Transcript

Brian Keating:
Today on Keating’s Razor. And I’ll just acknowledge right up front for a series called Keating’s Razor, it might be a little too appropriate, almost as if it’s a suspicious coincidence that we’re opening a Keating’s Razor video with a story about surgical precision allegedly being applied to cattle in 1980s Montana. I didn’t plan it that way. The universe did. So let’s get to it.

Kevin Knuth:
Where’s the beef when people are abducted by gray aliens? There were 60% of the people reported around the world that they were given babies to hold. Why would anyone reported that? They may have the mindset Earth is their planet, right? And we happen to live here. I don’t think anybody’s ready for this, really.

Brian Keating:
Today’s claim. Kevin Knuth, a working physicist, a former NASA scientist, a member of the physics community I respect. He believes aliens are very probably in our own solar system. He’s written a paper about the so called Tic Tac event, and he’s done the math on the Nimitz encounter.

Kevin Knuth:
And there was a cattle mutilation in Bozeman on a ranch that night. There were 100 phone calls to the sheriff’s office about UFOs. And then you have this cattle mutilation where there were two cows that were killed and surgically manipulated. It was very bizarre.

Brian Keating:
He traces all of it, the whole arc of his research, back to a story about cattle mutilations in Montana that happened in 1988. And he told it all to my friend Mayim Bialik recently. And here’s what most people missed about that interview. Mayim, throughout the interview was running the exact same methodology I’m about to apply. So this isn’t going to be a Brian versus Kevin. This is going to be about two scientists who looking for truth, using one set of inference. Does it make the Keating’s Razor cut? Let’s find out. Every claim gets a close shave.

Brian Keating:
Some survive, most don’t make the cut. Before I slice and dice anything, I’m going to tell you what’s not weak about Kevin’s case. Because a lot of people who roll their eyes at UAP research haven’t actually heard the steel version of it. Kevin is not the caricature of some armchair physicist. He’s a tenured professor of physics, a decorated educator at the University of Albany, the State University of New York, my ancestral homeland. He spent years at NASA Ames Research Center. He publishes about exoplanets in top astrophysics journals like the Astrophysical Journal. He teaches Bayesian inference and mathematical physics.

Brian Keating:
And he’s worked on exoplanet detection, actual exosolar planets found by actual telescopes in actual peer reviewed venues. This is a man who is a real scientist with a real track record, real peer reviewed publications, and you should set that down as a fact before we go any further. Kevin’s argument on the UAP question runs like, Claim one, there are sightings clustered around nuclear sites going back to the 1940s, before nuclear bombs were even loaded. Claim two, the speeds and accelerations reported in some of the encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, including encounters with multiple instruments, multiple platforms like boats and aircraft, with trained observers, are extraordinary.

Kevin Knuth:
I have friends who work up, who are in the Air Force, who work up at Malmstrom Air Force Base in northern Montana, and they have problems there with UFOs flying over the nuclear missile sites and shutting down our nuclear missiles.

Brian Keating:
He estimated the Nimitz tic tac physics himself. And the numbers do not look like weather balloons, swamp gas or the planet Venus. Claim three, cross cultural patterns reported in abductions shows up from Nepal to Congo to Chicago in cases from before the Internet even existed.

Kevin Knuth:
When people are abducted by gray aliens, there were 60% of the people reported around the world that they were given babies to hold before they. So they would have some medical tests done, something’s medically done to them, and then before they were sent back home they would be given babies to hold. And I was like, wait, why would anyone reported that? That’s bizarre. And so that was one of the surprising things. But it turns out it’s 60% of the cases from Nepal to Congo to Chicago. It’s pretty, it’s, it’s again something. And these are old cases, so these are things that you wouldn’t.

Brian Keating:
And lastly, when you irradiate alleged crash debris with neutrons in a lab, sometimes you get something extraordinary, something genuinely strange. And Kevin himself, in his own words, when Mayim asked him about it, an experience he had, he said, I don’t say that because I don’t know. And when Mayim pressed him about a personal experience he had, he was careful to relate the fact that it was his own personal experience, not a documented scientific fact in a laboratory. He said, I don’t say that because I don’t know what the hell a ghost really is.

Mayim Bialik:
Are you comfortable with saying I’m a physicist and I saw a ghost?

Kevin Knuth:
I don’t say that because I don’t know what the hell a ghost is. So I can’t really say it was a ghost.

Brian Keating:
That’s a careful man, a true Scientist. He’s not a true believer. He’s a true scientist. He doesn’t say what it is. He says something happened. This is a real physicist with real data, doing the real work, being careful with his language, but not overly careful. But we have to be careful too. And with Keating’s razor, it turns out that Mayim did some of the hard slicing for us already.

Brian Keating:
The subject today is something that’s near and dear to every animal lover on Earth. It takes us back to 1988. Kevin Knuth had been at Bozeman, Montana in graduate school for one whole week. All of a sudden, two cows are found mutilated in a field outside town. Surgical looking incisions, organs removed, no tracks, no blood. Now, cattle country takes these things seriously. And within days, the local sheriff’s office logs roughly a hundred phone calls from people about UFOs. A senior physics professor in Kevin’s own department wanders out of his laboratory and makes a comment connecting the cattle to the wave of UFO reports near Malmstrom Air Force Base.

Brian Keating:
The missile silo shutdowns, the lights over the launch facilities, all of it. That comment becomes a running joke in the physics department. For many people it stays a joke. But 27 years later, Kevin watches a press conference by Robert Hastings. Now Hastings is a journalist who spent decades documenting Air Force veterans testimonials about strange sightings, including UFOs at nuclear sites. And Kevin realizes the joke back then wasn’t a joke. The professor in 1988 had been telling him something that he was too young, or perhaps unwilling to hear. That moment, that retroactive realization, is the moment Kevin’s research pivoted on a dime.

Brian Keating:
From there, he writes the Tic Tac paper. From there he starts thinking about UFOs and, and UAPs as serious physics questions. And here’s the first cut in Keating’s razor. What Kevin had in 1988 was a story. What he had in 2015 was a second story that resembled the first. That’s so far not evidence. But that’s a pattern. And pattern recognition is ironically, something that Kevin himself recognizes.

Brian Keating:
He acknowledged this on Mayim’s show, that humans are wired to find patterns even when no such underlying causation exists.

Mayim Bialik:
Humans like to find patterns and we, we are wired to recognize patterns. And sometimes that means we will create patterns where they don’t exist. And when we’re talking about this kind of data, it’s very tempting to piece it together into a pattern that points to there are aliens.

Brian Keating:
He said it, and Mayim and I agree with him, but I want to apply it to his own experience and see where it takes us. Now, I want to take just a minute to tell you what this series is because if you’re new here on my channel, you’ve just watched the first four minutes of a series I’m calling Keating’s Razor. It’s going to be a new continuing series on this channel, so I owe you a quick explanation of what you’ve gotten yourself into. On every episode of Keating’s Razor, a claim will get a close shave. Some will survive, but most don’t. But all get a fair hearing. We’ll approach it scientifically. We’ll use evidence data.

Brian Keating:
We’ll test hypotheses. We’ll use induction deduction and even a little abduction. We’ll give a green light if the claim holds up, yellow if it’s wounded but not dead, and red if it got sliced through and didn’t survive the cut. Today’s claim. You can probably guess where I’m going, but the verdict isn’t in at this point. The work to get to the verdict is the point. That’s what the Keating Razor is. Now, here’s what this is not.

Brian Keating:
I’m not interested in dunking on people or participating in crank to crank warfare. There’s plenty of YouTubers who will spend a full day or week of their lives explaining why someone’s stupid or doesn’t deserve to be listened to or is a grifter or is a fool and only they should be listened to. God bless them. That’s not what I’m here for. Keating’s Razor is for serious people interested in in serious science. Working scientists, but curious laypeople, credentialed researchers and people with a passion for understanding more and wanting to go deeper, even if they didn’t have scientific training in their past. Kevin’s not like that. He’s a NASA scientist.

Brian Keating:
He’s a professor. He’s an educator. Future episodes will look at people whose work I’ve studied for a long time. Again, targets or dunking or poking fun. That’s easy to do because they put themselves out there. Now, sometimes it’s unavoidable. I’m going to disagree with certain claims and these people that I disagree with are often very smart themselves. They deserve a steel man before they get the cutting verdict.

Brian Keating:
That’s the rule of the show. Steel man first cut with steel second verdict comes last. We try again next time. We often tell our students that all questions are good questions, but that’s not always true in science. Not all Intentions are good intentions. Not all scientists are trustworthy. And the ones who still get things wrong are the ones sometimes that get the most attention. The razor is the tool that I use to figure out which is which.

Brian Keating:
Subscribe and you’ll catch every one of these close shaves. Okay, now back to the cattle mutilation money.

Kevin Knuth:
Knew something was going on, right?

Mayim Bialik:
But that’s also selection bias, right? Because if they were to say, we’d like you to report alien sightings near dairy farms, you know, I can’t go back in time, at least not currently, and say, well, if we had been looking at dairy farms, you know, maybe. And again, I’m devil’s advocate here. Maybe people who think that they’re seeing UFOs will see them anywhere you tell them to look.

Kevin Knuth:
That’s very true. Possible.

Brian Keating:
Yeah. That right there, that’s a scientist instinct fully intact. Mime is not in the lab anymore, but it’s impossible to take the lab out of the scientist. She studied neuroscience and has a PhD from UCLA. She. She caught the selection bias before Kevin could even finish his thought. And she pushed it even further than I would have into the priming question. What do witnesses do when you tell them where to look? That’s neuroscience, not astrophysics.

Brian Keating:
It’s her methodology being applied to UAP data in real time. Kevin nodded. He kind of had to, because she had him dead to rights. You don’t get a PhD in neuroscience and interview some of the brightest people on the planet and forget how to ask whether a correlation is truly a causation. Mayim asked it. Kevin answered it. But his answer didn’t survive the question. And to give him his due, he recognized it.

Brian Keating:
Now, for my atheist friends, like past guest Richard Dawkins, you’ve heard of God, of the gaps. It’s an old theological problem. Every time science explains some unexplained phenomena, the apologist retreats. Lightning isn’t divine wrath. Its electricity may be interacting with cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. Disease isn’t from sin, it’s from microbes. Mental illness isn’t possession or witchcraft. It’s in neurochemistry.

Brian Keating:
Each gap closes, and the deity has to relocate to a smaller and smaller region. A tinier and tinier gap. I want to introduce a parallel. Aliens are the gaps. Same move, different ceiling. Every time we encounter something we cannot immediately explain. An unusual sensor anomaly. A strange movement caught on camera.

Brian Keating:
A coincidence and correlation between sightings of eyewitness testimonials, weird patterns around sensitive sites. Cultural patterns that appear around the globe. The Inference jumps not to we don’t know yet, not to let’s design a probing experiment that we could falsify but rather to therefore non human intelligence exists and that non human intelligence is visiting us, interacting with us. Now the problem isn’t that aliens are impossible. Aliens are real or they aren’t. That’s an empirical question, one we can approach with the tools of epistemology. But aliens as the answer to every unexplained pattern in your data set, well that’s not necessarily science, that’s apologetics with a flying saucer. So let’s apply this to Kevin’s specific cases.

Brian Keating:
Lets go back to the Malmstrom Air Force base shutdowns. Kevin himself acknowledges that guidance malfunction in 1960s Nuclear control systems is perhaps a defensible explanation. Soviet spoofing using electronic warfare is another. Aliens is a third hypothesis. Now that’s just three, three hypotheses. The third one is the one that the data supports least the 60% cross cultural pattern in abduction reports. The babies, the medical procedures, the gray figures, those are cultural impressions that transmit via film, via comics, via the Internet, et cetera. There’s a whole communion template that Whitley striber published in 1987.

Brian Keating:
I remember that. That’s a hypothesis. Sleep paralysis universals across human neurology, that’s also a hypothesis. It’s generally shared an encounter with non human intelligence, that’s another hypothesis. Again three options. Now to his credit, Kevin admits he initially didn’t want to think of the least probable alien abduction phenomena as being the real explanation. But then he encountered data and he updated however towards the rarest of the three available hypotheses. Now that’s exactly the move that the Keatings razor is designed to catch and the materials work.

Brian Keating:
Matthew Zigdages, a serious experimental physicist on also at Kevin’s institution, University of Albany, has been running the actual neuron activation analysis, neutron activation analysis on alleged crash debris. And Kevin to his enormous credit, quoted Zegatis directly on Mayim’s show. Zadigad says I have analyzed more Earth dirt than I ever would have imagined. Not strange material Earth dirt. That’s the most important sentence in the entire interview.

Kevin Knuth:
Just quote Matthew here one day I asked him how it was going and what he’s found. And he goes I have analyzed more Earth dirt than I would have ever imagined, basically. And that’s one of the problems we’re finding here. The UFO community is thrilled that we scientists are involved, but in a lot of ways we ruin everything. We ruin all the fun. And because we find out that most of these things are not that interesting. And so most of these material he’s analyzed, it’s not interesting and clearly not alien.

Brian Keating:
The honest result of years of material science research, the irradiation, the probing, the sensing, is that the materials are not exotic. That should update Kevin to the downward position, but it doesn’t appear to.

Kevin Knuth:
So they were actually moving military equipment around to get UFOs to come. And that would typically happen within 24 hours. So light travels 186,000 miles a second. Right, got it.

Brian Keating:
That’s a self undermining trick. And Mayim walked Kevin right into it, but gently. She didn’t argue even against the alien hypothesis. She argued, you can’t have it both ways. Either the constraint applies and the speeds are impossible, or the speeds are possible and the constraint doesn’t always apply. That’s not skepticism, that’s basic logic. And again, she did it without raising her temper or her voice with humor. She even made a joke about the aliens being hangry.

Brian Keating:
We can all relate to that. Or maybe they were fighting with their alien wives over which direction to turn. But then Mayim asked a killer question.

Mayim Bialik:
So your solution to my question is they live here.

Kevin Knuth:
They have to live within one light day of this, of Earth.

Mayim Bialik:
What’s a light day?

Kevin Knuth:
So that basically puts them in our solar system somewhere. So they have to be somewhere in our solar system and very possibly here on Earth already. The Soviets, when trying to study some of these objects, would make military maneuvers, especially naval maneuvers. So they would perform these large naval maneuvers that would typically just confuse the United States. But what the Soviets were doing is they would make this large naval maneuver and then UFOs would show up and they would study them. So they were actually moving military equipment around to get UFOs to come. And that would typically happen within 24 hours. So light travels 186,000 miles a second.

Kevin Knuth:
Right, got it. So you. So for a UFO to get here in 24 hours, the light would have had to travel out information some distance and then they have to travel back.

Mayim Bialik:
If we’re talking about us communicating with aliens and them receiving information enough for them to act on it and then show up. Why on earth do they have to follow our information timescale of how bits and quanta travel through the universe?

Brian Keating:
This is exactly how you should run an interview. And I take notes whenever Mime does one of these tour de force interviews. She after making the joke about hangry aliens, she asked the question that broke the entire light Day argument. That’s not platforming, that’s interviewing. She takes her guests seriously and with respect. Even if she might disagree with them, and even if she agrees with them, she’ll push back where necessary. So where does all this leave me? Honest concession. First, I don’t know that aliens aren’t here.

Brian Keating:
Nobody does. I’m a cosmologist. I spent my entire career looking at the sky for signals from outer space. And in theory, I should be one of the first people to know if there were a credible signal of alien visitation using non human technology in our very backyard. If we can sense the wispy signals of the Big bang that happened 45 billion light years away, we can certainly detect things in our atmosphere on Earth. I’d be the first person to shout out Hallelujah. And I know that the inference structure that Kevin uses is the same inference structure used by every gap filling explanation in the history of theology and apologetics. The razor doesn’t cut Kevin.

Brian Keating:
The razor is going to cut the inference move. There’s a difference. Now, in her long conversation with Kevin, Mayim caught the inference move many, many times. She caught the selection bias. She caught the light speed contradiction. She caught the night day anomalies. She pushed Kevin on the hallucination question. She drew the hard line between banal pattern fallacy and the meaningful phenomenon of pattern detection.

Brian Keating:
Every one of those is a razor in motion. She didn’t call it that, but that’s what she was doing. And here’s the part most people missed after the newsletter. Mayim, in her substack newsletter, told her audience about it. And she didn’t write it as a gotcha or the way that a publicist would, or an AI would. Promoting the episode, hyping it up, promoting the guest and hyping the guest up. Maybe I would do that. But she wrote it as a researcher and she was candid.

Brian Keating:
She asked her substack readers, and I’m paraphrasing, how much evidence do we actually need to have before we believe something? And then this is the line that got me. She wondered in writing whether Kevin’s whole perspective as a researcher might be different if he hadn’t had that one experience back in 1988. That is the razor. That is exactly the cut I’m making in this episode, the first in the Keating’s Razor series. Mayhem got there first in writing on her own platform. And you should definitely subscribe to it. You’ll find me there soon. The framework that I’m calling Keating’s Razor is the framework that was in motion.

Brian Keating:
The most honest thing that Kevin Knuth said in his hours with Mayim was about a personal experience he had. And his exact words were, I don’t say that because I don’t know what the hell a ghost is. He’s describing an encounter that could sound paranormal. That sentence is the entire scientific method in words, in 14 words. Kevin had it, Mayim had it. The problem is the framework didn’t get applied to the cat.

Mayim Bialik:
Are you comfortable with saying I’m a physicist and I saw a ghost?

Kevin Knuth:
I don’t say that because I don’t know what the hell a ghost is. So I can’t really say it was a ghost.

Brian Keating:
So the data is real, the speeds are interesting, the material’s work is rigorous, the cultural patterns deserve study. Every one of those questions survives a close shave. But the inference therefore, that non human intelligence is responsible for all these phenomena, for cattle mutilation, for nuclear reactor shutdowns, for the strange motion from the perch of a base less than one light day outside of Earth in our solar system, that aliens operating, but the inference that therefore non human intelligence is operating from a base from a perch within one light day of Earth in our solar system, well that doesn’t survive. Kevin Knuth is a real physicist. The scientific method survives, the data can survive. Miam saw it. I’m here to give it a name. That’s the verdict.

Brian Keating:
Doesn’t survive the close shave. We’ll try again. Next time on Keating’s Razor. I’m Brian Keating, the Chancellor’s Distinguished professor of Physics at UC San Diego. And each week we’re here to never dumb down science, make it accessible, and always give you the facts on both sides. Now, one of the things that fascinates Mayim are near death experiences. And I’m generally a skeptic of near death experiences, but there’s absolutely 100% sure beyond any reasonable doubt that a near death experience led to the Nobel prizes. And how that changed signs and how it affects you is the subject of my video here.

Brian Keating:
Subscribe so you don’t miss it. And if you came from my nbialic’s breakdown, you already know the rigor that we give. We just gave it a name and you’ll enjoy it. Welcome to the research. Welcome to Keating Grazer.