Former NASA Physicist: The UAP Maneuver That Should Have Exploded

A physics professor ran the energy budget on the Nimitz tic-tac. The maneuver needs about a thousand gigawatts, more than ten times every nuclear plant in the United States combined. Nothing we build survives its own waste heat at that scale. So what was flying? Kevin Knuth is a professor of physics at the University at Albany and a former NASA scientist who now applies Bayesian statistics to UAP sensor data. We cover: why a 5,400 g maneuver would turn a pilot into soup, where the energy went when the object stopped and no explosion followed, the 1954 radar measurements nobody wants to talk about, the New Zealand frigate that went dark and adrift in three seconds, and why the records from that deployment stay classified until 2062. Knuth says the power numbers alone rule out human technology. I push back on whether the sensors agree. Newsletter, full transcript, and my Monday M. A. G. I. C. Message: briankeating.com/aliens CHAPTERS 00:00 Why this field needs gatekeepers 03:50 How anomalous is anomalous? 06:40 The UFO photo that was a seagull 10:40 Radar clocked them at 19 km/s in 1954 15:00 5,400 g and a body weighing 227 tonnes 19:00 The radar return problem he had not considered 21:45 A gigawatt of waste heat and nowhere to put it 24:30 The 747 chased by something carrier sized 29:00 Why a number without an error bar is worthless 34:30 The NASA job he was not qualified for 37:00 Proxima Centauri in a day and a half 41:00 The warship that lost all power in 3 seconds 46:30 Pushing a column of water that cannot compress 48:45 The light that burned bark off the trees 53:00 What the power numbers rule out 56:00 The 95 percent problem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:00Brian Keating?

  This is a two-part episode. We're discussing today a fascinating lecture that summarized 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 afflicting the UAP phenomenon is that there are very few actual, real scientists, professors. Yes, I'm sorry to be a gatekeeper, but sometimes we need gatekeeping. You and I met through a chat thread with about 300 other people, some accusing others of different nefarious things, and everyone's saying that they have their own truth. Well, no, there's only one scientific truth.

• 1:45Brian Keating?

  It's our job to investigate it, interrogate nature. And you do that through the lens of a practicing professional scientist. And you're also a professor. And 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 professor. And that's why I think it's really important what you're doing. So today, you're going to describe 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 going to have a 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.

• 2:27Brian Keating?

  This shows you I'm dedicating two hours to this phenomenon because I think it's so important, 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, lock up string theorists. And you know, I'm guilty of some of it too. But the reality is Kevin's a working professor. You can check out his website. I'll have all of his links below. And I'm 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 in, unable to ask at this point.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And thank you for the very, very kind introduction.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I gave this talk at the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies meeting, the SEU meeting this last summer and in Toronto.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  And I think one of the... There's a few things 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...

• 3:48Speaker 03

  I don't know how many times I'm told by somebody, "I'm skeptical." Well, I am too. I mean, I'm skeptical of my own ideas. And most people aren't.

• 3:57Brian Keating?

  That's a sign of a good scientist. Yep.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And then in addition to that, physicists think about things differently than other people. And so I can't say that that's the only good way to think about it. I know that it's not. But physicists often bring a unique perspective 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

• 4:52Speaker 03

  or in interaction with these objects. And very often, those energies or powers are 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 there's a lot of things that they can't do.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  So I think it's also difficult 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?

• 6:05Brian Keating?

  Yep, that's perfect.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Okay, you can see this one in the lower left?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Excuse me.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  When I first saw this image, 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 pulled all those images together and looked at them at the same time and realized, no, 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 going to try to jump over to another set of slides and can show you that. Oops, one second.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  All right, can you see this new set? All right?

• 7:00Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I see it. Yep.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Here we go. I'll go to full screen mode here too. All right, so this is from an earlier talk. This is the same picture. And the person was taking a picture of the ships here. I've cropped it a bit.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  We can zoom in. And maybe it's still not obvious what it is. It's not obvious until I do that.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Now it's pretty obvious what this is. It's a seagull. And I don't want to... I feel bad about raining on this guy's parade of his cool UAP photo. But it's... That's my job as a scientist. We've been ruining all the fun for, what, 400 years now? So...

• 7:44Speaker 03

  So I joke with people. I tell them, "I'm here to ruin the fun." And that's really what we've been doing. It's very funny. We work very closely with Matthew Shadagas and Cecilia Levy, both professors at the University at Albany. And I work with them under UAPX. And our UAPX group...

• 8:10Speaker 03

  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, which we have found. And...

• 8:43Speaker 03

  But we're here to figure out the truth. And that's another thing we academics are good at, getting at the truth.

• 8:50Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 8:51Speaker 03

  So I'm going to focus here first on speeds and accelerations. There are many cases where we can measure speeds and accelerations, and sometimes with radar.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Hermann Oberth, this grumpy-looking gentleman here at the bottom of the picture, was a German father of modern rocketry. He was 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.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  So... And then accelerations are so high that no man could stand it. This is not... What comes up is 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.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  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."

• 10:18Speaker 03

  So I find in 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 these things are flying, have been measured to fly at spacecraft speeds. And this has been known since 1954. And I think this is a big deal. And so where are these 50 radar measurements?

• 11:03Speaker 03

  And 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 airspeed record was something like 760 miles an hour. So you're looking at a huge difference in speeds.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  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. We're paying any attention. It's pretty obvious what the situation is. Excuse me. The Newt's 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 reported that he recorded on radar that these objects were dropping from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds.

• 12:10Speaker 00

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• 12:40Speaker 03

  So now you can estimate this acceleration. It comes out to something like 5,400 Gs. This is the distribution of probability distributions of acceleration. So how far off can you be? Well, it isn't less than 3,000 Gs, 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

• 13:11Speaker 03

  the, we know it's acceleration. 5,000 Gs is you're not going to be just pressed against the wall and bruised. Somebody who weighs 100 pounds normally under 5,000 Gs is going to weigh

• 13:25Speaker 03

  5,000, what, 50,000, wait, no, 500,000. They'd weigh 500,000 pounds. Yeah, under that acceleration. So 500,000, your body weighing 500,000 pounds, you're, you're going to just turn into soup at the bottom of 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 Gs halfway and then decelerates the other half, you can try to estimate its power, but you need

• 14:09Speaker 03

  to know its mass. We don't know its mass. We know its approximate size. David Fravor 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-18. So let's say it's one tenth as light as, tell me it weighs 10% of the weight of an F-18. So it 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 1,100

• 14:47Speaker 03

  gigawatts. And that's really, really a lot of power. This is more than 10 times the total nuclear power output of the United States.

• 15:00Brian Keating?

  Kevin, before we go on, yeah, I'm a physicist. I study the cosmic microwave background, which was pioneered by Bob Dickey at MIT Rad Labs and then later at Princeton University. And his colleague is his fellow professor there is David Wilkinson, who was my grand advisor. And so I'm very conversant with the radar technology and so forth. And I'm also a pilot, a private pilot, although I do have a jet type rating in several classes of jets and I'm commercial pilot, instrument pilot, et cetera. 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

• 15:44Brian Keating?

  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 matter much more to me than, than even Fravor, as great as an eyewitness he may be. And, and that I'll stipulate, even though I have counter examples 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 a, 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,

• 16:26Brian Keating?

  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 reflected, 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

• 17:09Brian Keating?

  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 microwave. How do you, how do you reconcile those facts?

• 17:24Speaker 03

  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 surface. So that's, that's, that's an interesting question. That's something I hadn't even considered.

• 17:47Brian Keating?

  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.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, no. And with regard to the power output, yeah, 10 times the total nuclear power output of the United States, that's shocking. I mean, here's the real problem, and this is going to come up again when I talk about luminosities, which are also incredibly high. But you're, you're talking about 1,000 gigawatts of power, right? And no engineering, no engineered object is 100% efficient. 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?

• 18:30Speaker 03

  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 99.9% efficient, right? So you've only got a 0.1% inefficiency. Let's say they're really very, very good. Even if you have a 0.1% inefficiency, that means that 0.1% of 1,000 gigawatts is going to be leaking out in waste heat. That means a gigawatt of power in the waste heat you'd have to deal with.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  That would melt any craft in a very short order. Clearly, something strange is going on. We're, we're missing something and it's not quite clear what exactly what that is.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  And, you know, is, could it be that these are not moving the way we think they're moving? Are they, you know, 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 beings on top of it, being able to survive accelerations like that. That's a whole different problem.

• 19:56Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  And then there's other questions that a physicist comes up with. I mean, the things that bother you. So this thing accelerates to, so the thing accelerates to about 40,000 miles an hour at the midpoint and then decelerates to zero. Where did that energy go when it decelerated? Energy doesn't disappear. You've got to, 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 250 Tomahawk cruise missiles worth of explosion when the thing just stopped. That should have been catastrophic and wasn't, right? So these

• 20:40Speaker 03

  things don't make sonic booms. They don't, we have a lot of, I, 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.

• 20:51Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  So this, this isn't, this isn't normal technology, clearly. And, but I think the power alone makes it clear that this is not human tech. If, if what's going on, what we think's going on.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  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, a 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 the event culminated with a large UFO that was shaped like a walnut. There's a drawing on the right here from the pilot.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  That, and the pilot estimated be about the size of four 747s. 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 45 minutes. They had military height-finding radar had detected this and was, was collected by the FAA. And the FAA chief for accidents and investigations,

• 22:31Speaker 03

  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 Kumpay, 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,

• 23:16Speaker 03

  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, the accelerations you're looking at. There are several, three cases where the acceleration's coming up on 10,000 Gs.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  The action's on the court. And as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch, and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside, 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes, and details.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Which is really, really insane, right? You've got something the size of an aircraft carrier accelerating at 10,000 Gs. The maximum speeds here, if you were, the maximum speed would be Mach 350. And that's basically close to 2,000, or 269,000 miles an hour. That speed, you can get to the moon in 53 minutes. So if this is going to 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 it'll take you to watch this two hour.

• 24:55Brian 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 field of study, you know, the chat.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Well, that's what happens when you get scientists involved.

• 25:10Brian Keating?

  Exactly. And that's why, and that's why we need more. I mean, I hear a lot of things about, oh, well, NASA's suppressing this and astronomer, you know, my friend Sarah Schalles wrote a book that, you know, they're already here about, you know, sightings and so forth. And she, she estimated, you know, how much time do astronomers like me and, and my colleagues spend looking at all domains from longest wave radio waves to, you know, gamma rays in space? How much time are we observing, you know, so many steradians 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, oh, you're just paid off by NASA. I mean, I, I worked for NASA once, you work for NASA. But I think it's more.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  I would love to be paid off by NASA.

• 25:54Brian Keating?

  I know, exactly, right?

• 25:55Speaker 03

  I would love somebody to pay me off would be great.

• 25:57Brian Keating?

  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. 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 9.8 meters per second squared. But you don't tell me that your error bar is 100 meters per second squared, plus or minus, you know, on the plus side and minus 10 meters per. That's my problem with the Drake equation.

• 26:41Brian Keating?

  It's always presented as a, as an 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 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's not that big. So, you know, how are they tracking this thing for that long? Getting this data and, and what, what can we ascribe these errors bars to first?

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Right. Well, when you calculate errors like this, but what you're doing is you are characterizing the, 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 systematic error. So what you're doing is you're basically looking at the error of the, you're, you're basically, 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. And this was done by sampling, which is why it's fuzzy.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  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 is the peak. I can find the peak. I can fit this to a curve and I found the peak. I can report the mode. I can report the, the mean. 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, you're on certainties, 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,

• 28:46Speaker 03

  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 use the, the standard deviation of the each Gaussian as the plus or minus. So it has a different plus or minus,

• 29:29Speaker 03

  whether you're on the plus side or the, or the minus side. And that's basically what's happening here with, with the accelerations. So you're, so that, so conceptually, what the uncertainty is telling you is it gives you the, an idea of the precision of your estimation procedure.

• 29:50Brian Keating?

  Yes.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  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 in any, any kind of bias unless you know what that bias is.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  And the uncertainties are important because it tells you how well you know the answer, right? So when I get as an answer this distribution, I tell you 5,400 Gs. I don't know that it's exactly 5,400 Gs. It's probably somewhere near. 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. But in the research paper that you can find online, I have the uncertainties listed there.

• 30:45Brian Keating?

  Got it. Okay. Yep. So let's go on.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. And in fact, when I worked at NASA, 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. Like, no, that's actually not true.

• 31:12Brian Keating?

  That's backwards.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  You've got it backwards. Exactly. And when I worked at NASA, it was the early 2000s. 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 it? How certain are you about these results? And NASA needed to go back and redo some of the work to produce those uncertainties. 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.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  So I need you to work on climate problems. And I was like, wait, I do astrophysics. I'm not a climate scientist. But like, and I told my staff, 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, I guess, in New York City, and you're going to train with them for six months. And like, you're, yep, I'm going to learn for the whole, you know, for the whole next two years about climate, earth, planet climates. And so, yeah, that happens and you have to, you have to do it. And that's how you, that's how you become successful.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  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 used 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, it was literally a kid's book. I thought, I'm going to start with a kid's book tonight. We'll build up.

• 33:10Brian Keating?

  Okay. Great.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  All right. So yes, so, so these accelerations are insane. And what can you do with these acceleration? 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 interest travel, interstellar travel, excuse me, they would make excellent interstellar craft. So a 1,000 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.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  You can get to 90% the speed of light in about 17 hours.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  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 these objects can sustain an acceleration in space, 1,000 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 Nimitz 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 Reticuli, which is in Trappus I, which are

• 34:46Speaker 03

  about 40 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 40 light years. And there's what? There's probably 80 sun-like stars in the 40 light year range. I don't know the exact number.

• 35:04Brian Keating?

  Yeah, a lot. Way more than I think.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:07Brian Keating?

  It's a radius.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Right. So, and those were just, I think I was just thinking about sun-like stars. You've got red dwarfs, which are, Trappus I is a red dwarf. It goes around a red dwarf star. So there's plenty of, plenty of places to go. Yeah. So these craft, now granted, and you'll hear, you'll hear scientists say this all the time, when they complain about interstellar travel and say, oh, even if you can go fast, it'll still take you, you know, 40 years to get to Zeta Reticuli. Well, it'll take you 40 years in the frame of the galaxy. For everybody in the galaxy, it takes 40 years. For the traveler, it takes less than two days.

• 35:51Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  And there's a time difference and just because time slows down. Now, what that means is that you can't, you can't fly from Zeta Reticuli to the sun, hang out for an afternoon, and then fly back to Zeta Reticuli and make it home for dinner. You, for you, it'll be a four day trip. For everybody on Zeta Reticuli or Earth, it'll be an 80 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, I noted that

• 36:35Speaker 03

  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 Reticuli. You want to go to Trappus I? 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 80 weeks later on Earth, but for us, it's only two weeks later. That's, that's how you could do it.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  And, and there are not as many nomadic societies on Earth now as there used to be, but there still are nomadic societies.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  And in fact, in Southeast Asia, there's a society that lives, they live entirely on their boats. And that's what they do.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  You already saw that this little Tic Tac, 1,000 kilogram Tic Tac would, in doing its 5,000 G maneuver, would put out, would require 1,000 gigawatts. 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.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  And now, let's see here, something has happened. There we go.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  All right. So underwater objects. This is a, this is the Agua Día object.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  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, um, so this may not be, 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, um, a seaplane. A seaplane, I love that example because a seaplane is neither a good plane nor a good boat.

• 39:40Brian Keating?

  That's right. The worst of all worlds.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  That's the worst of all worlds, but it can do both. That's, that's where we're at. Um, 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.

• 39:57Speaker 03

  The one encounter that I find fascinating is from February of 1987, where the New Zealand frigate, the HMNZS Southland, was involved in daily exercises from November to February, where they were basically trying to lure USOs in from the Pacific Ocean into the Harakei Gulf. So they basically would go out into the, go up north out of Auckland, through the Harakei 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

• 40:42Speaker 03

  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 largest submarine in the world, the Russian Typhoon class. 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

• 41:21Speaker 03

  for Red October came out the same year, basically. And, um, and I know about this. And, um, and that's an interesting fact. But, um, so they were followed by this USO for some time. They tried to shake it. And at, um, at one point, the USO was 22.5 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, um, passed under the ship in about three seconds, and, um, and actually took all the power out on the ship. The power went out

• 42:06Speaker 03

  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 1,800 miles an hour. Or if you have it accelerating, it would have a minimum acceleration of 57 Gs with a top speed of 37,000, 3,700 miles an hour.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  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 over the time. I actually have a printout of the raw sonar data. The raw sonar, um, is that basically the, the, this, there's a stylus that was moving across a sheet of papers, the papers 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 it faded a great deal because the stylus

• 43:21Speaker 03

  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 the accelerations out of it, out of that sonar data yet. But we were talking last night about how to go about doing that.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  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, um, a number of people have tried to get information about the Southland's activities in November through February of 86, 87. Um, and it's all classified. Their activities are classified. But people have learned other things. There were other ships involved. Um, the, there was an Australian ship that was there. And, um, and I don't have my notes with me. My notes are in the

• 44:26Speaker 03

  other room because I just learned this all last night, and I haven't transcribed them yet. But, um, but the Australian ship traveled with them for some time and then, um, left and then disappeared, dropped out of communication, um, 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. Um, and, and then there was also an American aircraft carrier involved that the Americans, um, the American records say that it was, that it was docked in Alameda,

• 45:08Speaker 03

  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, um, going out north of Auckland, uh, along the Kermetic Trench. So the Kermetic Trench is a very long trench that goes from, um, it's an undersea subduction zone. The trench goes from the north, northern part of New Zealand all the way up to Tonga. And at its deepest, it's 33,000 feet deep. So, um, so there was a lot going on. And then there was also another New Zealand ship involved

• 45:47Speaker 03

  that the HMNZS Tuie, and I think that was the one that was fitted with the, um, the, at the time, modern British Toray sonar, and they were actually mapping areas of the trench. So this apparently was an activity to study these USOs, these underwater objects. Um, that was a collaboration between the New Zealanders, the Australians, and the Americans. Um, and a lot of this is classified. One of the, he showed me a screenshot, one of the records from what the HMNZS Southland was doing is, was classified for 75 years.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  You're not getting that data, we're not getting that file until 2062 or something crazy.

• 46:35Brian Keating?

  It's like worse than the Kennedy assassination.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  It's worse than the Kennedy assassination. What are, 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, this object has got to push a cylinder of water out of the way, right? Um, 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's not compressible. Anybody

• 47:20Speaker 03

  who's done a belly flop off of a low dive or high dive knows this. Water's not compressible. You can't compress it. So you have to lift up the water, right?

• 47:29Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  You have to lift up the water. So you can estimate, now you can estimate the power, the amount of energy it takes, because they, you've got to basically lift up, uh, 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?

• 47:51Brian Keating?

  30 seconds. Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  30 seconds. So now we can calculate the amount of power here. I actually worked out this calculation. So how much mass was involved? Well, first, first, let's figure out the mass of the object. And, um, 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, um, 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. Um, this thing had to accelerate. So you can

• 48:36Speaker 03

  figure out the power from its motion. That's going to be the, um, 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, um, in 30 seconds. So this is basically the calculation for that.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  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 10 to the eighth megawatts. Um, uh, let's see, is that right? Or is it?

• 49:19Speaker 03

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

• 49:29Speaker 00

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• 49:58Speaker 03

  I may have messed up the units on my chart here because I'm thinking if it's, if this is 10 to the eighth megawatts, 10 to the eighth megawatts is 10 to the 14, which is more than insane. So, um, so I've got to double check that, but, um, 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 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. Um, insane amount of power.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  So what other evidence do we have? We have luminosities. Some of these things are really crazy bright.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  This is one thing that, one of the many things that, um, Steven Spielberg got right in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, people get sunburnt from these things.

• 50:56Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  That happens. Um, 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 and white. Um, they're very, very bright. The, this image here taken, um, in 1956 over the Canadian Rockies in Alberta, um, we can, um, Bruce McAbey and Jacques Vallée actually had access to the actual, um, film and counted silver grains to basically figure out how much, what the intensity of light was hitting the camera.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  So you can actually, um, yeah. So Dr. Bruce McAbey did study this and, um, Jacques Vallée has also summarized and reported. So you can look at the radiance of the object and, um, and how that's going to relate to camera parameters.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  And, um, basically they measured the exposure levels and the shutter times and estimated the radiance to be, um, this much. So it's, you know, well, there's interesting units there. Luminosity units are hard anyway, or radiance units, two watts per steradiance centimeter squared, right? Um, 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, um, between the plane and the object, which was estimated to be between six and 20 kilometers, you're looking at a power of 2,500 to 30,000 megawatts.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  That's a lot of light. That's a great 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.

• 53:00Brian Keating?

  Yeah, that's weird.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  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. 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 kilowatt of light is a lot of light.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  And that's pretty amazing.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Now, um,

• 53:29Speaker 03

  Jacques Vallée, Luc Denis, and Jeffrey Mascherewski had published a paper, um, in Progress in Aerospace Sciences last year, where they estimated the radiative energy, um, in ground level observations based on bark being burnt. So this is the Haynesville, Louisiana case,

• 53:52Speaker 03

  where a 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 brilliant white flash, illuminating the whole woods and it drowned out the headlights. And what the,

• 54:09Speaker 03

  what the, um, Professor Galloway noted is when it drowned out the headlights, he, he knew the, um, amount of power in the headlights and he was able to estimate,

• 54:22Speaker 03

  um, that the light coming from this thing in the forest was, had to be megawatts of power. And, um, that worried him. He actually turned the car around and went the other way.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Drove away from it, um, which was probably a smart idea.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  So the object itself wasn't seen. Um, 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, um, from the light from this object. And so, um,

• 55:03Speaker 03

  so this was actually described in the Condon Report and the Condon Report actually recalculated some of these power and actually had a higher amount of power. They did not have a good explanation for what happened and they left it as an uncertain event.

• 55:19Speaker 03

  When, uh, yeah, no, when Jacques Vallée and Luc Denis and Jeffrey Mascherewski looked at this, they were able to get, um, power estimates closer to, um, closer to 500 megawatts of light. So that's a, again, a crazy amount of light. Um, humans don't make things that, that's a nuclear power plant's worth of light, right? So, so, um, this is not a human made object.

• 55:50Brian Keating?

  So Kevin, we're, uh, I don't want to go past the half hour, but we haven't done the podcast yet.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  My conclusion slide, I think.

• 55:57Brian Keating?

  Yeah. Okay. Great. Yeah. Let's finish this up and then switch to the podcast. Yeah. Go for it.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so the minimal power estimates, estimates that we're making here and basically 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, um, I think this is, this to me is the strongest evidence that we have that we're not dealing with human technology.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  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. Um, and it could be catastrophic.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  And, and in fact, it, here is an interesting point. It suggests, I mentioned this earlier, it suggests an exceptional engineering since even if you had a 1% inefficiency of a one gigawatt system, that would give you 10 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, um, the, um, 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.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  The, um, and, and some of that debris and, and material's been collected and has been studied. And then you have the, um, 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. Um, 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. That, that could be what's going on.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  But these aren't, you know, these are not human made, um, 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? Um, that's debatable and we don't have enough evidence to, um, decide on those things yet. But some of these UAP are extremely anomalous when it comes to energy and power. I think that's important to keep in mind.

• 58:44Brian Keating?

  Well, Kevin, this is great. Uh, I would like to, uh, push back as much as I can respectfully, as I have a 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, uh, you know, the reports of, of, you know, planets and swamp gas. And the key thing I keep coming back to is my friend,

• 59:27Brian Keating?

  David Spiegel, 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 with my colleague here at UCSD, Shelley Wright, who's also a legitimate hardcore scientist, uh, but also, uh, is investigating extraterrestrial intelligence using, uh, pulses of light and other modes. She won the Drake Medal. 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, you know, it's like the Pareto Principle, 80/20 principle, except it's 95/5.

• 1:00:12Brian Keating?

  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, uh, 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.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

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