little pow wow and get
to know each other in person excellently. That'd be great. Well, hey,
Dave, thanks so much. We got a bunch of calls backed up
here, so yeah, thank you very much, Dave. All right,
and so everyone look for that link in the notes and I'll have that.
I'll have that to open next we have and I see Ray is on the
line here too, but we have Andy calling from Connecticut. He's the one
who saved of the show a while ago when I had to have a listener
show. And Andy, don't forget to call next week, absolutely I will,
I will. Welcome to the show. You have a question for our
guests, Kevin, Yeah, I have one quick question that I'll ask and
then I'll get off the phone. Is and I apologize if you might have
touched on this earlier. I didn't hear the whole show. But my question
is what are Kevin's thoughts on the concept or theory that scanning popularity with some
physicists that gravity is actually what we experience is a distortion in the fabric of
space time created by the Earth's own mass. And there are some analogies out
there like bowling balls on trampoline with marbles trying to go by and they can't
go by and they get sucked into that distortion that um, you know,
you know, depression created. Does he think that that's that's probably valid?
That's that's what gravity is, um, And I'll take your question off the
here. Good show, guys, Thank you, thank you, and thank
you Andy, and and hello, Um No, that's a good question.
That's basically the picture that one gets from Albert Einstein's children general relativity, which
is a very successful theory. So I think it's a very good description of
a good picture of what is going on with gravity. Um, is there
something more fundamental might be the question you could ask. And I think that
that's probably the case. And I think that's what you know, many theoretical
physicists are trying to um understand by studying quantum gravity. We're trying to understand
the the the relationship beween quantum mechanics and gravity, and at present, at
present, Einstein's general theory of relativity doesn't get along well with quantum mechanics,
and so so the thinking is that there's probably a more fundamental picture that will
allow us to understand gravity better. And I think that that's it's an exciting
area of research. Yeah, speaking of exciting, I was just thinking of
that word, where it must be exciting to you as a physicist to know
that you haven't discovered everything that is exciting, that is really exciting I had.
I remember when I was in about to go into graduate school, I
kind of lamented to my parents. I thought Oh my god, I really
am excited to study physics, but it's horrible. All the all the cool
things have been discovered already and I'm not going to be able to do anything
as fundamental as you know, what Einstein did and I kind of lamented that,
and it's turned out not to be true, which is great. I've
I've done some theoretical work we've got you know, I've been able to derive
some of the laws of quantum mechanics from simple symmetries and things like this.
So I've gotten to be able to do some real foundational um to sis work
that that that is new and interesting. So I think it's it's very it's
very exciting. It's I wouldn't I couldn't imagine doing anything else for a career
boring in my mind. Yeah, I'm lucky enough to say, believe it
or not, that's how I feel about the antiques and fine art and because
there's so much history and researching and I love it. By the way,
for the listener out there, I also do a podcast on antiques and fine
art called The Antiquection Form if anyone wants to go check that out. Wow.
But anyway, I think it's it's it's fun that whenever I've I've found
that whenever you study anything, you can find something interesting in it. And
I've always found that to be the case. And that's how it's great.
Yeah, that's right. Well we have we have about five minutes left.
Someone's trying to call in, but we also have Ray Stanford on the line
from Baltimore. Ray, Welcome to the show. Hello. I am thrilled
to hear Kevin say that he would like to meet me, and I hope
he would like to visit down here in the NASA Goddard Territory. I would
love I would love to. It's such a pleasure to meet you. There's
there's a tremendous amount that I want to share with you, and I'm delighted
to hear you say that. Look, it's not more pawing over old reports
that we need. We need hard data, we need instruments out there,
and what I want to share with you is that class of data in a
way that I think you will be delighted. And I wouldn't invite anybody to
fly in here and planes these days with the virus going around, but if
you're in New York, you could drive drive down that's oh, yes,
certainly, Yeah, yeah, I would. I would very much love too.
I'd be very interested in hearing about I know that you have an interesting
collection of of of UAPs or UFOs and I photographs, and I also would
be very interested in the paleontology too, So it's very exciting. I've never
I've been. I've been. I visited Ray, I don't know what was
that, three or four years ago, Ray, when I was down there
three and a half years ago. Yeah, yeah, when I was down
there, and I got to tell you, I've never Now I go into
a lot of houses with amazing collections of all kinds, you know, mostly
art stuff like that. I've never seen a collection like Ray has. It's
really great meteor rites Gray. I hope you don't mind me saying that,
but you just have some fascinating things. Yes, uh, And we'd love
to show these to Kevin and Kevin also, I want to say that if
you can give yourself enough time down here, I would also be happy to
take you on a dinosaur tracking trip. Oh, that would be so great.
That would be fun. Yeah, my father and I had gone to
the bad Lands in South Dakota several times when I was when I was young
and um, and of course not in the park itself, but we had
collected some fossils. So I have an oriodont skull that I had found and
restored as as well as a tortoise, and so I have my own little
collection. But that that's very exciting. Well, I would just like to
ask Morton to pass on to me the best email address to send you.
I'll send you some some material and links that you'll find them really exciting about
both sides of this, the objects, yes, I prefer objects to instead
of phenomena, and the pedantological side. I don't want to hold anybody else
up from calling in, but thank you for your interest, and to please
plan on coming and see me, and I'll give you the contact information and
we would welcome you here any amount of time you want to stay. Okay,
Well, thank you so much. That's very kind of you. Hey,
Ray, just for we have two minutes left. Basically, but Ray,
weren't you involved in well at least thinking about some type of craft propulsion
that had a beam ahead or am I? Am I getting that wrong?
Ray? That is correct? Yes, nineteen eighty five. A lot of
a witness, and I've filmed in Corpus Christian on the bayfront a broad daylight,
beautiful film of four different objects that were dish shaped with a dome,
but they had a structure on the other side that projected a very narrow collimated
beam out about thirty diameters ahead of it. And I will show you from
this movie. I'll show you the frames, and then I'll show you the
image process with false color contouring, and you will see like in a slaring
view, you will see the actual patterns of the plasma being generated in front
and pulled around on the object and squeezed in the back as if it were
a smaller and you will be as a as a scientist. I think you'll
be delighted at what you see. Wow, that sounds interesting. Yeah,
and so much more. I mean people from Goddard that have actually gone over
to race House and looked at some things, which I think is great.
Ray, I really am so glad you called in and I will make the
connection of you two. Thanks. I appreciate it. I'll go now.
Thank you so much. Looking forward to seeing it, Kevin. Okay,
thank you, Thank you. Have a good night. Ray. So we
just have one minute left. If someone wanted to reach out with you,
I saw that you or you have a link we have in the show notes
to it's actually to the university. Do you have any problem with people getting
in touch with you? No, that's fine. I'm a I'm a professor,
and i'm people can email me questions anytime they want. That's fine.
Yep, okay, excellent. Well, and you don't have a website though,
right? Do you have a website? Oh? Okay, I'm sorry
I didn't link that. Go ahead, what is that? Yeah, let's
see. Well, I'm actually true. Our websites are transitioning right now.
So I've got a new website that I put up and I have to fix
it a bet. But it's Kenneth lab dot org okay, and I've got
to do a little bit of work on it to get it right now.
It just has got a new host, so that's not the whole thing.
So I've got to put a little file in and then I'll have that fixed
by tonight. All right, Kevin, thanks so much. We're totally out
of time. I really appreciate it's been a real pleasure tonight. Oh,
thank you so much for having me all right, okay everyone, that's it
for the show, and I want to thank you all for listening, and
we'll be back next week with a listener show. I hope all listeners will
make an attempt to call in. I'd love to talk to you, and
remember everyone to keep your eyes to this guy twenty by the life came from
the sky, landed in a few fabing next to out burded fine will I
don't know what they want burd it might feel in an tell if by Mom's
baby, we've been working in their minds on the dark side of the mon
bathing, slaving all the time, ever since the David took us in we
had to leave earth behind. I'm tell if by life train, if by
God's bathing twenty six at the most, I take a space hammer, baby,
I could who ever get closed it will make a break bove and try
to call coach to col Swelling by the light that came from the sky.
I parked in a crater fabing right in front of you, and I let's
steel won't and try to make get flight trending by the light tand it by
second spaby of all it's gonna take as soon as our figures bathing as the
parking crazy we'll make our great moon is skin telling by the light. Came
from the sky and crashed in a field, bathing next to a thirty fire
will don't know what they want, fucking look like you and out, tweling
by the light, twelling by the light, tweling it by the light,
tweling by the light.