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Physics Professor: How Much Power Does a UFO Really Need?
Kevin Knuth argues that some UAP reports imply power and motion beyond human technology, while acknowledging that many cases have ordinary explanations.
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating · Brian Keating
- Kevin Knuth is a physics professor at the University at Albany.
The best minutes
- 7:54Extreme power estimates collide with waste-heat limits6 min
- 22:58Relativistic travel trades short trips for decades on EarthPro pick 4 min
- 27:44A reported underwater object implies extraordinary speedPro pick 3 min
Also worth watching
- 13:39A JAL radar analysis found jumps near 10,000 Gs3 min
- 36:18UFO brightness estimates depend on the assumed light pattern5 min
- 17:54Knuth treats acceleration estimates as probability distributions3 min
- 4:07Oberth cited radar-measured UAP speeds in 19543 min
Skip the opening setup and seagull photo, the NASA climate-science anecdote, and the closing sensor-reliability debate.
Full analysis · 6 min read
Real Alpha · Nov 11
Kevin Knuth says one UAP maneuver could need 1,100 gigawatts
- Knuth models one reported UAP maneuver at 1,100 gigawatts, using assumed mass and radar-derived acceleration.
- That scale follows only if the radar track and motion model are sound.
- For teams judging technical estimates, separate the signal from assumptions and unresolved errors.
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6 sections, the 3 other voices it tests Knuth against, and what it means for you. Every episode we cut gets one.
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The 1,100 gigawatt figure is a model output
The 1,100-gigawatt number is not a meter reading. The presentation starts from a reported radar drop from 28,000 feet to sea level. It then derives an acceleration estimate of about 5,400 Gs.
That acceleration comes from a reported maneuver, not a direct measurement of force. The episode gives a description of radar data, not the raw sequence itself.
To estimate power, Knuth needs mass, which he says is unknown. David Fravor described the object as about the size of an F-18. Knuth then chose one-tenth an F-18's mass as an example.
He also assumes acceleration through half the maneuver and deceleration through the other half. Those choices turn a reported track into a conditional engineering estimate, not an observation of power.
Knuth compares the result with more than ten times the total nuclear power output of the United States. That comparison conveys scale, but cannot strengthen the input data.
“The maximum power needed is 1100 gigawatts.”
Our read
The result is useful as a conditional stress test, not a direct measurement of a craft's power. Its scale depends on the reported track, chosen mass, and assumed trajectory.
Radar accounts cite records that remain unshown
Knuth cites Hermann Oberth's 1954 lecture. Oberth said speeds were sometimes very high, with measurements as high as 19 kilometers per second. The lecture, as presented here, does not include the underlying radar records.
Oberth also said more than 50 radar measurements existed by 1954. That is a report about evidence, not the evidence itself in this episode.
Take the 1986 Japan Airlines case. Knuth describes radar returns that changed position between sweeps. He says Daniel Kumbay analyzed several jumps, with three acceleration estimates approaching 10,000 Gs.
Knuth says FAA official John Callahan kept copies after a presidential science team took the data. The episode describes those copies, but does not display them or show independent review.
So the provenance story is worth following, but it is not confirmation by itself. The collection, interpretation, and sensor behavior still need independent examination.
Our read
These are accounts of records that reportedly exist, not records viewers can inspect here. The numbers remain conditional on how the radar returns were collected and interpreted.
Heat exposes a contradiction, not a propulsion mechanism
The heat problem is the episode's sharpest internal test. Knuth tests a hypothetical system using about 1,000 gigawatts of power and near-perfect efficiency.
For a one-thousandth loss, our arithmetic is 1,000 gigawatts × 0.001, or 1 gigawatt of waste heat. Knuth says even that amount would melt a craft quickly.
But neither efficiency nor heat output is measured in the episode. The result follows from a deliberately favorable hypothetical, not a measured thermal signature.
Keating asks whether radar and visible-light reflection constrain the material's dielectric properties. Knuth says he had not considered the radar-return question in those terms.
Another unresolved conservation question is where the kinetic energy goes when an object stops. Knuth notes the expected energy release, while the reports he discusses lack a corresponding explosion or sonic boom.
That mismatch could mean missing assumptions, wrong motion estimates, or an unknown process. Knuth mentions ideas such as space-time warping, but says evidence for them is limited.
Our read
The heat and energy questions challenge a straightforward engineering interpretation. They do not establish new physics, because the motion and object properties remain uncertain.
Error bars describe precision, not sensor validity
Knuth models acceleration as a probability distribution rather than a single exact value. He describes reporting its peak and width, with separate uncertainty on each side of an asymmetric distribution. That method preserves more information than a lone central estimate.
Yet a statistical range is not an all-purpose reliability score. Knuth says uncertainty estimates the precision of his procedure, not whether radar misread a target or identification is correct.
Keating asks where the error bars come from and whether systematic errors are included. Knuth answers that systematic error cannot be estimated without knowing the true value.
Three other November 2026 episodes offer narrow comparisons about framing estimates, not evidence about UAP. Their value here is limited to how scope, metrics, and underlying data affect a number.
On Unsupervised Learning in November 2026, TypeSafe co-founder Diogo Almeida estimated a 20 to 40 percent engineering speedup. He said the result depended on the use case, a reminder that scope should travel with an estimate.
On MTS in November 2026, Palisade Research director Jeffrey Ladish said METR's estimate of a 2x acceleration deserved attention. He urged Anthropic to release the data, a comparison about transparency rather than confirmation of Knuth's radar.
Herbie Bradley also spoke on MTS in November 2026. He interpreted Anthropic's reported 2x productivity threshold as roughly an RSI rate of 0.5, short of a self-sustaining loop. That comparison concerns defining a metric, not the UAP question.
Diogo Almeida · Unsupervised Learning · Nov 5Coding agents may speed engineering by 20 to 40 percent
Jeffrey Ladish · MTS · Nov 6METR sees faster progress, but key evidence remains hidden- HBHerbie Bradley · MTS · Nov 7Anthropic’s RSI threshold is not a full acceleration loop
Our read
The uncertainty method makes the calculation more legible, but it cannot resolve sensor bias or identification. These other episodes offer process comparisons only, not corroboration.
Misidentification keeps the UAP category broad
The episode repeatedly resists treating UAP as one type of object. Knuth says the category contains different phenomena, and most probably are not alien spacecraft.
His seagull example is useful because context changes the image's meaning. A photograph that looked like a craft resolved into a bird once the boats in the background were considered.
For example, UAPX colleagues found earth dirt and airplane parts among alleged debris. That establishes misidentification in examined cases, not that every unusual radar or sonar report has the same cause.
At the close, Keating says sensor signals may be artifacts. He cites a panel that found explanations for 95 percent of reports it reviewed. The episode gives no underlying case list.
Still, unexplained reports cannot be treated as one coherent class. A residual after review is a question to investigate, not automatic proof of extraordinary technology.
Our read
The episode supports investigating anomalies, not one explanation for all UAP. Misidentification and the possibility of sensor artifacts are real limits on interpretation.
Knuth says the evidence cannot choose new physics
Knuth concludes that available evidence cannot decide between new engineering and new physics. He calls some cases extremely anomalous on energy and power, while acknowledging that what the motion means remains unknown.
That is narrower than saying the objects are alien spacecraft. Knuth expressly says most UAP probably are not alien spacecraft, while Keating challenges whether the signals are genuine.
For a founder or technical lead, the useful decision rule is to mark each step from observation to conclusion. Budgeting or hiring around this power estimate would outrun what the episode establishes.
For example, a review could require original sensor records, an explicit model, sensitivity to assumed mass, and independent analysis. Those checks target gaps the conversation itself identifies.
The scale is memorable because it is enormous. Its evidentiary weight remains conditional on a radar interpretation, an assumed mass, and a trajectory model.
Our read
The number deserves attention as a conditional estimate, not a finding that settles what the objects are. Better records and independent checks could change how much weight it deserves.
What it means for you
- Separate inputs and outputs. For consequential technical estimates, record the raw observation, derived calculation, and assumptions separately. Ask which assumptions move the result most.
- Request uncertainty sources. Ask whether error bars cover sensor bias and identification errors, or only calculation precision. Require the presenter to name what remains unmeasured.
- Preserve raw records. When a decision depends on sensor data, check whether original files are available for independent analysis. Track who collected, transformed, and interpreted them.
- Set evidence thresholds. Before relying on an extraordinary technical estimate, specify what independent measurement or replication would change your confidence.
What to watch
- Whether Knuth and colleagues recover speed estimates from the faded Southland sonar printout.
- Whether the JAL radar records receive independent scrutiny.
- Whether follow-up testing distinguishes real motion from the sensor artifacts Keating raises.
Send this to the research lead and sensor-data owner reviewing anomalous measurements.
Watch the minute where Knuth gives the modeled power estimate
Written by Real Alpha from the episode's transcript and the other moments it links, then checked against the transcript. Quotes are the speaker's exact words.
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Read it with Pro, 7 days free- 0:32Skepticism separates signal from noise
Knuth says scientists should test their own ideas and treat UAP as a varied class, not a single phenomenon; he says most probably are not alien spacecraft. He shows a supposed UAP image that resolves into a seagull and recounts UAPX analyses that found earth dirt and airplane parts in alleged debris.
- 4:07Oberth cited fast radar tracks
Knuth cites a 1954 lecture in which Oberth said radar had measured UAP speeds of 19 kilometers per second and referred to more than 50 radar measurements. Knuth notes that Oberth did not provide the underlying data, but says the claim stands out against the airspeed record of the time.
- 6:32Nimitz acceleration implies extreme power
Using Kevin Day’s report that radar showed objects descending from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds, Knuth estimates acceleration around 5,400 G, with a broad range. Assuming an object one-tenth the mass of an F-18 and a maneuver that accelerates and then decelerates, he calculates peak power of 1,100 gigawatts, more than 10 times total U.S. nuclear power output.
- 8:54Radar and waste heat complicate the estimate
Keating asks whether an object visible to the eye and radar constrains the material properties Knuth assumes; Knuth says he had not considered the dielectric-constant question. Knuth says even a hypothetical 99.9%-efficient 1,000-gigawatt system would shed 1 gigawatt as waste heat. He also asks where the object's kinetic energy would go when it stopped.
- 13:26The JAL case suggests rapid jumps
Knuth describes the 1986 Japan Airlines case, in which radar tracked a large object near a cargo plane. He says an analysis of 11 radar jumps found several accelerations approaching 10,000 G and a maximum speed of Mach 350, or about 269,000 miles per hour.
- 15:51Acceleration estimates need error bars
Keating asks how the error bars were determined. Knuth says systematic error cannot be estimated without knowing the true value, so he uses Bayesian sampling to produce a probability distribution for acceleration. He explains that he reports a peak or mean and estimates the distribution’s width, which can be asymmetric.
- 20:56NASA work required learning climate science
Knuth recounts that NASA assigned him, an astrophysicist, to help estimate uncertainties in climate research after Congress asked about them. He says he trained for six months and spent the following two years learning about climate and Earth science; his first book on the subject was a children’s book about clouds.
- 22:58Relativistic travel changes the travelers’ clock
Knuth says a craft accelerating at 1,000 G could reach 90% of light speed in about 17 hours, making nearby stars reachable in less than two days for the travelers. He explains that a round trip could take four days for the travelers but 80 years for people on Earth.
- 26:16Underwater reports point to transmedium motion
Knuth says the Aguadilla video’s apparent strangeness may partly come from compression, then describes a 1987 encounter involving the HMNZS Southland. He says the underwater object was estimated at 150 feet wide and 800 feet long, had no detected propeller wash, and reportedly passed under the ship before its power went out. Knuth says the sonar records are difficult to analyze and related naval activity remains classified.
- 34:15Displacing water drives the power estimate
Knuth assumes the underwater object was at least as dense as water and estimates its mass at about 4 × 10^8 kilograms. He calculates that moving it while displacing a mile-long, 150-foot-wide column of water in 30 seconds would require power on the order of 10^8 megawatts.
- 36:18Light estimates span a wide range
Knuth cites a 1956 photo analysis estimating 2,500 to 30,000 megawatts if the light radiated uniformly, versus 1.7 kilowatts under a directed-light assumption. He also recounts a Louisiana case involving light that reportedly overwhelmed headlights and scorched trees; a later paper cited by Knuth estimated about 500 megawatts.
- 41:14Apparent failures may signal engineering problems
Knuth describes the Ubatuba case, in which an object reportedly wobbled and exploded, and the Council Bluffs case, where molten metal was reported in a forest. He suggests engineering problems could explain such events and says the reported motion may involve propulsion unlike ordinary Newtonian motion, but the evidence cannot settle whether it is new engineering or new physics.
- 42:38Keating questions the sensor evidence
Keating says the nonhuman-technology interpretation depends on the sensors recording real signals rather than artifacts or hallucinations. He cites a commission finding that 95% of the reports it reviewed had explanations, while arguing that unexplained cases remain; the episode ends with the two scientists’ disagreement still open.
Published Nov 11, 2026.
Transcript · 34 min read
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating, hosted by Brian Keating, with Kevin Knuth.
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
The maximum power needed is 1,100 gigawatts. This is more than 10 times the total nuclear power output of the United States. You've got something the size of an aircraft carrier accelerating at 10,000 Gs. At that speed, you can get to the moon in 53 minutes. Humans don't make vehicles that exhibit the amount of power of a nuclear power plant. It just doesn't happen. My guest today is Kevin Knuth, a physics professor at the University at Albany. There's only one scientific truth. It's our job to investigate it, interrogate nature. So if you wouldn't mind, you could take us through this presentation. I might interrupt here and there, but just to ask clarifying questions that the audience might be interested and unable to ask at this point. 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 And we're, 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. You have to be able to catch mistakes. And the fastest way to catch mistakes is for you to catch them. 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 when it comes to UAP? And I'm going to focus on energy and power. Hey, I just found out that many of you got unsubscribed recently in a YouTube update. make sure that didn't happen please make sure that you're subscribed and don't forget to leave a comment down below thanks a lot it really helps out and i think the reasons for focusing on energy and power are that in some cases we can estimate the energies and powers involved in a sighting or in interaction with these objects and very often the those energies or powers are as much much greater than humans are capable of dealing with and i think this is the real evidence that we have that we're dealing with non-human tech in many of these cases. And 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.
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 our 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 you can see this one in the lower left when i first saw this image years ago i got very excited because i had recognized several other images that looked similar and i thought wow maybe it's the same type of craft and i pulled all those images together and looked at them at the same time and realized no it's it's a bird it's a seagull and 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. That's actually a seagull. This is the same picture, and the person was taking a picture of the ships here. I've cropped it a bit.
Read the whole transcript
We can zoom in, and maybe it's still not obvious what it is. It's not obvious until I do that. Now it's pretty obvious what this is. I feel bad about raining on this guy's parade of his cool UAP photo, but that's my job as a scientist. We've been ruining all the fun for, what, 400 years now. And that's really what we've been doing. It's very funny. I 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. 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 He 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 of course, no one's happy to find out that their UFO debris is actually just earth dirt or airplane parts, but we're here to figure out the truth. And that's, that's another thing we academics are good at, getting at the truth. That's right.
“their speed is sometimes very high 19 kilometers a second has been measured with wireless measuring instruments radar”
Pretty obvious what the situation is. Everything he shows rests on one assumption, and at the end of this conversation, I'm going to push back on it. The Nuance 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. 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 g's and it certainly probably isn't much more than 10,000 g's but it's somewhere in between and most probably around 5,500 g's well 5,000 g's is you're not going to be just pressed against the wall and bruised somebody who weighs 100 pounds normally under 5 000 g's is going to weigh 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
“Even if you have a 0.1% inefficiency, that means that 0.1% of 1000 gigawatts is going to be leaking out in waste heat.”
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
“john callahan actually made copies of the radar data and kept them in a box under his desk”
of this this uh field of study you know that you have error that's what happens when you get scientists involved, academic scientists involved. And that's why we need more. I mean, I hear a lot of things about, oh, well, NASA suppressing this and, and astronomer, you know, my friend Sarah Scholes wrote a book that, you know, they're already here about, you know, sightings and so forth. And she, she's estimated how much time do astronomers like me 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 storadians 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 work for nasa once you work for nasa but i think it's more to be paid off by nasa i know exactly right somebody anybody to pay me off would be great i was like you know are you getting paid by you know galileo project nope 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 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 Like, I don't know.
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 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 for an hour
“you can't actually estimate a systematic error because you would need to know what the true value is to estimate that”
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That helps out more than I can tell you. And that's what the uncertainties in pretty much any scientific calculation actually give you. You can't easily estimate uncertainty and any kind of bias unless you know what that bias is. And the uncertainties are important because it tells you how well you know the answer, right? 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 in here. And that's what that uncertainty tells you. And I didn't list the uncertainty on this slide because it just will make it more busy than it already is.
But in the research paper that you can find online, I have the uncertainties listed there. 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. Because many times students, especially when they get into graduate school, they think, well, I'm all done taking classes. I don't have to learn anything else. I'm like, no, that's actually not true. That's backwards. 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 pushed back and said, look, what are your uncertainties about?
How certain are you about these results? 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. They said, Kevin, we have to do some work on estimating uncertainties for climate change. And you're one of the only experts we have in this department that can calculate those uncertainties. So I need you to work on climate problems. I was like, wait, I do astrophysics. I'm not a climate scientist. That's right, yeah. And I told myself, but I'm not a climate scientist. I don't know anything about climate. He goes, yeah, that's why you're going to learn.
He goes, we're going to send you to NASA, I guess, in New York City. And you're going to train with them for six months. it and like yep i'm going to learn for the whole you know for the whole next two years about climate earth planet climates and this so Yeah, that happens. And you have to do it. And that's how you become successful. And so what did I do that night? I panicked. I went to the bookstore to find a book on atmospheres or climate or something. And I was poking around. And the most useful book I found was my little golden book on clouds. And it was through cloud types. And I just bought it. I thought, I don't even know what kinds of clouds there are. So I should maybe learn this first.
It was literally a kid's book. I thought I'm going to start with a kid's book tonight. Build up. So these accelerations are insane. And what can you do with these accelerations?
“For everybody in the galaxy, it takes 40 years. For the traveler, it takes less than two days.”
there's a society that lives they live entirely on their boats and that's what they do all right so transmedium travel and unidentified submerged objects so we'll now look at another class another set of data so i've looked at these accelerations these are much higher than humans could could make you already saw that this little tic-tac a thousand kilogram tic-tac would in doing its
5000G maneuver would put out would require 1000 gigawatts. I can't even guess what an aircraft carrier size craft would require to do a 10,000G acceleration. You're looking at something way, orders of magnitude beyond that. All right, so underwater objects. This is the Aguadilla object. And Doug Bettner gave a talk at SCU and argued 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. 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 humans can't do that very well the craft that we have that does this is a is a um seaplane a seaplane i love that example because a seaplane is neither a good plane nor a good boat now of course there's new drones that can probably go in and out of water more easily that's right we're working on things like this the one encounter that i find fascinating
“they were followed by a large underwater object, which they measured to be 150 feet wide and 800 feet long.”
the time i actually have a printout of the um raw sonar data there's a stylus that was moving across the sheet of papers the papers printing showing the the actual sonar returns so i actually have have a scan of that that sheet of paper is 40 years old at this point and has faded a great deal because the stylus was actually burning into the paper and it's not a very powerful burn so it's all very faint and i'm not sure i can actually pull the speeds and the accelerations out of it out of that um sonar data yet but we were talking last night about how to go about doing that now it's amazing is since then and since since i first noted this i first talked about this case in the Seoul meeting in 2023. And since then, a number of people have tried to get information about the Southlands activities in November through February of 86-87, and it's all classified. Their activities are classified. But people have learned other things there were other ships involved there was an australian um ship that was there the
australian ship traveled with them for some time and then left and then disappeared dropped out of communication just before this event happened and um they dropped out of communication and then put out a distress call and they um had had some kind of encounter they made it back to sydney and then had to go in for refitting. And then there was also an American aircraft carrier involved. The American records say that it was docked in Alameda, California, but no, it was not. It was actually out in the Pacific Ocean in the same area. So what they were doing is they were going out north of Auckland along the Hermetic Trench.
It's an undersea subduction zone. And the trench goes from the northern part of New Zealand all the way up to Tonga. And at its deepest, it's 33,000 feet deep. So there was a lot going on. And then there was also another New Zealand ship involved, the HMNZS-2E. And I think that was the one that was fitted with the, at the time. modern British tool ray sonar, and they were actually mapping areas of the trench. So this apparently was an activity to study these USOs, or these underwater objects, that was a collaboration between the New Zealanders, the Australians, and the Americans. And a lot of this is classified, one of the, he showed me a screenshot, one of the records from what the HMNZS Southland was doing is was classified for 75 years you're not getting that data we're not giving that file until 2062 or something great it's like worse than the kennedy assassination it's worse than the kennedy assassination what are what are they doing in the hermetic 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 how do you move at 3d 700 miles an hour underwater and and this isn't a small object. Just a quick interruption from today's sponsor, me, Brian Keating. Since it's
Nobel Prize season, I can't resist advertising my three books. The first book I wrote is called Losing the Nobel Prize. It's a cosmology story mixed with a memoir of what it feels like to do science at the highest level and, spoiler alert, fail. But my next book, Think Like a Nobel Prize winner, tells the story of nine Nobel laureates who will reveal their insights and actions, how to take your science or just your job in general to the next level. It's full of insights and tips that I never would have thought of. And lastly, my book published last year, Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner, is written for students of all ages to learn the tools and the tricks to compete with yourself, which sometimes could be the hardest competitor of all. Get all three of them, Amazon affiliate links in the description below. And if you've read them already i'd love if you leave a review every single review comes now back to the episode basically you've got this object that's got to push a cylinder of water out of the way right and this this is a what 2.5 kilometers that's a mile a mile long cylinder of water with 150 foot diameter has to be pushed out of the way now water is not compressible anybody who's done a belly flop off of a low dive or high dive knows this water is not compressible you
can't compress it so you have to lift up the water right you have to lift up the water so you can estimate how the now you can estimate the power the amount of energy it takes because you've got Basically, lift up 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? 30 seconds. Yeah, yeah. 30 seconds. So now we can calculate the amount of power here. I actually work out this calculation. So how much mass was involved? Well, first, first, let's figure out the 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 because they know it was 150 foot in diameter and 800 feet long so you've got a mass of about four times 10 to the eighth kilograms this thing had to accelerate so you can figure out the power from its motion that's going to be the mass times the acceleration squared times the time that's how i'll calculate that and then now it also has to lift up a one mile long column of water and you have to do this in 30 seconds so this is basically the calculation for that now we can look at the amount of power it takes for this to happen as it's speeding up it's doing more it's taking more power so you're you know the top power is you're looking at something like something on the order of 10 to the eighth megawatts. You're dealing again with megawatts, you know, many, many megawatts of power
“you're looking at a power of 2,500 to 30,000 megawatts.”
just an exceptional engineering since even if you had a one percent 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 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 and some of that debris and material has been collected and it's been studied and then you have 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 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 could be what's going on but these aren't you know these are not human-made objects and the power estimates in propulsion plus the fact that the objects do not seem to be interacting with their environment suggests that we're observing non-Newtonian propulsion or motion. They're not moving in the way that we move. What that means exactly, I don't know. But it opens the door to new, you know, is this new engineering or new?
physics, that's debatable. And we don't have enough evidence to 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. I would like to push back as much as I can respectfully, as I have a tremendous amount of respect. I think the key gripping question that I cannot really let go of, you know, just despite how much I love your work and respect you and resonate with A lot of what you've said is that I agree, these cannot be human technology, but that's predicated that all of these, you know, sensors all agree that these are actually true signals.
In other words, they're not artifacts and they're not hallucinations. They're not, you know, the reports of, you know, planets and swamp gas. And the key thing I keep coming back to is my friend, David Spurgle, 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, but also is investigating extraterrestrial intelligence using pulses of light and other modes. She won the Drake medal. She's an esteemed scientist. 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 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 we'll see you over on the other on the podcast.
