Transcripts:

Brian Keating
Well, this is a two-part episode. we’re discussing today, fascinating lecture that summarizes a lot of the current cutting edge research and investigations that you’ve done as a physicist. And the reason that I’m having you on for this in a podcast as well is because I think you’re doing really important and heroic work in terms of bringing scientific rigor to this problem. And one of the problems that I see most and afflicting the UAP phenomenon is.

Is that there are very few actual real scientists, professors. Yes, I’m sorry to be a gatekeeper, but but sometimes we need gatekeeping. You and I met through a a chat thread with about 300 other people, some accusing others of different nefarious things, and everyone saying that they have their own truth. Well, no, there’s there’s only one scientific truth. It’s our job to investigate it, interrogate nature. And you do that through the lens of a pr practicing professional scientist.

And you’re also a professor. And these these things matter. Yes, it’s important to have other people and voices as well, but we need people from agencies, from industry, from the military, but we certainly do need from the professoriate. And that’s why I think it’s really important what you’re doing. So today you’re gonna describe the the research that you’ve gone into in terms of a presentation you made at a very important conference you gave over the summer, and you’re gracious enough to provide it here, and then we’re gonna have a lot nice long conversation.

Depending on which order you’re watching this in, you may have already seen the conversation with Kevin on the Into the Impossible podcast. This shows you I’m dedicating two hours to this phenomenon because I think it’s so important, so pr and it’s so prescient that Kevin’s been involved in this, bringing scientific rigor, bringing academic rigor. We hear a lot about peer review is broken, science is broken, Fauci’s this, lockup string theorist. and you know, I’m guilty of some of it too. But but the reality is Kevin’s a working professor.

you can check out his website. I’ll have all of his links below. And just really grateful for your presence today, Kevin. So if you wouldn’t mind, you could take us through this presentation. I might interrupt here and there, but just to ask clarifying questions that the audience might be interested and unable to ask at this point.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Absolutely and th thank you for the very very kind introduction. Yeah, I gave I gave this talk at the scientific coalition for UAP Studies meeting, the SCU meeting this last summer and in Toronto.

And I think one of the there there’s a few things that co that characterize academic scientists and make them different than others and perhaps in this field more useful is we study things and we’re trained to study things and we’re trained to be skeptical and we’re I I I don’t know how many times I’m told by somebody, I’m skeptical. well I am too. I mean I’m

I’m skeptical of my own ideas, and most people aren’t. And that that’s skeptics. Yeah, skepticism works both ways. You have to be able to catch mistakes. And the fastest way to catch mistakes is for you to catch them. and then and and then on in addition to that, physicists think about things differently than other people. And so I’m I can’t say that that’s the only good way to think about it. I know that it’s not, but

Brian Keating
That’s a sign of a good scientist. Yep, that’s a sign of a good scientist. Yep.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Physicists often bring a unique perspective that’s that you can’t get anywhere else. And so this talk is basically that. I’m asking the question how anomalous is anomalous, and when it comes to UAP, and I’m going to focus on energy and power. And I think the reasons for focusing on energy and power are that in some cases we can estimate the energies and powers involved in

a sighting or an interaction with these objects. And very often th those energies or powers are as much, much greater than humans are capable of dealing with. And I think this is the real evidence that we have that we’re dealing with non-human tech in many of these cases. And it’s pretty and when I go through some of these cases, it’ll be pretty obvious that this cannot possibly be human technology. I know Lockheed Martin can do some pretty cool things, but

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
there’s a lot of things that they can’t do.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
So I think it’s also difficult to for people to remember that UAP are a class of phenomena, not a single thing. There are very certainly different types of UAP. Not all of them are alien spacecraft. In fact, most of them probably aren’t. And in this slide, I actually show several pictures of UAPs.

one of them is actually identified. and it’s the one here in the lower the lower left. Can you see my cursor moving? Okay. You can see this one in the lower left. Excuse me. when I first saw this image years ago, I got very excited because I had recognized several other images that looked similar. And I thought, wow, maybe it’s the same type of craft. And I

Brian Keating
Fine.

Brian Keating
Yeah, that’s perfect. Yeah.

Brian Keating
Mm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Pulled all those images together and looked at them at the same time and realized, no, it’s it’s a bird. It’s a seagull. Which is precisely why the photographer didn’t notice it while he took the pictures, because he was taking a picture of the boats in the background that I have covered up with the text. that’s actually a seagull. I’m gonna try to jump over to another set of slides and I can show you that. Oops, one second.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Right, can you see this new set? Alright. Alright, here we go. I’ll go to full screen mode here too. Alright, so this is from an earlier talk. This is the same picture and the person was taking a picture of the the ships here. I’ve cropped it a bit. we can zoom in and maybe still not obvious what it is. It’s not obvious until I do that. now it’s pretty obvious what this is. it’s a seagull and I don’t wanna

Brian Keating
Yeah, I see it. Yep.

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
I feel bad about raining on this guy’s parade of his cool UAP photo. But but it’s it’s that’s my job as a scientist. We’ve been ruining all the fun for what four hundred years now. So it’s so I I like I joke with people, I tell them I’m here to ruin the fun. And

And that’s really what we’ve been doing. It’s very funny. We I work very closely with Matthew Matthew Shadagas and Cecilia Levy, both professors at the University at Albany, and I work with them at U on you know under UAPX and our UAPX group. And we’ve looked at many cases at this point, looked at photographs. Matthew’s been analyzing materials, and we have discovered more.

As Matthew puts it, he puts it quite well. He’s looked at all sorts of materials, crash debris, right? And he says he’s discovered more earth dirt than he ever expected. And so, yeah, and of course no one’s happy to find out that their UFO debris is actually just earth dirt or airplane parts and which we have found. And but we’re here to figure out the truth. And that’s that’s another thing we academics are good at, getting at the truth.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating
That’s right.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
So I’m going focus here first on speeds and accelerations. There are many cases where we can measure speeds and accelerations, and sometimes with radar. Hermann Oberth, this grumpy-looking gentleman here at the bottom of the picture, was a German father of modern rocketry. He was a the mentor to Werner von Braun, which is the guy just to the right. And Hermann Oberth.

gave a lecture on flying saucers in 1954. And he notes in the lecture their speed is sometimes very high. 19 kilometers a second has been measured with wireless measuring instruments, radar. This is 1954. Radar was new. so and then accelerations are so high that no man could stand it. This is no what comes up as an understatement actually it turns out he would be pressed to the wall and bruised. no they’d be turned into jelly in some cases.

the accuracy of such measurements has been doubted. If there would be only three or four measurements, I would not rely upon them and would wait for further measurements. But there is existing more than 50 such measurements, 50 radar measurements of UAP, existing in 1954. And the wireless sets of the American Air Force and Navy, which are used in all fighters, cannot be so inaccurate that the information obtained with them can be doubted completely.

So I find this presentation, while he doesn’t actually provide us with that radar evidence, he clearly notes it. 19 kilometers a second is extremely fast. That’s about 42,000 miles an hour. That’s approximately the speed of the New Horizons probe, which is currently flying through the Kuiper belt and the outer solar system. it flew past Pluto in 2015. So so these things

are flying have been measured to fly at spacecraft speeds. And this has been known since nineteen fifty four. And I think this is a big deal. And

Brian Keating
I think.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
So where are these 50 radar measurements? and how how is it that we’re still going back to saying, well, what about the Russians and the Chinese? Well, these things weren’t Russian and Chinese back in 1954, that’s for sure. They weren’t American either. 1954 the the air speed record was something like seven hundred and sixty miles an hour. So you’re looking at a huge difference in speeds.

And he told people about this back in 1954, and I like to say this is why he’s so grumpy because nobody’s listening to him or paying any attention. it’s pretty obvious what the situation is. Excuse me. the Numitz case was an excellent case in which one can estimate speeds and accelerations. There’s three events that allow you to do that. this one gives you the greatest acceleration. This is when Kevin Day

Brian Keating
Okay.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
reported that he recorded on radar that these objects were dropping from twenty eight thousand feet to sea level in point seven eight seconds.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
So now you can estimate this acceleration. It comes out to something like 5,400 G’s. This is the distribution of probability distributions of acceleration. So how far off can you be? Well, it isn’t less than 3,000 G’s, and it certainly probably isn’t much more than 10,000 Gs, but it’s somewhere in between. and most probably around 5,500 Gs. So we can estimate the

We know it’s acceleration. five thousand G’s is you’re not going to be just pressed against the wall and bruised. Somebody who weighs a hundred pounds normally under five thousand Gs is going to weigh five thousand what fifty thousand wait, no, five hundred thousand. They’d weigh five hundred thousand pounds. Yeah, under that acceleration. So

Brian Keating
Half a million.

I yeah, it happened. Yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
500,000, your body weighing five hundred thousand pounds, you’re you’re gonna just turn into soup at the bottom of the at the on the floor. we can try to estimate the power involved in its maneuver, assuming that it accelerated halfway and then decelerated the other half to stop moving at zero feet at at sea level. And if you use that acceleration where it accelerates at 5,400 G’s halfway and then decelerates the other half.

you can try to estimate its power, but you need to know its mass. We don’t know its mass. We know its approximate size. David Fraver described it as being about the size of an F-18. And so what I did here is I just took one tenth of the mass of an F eighteen. So let’s say it’s one tenth as light as to only to weighs ten percent of the weight of an F-18. So it’s weighs so I’m trying to low I’m trying to lowball it here in a reasonable way.

And if we do that and calculate the power, this is a graph of the power over time for the required for this maneuver, the maximum power needed is eleven hundred gigawatts.

And that’s really, really a lot of power. this is more than ten times the total nuclear power output of the United States.

Brian Keating
Now Kevin, before we go on, you know, I’m a physicist that studies I study the cosmic microwave background, which was pioneered by Bob Dickey at at MIT Rad Labs and then later at Princeton University, and his colleague is his fellow professor there was David Wilkinson, who is my grand advisor. and so

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Yeah. Excuse me.

Brian Keating
I’m very conversant with the radar technology and and so forth. And I’m also a pilot, a pr you private pilot, although I do have a jet type rating in several classes of jets and commercial pilot, instrument pilot, etc. Now I’m not anywhere near the courage, you know. I said David Fravor has more courage in his left cuticle than I have in my whole body. You know, I couldn’t get into the military, let alone be as good a pilot as he is. I’ll stipulate that all

But I know a lot about radar and I know a lot about microwave energy and returns. so in order for this to be true, the returns are matter matter much more to me than than even Fravor, as great as an eyewitness he may be, and and and that I’ll stipulate, even though I have counterexamples that I can present later. But for radar to return, it has to reflect off something. So that can be any form of dielectric, it could be anything with you know relatively large or small cross section.

You’re assuming, you know, that it’s actually smaller than the visible, visible cross section of the same encounter by a factor of, you know, 10 or something like that, which which I think is more than fair because you’re trying to get, you know, a lower limit. You know, you’re trying to have some credulity in this and and not go to the extremes. But for this to simultaneously reflect and also be visible in the visible light spectrum and reflect it, that puts a bound on the dielectric constants that are permissible. And I’m wondering if, you know, we don’t know what it was made of.

But we certainly know that any material object that will make that return will have these ancillary characteristics, sonic booms, you know, extreme thermal heating. I mean, 10x, you know, the nuclear reactor output is is not insubstantial. So how do you rectify that as a scientist? How do you, you know, square the circle that this can’t be something, you know, some unknown material? It can’t be it can’t be a materials problem. It has to be reflective and it has to be reflective.

in the visible and in the in the millimeter wave or or microwave. How do you how do you reconcile those facts?

Prof. Kevin Knuth
I I haven’t thought about the radar return problem. and I haven’t thought about it that way in being able to say something about the dielectric constants of the hull of the object or the the the surface. So that’s that’s that’s an interesting question. That’s something I hadn’t even considered.

Brian Keating
Is it?

Brian Keating
Okay. All right. Maybe something we can work on together at some point. so go on, Kevin. Yeah, I didn’t want to derail you but I you know.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Yeah, no, and and with regard to the power output, yeah, ten times the total nuclear out power output of the United States, that’s shocking. I mean the pr ser here’s the real problem, and this is gonna come up again when I talk about luminosities, which are also incredibly high. But you’re you’re talking about one thousand gigawatts of power, right? And no engineering no engineered object is a hundred percent efficient.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Right. So let’s say, I mean, the things we make are usually at best, at best, you’re looking at 30% efficient for a machinery, right? And and so let’s say that these guys are really good at what they do, and it’s they can get it down to you know an efficiency of ninety-nine point nine percent efficient, right? So you’ve only got a point one percent inefficiency.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Let’s say they’re really very, very good. Even if you have a 0.1% inefficiency, that means that 0.1% of a thousand gigawatts is going to be leaking out in waste heat. That means a gigawatt of power in waste heat you’d have to deal with. That would melt any craft in a very short order. clearly.

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
something strange is going on. we’re we’re missing something. And it’s not quite clear what exactly what that is. and, you know, is could it be that these are not moving the way we think they’re moving? are they, you know, peep of course we have ideas about space-time warping and, you know, these are rather far out ideas that we don’t actually have a lot of evidence for. But it’s hard to reconcile the

these high Gs and having the any machinery or living being beings on top of it being able to survive accelerations like that. That’s a whole different problem. and then there’s other questions that the physicist comes up with. I mean that things that bother you. So this thing accelerates to so the thing accelerates to about forty thousand miles an hour at the midpoint and then decelerates to zero. Where did that energy go when it decelerated?

Brian Keating
That’s right.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Energy doesn’t disappear. You’ve gotta when this thing comes to a stop, that energy had to go somewhere. And you know, this power is correct. There should have been about two an explosion, about two hundred and fifty tomahawk cruise missiles worth of of explosion when the thing just stopped. that should have been catastrophic and wasn’t, right? so these things don’t make sonic booms. They don’t we have a lot of I I

Brian Keating
Right.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
I try to think about this as a detective. We have a lot of clues, but they’re not fitting together very well. It’s very odd. so this this isn’t this isn’t normal technology, clearly. And the but I think the power alone makes it clear that this is not human tech if if what’s going on what we think is going on.

Brian Keating
Right.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating
If it’s yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
So this is one example. We have another example where we have radar data. This is from the Japanese airlines case in 1986, where you’ve had a Japanese cargo plane 747 was flying from Tokyo, or it was it was actually going from Paris to Tokyo. I have that backwards. It was going from Paris to Tokyo when it encountered several UFOs over Alaska.

And and the the event culminated with a large UFO that was shaped like a walnut. There’s a drawing on the right here from the pilot. that and the pilot estimated to be about this size of four seven forty sevens. so this thing’s about the size of an aircraft carrier. when the pilot had said when it was in front of the plane, that was all he could see out the windscreen.

how wrong can a pilot be about this, right? So so the object’s there. I think that’s pretty clear. And it followed him for forty five minutes. They had military height finding radar had detected this and was was collected by the FAA and the FAA chief for ad accidents and investigations, John Callahan, actually made copies of the radar data

And kept them in a box under his desk until he retired, at which point he made them public. But he kept copies because President Reagan’s science team came and took all the data. They confiscated it. So he actually released the copies publicly. let’s see, and Dr. Daniel Kumbay, who was who was at the Niels Bohr Institute for some time, had analyzed this radar data and

looked at the acceleration made by several jumps is the so this ufo basically stayed about seven kilometers away from the airplane and just with every sweep of the it basically moved around the plane and with every sweep of the radar it would be on one side of the plane and then the next sweep of the radar would be at the other side of the plane. So you can estimate the minimum accelerations here. And you can see here on this table they’ve got the 11 jumps

Prof. Kevin Knuth
the accelerations you’re looking at there are several three cases where the acceleration’s coming up on ten thousand G’s.

Which is really, really insane, right? You’ve got something the size of an aircraft carrier accelerating at ten thousand Gs. The maximum speeds here, you’re if you were the maximum speed would be th Mach 350. And that’s basically close to two thousand or two hundred and sixty-nine thousand miles an hour. at that speed you can get to the moon in fifty-three minutes.

So if this is gonna be a two hour podcast and all, we could have left for the moon on this craft and gotten there and come right back in the amount of time that it’ll take you to watch this two hour podcast.

Brian Keating
So two questions before just continuing. So one is there are error bars here, which is very rare in this pseudo industry or you know, kind of this this t field of study, you know, that you have error bars. Exactly. And that’s why and that’s why we need more. I mean, I hear a lot of things about well b NASA suppressing this and and astronomer, you know, my friend Sarah Scholes wrote a book that, you know, they’re already here about, you know.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Right. Well that’s what happens when you get scientists involved. Academic scientists involved. Yep.

Brian Keating
sightings and so forth and she she just estimated, you know, how much time do astronomers like me and and my colleagues spend looking at all domains from ra longest wave radio waves to you know gamma rays in space? How much time are we observing, you know, so many staradians on the sky? And it’s a huge amount. And for for a UFO enthusiast, you know, to kind of besmirch a scientist and say that like, you’re just paid off by NASA. I mean, I I work for NASA once, you work for NASA.

But I think it’s more you’re I know exactly, right? I mean it never ha I was like, you know, are you getting paid by you know Galileo Project? Nope, you’re not getting any, you’re not getting a dime from it, as far as I understand. So this is a canard. I think that people are sloppy thinkers that are true believers, they do their cause a disservice because they don’t include error bars. An error bar, I always tell my students, Kevin, I know you teach a lot about Bayesian statistics. I’ve gone through your lecturing, you’re an award winning lecturer.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
I would love to be paid off by now. I would love somebody, anybody to pay me off would be great. We don’t get paid a lot as academic scientists.

Brian Keating
I’ve gone through your lectures. I’ve watched them. You know, my my take is that I don’t care if you get the answer right. Like I don’t care if you get the central value. You know, you measure G and you get it nine point eight meters per second squared, but you don’t tell me that your error bar is a hundred meters per second squared, plus or minus, you know, on the plus side and minus ten meters per. That’s my problem with the Drake equation. It’s always presented as a equation for a number as if that’s what we do. No, no.

The sign of a good scientist is what error bar he or she can assign to it and the breakdown in that error in terms of systematic and statistical errors. My first question is what are those errors? Are they statistical? Are they systematic? And my second question is, this thing was flying at, you know, for for an hour at at 747 speeds, call it 500 miles an hour, pretty much. Let’s round up, round numbers. And so this thing was tracked over what? I mean, Alaska is not that big. So, you know, how are they tracking this thing for that long?

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating
Getting this data and and what to w what can we ascribe these errors bars to first?

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Right. Well when you calculate errors like this, but st what you’re doing is you are characterizing the

Prof. Kevin Knuth
You c you can’t you can’t actually estimate systematic error because you would need to know what the true value is to estimate that, right? You’d have to have some handle on what the true value is. So you can never really estimate a systematic error. so what you’re doing is you’re basically looking at the error of the you’re you’re basically kind you’re calculating a probability distribution of the acceleration.

Which is what I showed on this previous slide. This is actually what this is giving you. this was done by sampling, which is why it’s fuzzy. But this is the probability distribution for the acceleration. That’s that’s the answer that Bayesian statistics would give you, right? And and I can report, you know. So what do you want to report? Well, I can report the the mode, the peak. I can find the peak. I should fit this to a curve and I found the peak. I can report the mode, I can report the the mean.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
So I can calculate the average value, which is not going to be quite at the same place that the mode is. so you could so you actually have multiple numbers you can report. And then you have your uncertainties, which you can estimate another way. And uncertainty is a way of estimating the width of the distribution. So what’s typically done is once you find the mode, you you know where the mode is the peak. Once you know where the peak is, you can then

You can look at the curvature of the peak, and basically you’re fitting a Gaussian distribution to this, and that and you take the the standard deviation of that Gaussian distribution, fit to the peak, you use that as the measure of the width of this distribution. Now in this case, it’s asymmetric, it’s clearly an asymmetric distribution. So what I did is I I actually fit a one Gaussian to the left side and a second Gaussian to the right side, and then I used the

the standard deviation of the each Gaussian is the plus or minus. So it has a different plus or minus, whether you’re on the plus side or the le or the minus side. And that’s basically what’s happening here with the with the accelerations. So your so that so conceptually what the uncertainty is telling you is it gives you the an idea of the precision of your estimation procedure.

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Brian Keating
Yes.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
And that’s really what the uncertainty means. And that’s what the uncertainties in pretty much any scientific calculation actually give you. You can’t you can’t easily estimate uncertainty and any any kind of bias unless you know what that bias is.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
And and and the uncertainties are important because it tells you how well you know the answer, right? Right. So when you when I s when when I get as an answer this distribution, I tell you 5400 Gs. I don’t know that it’s exactly 5400 Gs, it’s probably somewhere in here. And that’s what that uncertainty tells you. And I didn’t list the uncertainty on this slide because it just will make it more busy than it already is.

Brian Keating
Right.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
but in the research paper that you can find online I have the uncertainties listed there.

Brian Keating
Got it. Okay. Yep. So let’s go on.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Yeah. And in fact, when I worked at NASA, I tell I tell my students, you have to be willing to learn new things when you’re actually working as a scientist. And you know, because many times students, especially when they get into graduate school, they think, Well, I’m all done taking classes, I don’t have to learn anything else. I’m like, no, that’s actually not true. you’ve got it backwards exactly.

Brian Keating
That’s backwards,

Prof. Kevin Knuth
And when I worked at NASA, we were it was the early 2000s and and NASA was producing information about climate change and Congress came back and said they pushed back and said, Look, what is your what are your uncertainties about? How certain are you about these results? And NASA needed to go back and redo some of the work to produce those uncertainties. And and so I actually got

Called into my boss’s office and they said, Kevin, we have to do some work on estimating uncertainties for climate change. And you’re one of the only experts we have in this department that can calculate those uncertainties. So I need you to work on climate problems. And I was like,

Wait a I do astrophysics, I’m not a climate scientist. Like and I and I told myself, but I’m not a climate scientist. I don’t know anything about climate. He goes, Yeah, that’s why you’re going to learn. He goes, We’re going to send you to NASA Gis in New York City and you’re going to train with them for six months and and like you’re yep, I’m gonna learn for the whole you know, for the whole next two years about climate, earth planet climates and this so yeah, that happens and you have to you have to do it and

Brian Keating
That’s right, yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
That’s how you’re that’s how you become successful.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
And so what did I do that night? I panicked. I went to the bookstore to find a book on atmospheres or climate or something and I was poking around and the most useful book I found was my little golden book on clouds and it was through cloud types and I just bought it. I thought I don’t even know what kinds of clouds there are. So I should maybe learn this first. So I so it was a it was literally a kid’s book. I thought I’m gonna start with the kids’ book tonight. We’ll build up.

Brian Keating
Okay.

Yeah.

Okay, great.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Alright, so yes, so so these accelerations are insane. And what can you do with these accelerations? What if this is actually a spacecraft? I mentioned here you can get to the moon in 53 minutes. What if you were traveling further? So now and I make this point in the paper. Not only do these objects have flight characteristics necessary for interstravel tell interstellar travel, excuse me, they would make excellent interstellar craft.

So a 1000 G acceleration, one fifth of the one fifth of what the Nimitz case was observed doing, and one tenth of the acceleration that was observed in JAL, you can get to ninety percent the speed of light in about seventeen hours.

Brian Keating
Fifty years, dark men are explained like

Brian Keating
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Once you’re going 90% the speed of light, you relativity kicks in. Time slows down, distances change. you can actually travel much, much further. So yeah, so if if these objects can sustain an acceleration in space, a 1000 G acceleration will get you to 30% the speed of light in 2.7 hours. how far could you go? Well, here’s some examples. The the the nimits

Brian Keating
yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Tic Tacs could get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, in less than one and a half days. It’s a day trip. and actually could make it to out to Zeta Reticulli, which is in Trappus I, which are about forty light years away, in less than two days. yeah, this is the amount of time it’ll take you to drive from New York to Florida. you could get to the nearest stars, right, within forty light years, and there’s what?

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
There’s probably 80 some like stars in the forty light year range. I don’t know the exact number.

Brian Keating
Yeah, a lot. Yeah, mu way more than I think thousand, forty light year radius, yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Yeah, it’s it’s right. So and those were just I I I think I was just thinking about sun like stars. So you’ve got red red dwarves, which are gun Trappus one is a red dwarf goes around a red dwarf star, so there’s plenty of plenty of places to go. Yeah, so these craft now now granted, and you’ll hear you’ll hear scientists say this all the time when they complain about interstellar travel, they say, it

Brian Keating
Sunlike stars, yeah, yeah.

Brian Keating
That’s right.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Even if you can go fast, it’ll still take you, you know, forty years to get to Zeta reticuli. Well, it’ll take you forty years in the frame of the galaxy. For everybody in the galaxy, it takes forty years. For the traveler, it takes less than two days. And there’s a time difference and just cause time slows down. Now what that means is that you can’t you can’t fly from Zeta reticuli to the sun.

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Brian Keating
That’s right.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
hang out for an afternoon and then fly back to Zeta Reticuli and make it home for dinner. you’ll for you it’ll be a four day trip. for everybody on Zeta Reticuli or Earth it’ll be an eighty year trip. Right. So so this is what makes this is what makes interstellar travel hard, not the fact that you can do it. Do you want to is the question. And actually I gave a talk at SCU, one of the first SCU meetings where I

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
I noted that if you actually had a nomadic society, so that you had a society that lived on their spaceships, didn’t live on a planet, they lived on spaceships, they then could do this easily because you would just meet up. So so you and I will meet up on Earth. I’ll go visit Zeta Reticula. You want to go to Trappist One, we take off and go there and then say we’ll meet back in two weeks. We come back two weeks later, and it’s

literally eighty weeks later on Earth, but for us it’s only two weeks later. that’s that’s how you could do it.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
And and there are not as many nomadic societies on Earth now as there used to be, but there still are nomadic societies. in sp in fact in Southeast Asia, there’s a society that lives they live entirely on their boats, and that’s what they do. All right, so transmedium travel and unidentified submerged objects. So we’ll now look at another class.

Another set of data. So I’ve looked at these accelerations. These are much higher than humans could could make. You already saw that this little Tic Tac, a thousand kilogram tic-tac would in doing its 5000 G maneuver would put out would require a thousand gigawatts. I I can’t even guess what an aircraft carrier sized craft would require to do a 10,000 G acceleration.

you’re looking at something way, way orders of magnitude beyond that.

Brian Keating
yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
And now let’s see here, something has happened. There we go. All right, so underwater objects. this is a this is the Aguadilla object.

And and Doug Bettner gave a talk at SCU and argued that that a lot of the strangeness of this object was actually due to the fact that you had a lot of video compression going on. And so so this may not be the this isn’t my good power example. It was just an example of transmedium travel. UFOs have been observed going from air into water and from water into air pretty seamlessly. And

Humans can’t do that very well. The one of the craft that we have that does this is a is a a seaplane. A seaplane, I love that example, because a seaplane is neither a good plane nor a good boat. So so it’s the worst of all worlds, but it can do both. And that’s that’s where we’re at. now of course there’s new drones that can probably go in and out of water more easily. I’m sure we’re working on things like this.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating
That’s right. The worst of all worlds, right?

Brian Keating
Trons, yeah.

That’s right.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
The one encounter that I find fascinating is from February of nineteen eighty-seven, where the New Zealand frigate, the HMNZS Southland, was involved in daily echo exercises from November to February, where they were basically trying to lure USOs in from the Pacific Ocean into the Haraki Gulf.

So they basically would go out into the go out north out of Auckland through the Heraki Gulf, out into the Pacific Ocean, then turn around and come back and watch on their sonar to see if they’re followed, and then try to study these objects. in February of 1987, they were followed by a large underwater object, which they measured to be 150 feet wide and 800 feet long. This is 30% longer than the typhoon class submarine, which is the

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Largest submarine in the world, the Russian typhoon class. it and they noted that they did not detect propeller wash on any of these objects. So they couldn’t identify whether they were Russian or American, if they were submarines. they weren’t typical submarines, there was no propeller wash. it does not escape me that the movie Hunt for Red October came out the same year, basically. And

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
And I know about this, and and and then that’s an interesting fact. But so they were followed by this USO for some time. They tried to shake it, and at at one point the USO was twenty two point five kilometers away, and they were trying to shake this, and it closed the distance in about three seconds. So this underwater object accelerated to the ship.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating
Mm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
passed under the ship in about three seconds and and actually took all the power out on the ship. the power went out on the ship, drained the batteries so they couldn’t restart the engines and they were adrift and had to be rescued. they had so you can do this calculation, this rough calculation. It closed a 2.5 kilometer distance in about three seconds, so you get a minimum speed of 1800 miles an hour.

Brian Keating
Mm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Or if it you have it accelerating, it would have a minimum acceleration of five 57 G’s with a top speed of 37,000 mile 3700 miles an hour. So this is a really interesting case. And in fact, I was on a Zoom call with David Barnett last night. We talked we talked for almost two and a half hours. I was really grateful for his time going over the go of the time. I actually have a printout of the

raw sonar data. The raw sonar the basically the the this there’s a stylus that was moving across a sheet of paper as the paper’s printing showing the the actual sonar returns. So I actually have a have a scan of that. Sadly it is

That sheet of paper is 40 years old at this point and has faded a great deal because the stylus was actually burning into the paper and it’s not a very powerful burn, so it’s all very faint. And I’m not sure I can actually pull the speeds and accelerations out of it for out of that sonar data yet. But we were talking last night about how to go about doing that.

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Now it’s amazing is since then, and since since I first noted this, I first talked about this case in the Seoul meeting in 2023. And since then a number of people have tried to get information about the Southlands activities in November through February of n eighty six, eighty-seven. and it’s all classified. their activities are classified.

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
But people have learned other things. There were other ships involved. the there was an Australian ship that was there. And and I don’t have my notes with me. My notes are in the other room because I just learned this all last night and I haven’t transcribed them yet. But but the Australian ship traveled with them for some time and then l left and then disappeared, dropped out of communication, just before this event happened.

And they dropped out of communication and then put out a distress call and they had had some kind of encounter and had to they made it back to Sydney and then had to go in for refitting. and and then there was also an American aircraft carrier involved that the Americans the American records say that it was that it was Doctor Alameda, California. but

No, it was not. It was actually out in the Pacific Ocean in the same area. So what they were doing is they were they were going out north of Auckland over along the Kermetic Trench. So the Kermetic Trench is a very long trench that goes from it’s an undersea subduction zone. The trench goes from the north, northern part of New Zealand all the way up to Tonga. And

Brian Keating
Mm-hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
at at its deepest it’s 33,000 feet deep. So so there was a lot going on. And then there was also another New Zealand ship involved that the HMNZS IIE and I think that was the one that was fitted with the the at the time modern British toll ray sonar and they were actually mapping areas of the trench. So this

Brian Keating
Hmm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
apparently was an activity to study these USOs or these underwater objects. that was a collaboration between the New Zealanders, the Australians, and the Americans. and a lot of this is classified. One of the I he showed me a screenshot, one of the records from what the HMNZS Southland was doing is was classified for 75 years. You’re not getting that data, we’re not getting that

Brian Keating
Yeah, that’s

Prof. Kevin Knuth
File until 2062 or something crazy like that. It’s worse than the Kennedy assassination. What are they doing in the Kermetic trench? It’s a good question. All right, so so let’s go back to the points of energy and power, right? So we’ve got speeds and accelerations. So how how do you move at 3,700 miles an hour underwater? And and this isn’t a small object. Basically, you’ve got

Brian Keating
It’s like worse than the Kennedy assassination or the

Prof. Kevin Knuth
This object has got to push a cylinder of water out of the way, right? and this this is a what 2.5 kilometers. That’s a mile, a mile-long cylinder of water with 150-foot diameter has to be pushed out of the way. Now, water is not compressible. Anybody who’s done a belly flop off of a low dive or high dive knows this. water is not compressible. You can’t compress it. So you have to lift up the water, right?

Brian Keating
So this is not Yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
You have to lift up the water. So you can estimate how the now you can estimate the power, the amount of energy it takes. Because they’ve got to basically lift up a one mile long column of water. You’ve got to lift it up about 150 feet, right? In what was it? How many seconds? It was what 30 seconds, right? So now we can calculate the amount of power here. I actually work out this calculation. So how much mass was involved?

Brian Keating
It’s thirty seconds, yeah, yeah.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Well how first first let’s figure out the mass of the object and mass of the object. I don’t know the mass of the object, but it’s underwater, so it has to at least have the mass of the water. It’s at least as dense as the water. If it wasn’t as dense as the water, it would be floating. So as a lower limit, you can figure out the the size of the object and because they know it was 150 foot.

In diameter and 800 feet long. So you’ve got a mass of about four times 10 to the eighth kilograms. this thing had to accelerate, so you can figure out the power from its motion. That’s going to be the the mass times the acceleration squared times the time. That’s how I’ll calculate that. And then now it also has to lift up a one mile-long column of water, and you have to do this in 30 seconds. So this is basically the calculation for that.

Now we can look at the amount of power it takes for this to happen. As it’s speeding up, it’s doing more it’s taking more power. So you’re you know the top power is you’re looking at something like something on the order of ten to the eighth megawatts. let’s see, is that right or is that

Let me go back. I’m worried that I have messed up the units on my

Prof. Kevin Knuth
I may have messed up the units on my chart here because I’m thinking if it’s if this is ten to the eighth megawatts, ten to the eighth megawatts is ten to the fourteen, which is more than insane. So so I’ve got to double check that. But you can you can do the math here. How’s that for that? So you’re dealing with you’re you’re dealing again with megawatts, you know, many, many megawatts of power.

w to be able to pull this off. You’ve got to take power to move the move the object and you’ve got to displace the water. insane amount of power. So what other evidence do we have? We have luminosities. Some of these things are really crazy bright. This is one thing that one of the many things that s Steven Spielberg got writing Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, people get sunburnt from these things. That happens.

Brian Keating
Right.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
So some of them are extremely luminous, and so much so that the photographs are difficult to interpret. So these are all photographs of UFOs where they’re just glowing in white. They’re very, very bright. The this image here taken in 1956 over the Canadian Rockies in Alberta. we can Bruce Maccabe and Jacques Villet actually had access to the actual film.

And counted silver grains to basically figure out how much and what the intensity of light was hitting the camera. So you can actually yeah, so Dr. Bruce Maccabee did study this and Jacques Vallet is also summarized and reported. So you can look at the radiance of the object and and how that’s going to relate to camera parameters and

Brian Keating
Wow.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Basically, they measure the exposure levels and the shutter times and estimated the radiance to be this much. So it’s yeah, well, there’s interesting units there. Luminosity units are hard anyway, or radiance units two watts per stair radium centimeters squared, right? for so for an isotropic source. So if what do you mean by isotropic? If this thing is radiating uniformly in all directions, then the distance

For the distance between the plane and the object, which was estimated to be between six and twenty kilometers, you’re looking at a power of two thousand five hundred to thirty thousand megawatts.

Brian Keating
Mm.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
That’s a lot of light. That’s a crazy amount of light. And I have a bit of a problem with that because if it’s putting out that much light and it’s close to the clouds, the clouds should be illuminated pretty much as much as the sun is illuminating them. So so I then thought, well, let’s redo the calculation, assuming that it’s a directed light. So it’s shining a light on the airplanes.

Brian Keating
Yeah.

Brian Keating
Yeah, that’s weird.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
And if you do this, you come down to a lesser power of 1.7 kilowatts. That’s not as shocking, but it’s still a a kilowatt of light is a lot of light. And and that’s pretty amazing. Now

Jacques Villet, Luc Denis, and Jeffrey Mystery Meschersky had published a paper in Progress in Aerospace Sciences last year where they estimated the radiative energy in ground level observations based on bark being burnt. So this is the Hainesville, Louisiana case where an physicist actually was driving with his family and they witnessed a pulsating light in the forest.

Which started as a red orange glow and became a brilliant white flash, illuminating the whole woods, and it drowned out the headlights. And what the

Th what the Professor Galloway noted is when it drowned out the headlights, he he knew the amount of power in the headlights and he was able to estimate that the light coming from this thing in the forest was had to be megawatts of power. And that worried him. He actually s turned the car around and went the other way when drove away from it, which is probably a smart idea.

Brian Keating
Uh-huh.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
so the object itself wasn’t seen. they were able to locate where it had that it had landed. It had landed in a clearing in the forest, and the trees around the clearing were all scorched from the from the light from this object. And so

Prof. Kevin Knuth
So this was actually described in the Condon report. And the Condon report actually recalculated some of these power and actually had a higher po amount of power. they did not have a good explanation for what happened and they left it as an uncertain event. when yeah, no, when Jacques Villet and Luc Denis and Ms. Jeffrey Mistherski looked at this, they were able to get power estimates closer to

closer to five hundred megawatts of light. So that’s a again, a crazy amount of light. humans don’t make things that that’s a nuclear power plant’s worth of light, right? So so this is not a human made object.

Brian Keating
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Brian Keating
So Kevin, we’re I don’t wanna go past the half hour, but we haven’t done the podcast yet. Yeah, okay, great. Yeah, let’s finish this up and then switch to the podcast. Yeah. Go for it.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
right. I’m basically on my conclusion slide. I think this will we’re I think we’re good.

Yeah, so so the minimal power estimates, estimates that we’re making here and basically in s in radar recorded maneuvers, sonar recorded maneuvers greatly exceed the power produced by nuclear power plants. And the minimal power estimates in the luminosity alone are on the order of nuclear power plants. So I think this is this to me is the strongest evidence that we have that we’re

not dealing with human technology.

humans don’t make vehicles that have the amount of that exhibit the amount of power of a nuclear power plant. It just doesn’t happen. it’s dangerous. It would be dangerous for us to do that. and it could be catastrophic. and and in fact, it here is an interesting point. It suggests I mentioned this earlier, it’s suggests an exceptional engineering since if even if you had a one percent inefficiency of a one gigawatt system.

That would give you ten megawatts of waste heat, which would be catastrophic. Now we do have a few cases where you have UFOs having trouble, right? You’ve got the Ubatuba incident in Brazil where the UFO was clearly was wobbling and all over the place, and the people observing it noted that they thought it was in trouble and then it just exploded. the and and some of that debris and

Prof. Kevin Knuth
And material’s been collected and has been studied. And then you have the the case in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where you’ve got the UFO that basically was dumping molten metal in the forest. And that also happened in Puget Sound in 1947. so could it be that in those UFOs they had a problem with their engineering system and they were basically melting the inside of their craft? That’s very possible. Well that that could be what’s going on.

but these aren’t, you know, these are not human made objects. And the power estimates in propulsion plus the fact that the objects do not seem to be interacting with their environment suggests that we’re observing non Newtonian propulsion or motion. They’re not moving in the way that we move. what that means exactly, I don’t know. but it opens the door to new, you know, is this new engineering or new physics? that’s debatable.

And we don’t have enough ev evidence to decide on those things yet. But some of these UAP are extremely anomalous when it comes to energy and power. And I think that’s important to keep in mind.

Brian Keating
Well, Gavin, this is great. I would like to push back as much as I can respectfully, as I have a cr tremendous amount of respect. I think the the key gripping question that I cannot really let go of, you know, just despite how much I love your work and and respect you and and resonate with a lot of what you’ve said is that.

You know, these cannot be, I agree, these cannot be human technology, but that’s predicated that all of these, you know, sensors all agree that these are actually true signals. In other words, they’re not artifacts and they’re not hallucinations, they’re not you know, the reports of of you know planets and swamp guests. And the key thing I keep coming back to is my friend David Spergl, a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the president of the Simons Foundation. He led NASA’s blue ribbon panel a couple of years back.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Ha ha.

Brian Keating
With my colleague here at UCSD, Shelly Wright, who’s also a legitimate hardcore scientist, but also is investigating extraterrestrial intelligence using pulses of light and other modes. She won the Drake medal. She’s she’s an esteemed scientist. that that commission found, you know, basically 95% of the things reported then had explanations. And we can never, as scientists, expect 100% lack of residuals.

And I think the anomalous residuals create n you know, it’s like the Pareto principle, 8020 per principle, except it’s 95.5. And that’s what I want to talk to you about on the podcast. So if you haven’t watched the podcast, go over to check out the podcast with Kevin Knuth. And we’ll see you over there. And we’ll get into some of the debate between two, you know, friendly debate, gentlemanly debate between two physicists that are seeking the truth. And I think that’s what I love most about what Kevin does. So Kevin, thank you for this lecture. And now we’ll

Prof. Kevin Knuth
thank you. Yeah.

Brian Keating
We’ll see you over on the other on the podcast now. Okay, so let’s stop this.

Prof. Kevin Knuth
Sounds good.