All right, hello everybody, and welcome to the Rojas Reports. I've got
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In fact, probably in the chat right now, we've got some of
our members. Hey, We've got all kinds of people, so that's how
it works. But welcome so much to the Rojas Report. We have a
wonderful guest today and I'll bring them on right now. Welcome Kevin Kanuth.
Hello, thank you for loving me. Thank you, doctor Kevin Kanuuth,
a Professor of Associate Professor of Astro astro physicist at Sunny Albany. Did I
stumble? I tripped over your title there. That's great. It's more generally
physics, but that's good. Yeah, thank you. So it's great.
I'm really happy that you have gotten involved with talking about, you know,
the UAP topic. I don't know, are you uncomfortable? I think I
hear you use the term UFO quite a bit. Yeah, well, I
guess I'm a bit older. I mean, for me, Pluto is a
planet and they're UFOs. So and how do you feel addressing that issue the
term UAP, because it does seem kind of weird almost. It's just kind
of always been kind of weird to me. That and it's true that the
scientific community, obviously the military has picked up this term and they're using the
term UAP. The UK government did as opposed to UFOs. Now, if
anybody asks you, what's your up, you're going to say it to UFO.
Is there an advantage to that term? What do you think about that
issue? Well? I don't. At first I thought it was rather silly
to come up with a new term, And but just watching how watching how
readily it's been adopted and and how comfortable people are using it, especially compared
to UFO, I think that it's I think that it's probably done what they
intended. I think that it had sidestepped some of the taboo associated with UFOs,
so it's so in some in some people's mind, I think that it's
more that UFOs are all those old flying saucers that people saw in the nineteen
forties and fifties. That's what Roswell was about. UAPs are what the Navy
deals with right and and I think that's what that seems to be how people's
mindsets is right now. And I think that in that sense, it's been
successful in getting people to think about these things and talk about them openly.
M hm. Now we both interact with this group called this the Scientific Coalition
for UAP Research, and it used to be UFO Research and we changed the
name. And it is kind of funny because I used to be opposed to
changing to the UAP, the reason being that it just means the same thing.
And it was actually the Air Force that came up with the term UFO.
However, you know, I have noticed and we kind of were forced
to do that because really it was just feedback, especially from scientists who were
like, I don't feel comfortable with UFO, I don't want nothing to do
with UFOs, UAPs. I'll get involved with something like that, but not,
you know, that seems to be the case. It's so weird.
Well, it's been really nice that you've been involved discussing UFOs and UAPs and
every thing in between in the last couple of months or years, I should
say. And I've seen now three of your lectures and I just think it's
invaluable to have someone like you getting involved with this. And one of the
things that we did at the UFO Congress, which you were at. I've
got my UFO Congress hat here is we had a panel with Diana Posolka and
Tim Brigham, also people with their doctoral degrees in some sort of science.
They're more in the social sciences. But it's not an easy thing. Like
what prompted you to kind of take a more active and in a way public
role in all of this. That's a good question. I've always been interested
in these, you know, in UFOs and way back to my teen years,
you know, or even as a as an you know, as an
older kid watching in search of you know, on TV and things like this.
So I've always found them interesting and wondered about what, you know,
what is the situation. And it was when I started in graduate school at
the university or I'm sorry, Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. I
started on my that's where I got my master's in physics from. I started
in graduate school there. It would have been September of nineteen eighty eight,
and it was within the first couple of weeks that there was a cattle mutilation
in the area where two cows were killed and surgically whatever. Were pretty horrible
things done to these cows, and it was very strange. It was not
it was not something you would expect anybody to do. And and I was
I had never heard of cattle mutilations before I come from Wisconsin. Originally I've
heard of cow tipping, but not not cattle mutilations. Who's who would mutilate
a cow? What a horrible thing. So I'm seeing that in the news.
I was kind of confused by this and worried. And there of course
there were the two main hypotheses were that there were aliens did it, or
they were Satanists, right, because it's there's so many Satanists running around mutilating
cows. So none of that made any sense to me. It just all
seemed kind of ridiculous. And and so when we when I went to the
university the next day, we got to talking about this in one of our
graduates dident offices. In the kindnversation kind of moved into the hallway and became
very animated, you know, and well, you know, the rancher saw
some weird lights in the sky, and so he thinks they were aliens,
but then other people think they're Satanists and and and I just remember thinking this
is all nuts. And many of the graduate students who were discussing this were
all the people who had moved there from, mostly from other parts of the
country or from other countries. And our general opinion was the real worry was
what kind of crazy place have we just moved to? Because we're going to
have to live here for another three to five years, right, to get
our degrees. So and you know, so, if there's satan Is running
around killing how's this is worrisome? Right? And well, if there's aliens
killing house, that's worrisome too, or whatever the situation is. It's very
odd and weird going on in Montana. Yeah, and so one of the
professors came out of his office and happened to see us. And I don't
quite remember who it is. I think I have an idea who it is.
I'm not going to name names, but he came down the hallway to
find out what all the commotion was and we told him, you know,
what we were talking about, and he said, y oh, yeah,
that's very strange. You know it happens from time to time, these cattle
mutilations, and they never figure out what causes them or who did it,
which is odd. And we all agreed. And then he said, but
what's really strange? He said, he said, I have some friends in
the Air Force who are up at Momstrom Air Force Base, and they have
problems up at Momstrom with with UFOs flying over the ICBM missile sites and shutting
down the missiles. And this just really stunned us. I mean, nobody
there was what response do you give to this? Right? Here's you know,
we're new graduate students, you know, here's one of our new professors
telling us that they have problems with UFOs shutting down ICBM missiles. And and
to be honest, when he walked away, we left like crazy. I
mean this and this kind of became an inside joke. You know, anytime
somebody said something weird, you know, somebody else would interject, yeah,
but you know, what's really going on is there some UFOs shutting down missiles
up at Momster Air Force Base. So I heard about this in nineteen eighty
eight. This is nineteen eighty eight. Now, I don't know when Robert
Hastings started being more public with his research on UFOs shutting down nuclear weapons or
appearing at NULE hanging out at nuclear weapons sites. But I saw I guess
it was his press conference that he had in what was it twenty ten or
something like this. So it's around twenty ten that he had a press conference,
didn't I didn't see it until a few years later. Actually, I
watched it on YouTube. I was preparing for a course that I was teaching,
an astrophysics course, and I had some students. I was talking about
astrobiology, and I had some students who wanted to discuss the possibilities of their
being, you know, intelligent aliens, that maybe we could communicate with them
or they could travel to Earth. And I so I was just poking around
on the internet just to you know, find some mostly research papers and things
on SETI and I happened to stumble on the press conference on YouTube that Robert
Hastings had and I was blown away, you know, I was like,
whoa, whoa, wha, wait a minute, he's talking. These guys
are talking about events that happened. I think Robert Solis's you know, encounter
happened something like nineteen sixty five, and and here I am seeing this press
conference that was that you know, happened in twenty ten, and I was
and all I could think was, like I knew about this in nineteen eighty
eight, you know how so you know, that's thirty years earlier. I
hadn't heard about this thirty years before this press conference, and I and I
just couldn't shake the feeling that this can't be nonsense. This has to be
real. There's no way you're going to have professionals, you know, several
generations of professionals working at a nuclear weapons site who make these claims that that's
just not going to happen. And I thought, I, you know,
how wrong can they be. They're not going to be that wrong. We
wouldn't be employing them to do something that important if they were that wrong.
And so so that really impacted me, and that I think I probably saw
saw the press conference probably around twenty fourteen or so, and then it wasn't
you know, it's you know, and then of course luel Azando comes out
with this is the a type revelation, you know, was what twenty seventeen,
December sixteenth, twenty seventeen, So it was only just a couple of
years later that that that had happened, and then I was like, whoa
wait a minute, this is why. And all I could ask myself is
why have we been ignoring this for fifty years? You know, these these
sightings have been happening with the I mean, these encounters been happening with Air
Force and with others, you know, at least for fifty years, and
we're all just pretending it's not real. That's that's that's madness, That's that's
insane. You know. I thought somebody should be looking into this. Somebody
should be looking into it seriously. This shouldn't be kept secret because when it's
secret, it's compartmentalized. Not everybody knows about it. This is how you
know, this is how you run into problems. This should be studied openly.
So and so, just coincidentally, I had around that time, I
had given a talk to our department on UFOs and and probably the announcement just
that title of my talk and need it you know, it was on the
internet to some degree, and I got a call from our media department in
late May, I believe it was of twenty seventeen, and somebody from an
editor from the online journal The Conversation wanted to find a physicist who would write
an article about UFOs for World UFO Day and and they said, well,
we'd like them to write an article about why people believe in UFOs even though
they're not we know they're not real. And this is what I was told.
And I thought, well, I'll have to think about this, you
know, for a little bit, and and I kind of molded over,
you know, slept on it. And the next day I thought, well,
this is really silly. I couldn't possibly write an article about an article
exactly like that because we don't know that they're not real. We don't we
don't know this, and they ought to be studied, really, And so
I called our media person. I said, yeah, please contact them.
I'd be willing to write a paper, a short article on why scientists ought
to study you have pos. I would be willing to do that. And
the editor contacted me right away and was very excited. They said, oh,
we never thought we'd fight a physicist who would who would actually support these
things. So so when we asked to find a physicist, we wanted a
physicist, you know, we wanted you know, a professional scientists to we
kind of, you know, to make this easier for them, We thought
to invite them to discuss why why people believe in them even though they're not
real, But we're more than happy to hear why scientists should study them.
So I wrote, I wrote that article for the Conversation, and and I
labored over it for the better part of a week and and had you know,
my wife helped me edited. She helped greatly, and some of my
colleagues read it over and helped as well. And I worked very hard to
make sure that, you know, I stuck to the facts, and you
know, kept clear that we don't know what these things are. We are
agnostic as to know their their nature, and and just really tried to drive
home the point that scientists study things. This is that's our job. We
study things, and we should we should be studying these things. And so
I, I guess I felt by this time, I felt very passionate about
this, you know, realizing that the Navy, you know, the Navy's
been having problems, you know, they've been having problems at nuclear weapons sites
for decades, and nobody knows anything about this. That's really that's insane,
it's insane. And potentially dangerous. We don't know what the situation is and
we need to know. And then of course the science the scientist and me
is curious. I want to know. I want to know what these things
are. You know, what are what are they? They? You know
from from the witness sightings they do many of them do appear to be structured
craft with really incredible flight characteristics and capabilities, and so how do you do
something like that? So there are there's a potential for a huge discovery here
as well, and so as a scientists you never walk away from the potential
for a big discovery. You hit yourself forever for that. So so I
thought it was I felt it was worth the risk. And one of the
done that I think I can't really import many is that you've kind of what
sort of science can be done in this field, because a lot of people
have asked, well, is there even any science that could be done?
Uh? But you have and we'll get into that, but I I kind
of want to go in order. And what's kind of funny is the order
of lectures I've seen are kind of opposite of kind of a good narrative,
I think, because the last lecture you did is why doesn't science look into
this stuff? Which was great you did that at the UFO Congress, and
I want to talk about some of the points you made there, and I
think the first important point is about the circular logic that kind of causes this
catch twenty two situation. Yeah, there's a good bit of circular logic that's
been applied here, which is frustrating to think about as a scientist. Scientists
don't study UFOs because they're not scientific. Why aren't UFOs scientific? They're not
scientific because scientists don't study them. That's really all it comes down to.
It's really that it's a pretty tight circle set that bit of logic. But
that's really what going on. You know, no scientists look back and say,
nobody has studied this, so it's not scientific, and so I'm not
going to study it. And it's really not It's really pretty ridiculous. And
there are many examples of you know, scientific theories that are now well accepted
that were treated this way initially. The theory of meteorites, you know,
rocks falling from the sky was one of them. And you can imagine why
people claiming that rocks can fall from the sky why people would look at them
and say, you were crazy. There's no way rocks are going to fall
from the sky and you so you can see why that would be a hard
theory to accept, and it really wasn't accepted until you had a meteorite event
that happened over a small town I believe it was somewhere in Europe, I
believe, I believe France perhaps, where the meteorite broken to several pieces and
actually hit These pieces hit in different parts of the town simultaneously, and each
one of them started a fire, you know, So the townspeople have to
put out these fires, and then they discover this strange rock here, and
there were multiple rocks found, each one found associated with a fire. So
the geologists then looked at them and said, well, these aren't from this
area. They're clearly not from the area. So that it wasn't until you
had an event where many people saw these things come in maybe think people saw
them start fire. As many people saw the rocks and there were multiple rocks,
it was just you couldn't deny it anymore. And so so then scientists
look at them and study them, and we learn about meteorites, and that's
really all there is to it. That's it. And that's another good point
because the other and this kind of and this will definitely be a thing because
I want to talk about kind of the state of affairs right now and how
science can and should play a role. But you also talked about the other
aspect is then when you want to start to study a phenomena, you have
to prove that there even is a phenomena there. When you, like you
just mentioned when the rocks started falling and stuff caught on fire, they say,
oh, there is a phenomena here to study. However, with a
lot of other stuff, we just have anecdotal information and I like you talked
about your your buddy Marco calls it anec data, but that really isn't scientific
data. So how do you justify something as real? And really what what
I think you made this point is that the Navy's kind of done that now
they've talked about UFOs being real. Yeah, that that's been the big That
was the big news. The big news really wasn't those videos. Those videos
aren't that spectacular. They the pilot's description of the behavior of these objects are
do not at all. That's not what's shown on the videos that we got
to see, and which is disappointing. It looks like we were given the
most boring parts of the video. But that's that's exactly right. One of
the differences that we one of the features that we use to decide whether something
is a science or a pseudoscience. In pseudoscience, you're the focus is usually
on trying to prove that something exists, that something is real. And the
problem with something new like studying UFOs is that the first thing you do need
to do is to prove that there is a phenomena here to study, and
so a lot of your activity looks like pseudoscience. Now I want to be
careful here because with UFOs there is a lot of pseudoscience going on, right,
So there is a lot of pseudoscience there, and so that makes it
even harder because it's hard for a scientist to come in and do science,
and especially when the first steps are to prove that there is a phenomenon,
because the scientists will look very much like everybody else, and that makes it
difficult. Now, the Navy has basically done this for us, which is
excellent they and they've done so out of necessity. They have a you know,
from my understanding, they have a serious problem on their hands. You
can't have and I believe it was twenty fifteen, they had near daily encounters
with these things and we can't afford that. And some of these were happening
in the Persian Gulf while they were going on. You know, on missions
into Syria, you've got to fly past UFOs first and then you enter Syria
and complete your mission and come back. But you have to be on your
game in Syria. But your pilots aren't going to be on their game if
there you've got you know, objects flying at the airplanes that thousands of miles
an hour and doing barrel rolls around the cockpit. There's you know, that's
that's unreasonable. So the Navy had a real problem that it needed to solve,
and we've unfortunately, from you know, my perspective, which you know,
I'm not privy to most of the information that the government has. I'm
just I'm a I'm a scientist of public scientists, so but my perception is
that these things have gone ignored for fifty years, and they've been ignored until
there was a serious problem. And this serious problem seems to be the problem
that the Navy is encountered with their pilots. And now I would have imagined
that the nuclear weapon site incursions would have been a serious problem. These things
kind of worry me because you you know, you can have a craft fly
over an ICBM missile and shine lights down into it and then fly away and
nobody does anything. I don't I don't know if you want that information about
public because it says to me that anybody can fly drone over one of these
ICBM missile sites and take photographs and shine lights on and nobody's gonna do anything
because they're gonna say, oh, it's just one of those uphones again,
and we don't believe in that. So what I mean, that's really what
it looks like, and it's a little worrisome. I would have hoped that
our you know, our defense would have been a little smarter in this respect,
and perhaps and and of course I don't know what they do do and
I don't know what they know and don't know, so it's I can't really
present a an objective you know, picture here, but but you know,
from somebody from the outside, that's kind of what it looks like. And
I think the different here a lot of people are asking I should say,
welcome everybody. We've got Rodrigo and Mark and Cartola and Will and Sonya and
the Unidentified Celebrity show and people all over. We've got Canada and UK,
Australia, So welcome everybody. And some of them are mentioning some of the
people who have done some science in the past, but these are kind of
one off individuals who have taken it upon themselves, like a Jacques Vallet or
doctor Eric Davis. People are mentioning some of these people, and sure they
have taken it upon themselves to do this, but what's different now is that,
to your point, it's kind of been officially. It's been made official
that UFOs at least exist. It is a phenomena. Even if you're a
scientist who doesn't believe it's anything abnormal, it's still, you know, then
incumbent upon you as a scientist to demonstrate that, to say, Navy's got
this all wrong, This isn't so weird. Here's the science why that's the
case. So at least now it's legit. I guess, yeah, the
phenomenon exists. This is something that some people have to deal with and they
would like to know what it is. And now it's a simple matter of
figuring out what these what some of these things are. And of course you
have to be careful because not all UFOs are going, you know, even
if some of them are alien spacecraft, they're not all alien spacecrafts. Some
of them are our misidentifications. In fact, the vast majority are misidentifications.
I don't believe that the navys misidentifying birds, you know, flying at their
planes at thousands of miles an hour. I don't think that that's the case,
but clearly, which is why what makes the Navy much more believable.
But it is true that people do misidentify planets and they think they're UFO or
or birds. I've actually seen photographs. I'm a birdwatcher. I've been a
bird watching since I was five years old, so I'm very familiar with birds,
and and there was a library of you of compelling UFO photos that I
had had come across, and in going through those, I found three photographs
of birds. So it was to me kind of surprising, but but that's
how it is, and a lot of these things are ar mis misidentifications.
I have yet to see swamp gas. I've never in my life seen swamp
gas hovering about doing whatever it supposedly does. Yeah, so there there gets
to be a point where the the skeptics explanations are far more ridiculous than you
know, the other you know, the other possibilities. So it's it.
But some of these things do appear to be structured craft, and those are
the ones, those are the cases I'm interested in. And I think it
was really interesting too when you brought up earth lights this whole you know,
you knew that the earthquake lights. Yes, yeah, that the guy who's
talking about the earthquake lights and doing that research, which was another kind of
something that people didn't believe existed until later on. Finally the evidence came that
you know, there were observations, which is really amazing. Yeah, which
is interesting because some of these things are I mean even of course the UFO
community was like, well, there, it's not even proven. There are
no such thing as earthquake lights. Now we know there are. Ball lightning
is another example. Ball lightning is not well understood in the physics community and
it's and it is taboo to study ball lightning because it's such a weird thing
that not everybody believes is real. So so there are you know, some
of the explanations that people have put forward, you know, as you know,
you know that, oh, that was probably just ball lightning. Well,
ball lightning is not really a thing either. I feel that way when
people say, oh, that was it's probably just a mass hallucination. Well,
yeah, there's no such thing as a mass hallucination either. So this
is where it gets great there. Then you're promoting psychic phenomena because there'd have
to be some sort of psychic connection these people would have, so exactly.
Yeah, yeah, that's it gets to be very interesting when you look at,
you know, the wide variety of cases and possible explanations. And one
of the issues is, I mean, and it's just so important, and
we'll get back to why what the Navy did was so important and how that
changes things, but prior to that, like we're talking about, to prove
something really is a phenomena, you have to rely on a lot of anecdotal
information or which, like you made the point, isn't really scientific data,
and which I think is important for people to understand. Also, Yeah,
that that is important to understand the difficulty is that, unfortunately in most cases,
that's all you have to go on. And so the best you can
do is to, you know, look at an anecdotal report and of what
somebody says they saw or says they experienced, and try to make sense of
it. I mean, it's a reasonable thing to do to try to make
sense of it, you know. And but you have to keep in mind
that people make mistakes and and and there are fabrications and hoaxes and things like
this too. So it's it's very challenging. But I like to in some
of the more prominent cases, I've often asked myself, you know, especially
when there's professionals involved, like pilots, where there's a real consequence for them
being you know, wrong, or or even reporting these things. You know,
the question I asked myself is how wrong could they be? You know,
how wrong can I expect that they're going could be? You know,
is you know, so even with the UA, you know, the UAP
footage from the two thousand and four Nimitz case, I did presumably we will
talk about this a bit, but I did some work to estimate their the
acceleration in the end of that video, and to do that I had to
know the size of the object, and of course there we don't have data
on the size of the object. We have anecdotal data from the pilots,
several pilots, I think up to six pilots who have seen these things.
And then that one event, you know, in that day, who described
them as being about the size of an eighteen about forty to fifty feet in
length, and these tic tac shaped objects, and so I use that number,
you know, forty fifty feet. Now, the first question you ask
yourself as a scientist, when you know I'm done with the analysis, and
you know, and when I did the analysis with those numbers, I found
that at the end of the video, when the when the computer loses lock
and the object flies off off to the left, that is that I estimated
that acceleration to be about eighty G's about eighty times the acceleration of gravity,
which is really unreasonable. It's still not the highest that's been observed, but
in fact it's on the low end of some of the actual data we have
or from either radar data or or from anecdotes. But the first question I
asked myself then as well, that number depends on the size of the tik
tak objects, right, So, and and of course you think, well,
how wrong could the pilots be. What if it wasn't forty feet long
and it was only thirty feet long, Well, then it's accelerating way it's
sixty g, which is still unreasonable. You know, at what point does
it become a more reasonable acceleration? Well down when you get it down to
around eight g. Maybe you might be able to imagine somebody pulling off something
with a craft or a drone at eight g. But then the object would
have had to be four feet long and only you know, one hundred feet
in front of the plane, which wasn't the case. The pilot's not going
to be that wrong, You're not, I use not off by a factor
of ten on the size of the craft, the size of the tech tac.
So I think that the you know, using a forty foot length is
a reasonable thing to do. And to put that in perspective, I think
you made the point that some of our newer aircraft, you know, fighter
jets, thirteen g, they'll fall apart. Oh yeah, you can't.
Most of our fighter jets, you can't accelerate more than thirteen G's of acceleration
the wing, the wings will rip off. Missiles missiles can't maneuver at accelerations
beyond thirty G. They can, I think they're frames of Some missiles can
withstand about sixty g's of acceleration, but they can't maneuver and under those conditions.
So so the fact that you have a video where this thing accelerated at
EIGHTYG is really significant. Now now I ask myself, I think, why,
well, why did we Why did the Navy release that video and not
one of the more exciting ones where like the pilots, you know, Fravor
describe these things as bouncing around like a pink pong ball inside of a jar.
I would love to see a video of that that's not been released.
Nothing like that's been released. And I suspect that the you know, the
one thousand and four and Imitz footage that was released appears to be quite boring.
I mean, the thing just sits there in front of the plane for
most of it. In the plane zooms, and you know, they change
the magnification a few times and it moves around then and then it flies off
the screen. It loses the lock and flies off the screen. And when
it flies off the screen. That Visually, looking at that as a movie,
it's not that impressive. It's not until you do the numbers and you
think that, well the computer lost missile lock. You know that's not easily
done. These things are made to track missiles, and missiles can accelerate very
fast. So so clearly this was a high acceleration. But I think it's
I think we lucked out. I think that, you know, when they
chose to release that video, that people reviewed the video maybe didn't do the
calculations to figure out what that acceleration was. And I believe that if I'm
remember right, some of the metadata was missing. I think there was metadata
to distance to object and that was actually missing from the videos. So so
unfortunately we had estimates. Fortunately we had estimates from the pilots how big this
thing was, so that we could get that acceleration. Mm hmm. Some
people were saying, you know, kind of criticizing because I think you posted
that paper, I think with Peter Robert Powell and Peter Reality at CU and
you posted in your journal Entropy, and they were questioning, well, how
could you how could you call this like a scientific paper if it's mostly based
off of anecdotal information, but I guess it's more of an analysis though,
and you have to take into consideration in this part. You know, it
is anecdotal information, but it's from a kind of in legal terms, it
would be like an expert witness. Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair.
The Yeah. So to be clear, and this is a good place
to be clear about this, we did. We published it in the journal
Entropy. The I presented this at the MACCENT twenty nineteen meeting at the Institute
for Plasma Physics in Garishing, Germany. And so that conference was organized by
the people at the monks Plunk Institute, and they were now they had already
gone to that conference for twenty years, so I'm familiar with all of these
people, and they had an agreement that year that the proceedings for the conference
where what was going to be published by the journal Entropy. The topics are
the same type of topics, so that it was a reasonable thing to do.
Now, So I wrote up the proceedings paper with Peter and Robert,
and it then went for review was reviewed by several people, with the with
the conference organizers as the guest editors. So the conference organizers made the decision
to have the paper published based on the reviews that they received. So even
though you know there's been some notes, you know, some things written,
well, he get it published in the journal where he's editor in chief,
so that it's a little fuzzy, But what really happened is it was you
know, yes, I am the editor in chief, but the guest editors
are in charge of their special issue, and that's that's where it got published.
So why did I publish there and not somewhere else? Basically I used,
you know, some of the data analysis techniques that we talk about at
that conference to analyze that video, and so I saw that as an opening
for this is my chance to get to talk about the UFOs or UAPs to
fellow scientists where I'm actually using the data analysis techniques that we're all familiar with
to analyze these videos from the from the US Navy, and I saw that
as an opportunity. But because I've been involved with that community for a long
time, you know, I'm the editor in chief of that journal, so
you know, so skeptics very you know, readily pointed out, wow,
you got it published in his own journal, and blah, blah blah.
But but the paper was was was reviewed by others and and some of the
reviewers had very good comments and that we took into account and editing the paper.
Yeah, how did your colleagues take that? I mean, what did
you're laughing? So some of it must have been No, it's interesting.
I think that you know, of course people are skeptical, you know,
and and of course scientists are going to be skeptical and they should be and
that's reasonable. I think I was. I was pleased. I did a
very care what I felt to be a careful job in the analysis and my
presentation, and most of my colleagues were very supportive. They said, you
know that. I think their eyes were kind of opened and thought, wow
that this is from the US Navy and this is really interesting, and yeah,
you're right, that has to be about an ADG acceleration, and ah,
well what is this all about? What is what's really going on here?
And I think that their curiosity was peaud which was exactly what needs needed
to happen. I did have one one colleague he's been a friend for years
and still is and he but he's very emotional, and he he stood up
and he says, Oh, I can't believe you're involved with this nonsense.
He said, he said, he said you could, you could show me
a UFO and give me a tour, and I still wouldn't believe it.
And it's such a weird thing to say, which kind of brings me to
the next time. Well, he kind of helped my case there, I
you know, and I you know, because he said that, and some
of my colleagues works with him, because he was like, oh, you
know, this was a good talk, and that was good work. You
should, you know, sit down and be quiet. But you know,
but I was able to plan this, I said. But this is the
problem with with extreme skepticism. Extreme skepticism is its own religion. You you
aren't going to believe it no matter what the data is. So and and
that's really the problem. And so so his statement, you know, I,
you know, I it couldn't have been better, you know it.
You know, I you know, if I was scheming, I you know,
I could have paid him a few bucks to say something like that,
so to make the point. But no, it was actually it was actually
him. He said that and he believed it. And that's fine. But
but oh but I was going to say, but there, you know,
but I do have other close colleagues, some of them not who weren't at
that meeting, who have seen, you know, read by my paper and
and looked, you know, saw the talk because it was recorded, and
you know, and who very strongly believe that these things are artifacts. One
of my one of them is a close colleague and close friend of mine at
NASA. He's still at NASA, ames he's been there for far longer than
I had been there. I was there for for four years, and you
know, and he really believes that these things are artifacts. And and that's
hard to argue. I mean, I have to, you know, I
am going to have to you have to think very carefully about how what kind
of proof do I need to convince him that this is not an artifact,
that this is actually a structured craft. What's going to be required? And
I think, you know, in some sense that I'm I'm lucky to have
a friend like this because I can, you know, I felt I could
bounce bounce these ideas off of him and send him my papers or my talks
to have him comment on them, so I know what skeptics are going to
say, or think or a skeptical scientist is going to say or think.
But he actually didn't want to have the conversation. He said, I've argued,
you know, for years. I think he's friends with Jacques Vallet and
so because they're both in Silicon Valley, right, And and he says,
I've had these arguments for years. I don't want to have them anymore,
so I you know, so it's too bad. It's unfortunately in this case.
I mean, we don't know much about the equipment that was used because
it's classified. However, there certainly have been plenty of or I know of
clear experts who've talked about you know, you just don't see that sort of
artifact, especially in this start of high end equipment, cutting ends equipment not
like that. Those are some pretty big, blatant and you don't and you
don't expect to have an artifact that the pilot can also see and follow with
his plane and that is being tracked by radar. You don't. It's not
a single artifact. There's something, you know, there could be something more
complicated going on. I think one of the more interesting explanations technological explanations that
one of the reviewers to my paper actually mentioned he claimed that what if what
if you had somebody shining lasers up and intersecting lasers, so you're basically ionizing
a patch of air, and then you can basically move the lasers very fast,
and basically this ionized patch of air will move, and this ionized air
will be hot, so it'll show up on an infrared video. You would
see it on your fleear camera. It would be giving off slights, so
the pilot would see it, and ionized air will reflect radio waves, so
radar would pick it up. And I thought that was an excellent hypothesis.
The problem is that there were the Navy is in control of that territory.
They know there were no other ships in the in the area. The objects,
the tic tact objects interacted with the planes, So if somebody is playing
around with laser beams, they're going to have to be monitoring where the planes
are and what the planes are doing so that they can have their fun.
But there were no other radar systems operating in the area, so now you
are, you don't and then there's no place to shine the lasers from.
So there's a lot of a lot of problems with that. Hypothesis. I
don't think it. You know, we argued in the paper that it didn't
hold up. It was a good guess, a nice try, but yeah,
someone brought up another skeptic, uh Mick West, and asked if you
I'd looked at his stuff, although I know Mick West does not look at
the anecdotal information, just the videos themselves. But there's not a lot of
data you can get out of the videos themselves. It doesn't seem you can't
get any speeds or accelerations of the object without knowing how big it is or
how far away it is from the camera. That's really the fact, and
so we needed to use the estimated size, you know, from the pilots,
And yes, that's a weak point, but as I mentioned, you
can then ask the question, how far off could they be. If they're
off by a factor of ten, it's still accelerated at eight eight g,
which is which is a hefty acceleration for a four foot object that's flying a
few hundred feet in front of the plane that we still don't know how it's
flying, and you still don't see any evidence of propellant. So there's still
the same questions are still in play what is what is that thing? And
how is it flying? And how is it moving? And you bring up
the point pseudoscience kind of you were the definition and the difference between regular science
and and pseudoscience. It can happen on both sides, I mean on the
extreme skepticism as well as of course and what people usually think of pseudoscience as
those speculating out in the public, which, like you said, there's a
lot of that going on in the UFO field, But it can happen on
both ends. And maybe explain that what is the difference between pseudoscience and real
science? Oh gosh, that's a really you'd have to look at your side.
I'm going through my slides to remind myself because it's to you, right,
Yeah, so, I mean pseudoscience seeks confirmation. Science seeks falsification.
Is what you wrote, right, That's that's what it was. I knew
that there was a really nice summary. Yeah so so yeah, pseudoscience you
seek confirmation. You're trying to confirm your theory, confirm the idea, and
science we work hard to falsify things. You know, can I show that
this is wrong? What what experiment can I do to show that that idea
is wrong, and you and and it's it's what the docs do when doctors
are doing medical tests. You know, you have your ankle hurts, and
they write you a script to get an X right. And what does it
say. It says our slash oh right. They write our slash oh broken
foot. And so what is the R slash O stand for? It means
rule out, you know, So doctors are you know, coming down to
making a diagnosis by ruling out other possible diagnoses. And that's what we do
as scientists. So so pseudoscientists aren't out there falsifying. They're out trying to
prove their case, whereas scientists are falsifying things. So can I can I
rule out the idea that this was a structured craft? And and that's a
good question. So now you look at these videos and you look at those
axhilarations, and another colleague of mine here at U Alpany, she said very
very correctly, she said, clearly, you can't accelerated craft at EIGHTYG through
the air without a sonic boom. So that rules out the hypothesis that it's
a structured craft. And that's difficult to argue against, right because that's very
logical. The you know, the argument against it is, well, well,
we're hypothesizing that there are craft that can accelerate that fast and you know,
and do this sort of thing. But so that would be what somebody
is trying to prove that it's an alien spacecraft would be having to do so.
But you don't try to prove that something. A scientist doesn't try to
prove that it's an alien spacecraft. We try to rule out other things,
and that's what we try to do. Or we present a hypothesis and you
show, well there is support for that hypothesis. Can we come up with
something that will rule out you know, that's where people get frustrated with me.
But it's the same thing when they send me pictures or videos or you
know, I'll say, I can't rule out that that's not a planet or
a star. I can't rule out that that's not a bug or a bird,
and they get Bush Street and that's really interesting. In videos, they
come really close to the camera and it looks really impressive. Birds and I've
done this, in fact, there's a video I have. In fact,
I do it with this UFO. But a bird flying by will look just
like that when they zoom by so any and this is what happens the most
is people look at their vacation pictures and they that looks like this, you
know, fuzzy in the background, and they're like, I didn't even see
that UFO. There's a flying disc, but no, it's just a bird
zooming buy very quickly in it. That's what it's. It's very easily could
be a swallow and yeah close and looks bigger and yeah. So along the
lines with the data and how things change right now is that. You know,
what's interesting to me is that you talk about the importance of the Navy
kind of making UFOs official, making officially making them a thing, and that
I know was one of Chris Mellen's goals with his effort, you know,
working with to the stars. You know, he worked with the sci the
Senate Intelligence Committee for those of you who don't know, and so he's got
a background doing this and he had this strategy, you know, he's worked
with with the Senate Intelligence Committee and he's like, as soon as we can
make this official in public, that justifies the government then to say, hey,
Navy, this is real, tell us about it. You haven't told
us about this yet why not? And of course airy answer, which makes
sense, I think, would be that, well, we don't think there's
anything to it, so that's why we haven't told you. We haven't felt
it's been important enough, which is fair, and then they've just got to
make that argument. But the one thing we don't know is the data.
So the Navy is saying this is not Chinese, this is Russian, this
is unidentified, but we have really very little to none of their data.
We don't know what data they use to come to that determination. We have
a little bit of it. Certainly they most likely use that anecdotal Well,
certainly they use the information you used in your report, but they likely had
a lot more. But we don't have access to that data, right,
nor do we even know what it is. Yeah, and unfortunately, even
if we did have access to it, it wouldn't be scientifically useful in the
sense that you wouldn't have access to those instruments. You wouldn't be able to
know the characteristics of that instrument to be able to, you know, really
pin down what's going on in the recording, and that would be challenging.
And plus you know these you know, these videos weren't recorded in a controlled
setting. You know, they're recorded, These are being recorded on the fly
while everybody is excited and and you know, holy beep, you know,
so it's not a controlled setting. And and it's going to be extremely difficult
to get any recordings in a controlled setting anybody, you know, I imagine
you know. I'm working with u ap X and we're we're hoping to go
out, We're aiming to go out on two research vessels out on the Pacific
Ocean just south of Catalina Island in the same area and look for these things
over there a few miles Oh really right, nice, Yeah, So we
hope to do this sometime next year. And but and we're going to do
our best to record, you know, if we see something, we're going
to record, you know, everything we can. But you know, but
it's depending on how impressive the you know, an encounter is. You know,
I can't ensure that I'm not going to be like, oh my god,
you know, and it's hard to stay controlled and to keep everything,
keep everything calm so that you're getting the best data you can and that you
you know, are understand this situation. This is one reason why I'm interested
in using satellites. Some of these objects that have been observed are you know,
a forty forty foot tick tack. That's pretty big. You could see
that by satellite. But but there are reports of three hundred foot discs and
things like that, you know, from pilots, and and of course the
skeptics are like three hundred foot discs, Well, well yeah, but when
you know, how wrong is a pilot going to be? You know,
when you know in some cases, you know, for the Japanese Airlines case
over Anchorage, Alaska in nineteen eighty six, you know, he said it
was it filled the whole. You know, his entire view was taken by
the object that's big, and so that should be observable by satellite and easily
observable by satellite. And so can we look for these things? Can we
find them? And then and you might be able to take a ground based
sighting, you know, even from regular citizens who normally wouldn't be very credible,
but you might get somebody who happened to get a photograph from the ground.
And then you go back at that time and day and look at for
satellite imagery. There's your satellite image of the object. You can verify whether
there's been a siting or not. So there you can falsify. You know,
you can falsify claims using satellite data. And I think that's about as
objective as we're going to be able to be in the near future. I
think, and you did. You were featured in a space dot com article
just in the last couple of days written by Leonard David, a good dude
I talked to, and a great article where you were talking about that with
Philippe and he presented that I remember at the SEU conference a couple of years
ago. But the data is an important part. So let's talk about if
you were working for the UAP Task Force. Now, presumably I think what
they're going to be looking for is mostly foreign technology drones, that sort of
thing, but they'll run across some unidentified and we're not sure even what they're
going to do completely with those. But let's say you're on the group,
let's pass this to Kevin's unidentified group. How would you go about doing some
scientific investigation on these things? Like you said, it might be really difficult
even if you're the United States Navy. Yeah, you're going to want to
get high quality images of the objects in as many wavelengths as possible, you
know, so you would want infrared imagery, You're going to want visual imagery.
You're going to want you know, you want to be able to pick
up X rays and gamma rays if they're there. You know, you're going
to want to see all of these things. What kind of light if the
objects emitting light, you know, what kind of light is it? How
how is the light being generated? You can figure that out by looking at
the spectrum of the light. So you're going to want to record spectrum,
you know, and over wide, you know, very broad frequency ranges or
wavelengths, and you're going to and if you do have something like X rays
or gamma rays, you're going to want to check for other types of particles.
Is the thing, you know, generating particles around it? You know,
are there alpha particles, beta particles, anything else? So you're going
to want to detect things like that. There's there's a lot of things you
would like to do. In the ideal case, whether the Navy is or
anybody is going to be set up with all of that equipment in any one
situation is very unlikely. So that's it's difficult it's difficult to study things that
you can't control. And this is really why this topic is as difficult to
study, is as all the others that are difficult to control. You have
to you can't just study supernovae. You can't study a supernova. I'm just
going to go study supernova. Well, there isn't one to look at.
You've got to wait till one happens, right, And so fortunately they are
common enough and you know in the nearby galaxies that we can wait for them
and look for them. Earthquakes, earthquakes, it's hard to have the equipment,
all the equipment you want set up to study an earthquake. You know,
when Freeman Freund was looking at trying to study earthquake lights, he has
to have certain equipment set up where there's going to be an earthquake. That's
hard to do. So that's really the difficulty, if not impossible. And
UFOs are especially if if if you know, if you've only got a fraction
of UFOs turned out to be something interesting like an alien spacecraft or an alien
probe, if it's only a fraction of those, then then it's going to
be impossible to have all of your equipment in the right place at the right
time to detect these things, better off monitoring for them coming in, you
know, from somewhere else or however they approach Earth or whatever. So it's
extremely it's extremely challenging, and it's not clear that that there's any easy answer.
I mean, this is really take a long time to figure out,
and the resources that you'd need would need to be extraordinary. Fortunately, the
military has you know, assets, uh an observation equipment throughout the world around
the entire planet, and it would take that sort of ability to be able
to capture even probably a small amount of data. Right now. When it
comes to the data, now, you've been doing some science around this,
mostly some computer modeling to kind of speculate or or on the nature of the
who might be coming here and their technology, and I think that's really interesting.
And what's interesting about that is it demonstrates this is some science that we
can do right now even without all this other data. Yeah, that's that's
one of the things that I wanted to I wanted to do something, and
so it's I can't just go collect data right now, so you know,
I really thought, what can we do? And so one of the things
I could, you know, thought of doing is I could try to model,
you know, a civilization exploring some region of the galaxy. Right,
And the idea then is to so what I what I had done in this
project is I I modeled about two million civilizations, and I kept track,
and they each had very they had slightly different characteristics. They had they could
travel at different speeds or different accelerations, they could withstand the longer journeys or
or some of them shorter journeys, and things like this. And so I
just looked to see what would happen if you had a civilization that started colonizing
other star systems and spreading out. Now were and of course not at that
point yet, but we're working towards that, right. And so after two
million civil simulations of this, I then looked to see in in my simulated
galaxy, Earth is there. So I look to see how many of those
simulated civilizations actually found Earth and so and and and for those civilizations that did
find Earth, I looked to see what their characteristics were what allowed them to
pull it off. So I'm not going to be remember all the you know,
results off the top of my head, of course, but the but
the chance of finding Earth is very slim. The it's it's literally down into
fractions of tents of a percent, and the kind of answering the Fermi paradox
a bit. Yeah, The problem is the galaxy is big. You've got
three hundred billion stars and and you're to find happen upon Earth is almost impossible,
and so that really, you know that that to me was a bit
surprising. It was much harder to find Earth than I expect that it would
be when I when I first just started the project, I realized I had
to literally go out to millions of civilizations before you had any number of them
finding Earth. And the algorithms I used actually pared down and focused on civilizations
I had a better chance of finding Earth, so that made it a bit
easier, but it ended up being something like, you know, one out
of you know, one out of ten million, one out of eight million
chants of finding Earth, and then I could then But then once I had
a set of civilizations I did find Earth. In my simulations, I could
look at what their characteristics were, so it didn't depend very much on their
speed or acceleration. They just had to be able to go fast enough to
get to nearby stars that didn't seem to once you could go much faster than
others that didn't do much for you. They just have to be able to
perform interstellar travel. That's really all that you needed there. And then it
turned out that the probability for their origin turned out to be that they were
within They originated from within ten thousand light years from here, which is a
good distance the galaxy is about it's about one hundred and fifty thousand light years
across. So I use this to get some idea of if we do have
aliens visiting Earth, what can we expect them to be like? And so
I have some answers there, which you know from these simulations which I'm now
working on writing up to hopefully publish. And so what would they be like,
Well, they're probably from nearby, they're probably from within ten thousand light
years of here. Originally they've their It turns out that they've probably been coming
to Earth for a long time. They probably discovered Earth a long time ago,
on the order of more than two hundred and fifty thousand years ago,
so certainly have known about Earth throughout human history. That's almost a certainty.
And and so there were some interesting facts that came out from that that simulated
these simulations, which was quite fun. So I do want to ask about
first, I guess I'll ask real quick at this question that someone just posted
in that I was looking up the details of and they said, uh,
why so little attention has been paid to scientific Americans changing their positions at uap
AR deserving of genuine research. I think that the article they we're referring to
is the one by surving Jacob Misra. Yeah, yes, yeah, it's
an opinion piece. Right. No, they're both they're both SETI researchers.
And after that article came out, I contacted them, Well, we were
actually I was actually presenting at a meeting that they helped to organize. They
organized a session SETI session at the European Astronomical Society meeting this summer, and
so their article came out about the same time and Philippe Alearis and I had
already had our abstract accepted to be presented there. So we were going to
be talking about looking for techno signatures we call them a you know, extraterrestrial
or techno signatures using satellites in the near Earth environment. And and so since
they had organized the meeting and they had just published that opinion piece, and
I contacted them. So we've been in touch and talked about what can be
done, what needs to be done, and things like this. So so
there are more scientists now getting interested and that's really exciting. Well, and
you and I are both affiliated with SCU, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies,
So this is another group that of scientists that are interested in studying these
things. When it comes to the scientific community, when and the UAP Task
Force, what ideally would you like to see because we have no indication,
at least we do have a little bit of indication that it doesn't seem like
they're going to be in a kind of a mode to regularly share information with
the public. There's been a couple of statements that their work will be classified
and the results will be classified. But I mean, would you like to
see some of that information shared with the public, perhaps the scientific community.
I think it would be in their best interest to share it with the scientific
community. The and and in fact, I had written a letter with Jacob
and Ravi and Matthew should Augus from one of my colleagues here at U Albany
to send to those on the UAP Task Force to request that they share information
with the scientific community. So I think that's very important. It's unfortunately,
it's very easy for the people who do people who do classified work have this
mindset that the most important work that happens is classified work, and that's unfortunately
it's not that not really true. And part of that comes from drinking their
own kool aid. They have to convince people that they have to convince the
people who give them money that what we do is the most important thing,
and so they end up believing that. But if you look at breakthroughs,
breakthroughs don't happen that way as often as they do other ways. Breakthroughs are
kind of random. You had the airplane was developed by two bicycle mechanics,
right, The theory of relativity came from a patent clerk. These are these
are you know, people out in the community. So so it would be
in their best interest to have the scientific community working on this problem and thinking
on this problem. In fact, in fact, I would be supportive of
something more like a Manhattan Project style effort, where we are we take this
seriously and let's find out what these things are. I mean, if it
if it really does turn out that some of the even one of these objects
was an alien probe, that's something we're going to want to know about,
and with something we ought to take soeriously as a planet, as humanity.
I know, you know, twenty twenty has thrown a lot at us this
year. But you know, if it turns out that we find out that
they're aliens visiting Earth, that's probably the biggest problem we'll have on our hands.
And I and I don't mean problem, you know, and I say
problem, but it's a potential problem. You have to make sure it's not
a problem. And the only way to do that is to educate ourselves.
We have to find out, you know, what are these things? You
know, if some of them turn out to be alien craft, then where
did they come from? What are they doing here? What do they want?
You know, are they just studying us? You know? Do they
do? They appear to be friendly? You know, that's good, but
I don't know if I'm not willing to you know, the risk we're worth
taking, you know, just to say, well, they haven't done anything
yet, so they're probably fine, so we'll just ignore them. Right,
and what that seems to be potentially what is going on? What's going on?
Right? Yeah, but you know, but they don't. We don't
do that about Russians. I mean, yeah, Russians us for a while,
so we'll just kind of ignore them and the I'm sure, oh that's
we know better. Yeah, and I think that I don't. I don't
like I don't like painting them, you know, if they exist, if
there are somebody visiting Earth, I don't want to paint them as a as
a threat. And we don't know that they're a threat. But but anything
is a potential threat, you know, and you know, you need to
just we need to be informed. That's that's what the situation needs to be.
I agree, because I think that's the best case scenario with what's going
on right now. The worst case scenario is that the Senate Intelligence Committee gets
their report, the public facing one, maybe has a few stats, not
much. Then the Senate Intelligence Committee says, hey, looks good to ash.
You guys got this all well taken care of, keep on keeping on,
and then we're all still left in the dark. I think the best
case scenario would be some cooperation with an organization where they are sharing data so
that there can be some scientific, transparent, scientific investigation on the true anomalies,
but it's hard to separate that from the data that should remain classified that
could potentially, you know, pose a genuine threat, right yeah, I
think, well, I think, you know, there's several difficulties if you
do have alien craft visiting Earth. There's the technology aspect. This technology is
going to be powerful and and there's going to be people who are going to
be worried about it falling in the wrong hands, so they won't want to
share information. But the difficulty is that other countries are looking into this too.
We're not the only ones you know, collecting data here, so it
really I think it really is better to share. Better for all of us
to get the technology at the same time than for any one of us to
get the technology over the others, I think. But I'm not not an
expert in this, So where do we go from here? Where for those
in the UFO community, for instance, how did they advocate for this?
I think that you know, calling the White House and saying we know that
you're making deals with aliens, it's probably not the way to go. It
hasn't worked in the past. It's difficult. I think the the UFO community
as a whole has a wide variety of beliefs that are not scientifically founded,
and we don't have the evidence. The evidence does not exist for those beliefs,
and it's unfortunate. I would like there to be evidence for some of
these things. And some of these beliefs are interesting, and I find some
of this fascinating, but but I call it a mythology, you know.
I try to understand this mythology. I like to you know, I like
to hear about some of these anecdotes, and some of them are really fascinating.
But it's important to realize it's important to keep in mind that this is
what you know. What we know is different and and for me, it
isn't about belief. And I've had people ask me in interviews, do you
believe that aliens are visiting Earth? And I and it doesn't matter what I
believe. I want to know if they're visiting Earth. I want something more
concrete, more powerful, And I think the best thing anybody can do is
to talk to their senators and congressmen and try to emphasize that this data should
be shared with the scientific community. Once you get once you get scientists involved,
nobody's going to be able to stop. I mean, and once scientists,
you know, if once we figure out how to collect data on some
of these things and we find out it's interesting, the discoveries are going to
happen, and they'll happen fast. I mean, scientists will dive on board,
It'll drop what they're doing, and they'll run to solve this problem because
it's one of the most interesting. It's potentially one of the most interesting discoveries
ever. So who wouldn't want to work on that? And speaking of myths,
I mean a lot of some of UFO people will hear that and say,
oh, yeah, right, Like who NASA they're lying about us,
about everything. Everybody's lying. Scientific community is hiding everything that whenever they find
something and alien bodies, they just hide it. You know. They believe
that the entire scientific community essentially is part of this cover up, whereas I
argue the opposite, especially like with NASA. I mean, the NASA has
a lot of citizens scienceist programs which are very successful. People are finding meteorites
and comment and getting them named after themselves and all of this sort of thing.
Science especially in astronomy. It doesn't work the way that conspiracy minded people
think it does. No. Yeah, and as important is data sharing amongst
scientists, especially when it comes to like astronomy. Oh, it depends.
Data is usually pretty freely shared. The I've I've found, you know,
my colleagues to be quite helpful, you know, some of the some of
the data's open. So for example, I do work on characterizing exoplanets plants
orbiting other stars, and we use data from the Coupler Space Telescope. And
that's all. That's all online. I mean, anybody can go you you
could, I can show you how you can go and download data from the
Kepler Space Telescope or anybody can. It's all online. It's it's you know,
and and it's it's produced by NASA. It's been paid for by the
American tax payer, and it's freely available to the American tax payer payer anybody
can. You know, it's fairly available with anybody on the planet. Really,
And so that's the data I use, you know, to do my
work on exoplanets. But you know, sometimes we need other data. And
so I have in the past contacted you know, colleagues and said, is
there do you have any data on this star? You know, we'd like
to get some of these measurements from this star. And usually it's like,
no, we don't, but you know, I have a little extra time
on the telescope tonight and I'll I'll swing over and I'll collect some data for
you and send it to you in the morning. I've had that happen and
so they're more than willing to do that, and people are generally very eager
to work together. Well, we've taken up a lot of your time.
I don't I think we've gotten to most of the top everybody's been talking about.
They've been loving it and having a great time. I did want to
show one image and let me see, let me get this up and it's
fitting for the time that we're in. And you'll see why when I bring
this up, because this here with one here slides and I love it because
it's almost Halloween and it says here this was your display in your yard for
Halloween? Was that last year? No, Well, this puno was taking
a few years ago. I've I've had the UFO put up a few years
in a row. Yeah, it's this year, probably not this year.
I'm a little. I'll be honest. My neighbors all asked me if I'm
going to put it out, and they seem to be eager for it to
be on display. But I'm to be truth be told, I'm a little
ufoed out at this point. I had had first built this as a project
with my you know, my son and daughter a few years ago before I
really actually started working on UFOs. But now I think, I now that
was a little too close to home and it feels a little weird. I
don't want people to My neighbors are going to really think he's a real nut.
He studies UFOs and he puts one on his lawn all the time.
It's so funny you say that, because I shy away from like UFO shirts
and T shirts and stuff for the same reason. And it's like, you
know, I don't want to be that guy, because just because I look
into it doesn't mean I'm obsessed, and I don't want to look like I'm
obsessed. That's right, that's funnyway, that's great, that's really cool.
Well, thank you very much. I mean, right now, in this
time and age, I mean, it's very exciting, obviously, and you
seem to enjoy getting involved. And I've noticed, you know at the Congress
you did get purchase a T shirt or too. I have a sweatshirt yep,
yeah, which are They're pretty cool? So I mean, how do
you in your mind, you know, a lot of people in the UFO
community, for a example, believe that you know this is all leading to
some kind of major disclosure of the UFO and a hangar and the roswell alien
people in the public. I think a lot of people in the public,
like your colleagues that you've been talking about, don't know what to make cads
or tails of what the heck's going on with all of this. But then
you have the Senate Intelligence Committee saying, Okay, we want to know more
and we want you to provide the public with some more information. Where do
you see all this heading and what is you do you have a positive kind
of outlook towards towards where we're headed with all this? I do, generally,
I think that this is all this is all positive. Every every time
there's some kind of disclosure, anytime another pilot comes forward, anytime we have
one of these things happen, it seems to have a snowballing effect, more,
more people get involved. More, you know, I get contacts from
more scientists. How I saw you study these things? What can I do
to help? You know? What? What can what could I do?
And I think there's people who are really interested, and so I think that
I think that we very well will will eventually get to the bottom of this
and we'll find out what's going on. Is it going to be what you
know, some of the people in the UFO community the thought was going on,
I don't know, you know, we'll find out. I I would
be very excited if there were you know, there were we were being visited
by somebody from and you know, from somewhere else. I think that would
be very exciting. Of course, it would be one of the biggest discoveries
in human history that were not alone. And and then of course the fact
that they have craft that can try to other stars means that that's something we
should be able to pull off too, And that I find out so exciting.
So I am hopeful, and I think that I think there is there
are some questions that need to be answered here, and I think that,
you know, scientists should get involved and look into this. But I think
it's important to keep in mind that we don't know, we don't know what
you know, these these especially these really anomalous interesting cases are we don't know
what these objects are. And to prove that they are, you know,
to determine whether something is extratrustrial is actually very difficult to do. It's not
going to be easy. I often joke that, and yes, you can
do an isotope analysis and things like this, but there's always, you know,
going to be some question. And I joke with my you know,
friends and colleagues that it's almost going to take dragging and living alien kicking and
screaming off as spacecraft and holding them up for everyone to see for people to
finally accept, oh that, oh, this is what's happening, you know.
And I think it might just take something crazy like that for people to
for for that to be to be believed. If that's the if that is
the case of what's going on, and I get ahead, Oh, I
was just going to say, and whether you know, whether we do whether
our government or other governments do possess crash craft and technology and things like this,
that that's an interesting question. And I and you know, and I'm
on the fence I'm not sure what I believe. I I worry because the
number of crashes appears to be quite high, and I would worry about their
ability to fly their spacecraft if they're crashing that often. So so I I'm
very skeptical that there really are that many crashes, and and and if if,
if any and so. But yeah, they'd happening all the time.
Yeah, they would be happy. They're like, hey, can you jump
start me? We gotta that's right. But I guess the last question would
be because now that you've mentioned all this, the other aspect is if that
is true too, they've got the UFO, an alien and the Hangar.
Because of the nature of the more secret the less people involved, and the
less scientists involved. Most likely then there isn't a lot of science being done.
If that's I guess, there's very little known. If you know,
if you know, if they are working on, if they do have crash
craft, if they do have data. I'm guessing that very little is actually
known about these things, and it's probably so compartmentalized it literally is going to
be a handful of people. And with the scenario that Eric Davis gave,
who is a contractor and and he says that's what he hears out there,
So who knows. I guess, huh, yeah, it's not you know,
when we say things like the government knows, well, the government isn't
really a thing. So it's not that it's a poorly worded statement, it's
there are there. There may be people who work, you know, for
the government or military or defense contractors who may know a few things, but
but they probably you know, you probably have several different sets of people.
Each group knows, you know, each group is just a handful of people
who knows one little piece of of something, and they probably don't communicate and
probably can't put it all together, which is really the problem for you know,
of that's what happens when you do work like that and you don't collaborate.
All right, Well, thank you so much. I think I've had
some sort of missing time experience because it's been an hour and a half and
it feels like, I know, I can't believe the time lived. Great
fun. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's been a
great time. Thank you so much for joining. And we'll be in touch.
And I guess is there a website or anything that you want to send
people to look at I have a website with my research and some of my
extra planet work. It's at kanouth, which was my last name, k
n u t H lab l a b dot dot org and you can go
there stop by and see what I'm doing. I don't have any of the
UFO stuff there yet, I probably will at some point, all right,
And it is pronounced kanoth. I think I've asked you that before. But
it's funny because I had a meeting, well, we had an su meeting
and your name came up a couple of times and things you're helping out with
and some people say nuth, some say kanuth uh pronunciation, so the case
pronounced Okay, great, thank you so much. And I guess people can
look on my social media to see that story from space dot com that you
were in recently. A great article. I think that was a really good
one. And if you enjoyed this interview, please push the like button and
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later they do go into the archive. So thank you all for joining us.
Thank you so much, Kevin, and we'll be in touch. You
have a great evening. I thank you you too,