UAlbany Physics Professor Kevin Knuth has spent a decade trying to convince fellow scientists that we should take the study of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (née UFOs) seriously. The federal government seems to be listening. For World Space Week, we talked to Kevin about why he can’t stop looking up and how he reckons with the possibility that he might never know the truth.
During our conversation with Kevin, there was a question that kept bugging us.
Assuming that it would require extraordinarily advanced technology to travel the enormous distances between stars, why would beings with technology that advanced seemingly keep getting busted by random humans looking up at the sky?
Kevin was quick to note that the answer to that question isn’t knowable right now, and it’s an example of one of the many areas where the vastness of what we don’t know entices us to speculate about the motivation of beings we’re not even certain exist.
In other words, our very human sense of wonder [see Episode 22 for more on that] continually bumps against the boundary of what science can credibly explain at the moment. And while it’s tempting to point to the allure of that wonder (not to mention science fiction's pull on our collective imagination) as part of why UAP studies fall short of "traditional science," it’s not difficult to imagine the early physicists — who saw only shadows of the forces within the atom — hypothesizing in similar ways about why the universe works the way it does.
All of which is to say, what science can credibly explain at any given moment has always only been a sliver of what can be known. And our drive to learn more is often propelled in part by wonder. Kevin and his colleagues are trying to fill in some of those gaps in a rigorous way.
Here’s that part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit:
Host: It seems to me that anything that was technologically so advanced that it could move interstellar could very easily not be seen by us if it didn’t want to be seen.
KK: That's very possible. They could probably hide quite easily. Yeah.
Host: So then why do they keep getting spotted?
KK: That’s an interesting question. These guys fly — and I'm going to call them “these guys” because we're not 100% sure of what we're dealing with, but assuming that you're dealing with another peoples — they're flying their ships around with lights on. So they're being spotted. But in some cases, these lights are incredibly bright — inhumanly bright [so much so that whatever is emitting the light is impossible to discern]. So why would you do that? And in fact, one of my good friends, my neighbor, had heard me ask this question in a talk. He was watching a podcast of my 2023 Sol Foundation presentation, and I brought up the same question. Why would you have these lights on these craft that are so bright that it just doesn't make sense? And he said something interesting, he goes, "You would do that if you wanted to be seen but you didn't want to be observed."
And I thought: That's really interesting. And the only thing that makes sense is that for some reason they want us to notice them, but they don't want us to know about them.
“Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious UFO Program” — this is The New York Times article that Kevin and many others credit with helping change the public and scientific discourse on UAP about a decade ago.
Kevin and his colleagues behind UAlbany Project X published their first field results last year in the widely cited journal Progress in Aerospace Sciences, leading to a philanthropic gift from Albany, NY, businessman Tony Gorman in support of their work.
UAPx was also featured in a 2022 documentary starring William Shatner called “A Tear in the Sky.”
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb wrote about why he accepted the invitation to lead the UAP Science Advisory Council.
Some of the records so far released by the Pentagon include video of UAP recorded by military pilots. The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office has more on its website here.
All the records so far released by the federal government can be found through PURSUE — the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters.
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photo by Patrick Dodson
Hosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
[0:01] Host: Welcome to The Short Version, the UAlbany podcast that tackles big ideas, big questions and big news in less time than it takes to cross the Academic Podium. I'm Jordan Carleo-Evangelist in UAlbany's Office of Communications and Marketing.
[0:18] Kevin Knuth: I think that's the problem here. This is very close to the big questions, and it also has a lot of, because it already has a long history and a mythology perhaps, there's a lot of potential expectation or hope or whatever you might call it that even the scientists have. And I think that's wreaking a bit of havoc.
[0:44] Host: Have aliens ever visited Earth? And by aliens, what we really mean is intelligent life from another planet or solar system.
That's a big question, maybe the biggest.
Trying to answer it in a scientific way, let alone on a podcast that's supposed to be short, is daunting. It requires some physics, some math, a lot of patience, and a high tolerance for existential rumination.
Seeing as it's World Space Week though, we're going to give it a shot. And to do that, we ask two things. First, hang with us for a few minutes longer than usual. It'll be worth it. And second, while you're here, think about this question the way Kevin Knuth does. Not as some sci-fi lark, but as a complex data collection and analysis problem.
Kevin is a professor of physics at UAlbany and one of the principals in UAlbany Project X. UAPx is a group of researchers developing scientifically rigorous ways to study the unexplained and sometimes unsettling things we see in the sky. We don't call them UFOs anymore. Now they're UAP -- unidentified anomalous phenomena.
From the 1947 Roswell incident to the 2024 East Coast drone swarms, UAP are deeply embedded in our popular consciousness. Where the X-Files and serious scientific research meet, though, has often felt awkward.
But the conversation about UAP has undeniably shifted since a New York Times report in 2017 revealed a secret military program to study unidentified flying objects. A series of sometimes half steps toward greater transparency followed. The Pentagon launched the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to coordinate the detection, identification, and explanation of UAP across the federal government. Congress held the first public hearings on UAP in 50 years. NASA, where Kevin used to work studying intelligent systems, named a chief UAP scientist. And earlier this year, the president directed the Pentagon to begin declassifying and releasing files related to UAP and extraterrestrial life.
A few months later, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb was tapped by the office of the Director of National Intelligence to lead a new UAP Science Advisory Council. That council includes both Kevin and fellow UAlbany physicist Matthew Gidagis.
Kevin, Matthew, and their colleagues have taken their work to rooftops and fields from California to Connecticut where their special instruments watch the sky for flashes of light, surges of electromagnetism or bursts of radiation that might help explain what has so far eluded explanation.
The first results were published last year in a widely cited aerospace journal, a milestone for a young field seeking to build legitimacy with the public and within academia. We sat down with Kevin to ask him why he can't stop looking up, about the slow-but-growing acceptance of UAP studies as serious science, and how he reckons with the possibility that he might never know the truth.
Here's our conversation.
[4:03] Host: You research unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAPs, which is the term we use today to talk about what folks used to call UFOs. At the most basic level, what is a UAP?
[4:16] KK: A UAP describes a class of objects, unidentified aerial phenomena, or it also means unidentified anomalous phenomena. And so they can include basically anything that's unidentified that's typically aerial. So they can be lights in the sky, they can be things that look like craft. They could turn out to be something like ball lightning or phenomena like that. We don't know what it is, and we don't know the taxonomy of these phenomena. So that's some of the work that we're doing is to collect data on these objects and basically characterize them. And once they're characterized, we can then work on classifying them or categorizing them in some way.
[4:58] Host: What is it about UAP studies that interests you? Because if I understood your background correctly, early in your career, you studied actually kind of a form of neuroscience, the way the brain processes sound, which is very different from what you do now. What is it that sort of drew you to this field and what about it interests you?
[5:17] KK: My PhD work was mainly in biophysics and measuring magnetic fields from the human brain. And then I got more interested in data analysis techniques when I was looking at electric potentials measured on the surface of the brain like you do for EEG, and then trying to identify where the sources are in the brain. That's a very difficult data analysis problem. So I learned a lot about data analysis techniques there. And once I learned how to apply that to neuroscience, I've always been interested in space and things like this. So I happened to be at a neuroscience conference in DC but staying with one of my friends who was an astrophysicist and her husband is an astronomer, and he was having problems with something he was working on and I was able to help him with the data analysis. And so I started collaborating with him just for fun on the side.
And then before I knew it I had a position at NASA and was doing work on space physics rather than neuroscience. I've always been interested in UAP. I was 12 years old when Star Wars came out in 1977. And it was around that time you had TV shows on like In Search Of with Leonard Nemoy where they would often cover UFO sightings. And so we watched those almost every night after dinner. So I became interested in UFOs that way. When the article came out in the New York Times in 2017, the fact that the Defense Intelligence Agency had actually been studying UFOs, then I thought, "Well, this is really interesting. We should study them as scientists. That would be great fun."
[6:50] Host: So your entry point in a way to this field comes from your childhood where you were influenced by Star Wars and pop culture. And I wonder, does it make it more difficult to try to study in a rigorous way, in a scientific way, or does it make it easier because there's an innate interest?
[7:08] KK: I think it's both in different aspects. In some ways it's easier because there is a public interest in it. There's a lot that seems to be known about them, but it's all mostly anecdotal evidence. So it's hard to sort through what we would say in physics or engineering, it's a low signal-to-noise ratio, right? I mean, there's mostly noise and mostly nonsense. Most objects that people see that they can't identify, 98% of them are identifiable if you had enough information or if you knew what you were looking at. The residual is the interesting part. So that's only about 2% or 3% of the cases, and that makes it a little bit difficult. You've got a lot of nonsense to sort through to try to learn anything about these things, but that's why we collect our own data and go make our own observations and that solves that problem.
But these objects aren't common, so there's a lot of sitting around and waiting and a lot of watching airplanes fly by and birds and everything else. I think the general perception still is that a lot of this is just nonsense and that's not the case. There is a lot of nonsense out there, but it's not all nonsense. And I think that's what's important to remember.
[8:24] Host: You and your colleagues have often spoken about the importance of approaching this question in a sort of scientifically rigorous way. You go to the bottom of the ocean and you see a thing you've never seen before and you're like, "What is that? We have to classify it, figure out what it is." What does it mean to bring scientific rigor to the field of UAPs?
[8:41] KK: It's kind of the same as what's been done in other fields in the past, such as biology. Biology, you go in and you characterize the different types of organisms you're interested in. So if you're Darwin, he was characterizing birds, especially the finches on the island. He characterized them, and then after characterizing them, you can then classify them. This one species is another species and so on. And this is basically where we're sitting right now. We don't really know what we're all dealing with. Of course, we're probably mostly interested in the things that appear to be technologically advanced craft, and some of them do appear to be that. Those I think are the most exciting and interesting ones, but our teams also work to collect data, mainly imagery. So we have multiple camera systems ranging from infrared, visible, and ultraviolet. And we also collect electromagnetic data, electric fields and magnetic fields and collect radiation samples to see what kinds of radiation we're dealing with.
And recently we were at a site in Connecticut where we were trying to collect data on orbs. What are usually seen there, they call them orbs. These are basically the balls of light reportedly ranging from the size of a Mini Cooper all the way down to baseball size. We've worked to collect data on things like that. What we encountered mostly when we were at our site in Connecticut were airplanes. You've got nearby airports and you've got planes coming in with their landing lights, so it's a bright white light coming and... Nope, nope, nope -- that's an airplane. Yeah, so the first thing we do is we are trying to separate airplanes or drones from known objects in the air from unknown objects in the air. And we have meteorites, we have lightning, we have birds and bugs, and you got a bee that flies really close to the camera. It looks big and it's fast, right? But it's an insect. So we have to do a lot of sorting out. I think we too are coming into, yeah, there's 2% or 3% that are really interesting that we can't figure out.
[10:40] Host: Have you detected a difference or a change in the way that you and your work and your colleagues' work has received in academia, say versus what it was before that New York Times story in 2017 or going back even further than that?
[10:55] KK: It's changed dramatically actually, and I think there's a few factors. One definitely is the fact that the U.S. government has acknowledged that there's things in the sky that they can't identify, and the military's acknowledged that. So that's already a big step. It's not all just swamp gas, right? I've never seen swamp gas. Let me be honest about swamp gas. That's why I find that explanation funny. I know certain other scientists who've gotten involved mainly because of our work. I wrote one of the first peer-reviewed papers on speed and accelerations of some UAP, and I presented that at a scientific conference, and I got it published in the proceedings for that conference. And that paper made a huge difference, and I didn't do anything special. I just did the basic calculations that any scientist ought to do when they encounter descriptions of these phenomena. I wanted to see how anomalous are they, and it turns out they're really anomalous.
The speeds and accelerations are incredibly high – not anything that you would expect from a human-made craft. It's something that requires explanation. Having that in print, I know that it made a big difference in a couple scientists who read that and thought, "Yeah, this is really interesting. I should study this, too." And they basically dove in. So the field's slowly growing, and I think now the more scientists that we have that are active in it and there's more publications coming out, even more scientists are becoming interested.
[12:18] Host: You mentioned earlier this notion of the military acknowledging that there are certain things they cannot explain. And it's interesting to me because you're a scientist and scientists tend to be very comfortable with uncertainty. There are things that you don't know, and we don't know most things, and you spend your entire career trying to figure out relatively narrow but very important things about the way the universe works. The military is not historically super comfortable with uncertainty or publicly embracing uncertainty. So when the military says, "Yeah, we don't know what this is," do you find that plausible that they really don't know?
[12:54] KK: I do, because for them it's a real problem in a few different respects. One is the Air Force and the Navy are tasked with controlling our airspace. They need to know what's in it, and if they're admitting they don't know what's in it, that's already a big admission where they're basically saying, "This is our job and we're not exactly able to do this because we don't even know what these things are." And these things are basically, these objects or phenomena are moving into sensitive regions with impunity. They move in and out and nobody can do anything about it. And that's their other admission, which is a little surprising. So they're basically admitting that they're not capable of controlling the motions of objects in our airspace. Those are both pretty big admissions, and they went to Congress for help. They wanted Congress to open things up so they can get more information about this, so they can have other agencies communicate with them and they can learn about what these objects are.
The other side of it is a flight safety issue. You've got pilots up there, not just military pilots, commercial airline pilots and private pilots who are encountering these things. And for a pilot who encounters an unknown object poses all sorts of hazards.
[14:03] Host: So this isn't exactly related to UAP studies, but I think it is relevant. Many of your colleagues in physics generally, but even here at UAlbany, are involved in this search for dark matter, right? Something we can't see and we haven't found yet, don't really know what it looks like, but they have reason to believe that it's there based on the understood math of the way the universe works and our understanding of how the universe works. And it seems similar to me that if we believe that there's a possibility that in this 2% or 3% of things that so far we can't explain, some of it may be alien craft from someplace else. It seems part of the exercise in understanding how you study that and how you research it is understanding the likelihood that that is true, that it could be true, that there could be alien life that has visited earth from a sort of mathematical and physics perspective. How do you go about wrapping your head around how likely that is to begin with?
[14:58] KK: First, let me hit on the dark matter point. It's a good analogy, and in fact Matthew Szydagis, who works with me on the UAPx project, is also working to detect dark matter. They just made the announcement of their first detection of something unknown, right? It's unknown, but it appears to be in the parameter range of where they expected dark matter to be. It's one detection and of course gives you hope, okay, maybe we'll find more, and when we find more, we can then start to classify these things. And that's basically what we're doing with UAP as well.
How likely is it something extraterrestrial is really what you're wanting to know. I think that's what drives a lot of the investigation here. That is very difficult to assess. A lot of scientists have tried to assess this and they always just try to do it off the top of their head. It leads to sloppy thinking. The better way to do it is to run simulations, and that's something I have done. I've run simulations of interstellar colonization where you basically simulate the galaxy, you simulate here's an interstellar civilization with these capabilities and they are colonizing star systems and their territory is growing. I've done that with several million civilizations to try to estimate how many of them find earth. It's not easy. It's not easy to find earth. But this way you can actually put numbers on it. But doing this, I found that it's hard -- and it's hard for two reasons. The distances between the stars are very large. It is a long way from one star to another, and it's a difficult trip to make. So that's one of the problems. The second problem is the fact that to find earth, there are many stars to look at. There are about 300 to 400 billion stars in the galaxy, so that's a lot of places to look.
[16:45] Host: Of course, that assumes they would be looking for the same things we would be looking for. Their understanding of life as they know is the same as our understanding of life as we know it..
[16:53] KK: They might not be. They may not be. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. They might look at Earth and just say, “That's a weird planet,” and then maybe come here, maybe not. So I didn't simulate it that way. I just simulated them randomly going to another planet or another star system and found that it comes down to something like there's like a nine out of a million chance that a civilization in the galaxy would come to Earth. So yeah, it's small. What you can do is then you can turn that around and say, "All right, if we do detect extraterrestrial visitors here on earth, then we can use the fact that we've estimated the probability of finding Earth to estimate how many civilizations are in the galaxy. How many civilizations would there have to be in the galaxy for somebody to actually make it? What's the most probable number? And it turns out that you would have to have about a million space-faring civilizations in the galaxy, and about 250,000 of them would be capable of traveling to another star. So if we detect somebody here who is from another star system, then there have to be about 250,000 other space faring civilizations out there that can travel from star to star. Yeah.
[18:01] Host: Just for the math to work. That's fascinating.
[18:02] KK: Yeah. Which is then quite fun because that's like Star Trek on steroids, right? I mean, it's a lot more than you would expect in Star Trek.
[18:10] Host: What do you think? Is it likely we will ever know for sure?
[18:15] KK: I think that we already have enough evidence that some of these objects are technologically advanced craft. I think we can pretty confidently say that from both the speeds and accelerations that have been measured on radar and also the energy and power involved. Some of the energy and power estimates come from the speeds and accelerations, but you can also estimate energy and power from luminosity. Some of these objects are really bright. So bright that it's just this glowing thing on a photograph. You've probably seen some of these UFO photographs of just a white disc, and it just looks unreal. The amount of light that's coming off of it is unreal. So there have been a few cases where when the photograph is made, Bruce Maccabee was a physicist who had done this with one photograph taken from Canadian Air Force pilots in Alberta in 1956. They went under a microscope and literally counted the silver grains on the film that was exposed to estimate how much light had hit the film.
And then from that, you can figure out how much light this thing was putting off. And the estimates come in at hundreds of megawatts of light, which is like a small nuclear power plant's worth of light, which is crazy. No human is making anything that's putting out hundreds of megawatts of light. We wouldn't know how to do that. There's other cases like this, too. There was a landing in Haynesville, Louisiana, in the 1960s and a physics professor was actually driving down the road with his family and saw the light from this object. And as he got closer, the light of this object in a forest clearing was shining on the road and he noticed it was drowning out the headlights. He knew how much power his headlights put out. He did the math in his head and he was like, "That's like megawatts of light." He realized this was clearly several megawatts of light.
He literally turned the car around in the road and drove the other way to get out of there because he didn't want to go anywhere near this light, which was smart because this object, whatever it was, and no one ever saw it, had burnt the trees in the clearing. The bark was burnt and people have since gone and sampled the bark. And French researchers Luc Dini and Jacques Vallée and Geoffrey Mestchersky had analyzed that bark and shown that, yes, indeed it was hundreds of megawatts of light to burn those trees. So we know that these things are working with energies and power that shift well beyond what we're capable of. Now where they're from or who they are, we can't answer that. We do have evidence that they're probably not coming in from interstellar space every Tuesday, which was Carl Sagan's complaint. He said that would be hard to imagine that we've got an interstellar ship arriving at Earth every Tuesday. That's hard to believe and it is hard to believe, but he didn't follow that up with the next thought. That means they're not coming from interstellar space. They're here already and they live here. And I think that that's the answer.
[21:13] Host: You and several colleagues were recently selected to serve on the federal government's UAP Science Advisory Council. What does that entail and what does it signal to the broader public, to the scientific community, that the U.S. government is taking it seriously?
[21:35] KK: The UAP Science Advisory Council was formed by ODNI, so the Director of National Intelligence wanted this council to basically act as an interface in an advisory panel of scientists and academics who would take information from the military or the Pentagon and then interpret it and advise the president or the other agencies. And so that's basically our role.
[22:01] Host: Scientists are generally very comfortable, more comfortable than most of us with this notion of uncertainty. How does that sit with you?
[22:08] KK: For me, it's hard because I want to know. I really want to know. And today, I'll say this much, we had a flurry of signal messages today, over 50 in just a couple-like two hours. What were these all about? It was about the frustration that we are in contact with government peoples and we are all there because we want to see craft and bodies. I mean, we want to see the crash craft and we want to see the alien bodies. Yeah, we all do. And we are trying to figure out how to maneuver this or get some information about this. I know the public has been skeptical of whether we even exist or whether we're being told what to say or – none of that's happening. We are doing our best to figure out how to navigate this very complicated system that doesn't want to tell us anything, but is supposed to.
And so is it a mess? Of course it's a mess for a lot of reasons, and that was the flurry of conversations was basically all of us being frustrated because we want to see the crash craft in the bodies. We want to know. These are some of the basic questions, right? They're related to the basic questions. Are we alone in the universe? What is this technology like? Is this advanced engineering or do they know physics we don't know? The number of possibilities for discovery here are huge, and I think we all feel like kids in a candy store, but you can't reach the candy.
[23:34] Host: Your field has the potential to destabilize the way nine billion people understand their place in the universe.
[23:44] KK: Yeah. It's a huge change. Yeah, we could be at the edge of a humongous change in how we perceive everything. Yeah.
[23:54] Host: You go out to Montana and you look up at the sky or you're in Connecticut and you look up at the sky or wherever you are. What do you see? And I don't necessarily mean this light or this blip, but you look up and you see the stars that we all see. What do you see up there? What is it?
[24:09] KK: Well, as an astronomer in the past, I would of course notice different stars or constellations or the planets that are out or the Milky Way and things like this. And that's what I would see and enjoy in the past. However, now since studying UAP and being aware that there's a real possibility that you could have somebody coming in from here, I have a stranger perspective now.
I look at the sky and I think we are wide open. Anybody can come here from anywhere and we wouldn't even know it. And that kind of blows my mind and it feels a little scary, right? I mean, we are wide open. It's a bit anxiety provoking. These are big questions with big answers and big questions that follow, and it's tough to deal with sometimes.
[25:00] Host: That was Kevin Knuth, one of the UAlbany physicists working to bring UAP studies into the scientific mainstream.
To learn more about UAlbany Project X, the UAP Science Advisory Council, and for links to the Pentagon document releases so far, be sure to check out The Longer Version in our show notes.
The Short Version would not be possible without contributions from many people, including audio production and editing by Scott Freedman in UAlbany's Digital Media Studio, deep inside the podium tunnels. That's where you'll find me on Disclosure Day.
And maybe it's not a coincidence after all that UlAbany's campus kind of resembles Star Fleet Academy.
We'll be back next week with another conversation about something interesting. I'm Jordan Carleo- Evangelist here at the University at Albany, and this has been The Short Version.