# Physics Professor: How Much Power Does a UFO Really Need? Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. Kevin Knuth argues that some UAP reports imply power and motion beyond human technology, while acknowledging that many cases have ordinary explanations. - Show: Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Hosts: [Brian Keating](https://realalpha.app/people/brian-keating/) - Guest: [Kevin Knuth](https://realalpha.app/people/kevin-knuth/) is a physics professor at the University at Albany. - Published: Nov 11, 2026 - Length: 44 min ## The best minutes - [7:54](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=474) [Extreme power estimates collide with waste-heat limits](https://realalpha.app/s/extreme-power-estimates-collide-with-waste-heat-limits/) (6 min) - [22:58](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1378) [Relativistic travel trades short trips for decades on Earth](https://realalpha.app/s/relativistic-travel-trades-short-trips-for-decades-on-earth/) (4 min) - [27:44](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1664) [A reported underwater object implies extraordinary speed](https://realalpha.app/s/a-reported-underwater-object-implies-extraordinary-speed/) (3 min) ## Also worth watching - [13:39](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=819) [A JAL radar analysis found jumps near 10,000 Gs](https://realalpha.app/s/a-jal-radar-analysis-found-jumps-near-10-000-gs/) (3 min) - [36:18](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2178) [UFO brightness estimates depend on the assumed light pattern](https://realalpha.app/s/ufo-brightness-estimates-depend-on-the-assumed-light-pattern/) (5 min) - [17:54](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1074) [Knuth treats acceleration estimates as probability distributions](https://realalpha.app/s/knuth-treats-acceleration-estimates-as-probability/) (3 min) - [4:07](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=247) [Oberth cited radar-measured UAP speeds in 1954](https://realalpha.app/s/oberth-cited-radar-measured-uap-speeds-in-1954/) (3 min) Skip the opening setup and seagull photo, the NASA climate-science anecdote, and the closing sensor-reliability debate. ## Full analysis: 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. Its 6 sections, what it means for you and what to watch are on [the page](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/#analysis), free with an account: - [8:40](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=520) The 1,100 gigawatt figure is a model output - [15:34](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=934) Radar accounts cite records that remain unshown - [11:47](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=707) Heat exposes a contradiction, not a propulsion mechanism - [18:32](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1112) Error bars describe precision, not sensor validity - [2:08](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=128) Misidentification keeps the UAP category broad - [42:30](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2550) Knuth says the evidence cannot choose new physics ## Summary Knuth is a physics professor at the University at Albany. He works with Matthew Shadagas and Cecilia Levy through UAPX, where they examine UAP cases, photographs and materials. He also worked at NASA on uncertainty estimates for climate research. Knuth argues that some UAP reports imply accelerations, power demands and light output far beyond human technology, but says UAP are a varied class and most probably are not alien spacecraft. He illustrates the risk of misidentification with a seagull photo and describes UAPX’s findings of earth dirt and airplane parts in alleged debris. Keating challenges the assumptions behind radar and other sensor readings; Knuth acknowledges unresolved questions about material properties, waste heat, energy loss and measurement uncertainty. They conclude that the evidence does not establish whether the most anomalous cases reflect new engineering or new physics, and Keating says the sensor signals themselves may be artifacts. ### Minute by minute - [0:32](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=32) **Skepticism 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. - [4:07](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=247) **Oberth 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. - [6:32](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=392) **Nimitz 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. - [8:54](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=534) **Radar 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. - [13:26](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=806) **The 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. - [15:51](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=951) **Acceleration 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. - [20:56](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1256) **NASA 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. - [22:58](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1378) **Relativistic 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. - [26:16](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1576) **Underwater 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. - [34:15](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2055) **Displacing 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. - [36:18](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2178) **Light 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. - [41:14](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2474) **Apparent 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. - [42:38](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2558) **Keating 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. ## Transcript 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. [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=0) 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. [0:58](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=58) 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. [2:08](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=128) 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. [3:07](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=187) 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. [3:55](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=235) 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. 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 Herman Oberth this grumpy looking gentleman here at the bottom of the picture was a German father of modern rocketry he was a mentor to Wernher von Braun which is the guy just to the right [4:37](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=277) **Kevin Knuth:** Herman 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 and then accelerations are so high that no man could [4:55](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=295) stand it now what comes up is an understatement actually it turns out he would be pressed to the wall and bruised. They'd be turning to 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. The wireless sets of the American Air Force and Navy, which are used in all fighters, cannot be so inaccurate that the information obtained with them can be doubted completely. So I find 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 in the outer solar system. It flew past Pluto in 2015. [5:50](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=350) 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 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 In 1954, the airspeed record was something like 760 miles an hour. So you're looking at a huge difference in speeds. And he told people about this back in 1954, and I like to say this is why he's so grumpy, because nobody's listening to him or paying any attention. [6:33](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=393) 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 [8:02](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=482) stop moving at zero feet 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 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 f18. And so what I did here is I just took one-tenth of the mass of an f18. So let's say it's one-tenth as light as, only weighs 10% of the weight of an f18. 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 1100 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. [8:57](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=537) Kevin, before we go on, I study the cosmic microwave background, which was pioneered by Bob Dickey. 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 commercial pilot, instrument pilot, et cetera. Now I'm not anywhere near the courage. I said David Fravor has more courage in his left cuticle than I have in my whole body. 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 even Fravor, as great as an eyewitness he may be, and that I'll stipulate, even though I have counter examples that I can present later. [9:42](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=582) 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, 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 not go to the extremes. But for this to simultaneously reflect and also be visible in the visible light spectrum and reflect it, that puts a bound on the dielectric constants that are permissible. 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 uh is not insubstantial so how do you rectify that as a scientist how do you you know square the circle that this can't be something you know some unknown material it can't be it can't be a materials problem it has to be reflective and it has to be reflective in the visible and in the [10:47](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=647) in the millimeter wave or microwave how do you how do you reconcile those facts i haven't thought about the radar return problem and i haven't thought about it that way in being able to You say something about the dielectric constants of the hull of the object or the surface. So that's an interesting question. That's something I hadn't even considered. And with regard to the power output, yeah, 10 times the total nuclear power output of the United States, that's shocking. Here's the real problem, and this is going to come up again when I talk about luminosities. But you're talking about 1,000 gigawatts of power, right? [11:24](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=684) 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 machinery right and so let's say that these guys are really good at what they do and 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 [11:55](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=715) **Kevin Knuth:** really very, very good. 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. That means a gigawatt of power in waste heat [12:11](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=731) you'd have to deal with that would melt any craft in a very short order clearly something strange is going on we're missing something and it's not quite clear what exactly what that is could it be that these are not moving the way we think they're moving of course we of 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 these high Gs and having any machinery or living beings on top of it being able to survive accelerations like that. That's a whole different problem. And then there's other questions that a physicist comes up with, I mean, the things that bother you. 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 when this thing comes to a stop that energy had to go somewhere and you know this power is correct this should have been about 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 things don't make sonic booms. I try to think about this as a detective. We have a lot of clues, [13:26](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=806) but they're not fitting together very well. It's very odd. This isn't normal technology, clearly. But I think the power alone makes it clear that this is not human tech. 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 of 747 was going from pairs to tokyo when it encountered several um ufos over alaska the event culminated with a large ufo that was shaped like a walnut there's a drawing on the right here from the pilot and the pilot estimated be about this 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 objects there i think that's pretty clear and um it followed him for 45 minutes they had military height finding radar had detected this and was collected by um the faa and the faa chief for [14:34](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=874) **Kevin Knuth:** accidents and investigations john callahan actually made copies of the radar data and kept them in a box under his desk until he retired, [14:43](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=883) 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. And Dr. Daniel Kumbay, who was at the Niels Bohr Institute, Here, for some time, had analyzed this radar data and looked at the acceleration made by several jumps. So this UFO basically stayed about seven kilometers away from the airplane and just, with every sweep of the, it basically moved around the plane. And with every sweep of the radar, it would be on one side of the plane, and then the next sweep of the radar would be at the other side of the plane. [15:25](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=925) So you can estimate the minimum accelerations here. And you can see here on this table, you'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, which is really, really insane, right? You've got something the size of an aircraft carrier accelerating at 10,000 Gs. the maximum speed would be Mach 350 and that's basically close to 2,000 or 269,000 miles an hour at that speed you can get to the moon in 53 minutes two questions before just continuing so one is there are error bars here which is very rare in this uh pseudo industry or you know kind 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 [16:41](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1001) 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. [17:30](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1050) 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 at 747 speeds, call it 500 miles an hour, pretty much. Let's round up round numbers. [18:08](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1088) And so this thing was tracked over what? I mean, Alaska is not that big. So how are they tracking this thing for that long, getting this data? And what can we ascribe these errors bars to first? [18:21](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1101) **Kevin Knuth:** Right. Well, when you calculate errors like this, you can't actually estimate a systematic error because you would need to know what the true value is to estimate that, right? [18:29](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1109) You'd have to have some handle on what the true value is. So you can never really estimate a systematic error. You're calculating a probability distribution of the acceleration, which is what I showed on this previous slide. This is actually what this is giving you. This was done by sampling, which is why it's fuzzy. But this is the probability distribution for the acceleration. That's the answer that Bayesian statistics would give you, right? And I can report, you know, so what do you want to report? Well, I can report the mode, the peak. I can find the peak. I can fit this to a curve and I found the peak. [19:01](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1141) I can report the mode. I can report 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 actually have multiple numbers you can report. And then you have your uncertainties, which you can estimate another way. And uncertainty is a way of estimating the width of the distribution. So what's typically done is once you find the mode, you know where the mode is the peak. Once you know where the peak is, you can look at the curvature of the peak, and basically you're fitting a Gaussian distribution to this, and you take the standard deviation of that Gaussian distribution, fit to the peak. You use that as the measure of the width of this distribution. [19:41](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1181) Now, in this case, it's asymmetric. It's clearly an asymmetric distribution. So what I did is I actually fit one Gaussian to the left side and a second Gaussian to the right side, And then I use the standard deviation of each Gaussian as the plus or minus. So it has a different plus or minus. whether you're on the plus side or the minus side. And that's basically what's happening here with the accelerations. So conceptually, what the uncertainty is telling you is it gives you an idea of the precision of your estimation procedure. And that's really what the uncertainty means. Hey, do me a favor. I know you're enjoying this on YouTube, but make sure you follow me on Spotify too and leave a review. [20:23](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1223) 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. [20:59](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1259) 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? [21:37](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1297) 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. [22:16](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1336) 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. [22:55](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1375) 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? 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? And I make this point in the paper. Not only do these objects have flight characteristics necessary for interstellar travel, excuse me, they would make excellent interstellar craft. so a 1000 g acceleration, one-fifth of what the Nimitz case was observed doing, and one-tenth of the acceleration that was observed at JAL, you can get to 90% the speed of light in about 17 hours. [23:39](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1419) Once you're going 90% the speed of light, relativity kicks in. Time slows down, distances change, you can actually travel much, much further. If these objects can sustain an acceleration in space, a 1000 g acceleration will get you to 30% the speed of light in 2.7 hours. How far could you go? Well, here's some examples. The 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 out to Zeta Reticuli in less than two days. you know 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 way more than i think thousand i think i was just thinking about sun like stars you've got red red dwarves which are good trappist one 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 now granted and you'll hear you'll hear scientists say this all the time when they complain about interstellar travel say oh and even if you can go fast it'll still take you you know [24:54](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1494) 40 years to get to zeta reticuli well it'll take you 40 years in the [25:00](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1500) **Kevin Knuth:** Frame of the galaxy. For everybody in the galaxy, it takes 40 years. For the traveler, it takes less than two days. There's a time difference, and just because time slows down. Now, what that means is that 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. For you, it'll be a four-day trip. For everybody on Zeta Reticuli or Earth, it'll be in 80 years. [25:30](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1530) 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 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 you and I will meet up on earth. I'll go visit Zeta Reticuli. You want to go to Trappist-1. 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 how you could do it. And there are not as many nomadic societies on earth now as there used to be, but there still are nomadic societies. In fact, in Southeast Asia, there's a society that lives they live entirely on their boats and that's what they do all right so transmedium travel and unidentified submerged objects so we'll now look at another class another set of data so i've looked at these accelerations these are much higher than humans could could make you already saw that this little tic-tac a thousand kilogram tic-tac would in doing its [26:50](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1610) 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 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 Haraki Gulf. So they basically would go up north out of Auckland, [28:19](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1699) through the Hiroki Gulf out into the Pacific Ocean, then turn around and come back and watch on their sonar to see if they're followed, and then try to study these objects. In February of [28:30](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1710) **Kevin Knuth:** 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 [28:43](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1723) 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 for Red October came out the same year, basically. And I know about this. And that's an interesting fact. So they were followed by this USO for some time they tried to shake it and at one point the USO was a 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 passed under the ship in about three seconds and actually took all the power out on the ship the power went out on the ship drained the batteries so they couldn't restart the engines and they were adrift and had to be rescued 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 3,700 miles an hour. [30:00](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1800) 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 ago 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 [31:24](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1884) 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. [32:07](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=1927) 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 [33:31](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2011) 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 [34:50](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2090) 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. [35:30](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2130) 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 to be able to pull this off. You've got to take power to move the object and you've got to displace the water. Insane amount of power. So what other evidence do we have? We have luminosities. Some of these things are really crazy bright. This is one thing that one of the many things that Steven [36:43](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2203) Spielberg got right in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Yes, people get sunburned from these things so some of them are extremely luminous and so much so that the photographs are difficult to interpret these are all photographs of ufos where they're just glowing and white um they're very bright the this image here taken um in 1956 over the canadian rockies in alberta bruce mccabee and jock valet actually had access to the actual film and counted silver grains to basically figure out what the intensity of light was hitting the camera. So Dr. Bruce McAbee did study this and Jacques Vallée also summarized and reported. [37:23](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2243) So you can look at the radiance of the object and how that's going to relate to camera parameters. Basically, they measure the exposure levels and the shutter times and estimated the radians to be this much. So it's, well, there's interesting units there. Luminosity units are hard anyway, or radians units, 2 watts per star radian centimeters squared, right? So for an isotropic source, so if, what do you mean by isotropic? [37:49](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2269) **Kevin Knuth:** If this thing is radiating uniformly in all directions, then the distance for the distance between the plane and the object, which was estimated to be between 6 and 20 kilometers, you're looking at a power of 2,500 to 30,000 megawatts. [38:09](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2289) That's a lot of light. That's a great amount of light. Right. 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. Yeah, that's weird. 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, and that's pretty amazing. Jacques Vallée, Luc Denis, and Geoffrey Mastrzewski had published a paper in Progress in Aerospace Sciences last year where they estimated the radiative energy in ground-level observations based on bark being burnt. [39:03](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2343) So this is the Hainesville, Louisiana case 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 eliminating the whole woods and it drowned out the headlights and what professor galloway noted is when it drowned out the headlights he he knew the amount of power in the headlights and he was able to estimate that the light coming from this thing in the forest was had to be megawatts of power that worried him he actually turned the car around and went the other way drove away from it which was probably a smart idea so the object itself wasn't seen they were able to locate where it had that it had landed it had landed in a clearing in the forest and the trees around the clearing were all scorched from the light from this object so this was actually described in the 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. [40:11](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2411) Yeah, now, when Jacques Vallée and Luc Digny and Jeffrey Mischewski looked at this, they were able to get power estimates closer to 500 megawatts of light. So, that's, again, a crazy amount of light. Humans don't make things that—that's a nuclear power plant's worth of light. this is not a human-made object 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 this to me is the strongest evidence that we have that we're not dealing with human technology humans don't make vehicles that exhibit the amount of power of a nuclear power plant it just doesn't happen it would be dangerous for us to do that um and it could be catastrophic here is an interesting point it suggests i mentioned this earlier it's 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 [41:31](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2491) 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? [42:30](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2550) 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. [43:09](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2589) 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. [43:51](https://realalpha.app/v/EKlLswUgyRI/?t=2631) 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.