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American Alchemy with Jesse Michels
NASA Whistleblower: “We Systematically Suppress UFO Data!”
01:57:16
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- [00:00]
Kevin Knuth
They're not coming in from another star system every other Tuesday. They're present here. There are handfuls of people doing weird things here and there. Those people are all over the place. Some of them I knew when I was at NASA have come to talk to me and said, oh, yeah, I was interested. I know something about this or that.
- [00:20]
American Alchemy Host
Have you met anybody working on the crafts themselves?
- [00:23]
Kevin Knuth
I've met people who've claimed to have worked on them or seen them, really. So, yeah. So the question I've had is, why, when we had the NASA Commission, why was there no section on what astronauts have seen in space? I talked to Alan Bean. He was from Apollo 12. He said that when he went up to Skylab, they actually photographed a red flashing light. Nobody puts lights on satellites. First, you don't need them, and second, it's more weight.
- [00:52]
American Alchemy Host
Also, satellites back then weren't doing proximity operations. They were just following predictable orbits. They weren't changing orbits either.
- [00:59]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, they actually had a craft pull up alongside of them.
- [01:04]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa.
- [01:05]
Kevin Knuth
Half their orbit. And the cosmonaut drew a picture of the object story. Musgrave, a shuttle pilot, also talked about seeing things like snakes, these things writhing around in space.
- [01:16]
American Alchemy Host
Really?
- [01:17]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. This is a phenomena that people have seen for centuries. This case is going Back to the 1800s, back to Columbus. Balls of light coming out of the water, hovering next to the ship, following the ship, and then taking off into the clouds. And that's why I think there's probably bases underwater as your best bet.
- [01:43]
American Alchemy Host
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- [03:38]
Kevin Knuth
Well, and thank you so much for having me. It was very exciting.
- [03:41]
American Alchemy Host
Oh no, it's an absolute honor. And you have a NASA background as well. I want to know how you got into UFOs to begin with because a lot of people with your sort of credentials and background think UFOs are a joke, right?
- [03:58]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, I mean, I've always been interested in UFOs. I was 12 when Star wars came out in 1977. And during, and during that time, I mean, that was the same year Close Encounters, the Third Kind came out. It was another movie studio's response to Star wars that came out in December. And I didn't like it as much because there weren't spaceships shooting each other with lasers. Right. So as a 12 year old, that wasn't that exciting. But at the same time there were TV shows like In Search of with Leonard Nimoy and they would cover UFO topics and that was on every night, like at 6:30 when we're eating dinner. So I watched that all the time. So I've always been interested in them. And I think I wasn't. So, so this. So I went to graduate School in 1988. I grew up in Wisconsin and I moved out to Montana to go to graduate school at Montana State University in Bozeman. And our first week or two there, I had just moved there and there was a cattle mutilation where two cows were killed and surgically manipulated. I don't have a good word for what happened to them, the blood was drained, the blood was Dr. The sensory organs removed, the genitals removed. One of them had, like, a core sample. It had this cylindrical hole punched through it. Just bizarre. I mean, really bizarre. And the stand and the people on the news were crazed about this, right? Oh, my God. There's, you know, these two cows on this ranch were killed. And there were UFO reports in the county that night, hundreds of reports. And so the two stories were that it was either aliens or Satanists. And everybody's all got their undies in a bundle over this, right? And so we're at the physics department and some of us grad students are talking about this and especially the new graduate students. We've all just moved there into a PhD program. So you're looking down the barrel of spending five or six years of your life at this place. And we want. What kind of place did we just move to? Where cows are murdered this way, right? This is really bizarre. So we're discussing this in the hallway, and it was this heated discussion. And I remember shouting at one point, I don't know why aliens would do it, and I don't know how Satanists would do it. I mean, it was that level of stupid discussion, right, that students would have. And we were quite loud and disturbed. One of the professors down the hall, and he came out from his office to find out what we were talking about. He comes down the hall and we tell him. And I don't know if he was trying to make us feel better, because it was the opposite, but he said, oh, yeah, yeah, this happens from time to time, and they'll investigate it and they won't figure anything out. And then everybody will just forget about it until it happens again. And we're just like, what? That's even crazier than what we're already talking about. And then he adds. And he goes, but you know what's really strange? There are. He goes, I have friends who work up at Malmstrom Air Force Base, and they have problems with UFOs flying over the nuclear missile sites and shutting down nuclear missiles. And we listened politely, and when he walked away, we laughed our asses off. Because this was the. At the time, it was the silliest thing I thought I'd ever heard. I mean, UFOs are shutting down nuclear missiles. And this isn't. Everybody's not on red alert. I mean, our entire military should be mobilized for something like that, right? So we just didn't believe it. We thought this was just silly. And it became kind of A running joke. Anytime something weird would happen at, you know, at school or somebody's telling a story, oh, this weird thing happened to me. Someone would invariably interject. But you know what's really strange? UFOs are shutting down nuclear missiles up in Malmstrom Air Force Base. We would all laugh, right? And so that was a running joke for a whole year. And so now time passes. And that was September of 1988. And he had said that it was ongoing. He said, they are doing this presently, right? And so now fast forward to.
- [08:13]
American Alchemy Host
It.
- [08:13]
Kevin Knuth
Was about 2015, so it's a couple years before the New York Times article. And I was teaching an astronomy class, and we got to the point we were talking about possibility of life elsewhere. And some of the students wanted me to comment on UFOs. I'm like, well, I don't know anything about UFOs, and it's certainly not science. This is an astronomy class. So I was just poking around on the Internet. Is there anything reasonable I can actually say other than the Drake Equation and the Fermi paradox? Right? Two typical things that scientists might talk about. And I was just poking around at like 2am and I stumbled on Robert Hastings news conference from like 2010, where he had six people on, from the Air Force, various Air Force positions. The first one was Robert salas talking about UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I heard about this in grad school. That was a joke, right? And then I'm listening to this, I'm like, that's just not a joke. Between September of 66 and March of 67, we lost 30 missiles to UFO activity.
- [09:29]
American Alchemy Host
It's wild. Yeah.
- [09:31]
Kevin Knuth
30.
- [09:32]
American Alchemy Host
30. That's pretty, pretty insane.
- [09:35]
Kevin Knuth
Now, now what are you doing? He's talking about events from 1966. And I heard about it in 1988. And the professor that told me in 1988 about this said that it is happening. So this has been going on for 20 years and no one's paying any attention to this. I mean, the army's still not. The military's still not mobilized and worrying about this. And I thought, there is something really wrong here. And. And I. And I spent some time thinking about it. I was up late that night teaching class early, right? I didn't barely slept. But I'm thinking about it and I thought, I mean, it's either nonsense and the people who are in charge of our nuclear missiles are people we shouldn't be trusting with anything, or this is actually real. Which makes more sense considering the amount of time that's involved. A 20 year time Spanish, and nobody's reacting to it maybe because they all think it's nonsense. And I thought this is extremely dangerous. We're going to get blindsided by something if we're not careful. And I thought somebody ought to look into this. And I thought, I'm going to start looking into this UFO business. What is here? How real is this? How possible is this? So that's when I started looking into it. And I had actually given a talk in our department like a year later after I looked into it somewhat, I thought this is actually really interesting. So I gave a talk in our physics department about it. Just an informal talk. And the room was packed. I mean we, I don't know how many people can actually sit in that room, but it was well over the fire limit, right? I mean, we had people sitting cross legged right up to the front screen. And the talk went on. There were so many questions. I talked for it for almost three hours and most people just stayed for it because everybody was really interested. And I thought, yeah, see, this is interesting. I mean, this is an interesting problem here and it's not that simple. And then of course, a year after that, the New York Times article comes out and I thought, well, somebody has to be, somebody ought to study this. And I thought, well, shoot, you just do it. Yeah, I should do it.
- [11:54]
American Alchemy Host
And the nuclear link, I could see that being the perfect gateway for rigorous scientists like yourself. Because I think science and in the conventional sense has to be repeatable. You need, you know, every time you drop this pen, it needs to fall in sort of the same way for it to be science. Right. And so I think the nuclear link is a version of that with UFOs where UFOs seem to show up across nuclear bases, not only in the US but all over the world.
- [12:20]
Kevin Knuth
And, and that's, that's one thing that worried me. Once I looked into it, I thought, wow, this is happening in the Soviet Union, this is happening in France, this is happening in England.
- [12:29]
American Alchemy Host
We were talking before the show. I'm wearing my American Alchemy Japan shirt, which is paying homage to Lino, which is a town next to their Fukushima prefecture where they have, they're famous for their nuclear spill in 2011. They have their civilian energy grid and UFOs were reported to show up there. They have a whole museum dedicated to UFOs.
- [12:47]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [12:47]
American Alchemy Host
Vice did a documentary on them in 2022. And it's the town in Japan that's obsessed with UFOs, and it's right next to this nuclear grid.
- [12:54]
Kevin Knuth
There was a Netflix encounter episode. I think episode four focused on that as well.
- [12:59]
American Alchemy Host
And Malmstrom, where you mentioned that is the site of tons and tons of activity. You have Bob salas, obviously, in 67, but before that you had this echo flight incident. You know, I think it was like very. It was 10 days before or something. One was March 16, one was March 24. Then you have John Mills, this retired missile technician in the early 90s, seeing a bunch of UFOs there. You even have an interview with this guy, Chris Langan, which. Say what you will about the guy, he says he has the highest IQ in the world. He seems a little cocky to me, but he's just offhand. He's saying he's seen UFOs and he's seen them around Malmstrom Air Force Base.
- [13:37]
Kevin Knuth
On the UFO thing. I was working for the Forest Service not too far from Malmstrom Air Force Base. One day I was up there in a Forest Service pickup truck at a certain campground. And I was there. And suddenly I look up and I say, suddenly it was just in the skunks. I became aware that it was up there, and I looked up. There's this huge spheroidal, you know, but elliptical. Not a perfect spheroid, like a saucer that was turned partially on its side. Right.
- [14:06]
American Alchemy Host
And so it's just this recurring trope from all these uncorrelated sources. Robert Hastings, who wrote the book UFOs and Nukes, got into this whole subject because his father was actually working at Malmstrom Base, and he was learning radar theory from one of the radar operators there. Bob Hastings was, while he was a janitor, he was in high school. And the radar operator was like, we're tracking some of these unknowns. You should take a look. And then that was it for him. He was hooked. And he dedicated his life to studying this.
- [14:38]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, yeah, it's cool. Maybe three years ago, we were down in Louisiana visiting my in laws for Mardi Gras. And so we're. It was February, and we're outside grilling, right? And I was grilling with my wife's Uncle Matt, and he had his Air Force cap on. And I spotted Malmstrom Air Force Base on his Air Force cap. And I was like, uncle Matt, you were there. You were in the Air Force, and you were at Malmstrom. You were at Malmstrom. And he goes, yeah, I was stationed in Malmstrom. When were you there? And he goes like 1971 through 74 or something like that, and early 70s. And I said, did you ever hear anything about UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites? He goes, oh, that happened all the time. These things would come in and shut down the nuclear weap. And he was going on and on about this, and I'm like, it's common knowledge. Right. And how is it Congress is just finding out about this? Right. And my wife's Uncle Matt has known this since 1971. This is something to worry about. Right. And I was so excited. I told him, okay, can you tell my wife this? Because I am tired of being the only crazy person in this. But. But it was. His response was mainly, oh, yeah, this happened all the time. And like. Like, it's nothing. Right.
- [15:59]
American Alchemy Host
So on the one hand, you have UFOs showing up around our most important assets or nuclear assets with people who are on the PRP program who literally, like, they have to report if they're on ibuprofen. These are people who work at the nuclear basis. They're the picture of mental health and of sound mind. And they all see Tic Tac saucers, orbs, you know, shutting down, nukes.
- [16:20]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [16:21]
American Alchemy Host
There's that, and then there's the idea that the US Government might have saucers and hangers.
- [16:26]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [16:27]
American Alchemy Host
Do you think it's clear that this is happening, the nuclear thing? That's. That's clear.
- [16:31]
Kevin Knuth
Absolutely clear, yeah.
- [16:32]
American Alchemy Host
Do you think the US Government has saucers and hangers and we have an active reverse engineering program for nuts and bolts, physical craft?
- [16:41]
Kevin Knuth
I think that's probably true. I've heard this from enough people who've done that kind of work for years now that. That's probably the case. Yeah.
- [16:49]
American Alchemy Host
Have you met anybody working on the crafts themselves?
- [16:52]
Kevin Knuth
I've met people who've claimed to have worked on them or seen them, really. So, yeah.
- [16:56]
American Alchemy Host
Anybody that you can mention or.
- [16:58]
Kevin Knuth
No, I shouldn't do that.
- [16:59]
American Alchemy Host
Okay.
- [17:01]
Kevin Knuth
These are whispers that you get every now and again.
- [17:03]
American Alchemy Host
Did you find them believable, though?
- [17:05]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, entirely believable. Yeah.
- [17:06]
American Alchemy Host
Really?
- [17:06]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah.
- [17:07]
American Alchemy Host
No. You didn't sense any sort of deception?
- [17:09]
Kevin Knuth
No, no. One of the most believable things I've heard is, well, have you been able to figure anything out? No, we don't know. We don't know what anything is or how anything works. Yes, that was my most. And I was like, that makes sense.
- [17:20]
American Alchemy Host
Interesting.
- [17:21]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah.
- [17:21]
American Alchemy Host
So it's like, you know, giving an iPhone to a caveman or something?
- [17:27]
Kevin Knuth
Something like that, yeah.
- [17:28]
American Alchemy Host
Interesting.
- [17:28]
Kevin Knuth
I mean, it seems. It seems like the tech, any technologies they've got from it are just surface level type stuff. Oh, this is some interesting material. What's it made of that level?
- [17:39]
American Alchemy Host
If I were on the inside, I would probably want somebody like you working on this sort of thing.
- [17:44]
Kevin Knuth
I'd love to be working on this, but I' not black work. I'd love to work on this in the open.
- [17:48]
American Alchemy Host
Okay. Have you ever been contacted to do black work?
- [17:52]
Kevin Knuth
I had the opportunity to have clearance when I worked at NASA, but I turned it down.
- [17:58]
American Alchemy Host
Because you've always wanted to do things in an open, transparent way.
- [18:00]
Kevin Knuth
I'm a scientist and I want to. And one of the benefits of being a scientist is we share information, we work together, we cooperate.
- [18:09]
American Alchemy Host
Do you think that's.
- [18:10]
Kevin Knuth
And yeah, there's some competition, but there's a lot of collaboration as well, so. And that's very healthy.
- [18:15]
American Alchemy Host
Do you think that's part of what's held back the legacy UFO program?
- [18:20]
Kevin Knuth
If it's held back at all, it's because you've got 10 people closeted working on one thing and they don't get extra information that you might need to get interesting ideas. The more people you have working on a problem, the more diversity of ideas you're going to get.
- [18:37]
American Alchemy Host
Do you think that there are certain scientific things that you can't work on in the kind of civil side, you know, open world of science without receiving backlash?
- [18:48]
Kevin Knuth
UFOs is one of them.
- [18:50]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, yeah, we.
- [18:51]
Kevin Knuth
There was some backlash, some backlash when we started working on UFOs.
- [18:56]
American Alchemy Host
There's you mentioned on Danny Jones that you've had various friends work on anti gravity and receive sort of backlash, threatened.
- [19:04]
Kevin Knuth
Threats and things like that. Yeah, too.
- [19:06]
American Alchemy Host
That's scary.
- [19:07]
Kevin Knuth
That's very strange. Yeah.
- [19:09]
American Alchemy Host
What do you think that is with the anti gravity stuff?
- [19:12]
Kevin Knuth
I really have no idea. I mean, you can jump to conclusions and say, well, because somebody doesn't want other people discovering things that they know about and have control over. I mean, you could jump to that conclusion, but I don't actually know what the situation is. It's hard to tell.
- [19:28]
American Alchemy Host
Doesn't that feel like the base case conclusion? Like if somebody's getting threatened over discovering a thing, it would seem like there'd be some group on the inside that would be tracking people trying to discover a thing that they're already aware of.
- [19:42]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [19:42]
American Alchemy Host
Like that seems like the Occam's razor easy explanation.
- [19:45]
Kevin Knuth
It leads to a whole sets of conspiracy theories. Right. And it's difficult.
- [19:50]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, yeah. I've done deep dives on this guy like Townsend Brown, who I'm really fascinated with, and I talk about him probably too much for the audience, always laughs when I talk. But. But, you know, I find him to be really interesting because I do think he made breakthroughs in the world of gravity. This sort of Byfield Brown effect, which is, I think, a very simple experiment. But have you looked into that at all or.
- [20:11]
Kevin Knuth
I haven't looked into that much at all. You have limited time. That's the problem. I've got stacks of books I want to read and things I want to look at, and it's just you have to pick and choose. And I think that's when. That's one reason why you don't have academics in the past looking into UFOs, because why spend time on something that's probably nonsensical when you can be spending time on something that is probably going to pay off? And I think that's the calculation most people are doing. And how do you. Except at this point, I don't think it's nonsensical. So the payoff's huge. Right.
- [20:45]
American Alchemy Host
How do you think UFOs fly?
- [20:48]
Kevin Knuth
I have no idea. They're very strange in a lot of ways. First, the. How many ways are they strange? Right. The speeds and accelerations are crazy. Right? The accelerations. Nobody's going to survive that. So the equipment isn't going to survive it. So, you know, in the Nimitz case, we estimated the acceleration of the Tic tac dropping from 28,000ft to sea level and 0.75 seconds or so, 0.78 seconds. It's about 5,000 GS of acceleration minimum. Right. 5,000 GS is insane. The new F35 fighter jets, the wings rip off at 13 GS. You know, most missile frames can't handle more than a missile can't maneuver at more than about 35 GS. And the frame isn't going to survive more than 60 GS. And now you got this Tic Tac thing accelerating at 5,000 G's. That's not possible. I mean, equipment won't survive. So now this leads you to think the only solutions there is. You've got to be playing with inertia somehow. You've got to be playing with gravity somehow. And so that leads you down the path of general relativity and warp drive and that way of thinking. Right.
- [22:11]
American Alchemy Host
Do you have a propulsion modality that you like best when it comes to UFOs?
- [22:16]
Kevin Knuth
No, I don't exactly. But then the other problem is power. If you look at energies and power involved. The amount of power for that Tic Tac dropping is something like what was. It was 1100 gigawatts of power. You know, I remember Back to the Future with doc Doc Brown. 2.1 gigawatts. Like that's crazy or something. This thing was 1100 gigawatts, right? I mean, this is.
- [22:42]
American Alchemy Host
And he had. He had Mr. Fusion, which is a nuclear fusion machine.
- [22:45]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So this is more power. The Tic Tac maneuver took more power than the total nuclear power output of the United States. Wow.
- [22:55]
American Alchemy Host
Wow.
- [22:55]
Kevin Knuth
And that's in that Tic Tac in the size of an F18. I mean, that's crazy. New Year, same extra value meals at McDonald's. So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for just $8 for limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California and for delivery. And so now how do you. How do you get your head around that? So let's say they can deal with that kind of power. For some reason, they have access to that much energy. Equipment is never 100% efficient. So a 1% inefficiency. So most of the things we make are like 20% efficient at best. Right. So let's say they're really good at this. They can get to 99% efficiency. That means you've got a 1% inefficiency. 1% of 1,000 gigawatts is like 11 gigawatts of power. That means 11 gigawatts of power is going into waste heat. The thing would melt. So now what's happening? Are they really more efficient than 99%? Or is, or do we have something wrong? Are we looking at this the wrong way? Maybe. Maybe they're not actually moving in such a way that takes that much power.
- [24:15]
American Alchemy Host
Do you have any theories?
- [24:17]
Kevin Knuth
I don't exactly. Warp drive is certainly on the table, but that too is messy because we don't know enough about how. You know, since there has been theoretical work done on warp bubbles, we don't really know how these would interact with matter. So what does a warp bubble do in an atmosphere? We don't. Nobody's, I don't think, has looked into that. So these things are strange because they don't appear to be interacting with the atmosphere at all. There's no sonic boom, there's no fireball. There's no sound. In many cases, the underwater UFOs. You've even got more. And you should be have much more friction There these things are moving. The one with the New Zealand frigate in 1980s, the HMNZS Southland had an 800 foot long USO following it and it was about 2km behind the ship and actually closed that distance in 25 seconds and went under the ship and drained all the batteries, drained all the power from the ship. Ship. And you've got a clear. The width of this thing was about 150ft in diameter. This cylindrical shaped object 800ft long. So it's. What is that? That's 30% longer than the largest Russian sub, which would be the Typhoon class subs. Right. So it's 30% bigger than a typhoon class sub. The thing closes 2 kilometers in 25 seconds. This gives you a crazy acceleration right underwater. The top speed is something like 3,500 miles an hour. And you've got to clear a 150 foot diameter, 2 kilometer long cylinder of water out of the way. To move this thing in 25 seconds, that water had to go somewhere. Water is not compressible, so you would have had waves coming up that did not happen. So the thing is acting like it's not even interacting with the water yet. We have sonar records from this, which means sonar works by water molecules banging on things. Right. And bouncing off. So the water molecules are bouncing off this thing, but it's not interacting with the water all at the same time. How this works, I have no explanation for this. But that's the data. Now what do you do?
- [26:49]
American Alchemy Host
Interesting.
- [26:50]
Kevin Knuth
It's really perplexing. These things are really not simple.
- [26:54]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. Do you think you've ever studied UFO parts?
- [27:01]
Kevin Knuth
My colleague Matthew Shadalgis has been working on studying debris from purported crashes.
- [27:06]
American Alchemy Host
Really?
- [27:07]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. He has a new technique for detecting isotopes using neutron activation. So he's developed this technique and he's been working on this furiously for the last couple months.
- [27:19]
American Alchemy Host
Neutron activations. How is that different than mass spec?
- [27:24]
Kevin Knuth
Mass spec? You basically, you typically, you dissolve the material in nitric acid and then you spray it into some electric plates that basically electrify it, ionize it, and then you shoot it into a magnetic field, that constant magnetic field. The thing will move in a circle. So and the radius of the circle depends on the mass. So then it hits a screen. Depending on where the mass is, changes where it hits the screen. So you can measure the mass of the isotopes inside that spray.
- [27:55]
American Alchemy Host
And to back up for the audience, isotope differences are neutron differences in various elements. And if you were to find some, you know, isotope ratios in a material that don't occur naturally on Earth and don't pattern match to asteroids. That would be this really exciting, you know, possible smoking gun that the thing is actually a ufo.
- [28:16]
Kevin Knuth
Right, Exactly. Well said. You summarize that very nicely. Yeah, that's exactly it. And so Matthew's technique is different. He basically irradiates the material with neutrons, with a neutron source and basically creates heavier isotopes with these extra neutrons and, and then he watches them decay back into the, the states that they were in before. So he can tell what the isotopes he created were and then he can infer what they were originally from that. And it's non destructive because the, they, they decay back to where they were and pretty quickly. And you're not doing it to most of the material. You're only reading thousands of these atoms rather than as compared to Avogadro's number for the whole sample. Right.
- [29:11]
American Alchemy Host
So amazing. I mean Gary Nolan is also doing this at Stanford. He's using mass spec.
- [29:16]
Kevin Knuth
He uses mass spec. Right.
- [29:17]
American Alchemy Host
So it's cool to see that there's, you know, there are updates even on his work as far as this material analysis. The UFO legacy program has to be keeping tabs on what you guys are doing. That would be my guess. Right. You'd want some sort of like civilian like the smartest, like.
- [29:33]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, no, I know there's interest in Matthew's work. He's had contact with government people.
- [29:38]
American Alchemy Host
Okay.
- [29:39]
Kevin Knuth
They can't really talk about those details, but.
- [29:41]
American Alchemy Host
Okay. Are the parts like arts parts? The parts that some of them were arts parts.
- [29:46]
Kevin Knuth
He's had other ones too. He's had material from Ukraine and Israel and all over. Yeah.
- [29:51]
American Alchemy Host
Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Arts parts. It's this rumor that Art Bell. Right. Eventually ended up in possession of this material that I think was from the, was it from the Roswell?
- [30:02]
Kevin Knuth
Some of it's from Roswell, yeah. Yeah.
- [30:04]
American Alchemy Host
And, and the, the material is in Art Bell, obviously famous coast to coast, you know, amazing, you know, radio show host that reached, you know, 10 to 15 million people every night, super into UFOs. And it's so interesting that he received these pieces because he, you know, he's so passionate about, about this stuff. I believe one of the pieces is magnesium bismuth. Is that right?
- [30:25]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, yeah.
- [30:26]
American Alchemy Host
Because that's what Nolan has as well. I find this really interesting because in the bifield Brown effect with Townsend Brown, the anti gravity stuff, and I don't have any. I have a little bit of evidence that Townsend Brown might have been involved in one UFO crash retrieval, but I don't have a ton. I, I mostly have evidence that he figured out an anti gravity modality. But magnesium or bismuth rather is constantly talked about by bismuth because bismuth is a high K dielectric. So it stores and discharges easily a lot of electromagnetism. And that in the bifield brown effect, if you use that as the insulator between the two, you know, negative and positive electrodes, that creates greater thrust. So I find it fascinating that you have UFO parts that in the only anti or in one of the few anti gravity experiments that we know of, it creates more thrust in that experiment. That seems really significant to me.
- [31:18]
Kevin Knuth
Right. And the other interesting thing is it has nano layers of the bismuth and magnesium and the, and one of, one of the two is paramagnetic and the other is diamagnetic. So they're, they have two very different magnetic properties, which is interesting. So a lot of the, a lot of the modern work that we do in material science on like spintronics and this sort of thing basically is dealing with magnetic spins with diamagnetic and paramagnetic materials. So a lot of the new breakthroughs in material science as related to these types of materials as well. So this is interesting stuff.
- [31:54]
American Alchemy Host
Super interesting. Yeah. Gary was also, when I was at his lab, he showed me some of the pieces and he mentioned that some of these materials might be able to micro size wave guides for terahertz power. And do you think that that's true? Do you think these pieces are able to do that?
- [32:14]
Kevin Knuth
I don't know if that's possible that we haven't looked into. Ok. And I know, I know what Matthew's done, but I don't think that he's looked into that at all.
- [32:24]
American Alchemy Host
What is, what is one scientific truth that you adamantly believe that conventional science disagrees with you vehemently on?
- [32:34]
Kevin Knuth
Oh, that's a good question. I don't know if I have an answer immediately.
- [32:43]
American Alchemy Host
You could dwell on it if you want for the movie, if it comes.
- [32:46]
Kevin Knuth
Up to think about that. What do I. What? Hmm, interesting. Yeah. I don't know if. I don't know if there is one. Exactly.
- [32:52]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. At NASA you mentioned the people there weren't really into UFOs. How does, how do you square that with all this lore of them being interested in UFOs? And I don't know, you have like Diana Pasulka, have you ever read her book American Cosmic? So she has this NASA mission controller who I guess now is public, but his name is Tim Taylor. And you know, he's going around taking them to crash UFO crash sites. Seems extremely read into any sort of UFO program that exists.
- [33:24]
Kevin Knuth
There are individuals at NASA who are interested in that. And since I've gotten interested and been vocal about it, I've had some of the, some of them I knew when I was at NASA have come talk to me and said, oh yeah, I was interested or I knew I know some, something about this or that.
- [33:39]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, it's so strange because. Yeah, you have Hal Pobbenmeyer who was a. I think he was both CIA and NASA showing up at Chris Bledsoe's door when he starts to tracked UFOs. Very. It's like.
- [33:52]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, well, people come kind of come out of the woodwork. You find that, you know, I've now had a couple people from NASA I find out were interested in remote viewing. Like I wouldn't have thought that when I was back, you know, when I worked there, but.
- [34:08]
American Alchemy Host
Interesting.
- [34:09]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah.
- [34:10]
American Alchemy Host
Is there a. When were they doing remote viewing in a professional capacity at NASA?
- [34:14]
Kevin Knuth
No. Well, yeah, so I don't know. I don't want to tell on anybody, but some of this is actually public, but nobody's noticed. So one of the people at NASA has actually written a CIA training manual for remote viewing.
- [34:28]
American Alchemy Host
Really?
- [34:29]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah.
- [34:30]
American Alchemy Host
But this is, this is public.
- [34:32]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah.
- [34:32]
American Alchemy Host
Okay, well then. Well, we can. People are going to look it up.
- [34:35]
Kevin Knuth
We can figure out who it is.
- [34:36]
American Alchemy Host
Okay. All right.
- [34:37]
Kevin Knuth
All right. Yeah, no, I actually, I was. Yeah, there was a. Yeah. So.
- [34:41]
American Alchemy Host
But well, if it's public, it's, you know, interesting. Yeah, that's fascinating.
- [34:46]
Kevin Knuth
And, and that person did it before they came to NASA. But, but are currently or were. Were NASA. They may be retired now at this point.
- [34:55]
American Alchemy Host
You know, they also have a patent, I believe in 2003 on a barrel shaped asymmetric capacitor. And they, they say this is. We're talking about Thomas Townsend Brown.
- [35:04]
Kevin Knuth
Oh, yeah, that. That works. Interesting too.
- [35:06]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, it's very interesting.
- [35:08]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, there are these. There are handfuls of people doing weird things here and there. Right. And it's.
- [35:16]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [35:16]
Kevin Knuth
And they've been. I mean you. And once I've gotten involved with this, I find that those people are all over the place and they're all studying things they're not supposed to be studying, which is fascinating.
- [35:28]
American Alchemy Host
On that patent, that NASA patent, I believe Larry Smalley has his name there. He's a University of Alabama, Huntsville. He was the physics chair. And under him was a woman named Ning Li. And she was studying, I think like superconductor based, you know, kind of weight reduction via kind of anti gravity. I think she, she called it gravitons gravity particles would, would cause this sort of effect and you know, obviously, you know, groundbreaking sort of controversial claim. And she speaks about this at some sort of MITRE Corporation event. And then she kind of, you know, goes dark, I think gets a security clearance. But her physics, she leaves and starts a company, I think it's called Anti Gravity LLC or something. And then her physics chair, Larry Smalley goes and joins her, which I think is. Lends credence to the actual findings. Right. If your physics chair leaves, I mean, you know, academia, it's kind of okay. Everybody's got to be high conviction at that point.
- [36:26]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, yeah. You don't leave a tenured position and.
- [36:29]
American Alchemy Host
Then his name shows up on a patent around a barrel shaped asymmetric capacitor, which is town. And it's talking about Townsend brass. And I'm like, okay, what's going on?
- [36:36]
Kevin Knuth
That's interesting. Yeah. Wow.
- [36:38]
American Alchemy Host
I find it fascinating. Yeah. But I mean, one question I have is you have all these names pop up, right? And you have, you know, how put off is obviously like seems so at the center of so much UFO physics, but a lot of, a lot of the names that pop up in UFO science, quote, unquote, it's almost like there's some sort of like substructure of a lot of these like mega structures. So like, like NASA, I don't like. It almost seems like what you're saying is there is no official knowledge of UFOs, but it's like these people within NASA that are extremely interested in this stuff. How do you square that with like, you watch the age of Disclosure and it's like we have a legacy program which you would. That implies some sort of like, you know, it's like super well coordinated.
- [37:25]
Kevin Knuth
It's a different thing. Yeah.
- [37:27]
American Alchemy Host
So like what I always try to ask that I try to press on people here. Is it like, like is there a program or is it like this hermetic substructure where people come together via synchronicities.
- [37:39]
Kevin Knuth
Or just people doing things? I mean that's one thing. I mean, scientists tinker as well, right?
- [37:45]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [37:45]
Kevin Knuth
And NASA isn't like that now, but when I worked there, which was the early 2000s, you still were able to do like blue sky research as long as, I mean the requirement was you had to convince your area lead that this was in line with NASA's missions basically in some way. And that's all you had to do. And so then you could go off and work on this project. And while I worked there, near the end of the time I worked there, during the Bush administration, they started what they called full cost accounting, where they have to account for all their costs. So now you have to. You have to account for the time you spend on things. And if you're doing that, then you can't do this blue sky research on this. You can't do this little thing on the side. So, for example, one of the things that we tried to do on the side. So this was a. Yeah, why not? I was interested in the Roswell story, and I was struck by the fact that the picture, you know, Jesse Marcel says one thing about the material and sounds entirely believable. And then they get the picture in the newspaper with General Ramey, with what clearly is aluminum foil and balsa wood in the picture. Right. And you look at that picture and you think, there's no way anybody's gonna mistake that for any kind of craft debris. So what was Jesse Marcel thinking or did? Was it as they claimed, that they switched the debris? Right. And I think it's more likely they switched the debris.
- [39:28]
American Alchemy Host
Well, Marcel claimed that the real UFO debris was off to the side, right outside of the frame.
- [39:33]
Kevin Knuth
Right outside the photo. Did he say that?
- [39:35]
American Alchemy Host
I think he did, yeah. He also said he brought it home and that his son played with it.
- [39:39]
Kevin Knuth
Yes, he'd showed it with his son.
- [39:40]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. So I think he would know the difference.
- [39:43]
Kevin Knuth
He would know the difference. Right. So then there's the picture of General Ramey, and he's holding a memo that you can see in the photographs. And it's a. Clearly, it's stamped top secret. And I thought, what does that memo say? And so me and one of my colleagues at NASA, because I was in the intelligence systems division, so our job was to develop machine learning systems to analyze data. And so we were doing a lot of work with imagery. I worked with Hubble imagery, and I thought, why don't we try cleaning up this memo and see what the memo says? So we actually wrote the algorithms to actually read this memo. And it wrote them, got them running, and we're testing them. And we just didn't have the computer power at the time. It was a 300 MHz machines we were working on, and we couldn't use the supercomputer for this, so we couldn't get away with that. We could get away with using the 300 MHz computer on this. It just didn't have the computing power and computing time to do it. So we abandoned the project. But we had thought that we were going. Our little dream was, all right, we're going to figure out what this memo says, and then we're going to publish it as a NASA publication. But it's going to be buried as an example. The publication will be on our methodology and our algorithm. And then we'll have several examples, and one of them will be the Roswell memo. And then we'll make it public and make it an official NASA publication. Right? That was our little plan.
- [41:17]
American Alchemy Host
I love it.
- [41:18]
Kevin Knuth
Our sneaky plant.
- [41:19]
American Alchemy Host
I love it.
- [41:19]
Kevin Knuth
And it just didn't work out because we couldn't analyze that imagery right. But this is, but this is what's going on behind the scenes. And probably a lot of government labs people are doing stuff like this. You know, maybe not trying to publish it, but but trying to figure out if they can get something to work or try something interesting.
- [41:37]
American Alchemy Host
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- [43:00]
Kevin Knuth
Summarize so you can cut through clutter.
- [43:03]
American Alchemy Host
And clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com enthusiastic 365 copilot so it's like there is this UFO truth. You have, you know, various crashes, you have various maybe scientific frameworks that are not public. And then you just have a bunch of vigilante efforts in little pockets and compartments, like attempting things.
- [43:27]
Kevin Knuth
You got people, smart people trying things. And it's, you know, I think what, you know, John. I think it was John Stewart said, isn't it amazing what scientists can do when no one makes them stop, Stop. And I think that's all it is. It's. No one's making them stop. And they're discovering things, and some of them are useful, some aren't, and some are really interesting and some they feel they probably shouldn't talk about. I think that it's that simple. Yeah, in a lot of cases.
- [43:52]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. It's so fascinating. You have an interesting theory around water worlds and, you know, water being this really important kind of variable for UFO transport. Do you want to explain that?
- [44:06]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, well, there's a few. Yeah. So it has two aspects. The first one is, Is why, you know, I was at one point wondering, why are There so many USOs submerged, unidentified submerged craft? Why is that such a big thing? And when you think about living on a planet, living under an atmosphere is horrible. It's difficult. The weather is. The conditions change every day. They change hourly, even. And I'm coming down here from Albany, I'm down here to Austin. We had snowstorm this weekend in Albany, or north of Albany. I drove from Montreal to Albany through a snowstorm. And now we're down here and it's what, 60 degrees and sunny. And I hope to go to the Botanical Garden before I leave or something. Right. So the atmospheres are very. Are quite variable. And now you go from Earth to Venus. Venus's atmosphere has 100 times the air pressure on Earth, which would crush you. And it's about 800 degrees Fahrenheit. And actually I was at NASA Ames when the Magellan probe was doing radar mapping of Venus. And we were perplexed because the mountaintops would become radar reflective at times, and then it would fade, and then they would become reflective again and fade. And we were like, what's going on with these mountaintops? And realized they would become reflective when the temperature would drop. So the temperature would drop, the mountaintops would become radar reflective. And they realized what was happening is vaporized lead and bismuth was actually making snowflakes. And so it was actually snowing lead and bismuth snow on the mountaintop. I mean, imagine what that would. I can't imagine what that would look like to have Metal snow, I want to go there and actually see that. But that's what they figure. That's a cold day in hell, by the way, when you've got metal snow raining on the mountaintops. So that's what Venus's atmosphere is like. Right. And then you go to Mars And Mars has 1/100 the atmospheric pressure of Earth. So you need a spacesuit and it's cold, you know what 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, something like that, Colder than Antarctica temperatures. So now comparing Venus to Mars, the temperature difference is a factor of 10,000 different. It's huge. Now you consider a water world. Water is only liquid from 0 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees Celsius. Right. So you've got, as long as you have liquid water, you are in that temperature range, you're not going out of it. And so it's much more stable temperature wise. The pressure varies with depth dramatically. I mean atmospheric pressure varies with atmospheric height as well. But because water is so much more dense, it's much more dramatic. So you can control what pressure you like by controlling the depth. And water has such a high heat capacity, the temperature doesn't change that much. You don't have the temperature fluctuations of water temperature that you do in air temperature. So it's a much more stable environment. You're protected from solar radiation, you're protected from ultraviolet rays, you're protected from cosmic rays, you're protected from small meteorites at least. And it's a great place to hide. Electromagnetic waves don't travel far in water, so you can't see far. You can't detect things with electromagnetism very well, which is why we use sonar. Right. And so it's a great place to hide.
- [47:55]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [47:56]
Kevin Knuth
So there's every reason to go to the water.
- [47:59]
American Alchemy Host
It's fascinating. So if you were like a Kardashev 3 or 4 scale civilization and you wanted to colonize a bunch of other planets, water is the perfect hideout spot. It's evidence.
- [48:10]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, well that's the other thing. So you only have a couple choices, Right. So if you're going to go colonize another star system, you've got to carry everything you need need to do it with you. Right. So getting already the traveling is hard. It's going to be hard for anybody. But bringing everything you need to build up a base or some kind of settlement is going to be extra difficult. So you really have a few options. And water worlds we now know are relatively common. We have several water worlds in our solar system. Most of them are frozen moons, icy surfaces, but there's oceans underneath. Right. So you can either plan to colonize, you can either just plan to stay near spaceships. Right. We're just going to live in our spaceships. That's probably the easiest thing to do. Right. Or to colonize airless worlds like the moon, which is no different than staying in your spaceship. But then the other option is to live on a planet. And if you want to live on a planet to access its resources, you're either going to go with an airless world and stay near spaceship, ship, or the next most reasonable choice for could be to go to water.
- [49:22]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. And so it's also evidence, as you said, of this kind of Goldilocks temperature zone. I think water is specifically unique as well because the way that hydrogen and oxygen bond in an H2O molecule is a perfect crystal lattice structure. And so it's unique in that the solid form of it is actually less dense than the liquid form of it.
- [49:42]
Kevin Knuth
It.
- [49:42]
American Alchemy Host
So you end up with, you know, these worlds that don't flood because you end up with a lot of, a lot of ice. And so, you know, that's fascinating as well. And then I think that the final thing on the UFO front is you're talking about tons and tons of power. If you were to theoretically break hydrogen and oxygen bonds in H2O, you would get a ton of power.
- [50:05]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. You can use water for storing energy that way.
- [50:08]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. Or for fuel.
- [50:09]
Kevin Knuth
And then seas, and you know, seas have dissolved minerals in them, so you could, I mean, it's not a fast process, but you can, you could extract any kind of mineral you want. Any, any atom, Any atom you want, you can probably pull out of seawater. You know, whether you can do it fast enough to get a substantial amount is really the question. But so, but that would be easier than mining. Right.
- [50:31]
American Alchemy Host
Do you think there are UFO bases in our oceans? Tim Burchette recently said there are five oceanic hotspots across the world.
- [50:41]
Kevin Knuth
We have a higher propensity of sightings around these five or six, I believe.
- [50:47]
American Alchemy Host
Deep area, deep water areas.
- [50:50]
Kevin Knuth
And so to me, it just, it.
- [50:52]
American Alchemy Host
Creates a question there. Do you think there are UFO bases?
- [50:57]
Kevin Knuth
I think that's probably that, that's probably the best bet, really. Yeah.
- [51:01]
American Alchemy Host
And you went to Catalina. Right. Which is one of the, it's off the coast of Southern California. And a lot of people think it's this UFO hotspot. There's a great book, I think it's called Under Underwater or Undersea UFO Base by Preston Dennett.
- [51:15]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [51:15]
American Alchemy Host
And there's a ton of history in the region. And so what did you find when you went out there?
- [51:21]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, well, we, we spent, we spent five days on a rooftop in Laguna beach and watching the skies. And, and it's all documented in the, the movie A Tear in the Sky. So. And the movie best documents what the. Basically how the mission progressed. Right. And so it's one of the first, you know, university supported UFO data collection missions that, that we know of has happened. Right. So. So there's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of excitement in that movie. And that's real excitement. Right?
- [52:02]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [52:02]
Kevin Knuth
And we did see some interesting things that. And so here comes some spoilers. And so I'm going to spoil things twice. So at one point, there's a bright light that's seen from the team in Catalina island, which was across the Catalina Channel. We had two teams. They spotted this bright light that was moving and they said it's too bright to be a satellite. It's. It's going in this direction. So we're looking for it as well. So we recorded this object and then it just abruptly disappears, which is very strange. And the problem with documentaries is that, yes, it takes a long time to make a film, maybe a year to two years in some cases. Science takes a lot longer. We're a lot slower. And so the scientific study of what the data we collected took a lot longer. And that got published just last year. So our mission was what, in 2021? Tear in the Sky, I think came out in 2023, something like that. And our scientific paper on the mission came out just this summer. Matthew Shidagas was the first author of that paper. And so we found that that bright light was the space station. Why didn't we figure that out earlier? The app we were using to track satellites didn't take into account daylight. A stupid mistake. Right. That we shouldn't have made. But this is your first time doing this sort of thing and you make. And I remember telling Matthew on our way.
- [53:38]
American Alchemy Host
Space station looks weird, by the way. And it looks really weird. It looks like a ufo. Yeah.
- [53:43]
Kevin Knuth
And I remember telling Matthew on the airplane, you know, we were both excited. Oh, this is gonna be so much fun. Think. Imagine what we can see. And I said, yeah, but the problem is we're just. What we're probably gonna learn is what not to do. And that's really what happened. That first mission. We learned how not to do it. It. But Matthew's the one who figured out it was the Space station. He put it all together and he actually took the pixel size on the camera and then knowing the altitude of the space station, figured out how big the space station should be. And he was within one foot of the space size of the space station. It's really a nice analysis. He does put it in the appendix and. And, yeah, something to be proud of, the fact that, yeah, we identified it to be the space station and actually proved it. Right. So that's cool. Another event that happened was one of the FLIR cameras was showing these objects dropping to the sea. And I was actually, at the time, looking through night vision goggles. This didn't end up in the movie. And people were too excited about the FLIR camera to hear me shouting about the night. I was telling people, put on your night vision goggles and look over here. But I saw something actually drop and hit the water in infrared.
- [55:02]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa, you got that on video?
- [55:04]
Kevin Knuth
No, no, I was just looking through the goggles, watching for things and.
- [55:08]
American Alchemy Host
But it was through infrared.
- [55:10]
Kevin Knuth
It was in infrared, yeah. And then. Then. And I think they tried to simulate this in the film, but it's not simulated properly. They showed this thing hovering. It wasn't. It just dropped.
- [55:19]
American Alchemy Host
Wow.
- [55:20]
Kevin Knuth
But. But the FLIR cameras recorded things dropping into the sea and we.
- [55:25]
American Alchemy Host
So you think you saw, like, a ufo?
- [55:27]
Kevin Knuth
I don't know what I saw, actually, because. But I was excited because it happened about the same time the flare camera was showing things dropping. But then we figured out later that the flare camera was actually malfunctioning. And that's. And that's a failure mode of the flare cameras. We actually talked to the engineers who.
- [55:41]
American Alchemy Host
Were seeing something drop.
- [55:43]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, These things falling down is actually a failure mode.
- [55:45]
American Alchemy Host
Oh, so maybe it was an issue with the camera.
- [55:48]
Kevin Knuth
So the FLIR camera recording we had was not something dropping into the scene. See, I don't know what I saw and probably will never know because you can't. It has to be reproducible. Right. You have to be able to see it again and try different things.
- [56:01]
American Alchemy Host
Is there a best sensor modality if you're trying to spot UFOs?
- [56:05]
Kevin Knuth
I think as many sensors as you can.
- [56:08]
American Alchemy Host
Is there one different kind, say, to pick one and you had to, you know, what would you pick?
- [56:13]
Kevin Knuth
If I picked one, I would try. That's tough. I think I would go with. A FLIR camera is a good choice for a few reasons. One, you get a visual record of the object. It's not a very good visual record because it's gonna be blurry, because it's infrared. I've heard people complain, oh the Navy produces all these blurry photos of UFOs. Well they're infrared images. What do you expect? I've heard scientists say this and you wanna slap them upside the head and say what did you think was gonna happen? And so you know. But the other benefit is for with a FLIR camera is you can measure the temperature of the object. Object because you're picking up infrared emissions. Right. So that black body infrared spectrum actually gives you the temperature of the object.
- [57:00]
American Alchemy Host
Where white hot comes from.
- [57:02]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. So not only do you get a visual record of the object, but you get its temperature too, which is you get extra pieces of information for that. So for that reason I probably would choose a flircum.
- [57:13]
American Alchemy Host
Is there a sighting or a crash that you rank as highest conviction as far as your analysis of it that like you, you are convinced that this happened.
- [57:27]
Kevin Knuth
Oh.
- [57:29]
American Alchemy Host
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- [58:04]
Kevin Knuth
I would have to say the most convincing one is one of the most hard to believe ones. It's JAL Airlines 6 JAL 1628.
- [58:16]
American Alchemy Host
It was a Japan Airlines cargo flight.
- [58:18]
Kevin Knuth
Piloted by Captain Kenju Tarauchi. This is the sketch Tarauchi drew of.
- [58:23]
American Alchemy Host
What he says he saw at his window that night. And this Japanese television graphic is based on his description.
- [58:28]
Kevin Knuth
This is just a small space, we.
- [58:31]
American Alchemy Host
Can see big fame.
- [58:34]
Kevin Knuth
This one is size is carrier. So motherships and I and I remember, I remember that being on the nightly news. I remember watching it was on NBC. Tom Brokaw, Connie Chung. I remember that being on the news and being holy shit. There's giant aircraft carrier sized walnut shaped UFO followed that Japanese airlines for 45 minutes across Alaska Wild.
- [59:01]
American Alchemy Host
Give us the whole sequence.
- [59:03]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. So these guys. So the Japanese airlines, it's not a passenger jet, it's a 747. They are transporting Bouchulet Nouveau. Yep, they got wine in the back. Let the skeptics rejoice. No, the pilots were not drunk on Bourgeoislet Nouveau. That's just A silly thing.
- [59:23]
American Alchemy Host
They're just transporting it.
- [59:24]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, they're just transporting it. And they're flying across Alaska. And first, I don't remember all the events. Several things happened. They actually saw several UFOs. First, these rectangular things show up in front of the ship and have these lights that go up and down, shining light into the cockpit. And the pilots could feel the heat from the light of these objects. And they're like scanning or you know, like that kind of behavior. And they follow in front of the plane for some time and then, and then this giant walnut shaped object shows up. That's something like four 7. Four 7s in length, right. So the thing's the size of an aircraft carrier. And the pilot said that when it was in front of the plane, he couldn't see anything. But the craft, it's that big. So it's unmistakable. I mean, and he's screaming at air traffic control, you know, what do I do about this? And they're not picking it up on radar. And so it was later found that military height finding radar was picking it up. And so that radar actually, those radar records actually got collected. And so this walnut shaped craft basically follow the 747 for about 45 minutes, stayed about 7km away. But it would go from one side of the plane to the other. It was bouncing around from one side to the other. And, and we analyzed its speed and acceleration just crudely based on the description of what it was doing. So it would go. So at one point it would be at like one o', clock, and then the next sweep of the radar, which is about 12 seconds or so, would be at 6 o'. Clock. And so we were using those, that information to estimate speeds and accelerations. Daniel Kumbe, another physicists from the Niels Bohr Institute, actually took the radar. I didn't know that we could get our hands on the radar measurements when we published that paper. But he actually got the radar data and he analyzed that. He was analyzing the jumps and he found that the object was accelerating, took several jumps, different accelerations at different times, but there were three of them were, the accelerations were greater than 9,000 GS, one of them was like 11,000 GS. And the top speed he estimated to be 250,000 miles an hour. And at 250,000 miles an hour, you can get to the moon in 54 minutes. Whoa, that's not a joke. So you've got something the size of an aircraft carrier that could get to the moon in less than an hour, right? That's basically what you're dealing with here. So that's what. And we have. And we have the radar data from that.
- [62:22]
American Alchemy Host
We have the radar data.
- [62:23]
Kevin Knuth
You have the radar data.
- [62:24]
American Alchemy Host
That's amazing. I didn't know that.
- [62:25]
Kevin Knuth
That's amazing. Yeah. John Callahan, who was the FAA chief of accidents and investigations, actually reviewed the case. And then Reagan, President Reagan's scientific team and the CIA showed up and they wanted all the data.
- [62:41]
American Alchemy Host
No way.
- [62:42]
Kevin Knuth
And so they came to collect the data. Callahan copied it it and put it in a box that he just put under his desk. And so he had a copy of it and he didn't turn that over. So they got.
- [62:56]
American Alchemy Host
And that's public now.
- [62:57]
Kevin Knuth
And now that's public. Whoa. He held onto it for like 20 years, and then when he retired, he made it public.
- [63:03]
American Alchemy Host
Good for him.
- [63:03]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. He's a hero, right?
- [63:05]
American Alchemy Host
Kinda. Yeah.
- [63:06]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. But he said. So when he was in the meeting with Reagan scientific team, they were all excited. They said, we've never had 45 minutes of radar data from one of these things before. Wow. And so that exists. But from that radar data, it's accelerating at 10,000 G's, 250,000 miles an hour. And you can actually see the position of the plane on the radar. That is the one point where the plane actually does a360 to try to shake this thing. You can actually see that on the radar. So the radar's working.
- [63:37]
American Alchemy Host
Are the pilots still alive?
- [63:38]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, I think so.
- [63:39]
American Alchemy Host
I want to get in touch with them.
- [63:40]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. I'm sure the one pilot was actually fired.
- [63:43]
American Alchemy Host
Okay.
- [63:44]
Kevin Knuth
For going public with it. He was fired and had his license taken away. And then several years later was reinstated.
- [63:51]
American Alchemy Host
That's horrible that he was fired for that. I mean, what are you supposed to. You experience something that kind of traumatic and worldview shattering.
- [63:59]
Kevin Knuth
What would lying about it be a better thing to do for flight safety?
- [64:03]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, right.
- [64:04]
Kevin Knuth
That's really the question.
- [64:05]
American Alchemy Host
Just ignore it. Yeah. That's crazy. Fascinating. You know, there's that audio recording of Steven Spielberg, I believe, talking about his trip to the White House and they do a viewing of E.T.
- [64:18]
Kevin Knuth
Oh, right. I've heard this. Yes.
- [64:20]
American Alchemy Host
And Reagan says, you know, a lot of you in this room know that everything on that screen there that you just watched is true. And he just stood up and he.
- [64:29]
Kevin Knuth
Looked around the room, almost like he was doing a head count. And he said, I want to thank.
- [64:33]
American Alchemy Host
You for bringing ET to the White House. We really enjoyed your movie.
- [64:37]
Kevin Knuth
And then he looked around the room, he said, and there's. There are a number of people in.
- [64:41]
American Alchemy Host
This room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely true. And he said it without smiling.
- [64:48]
Kevin Knuth
But he, but, but, but he, he said that and everybody laughed, by the way. The whole room laughed because he presented it like a joke, but he wasn't smiling as he said it.
- [64:55]
American Alchemy Host
And so. Pretty interesting, right?
- [64:58]
Kevin Knuth
Interesting, right?
- [64:59]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. Well, that's fascinating that people from his scientific team, I mean, it sounds like they were pretty aware of this to, to say, oh, we've, we've never had 45 minutes, but it's like, like that implies. Okay, you're sitting on maybe, you know, shorter clips of UFOs.
- [65:15]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, they've got something.
- [65:16]
American Alchemy Host
They've got something. Yeah. I mean, Alaska is a hotspot historically as well. I believe Nathan Twining, who's head of Air Material Command, responsible for all aircraft development of the Air Force, wrote the famous twining memo in 1947 saying UFOs are not visionary nor fictitious.
- [65:34]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [65:35]
American Alchemy Host
He, he. I believe they had, like, an observation program going on in Alaska. And then just recently, you had. It was this weird sequence of events, but in 2020, early 2023, you had the Chinese spy balloon. And then right after that, you had this bizarre, you know, these things seem to show up and, like, jam, you know, the radars of these F22s. And one of them specifically was in Alaska and crashed. And I've heard some very strange things around this specific craft. I've heard things like it reassembled itself and was seen in the air over Canada.
- [66:12]
Kevin Knuth
Bizarre.
- [66:13]
American Alchemy Host
I've heard something. I've heard something about deleted emails involving this specific craft, the National Military Command center servers. So I don't know, it seems like there's something strange about this craft. And this was also in Alaska, so.
- [66:29]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [66:29]
American Alchemy Host
Who knows?
- [66:30]
Kevin Knuth
That's amazing.
- [66:30]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [66:31]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, it's amazing to know that, that, you know, his scientific, Reagan scientific team had gotten that data. What did they do with it? What is, you know, what are, what are their reports? I would like to see that, you know, the, you know, disclose those. That would be interesting alone. The Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, UFO crash.
- [66:56]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. 1965.
- [66:58]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. And my, My dad's cousin, Donald Hornig, he was later the president of Brown University, was on. He was the scientific advisor to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.
- [67:12]
American Alchemy Host
What?
- [67:13]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, that was. My dad's cousin did that. In fact, he's the person who. He designed the electronic triggers for the plutonium bomb.
- [67:24]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa.
- [67:24]
Kevin Knuth
In the Manhattan Project.
- [67:27]
American Alchemy Host
What was his name?
- [67:28]
Kevin Knuth
Donald Hornig.
- [67:29]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa.
- [67:30]
Kevin Knuth
And the night before the first test and Trinity. Oppenheimer gave him a sidearm and had him babysit the bomb up in the tower during a thunderstorm.
- [67:41]
American Alchemy Host
What?
- [67:42]
Kevin Knuth
And I was surprised that they didn't put that in the movie Oppenheimer, because it's an awesome story, but the movie's about Oppenheimer, not about the Manhattan Project. But he was. Yeah. So that was. And his wife was. But his wife was in the movie. Lily Hornig was in the movie. She was the. The woman who came from Harvard and some of the things she actually said. She told us this at dinner once. We visited her in Rhode island when she was still alive. But she said when she got to Los Alamos and was being interviewed for a position, they asked her how fast she typed, and she goes, they don't teach typing at Harvard. And they used that line in the movie, which was great.
- [68:22]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa. That is fascinating.
- [68:25]
Kevin Knuth
So I mentioned that because Donald Hoarding was the chief scientist, scientific advisor to President Johnson, who was president during the Kecksburg crash. And I had actually found a document about the Kecksburg ufo, and Donald Hornig was listed as being present. And I thought, oh, my God. And I never got to meet him. And I did ask his wife Lily about it, but she didn't know what document. I don't know. Maybe I have to look for it. But, you know, it's some kind of summary of. About the Kecksburg crash and something. It was some kind of government summary.
- [69:02]
American Alchemy Host
Official. Official.
- [69:02]
Kevin Knuth
Government official. Yeah. Yeah.
- [69:04]
American Alchemy Host
And.
- [69:04]
Kevin Knuth
And he was listed as being present, which he should have been. So I was like, wow, this is pretty.
- [69:09]
American Alchemy Host
But that's. That's even absent the fact that he's your dad's cousin, which is a remarkable synchronicity. The fact that a pre. The presidential science advisor is on site at a UFO crash.
- [69:21]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah.
- [69:22]
American Alchemy Host
Is amazing unto itself.
- [69:24]
Kevin Knuth
Oh, that's true. Yeah. That's a good point.
- [69:25]
American Alchemy Host
That's a really big deal. I think Eric Walker was supposedly present as well, at the Kecksburg crash. He was the, I believe, president of Penn State, and he was kind of a material science guy. I don't know if you know anything about him.
- [69:37]
Kevin Knuth
I don't know anything about him.
- [69:38]
American Alchemy Host
He's an interesting guy who, like, seems to imply to many researchers, UFO researchers, that he's very aware of the Majestic 12 and what they do and, you know, who knows?
- [69:50]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [69:50]
American Alchemy Host
I don't know. Do you lend credence to any of those sorts of stories? The idea that there's sort of an elite military scientific.
- [69:58]
Kevin Knuth
I can't. I. I wouldn't be surprised if they were true.
- [70:01]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [70:02]
Kevin Knuth
I don't know if I would just jump on believing they're true without any evidence, but. Yeah, but, you know, if I was. If I found out they were true, I wouldn't. It wouldn't shock me at all.
- [70:13]
American Alchemy Host
Well, it's like if the UFO issue is real and understood at the highest levels of government, of course they would have some sort of somebody, elite body.
- [70:20]
Kevin Knuth
Kind of group of. And if it's not a formal group, there's probably informal groups and.
- [70:25]
American Alchemy Host
Yes.
- [70:26]
Kevin Knuth
All that sort of thing.
- [70:27]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, yeah. Do you think, you know, we've mentioned the nuclear connection a bunch in this conversation. Do you think that not only UFOs are just showing up around nuclear sites, but that the secrecy involved in the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Energy overlays UFO secrecy and that the program is somehow bound up in, you know, atomic stuff?
- [70:52]
Kevin Knuth
That's a good question, too. Yeah. It's not clear how. I mean, what it. What it looks like. An SCU did a study of this, of UFOs monitoring nuclear sites. And so it looks like whoever's behind the whole UFO business, whoever these guys are, have been performing, you know, surveillance this whole time. They're surveilling us. And it's intelligent surveillance. They know what they're doing. And in fact, the SCU study showed that not only do you. So when they compared UFO sightings at nuclear sites compared to nearby military bases and nearby population centers, and the nuclear sites have more, you know, in the early 40s, had more UFO sightings than any of the other places.
- [71:46]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa.
- [71:46]
Kevin Knuth
Nearby. So it shows that it's statistically significant that they're hanging out at nuclear sites. Yeah. Now, what's weird about it is that they are present at the nuclear sites before we. Before they were totally constructed.
- [72:00]
American Alchemy Host
Yes.
- [72:01]
Kevin Knuth
And before they had nuclear material there. Radioactive material there. So while some of these sites were being built, UFOs were present.
- [72:10]
American Alchemy Host
That's definitely right.
- [72:11]
Kevin Knuth
So now you're like, wait a minute, how did they know that something important is going to be there? Right. How do they know what they know?
- [72:18]
American Alchemy Host
There's something about nuclear that they're really concerned with or interested in. I think in 1945, there's a pilot named Bud Clem and he's flying over Hanford Plutonium Base. And it was like, yeah, before the thing was fully up and he's seeing UFOs. And Robert Hastings has an interview with him.
- [72:37]
Kevin Knuth
When we got down there, they told us that this bogey was out there right over the Hanford ordinance works and directed Lieutenant Commander Brown to take off and check. Challenge him. Yeah, and I think I mentioned him in our paper. I've got the. We published a paper this year on the scientific study of uap. Basically goes through the history of how people have tried to study this. And I. And I mentioned Bud Clem's sightings at Hanford there.
- [73:05]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. It's so fascinating that that connection is. And there are all these theories you can. One can have. One is that they're sort of doing some sort of. Sort of intelligence recon or something. And then another is that they're just protecting their resources somehow. The Earth maintaining itself in its current form is important. Or maybe we're a resource. Humans are a resource to them, and so they need to intervene and ensure things we don't blow ourselves up or something. But it's really hard to say. I mean, I know, like the age of disclosure, Lou Elizondo kind of crew, like, they talk about it as far as, like, they're monitoring our ability to achieve energy breakthroughs. So that would be the tip of the spear of energy breakthroughs like high energy physics occurs in the national labs, in your atomic sites and that sort of thing. And we could break out of our cage or something if we achieve some unlock. And so there are various theories.
- [74:03]
Kevin Knuth
Humans are a hot mess. Right. And so if they're present in the universe, in our neighborhood, and then right now they don't have to deal with us directly, but if we go out there, they might have to deal with us. I think Stanton Friedman put it this way. It's kind of like you've got a neighborhood where you've got this one house on the block with crazy neighbors. The police are always there. There's screaming and yelling and things breaking. And you can hear that going on in the house on the block. And then one day the neighbors come out of the house and they're in the yard, and now you have to deal with them. Right. And so he was describing humanity this way and thought, that's pretty good. Pretty good description.
- [74:40]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. No, that. That feels pretty. Pretty apt to me. I want to talk because you're in a, I think, very unique vantage point as somebody who is at the intersection of kind of credible physics and then kind of very speculative ufo, you know, interest. There are a couple of interesting objects of interest of late that kind of, you know, hit that intersection. The first I want to talk about is actually this discovery of Beatrice Viaurea, Al at Stockholm University, who, you know, I had the pleasure of interviewing her and she was looking at the Palomar Observatory which was the most you know, in use observatory, you know in the kind of mid century in the US it's in San Diego. And she found over a hundred thousand in an eight year period what appeared to be UFOs mirror like objects, little transients, light flashes is. And they seem to actually be correlated with nuclear sites too. There's like a follow up study that they're 68% more likely to show up a day before or after a nuclear detonation. So this is just fascinating study and, and nobody in the credentialed conventional physics world has debunked it. It's been peer reviewed.
- [75:55]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [75:55]
American Alchemy Host
And you have people like Sabina Hassenfelder and Brian Keating, you know, people you don't think of as like UFO nuts.
- [76:01]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [76:02]
American Alchemy Host
Like going on, you know, YouTube and saying like this actually seems kind of intriguing. So what do, what do you make of it?
- [76:07]
Kevin Knuth
Oh it's, I mean her. That's the Vasco project. I mean it's an excellent idea for a project. You've got all of these photographic plates from the 1940s that if you have something in orbit you might pick, you might be able to detect it in a photograph. Right. So that's the, that's the premise. And she published a few early papers which I found really interesting. The ones where you have several of them like in a line or something like this. And I think that's fascinating. It's tough. The most recent papers with 100,000. That's hard to believe. That's a little shocking. That makes me worry that you really have to double your efforts to look to make sure there's not an artifact issue that you haven't considered.
- [77:00]
American Alchemy Host
Well, it was a hundred thousand between 1949 and 1957. The reason you'd ended in 1957 is because Sputnik goes up. So it's pre satellites which is, that's remarkable. And it's. They're all in geostationary orbit. Geo. So it's like the, you know, outer Earth's orbit. So I think it's pretty remarkable. That does seem really high as well. I think she says there could be an error rate of up to 30% or something. So that's a, you know, that's a big market margin. Yeah, but what, what's remarkable is like when she put this out, the main detraction, the main way people tried to kind of straw man or, or you know beat. Beat this thing was they said you know, these have to be plate defects These have to be sort of, you know, the, the, the, the astronomical plates, you know, have all sorts of weird, you know, chemical issues over long periods of time and you end up with these sort of stains and issues. And then, you know, those could look like transients or UFO those. But then she followed up on the study and she said, is there a. So obviously you have the sun, it's hitting the Earth and then you have the shadow of the Earth. Right. You have a kind of a dark side of the Earth. She said, is, you know, are these objects dropping off on the dark side.
- [78:12]
Kevin Knuth
Of the Earth when, when they shouldn't be being illuminated by the sun? I think that's the idea.
- [78:17]
American Alchemy Host
That's right. Are they physical objects? Are they reflecting off the sun? And A and B, if they're plate defects. Plate defects would not play favorites between the Earth's shadow and, you know, the sun side of the Earth should have.
- [78:30]
Kevin Knuth
The plate defect rate should be constant.
- [78:32]
American Alchemy Host
It would be completely proportional and constant. And so she found a serious drop off. And so that seems like pretty significant.
- [78:40]
Kevin Knuth
It's interesting. Yeah, certainly it's interesting. I think it's one of the, I mean the hallmark of science is reproducibility. Right. So what you need to have is you need to have other, other labs look at those plates and actually do the study, try to replicate the study. And I think that's what needs to happen.
- [79:01]
American Alchemy Host
And that's what she's beautiful about. Her kind of orientation towards this whole thing is she's now saying, you can go look at the data for yourself. So the, the raw data I think is online now for people to. Oh, it's not online. Okay. It will be, it will try to get it. Okay, you've tried to get it. Okay, okay. Okay. Then she says she's putting online.
- [79:18]
Kevin Knuth
She's working on that.
- [79:19]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I think that the, the next Holy Grail would be. You'd want it from another observatory and you'd want the actual transients to line up one to one, ideally.
- [79:28]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [79:29]
American Alchemy Host
Least with some correlation. That would be really important.
- [79:31]
Kevin Knuth
Observatories. That would be ideal.
- [79:32]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. So, yeah, totally agree. There's work to be done there, but pretty intriguing, I think.
- [79:37]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, it is intriguing. It is.
- [79:39]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [79:40]
Kevin Knuth
It was an, it's a nice idea for a project. I mean it's a. You've got, got all of these photographic records and to go through them, I mean, just to look for transients in the first place. I mean, transients would be anything that you don't have a good explanation for. So there's potential for lots of discoveries there, not just things orbiting the Earth.
- [80:00]
American Alchemy Host
So do you think UFOs come from space or do you think they are sort of, you know, going through wormholes, you know, or time travelers?
- [80:09]
Kevin Knuth
Absolutely no idea. They are. I think that many of them that we see that are observed by people are actually coming from Earth presently. You know, Carl Sagan once quipped, I think it's extremely doubtful that somebody is arriving from interstellar space every other Tuesday. You know, he made something like that, you know, basically saying that I don't think that he didn't say interstellar travel was impossible, it wasn't going to happen every other Tuesday is basically what he was saying. It's not going to be common. And I think he's right. They're not coming in from another star system every other Tuesday. They're present here. And that's why I think there's probably bases underwater as your best bet or maybe somewhere else in the solar system. But we know that they can't be more than. In many cases, they can't be more than a light day away because they showed up. So when you had the Fukushima disaster, they showed up the next day. So if they're coming from another star system, it would take years for any signal, any information about Fukushima, Fukushima to get out to that star system and then years for them to come, unless.
- [81:19]
American Alchemy Host
Fast and light communications and travel is.
- [81:22]
Kevin Knuth
Possible or something like that. Right.
- [81:23]
American Alchemy Host
But yes, in general relativity it would need to be.
- [81:25]
Kevin Knuth
But they're probably coming from Earth in that case.
- [81:29]
American Alchemy Host
Interesting. Do you know of any interesting space based encounters of UFOs, like NASA encounters?
- [81:37]
Kevin Knuth
That's also a good question. So I know a few of them. Well, there's several cosmonauts have reported seeing things in space and that's important. Oh, I can't. I'm blanking on his name right now. Of course, it's a long Russian name that I'm not familiar with. It starts with an A. But they actually had a craft pull up alongside of them.
- [82:01]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa.
- [82:02]
Kevin Knuth
Half their orbit. And they took pictures. The cosmonaut drew a picture of the object.
- [82:07]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa.
- [82:08]
Kevin Knuth
Because the pictures all got confiscated by the Soviet the.
- [82:12]
American Alchemy Host
Not Gagarin.
- [82:13]
Kevin Knuth
No, it's not Gagarin. Check this out, okay.
- [82:18]
American Alchemy Host
And he drew a ufo.
- [82:20]
Kevin Knuth
He drew a picture of what they took photographs of. Whoa.
- [82:23]
American Alchemy Host
What, what mission was this, do you know or.
- [82:25]
Kevin Knuth
No, I think it was one when they were going to one of the beginning early space stations.
- [82:30]
American Alchemy Host
Wow.
- [82:31]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. This thing pulled up it had. It had windows. It had windows and pulled up and followed them for part of the orbit and then left.
- [82:38]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa.
- [82:39]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. Which is awesome.
- [82:40]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [82:41]
Kevin Knuth
I talked to Alan Bean. I met him and talked to him. He was from Apollo 12, and he said that when he went up to Skylab, they were on skylab, I think, 1977. Ish. They actually photographed a red flashing light.
- [83:01]
American Alchemy Host
Well, what is Skylab for?
- [83:02]
Kevin Knuth
The Skylab was one of our early space stations.
- [83:05]
American Alchemy Host
Okay.
- [83:06]
Kevin Knuth
And. And they actually saw a red flashing light that followed them for part of their orbit and then disappeared.
- [83:12]
American Alchemy Host
Really?
- [83:12]
Kevin Knuth
Yes. And they had photographs of that? Yeah.
- [83:14]
American Alchemy Host
What did he say happened to the photographs?
- [83:16]
Kevin Knuth
Oh, they're actually public. Oh, they are online.
- [83:18]
American Alchemy Host
Okay. Wow.
- [83:19]
Kevin Knuth
Well, the big problem. You're photographing a light in the sky, and it's a handheld camera.
- [83:25]
American Alchemy Host
Sure.
- [83:25]
Kevin Knuth
On a spaceship through a window. And yeah, it's a bouncy and blurry and out.
- [83:29]
American Alchemy Host
But it's a red light that seems to be falling.
- [83:31]
Kevin Knuth
Red flashing light in space. No. Nobody. Nobody puts lights on satellites. First, you don't need them. And second, it's more weight. You know, every. Every ounce is going to cost you a crazy.
- [83:41]
American Alchemy Host
Also, satellites back then weren't doing proximity operations. They were just following predictable orbits. They weren't changing orbits. Yeah. Okay, so that's a big deal.
- [83:51]
Kevin Knuth
That whole thing is very strange.
- [83:52]
American Alchemy Host
Yes.
- [83:53]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. And then you have the Gemini 11 mission, where the. From the transcripts. The. The astronauts were working and something flew over their Houston assets. Did something just fly over you? And they say, affirmative. Weird, weird, weird. And then there's something like six minutes of no transcript. Right. But when the thing flew over, the object flew over them. It drained their. It drained one of their battery sets. Stack Charlie. Stack got drained. So Stack C got drained. So it's almost a classic UFO sighting. They see an object in space, it flies over their ship and then drains their batteries. Right. And so that's in the transcripts of Gemini 11. Wow.
- [84:45]
American Alchemy Host
And that's public. That audio is public as well.
- [84:48]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. And now. So the question I've had is why, when we had the NASA camera mission.
- [84:53]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [84:53]
Kevin Knuth
Why was there no section on what astronauts have seen in space? I mean, story Musgrave, a shuttle pilot, also talked about seeing things like snakes.
- [85:03]
American Alchemy Host
Wow.
- [85:04]
Kevin Knuth
Things writhing around in space. Really? Yeah. None of that mentioned in the NASA commission's report.
- [85:10]
American Alchemy Host
So bizarre.
- [85:11]
Kevin Knuth
So you've got. And then you have. What is there? The. The mission. The Soviet mission to Phobos where their craft got disabled. The last picture shows an object like a fin in the. Like a tail fin of a plane, looks like in the picture.
- [85:27]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa.
- [85:27]
Kevin Knuth
That's the last picture it took. And then the whole thing was disabled.
- [85:30]
American Alchemy Host
The whole thing was disabled. And Gemini 11 also looks like the audio. Like there was some sort of power interference or something as well. Right. Like electromagnetic interference.
- [85:39]
Kevin Knuth
Multiple events in space that weren't even talked or weren't even mentioned in the NASA Commission report. Why shouldn't that be of interest?
- [85:48]
American Alchemy Host
They all sign NDAs, right?
- [85:50]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [85:50]
American Alchemy Host
The astronauts.
- [85:51]
Kevin Knuth
Oh, I don't know what they do.
- [85:53]
American Alchemy Host
I believe they do.
- [85:54]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah.
- [85:55]
American Alchemy Host
So do you think. I mean, you were at NASA. Do you think NASA is sort of systematically covering this stuff up?
- [86:01]
Kevin Knuth
I would have no idea.
- [86:02]
American Alchemy Host
Because the other interesting thing from Beatrice Villarreal is she says she was in touch with a current NASA person who said that NASA tracks what they call uncorrelated targets all the time. So these are. These are, you know, sort of, you know, noise.
- [86:16]
Kevin Knuth
Well, they're not necessarily literally alien spaceships. Right. But it's. But yeah, but these are things that should be reported.
- [86:22]
American Alchemy Host
Figure out what they are.
- [86:23]
Kevin Knuth
If you don't know what they are and you've got a. If you're running a commission on unidentified aerial phenomenon and you've got a bunch of unidentified things, you should talk about them.
- [86:35]
American Alchemy Host
Totally. But also, apparently the uncorrelated targets are systematically tracked by space force and not by. According to this insider. Again, I don't know if this is true, but that's really interesting.
- [86:47]
Kevin Knuth
All of our government documents on these things, even the recent ones, barely have any information in them. Meanwhile, The French in 1999 put out the Cometa report, which is 100 pages or something, right?
- [87:00]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. It's just crazy. Yeah.
- [87:02]
Kevin Knuth
10 pages.
- [87:03]
American Alchemy Host
The French have a UFO research group officially called Guy Pen, which, unlike Arrow, doesn't gaslight the population. They, you know, admit that this stuff is real and are open about it.
- [87:12]
Kevin Knuth
That's right. Yeah.
- [87:13]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, yeah.
- [87:14]
Kevin Knuth
Cometa Report, Report's final analysis from 1999 was that. Was that, yeah, these things could be alien spacecraft. There might be a base somewhere in our solar system, and the US is probably hiding information.
- [87:28]
American Alchemy Host
So. Fascinating.
- [87:29]
Kevin Knuth
And that's what they actually said in the United States is probably covering up information.
- [87:33]
American Alchemy Host
That was their official report. That's amazing. So.
- [87:37]
Kevin Knuth
And then.
- [87:37]
American Alchemy Host
And I believe the head of their CIA. CIA, former head of their CIA, Elaine Juliet, was extremely interested in UFOs and publicly to this day is like this big, you know, UFO proponent. So.
- [87:49]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [87:50]
American Alchemy Host
They have a long history. So Gemini 11, that was Pete Conrad was The astronaut?
- [87:56]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, Conrad and Gordon.
- [87:57]
American Alchemy Host
And Gordon. And did they come back and say we saw a ufo? Did they say anything?
- [88:03]
Kevin Knuth
I don't think so.
- [88:03]
American Alchemy Host
Okay. I mean, because that's the other. Look, I, I've looked into all the moon landing stuff and I just actually had Joe Rogan on the podcast, which was a big honor. He, he kind of was the, the first person to be in our spaceship set which we just built, which is really cool. Yeah. And I just couldn't, couldn't think of anybody better for that. And we, we talked about a lot of the moon, moon landing weirdness, you know, in the presentation of the moon land landing. And I think neither of us are suggesting that definitively like the US didn't go to the moon. I think you can, to, you know, the, the inverse of that, you, you can say definitively the presentation of whatever happened is weird and it was sanitized and manicured and presented in a bizarre way. And there was definitely some, you know, managing of that that was, that was going on, that, that's obvious. And so I wonder if, if maybe we did actually attempt or go and maybe we just saw UFOs along the way or maybe there's something very ontologically weird about the trip to space that's hard to come back with as far as a revelation to the public or something. I don't know.
- [89:17]
Kevin Knuth
But I mean, Edgar Mitchell came back talking about having an epiphany of how we're all connected in the different way of thinking about the universe and humanity. But then after that he was very, very, very much involved with UFOs. Yeah, but he grew up in Roswell.
- [89:34]
American Alchemy Host
Grew up in Roswell. Apollo 14 astronaut.
- [89:36]
Kevin Knuth
And he had gotten. And so because he was an Apollo astronaut, he got to hear all sorts of things about Roswell from people from at all levels.
- [89:43]
American Alchemy Host
He was very close with Werner von Braun, who seemed really interested in UFOs as well. He's the father of our, of our space program, essentially.
- [89:49]
Kevin Knuth
Wernher von Braun's mentor was Herman, Herman Oberth, who gave a lecture in 1954 on UFOs. After so many witnesses have seen the so called flying saucers, their existence can no longer be denied. I believe that these flying objects come from another solar system. I have his notes and his lecture notes, and in there he mentions that he has seen numerous radar measurements of their speeds up to 19 kilometers a second, which is about 40,000 miles an hour.
- [90:30]
American Alchemy Host
He also says that the rocket program was helped and he was basically the father of German rocketry and he Said that it was aided by these non human beings.
- [90:39]
Kevin Knuth
So that's great. Yeah. But that's going back to 19. So 1954, we knew that these things traveled at spacecraft speeds. We already knew that in 1954. And, and why are we playing catch up just now? Why did this, why did this take a half a century to unfold is really crazy.
- [91:02]
American Alchemy Host
Well, proof that NASA, you know, probably knows something, a thing or two internally about the UFO stuff. And I know this is something you've looked into and I think my buddy Chris Ramsey might be doing an interesting follow up with you on, on all this stuff, but.
- [91:16]
Kevin Knuth
Oh yeah, Chris. Right.
- [91:17]
American Alchemy Host
There's. There's this Simpkinson photo around Gemini 11 that flight. And there's maybe the best UFO photo you could ever ask for. It's like a perfect UFO photo. In fact, I have the book right here. I'm going to take it.
- [91:33]
Kevin Knuth
I'll go grab it. Sure.
- [91:35]
American Alchemy Host
So we have this, this Simpkinson NASA UFO archive and this photo, which is like maybe the best UFO photo of all time, if it's real and it comes from Gemini 11. And you figured out that this was a Gemini 11 photo, right?
- [91:54]
Kevin Knuth
Well, Ed Wilson knew that.
- [91:55]
American Alchemy Host
Oh, okay. Ed Wilson did. Okay.
- [91:57]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. But it actually says on it says strange object as seen by the astronauts of Gemini 11. I think that's what it says underneath on the lithograph. So what he found was a lithograph, which is a printing, a printed photograph. They printed them kind of like a lithograph is kind of like a comic book is printed with all the dots. Right. Which makes it horrible to analyze if you're trying to find stars in that picture. You were so out of luck. I mean, several of us were trying to identify stars and things like this in that picture, and you just can't do it.
- [92:36]
American Alchemy Host
Is that a ufo?
- [92:38]
Kevin Knuth
I actually, I. So what I. My best assessment of what that image shows is that it is probably a mock up of what the astronauts claim to have seen.
- [92:52]
American Alchemy Host
Why is that your assessment?
- [92:55]
Kevin Knuth
Because Ed actually found the original photograph in the University of Arizona archives that shows Earth with that cloud pattern in the background and there's no UFO there. Now, of course, it's easy to claim. Well, NASA erased the UFO from that picture and it doesn't now, of course, doing an image analysis like that on a scanned negative, Right. Where you don't know what kind of process, and it's JPEG where, which is lossy encoding and all these types of image analysis problems. So it's not great. It's not great for doing an image analysis on, but I found no evidence that anything was erased from that picture. And that picture actually is showing the end of the tether experiment. So the Gemini, project Gemini, meaning twins, was all about docking. Can we actually dock with another spacecraft in space? And so Gemini 11 was the last one of the series and a unique one in that their goal was to go up, literally launch and dock within one orbit. So what they were doing previously, they'd go and they'd get up into orbit and then they'd maneuver to dock. But the trick was, can we just go up and dock? And that's what they tried to do with the Gemini 11 and they were successful. And after they docked, they then were tethered to the other craft and they did a tether experiment where they actually got the two crafts spinning like this. I'm going to knock things over. Got the two crafts spinning on a tether and did experiments to see how stable that is and what goes wrong. So they had just finished that experiment and they had just released the other craft, the unmanned craft. And that's in the picture that the background of that lithograph is from. And there's no indication that the astronauts saw any UFO at that time in the transcripts. They were busy with the, you know. Yeah, they're busy with the tether experiment.
- [95:08]
American Alchemy Host
So when was the. Because you just said earlier that then the UFO sighting.
- [95:12]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, the weird thing that happened, happened an hour later, put it in another orbit. Right. Two thirds of an orbit.
- [95:19]
American Alchemy Host
So you did some forensic investigating and realized that the timing was.
- [95:22]
Kevin Knuth
Timing's off for.
- [95:24]
American Alchemy Host
For when they actually did see the ufo.
- [95:26]
Kevin Knuth
So the big problems with that being a real picture are first, we don't have a picture of the ufo. We don't have an actual photograph of the ufo. We just have the lithograph. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of that photograph being tampered with. There was no indication that they saw a UFO at that time. And the UFO they did see happened an hour later.
- [95:53]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, so. So, so what's your best explanation as to how that photo surfaced at all with the ufo?
- [95:59]
Kevin Knuth
So what I suspect happened is, is it's. I think that what that photo is is exactly what it says under the photo. What's printed there? Strange object as seen by Gemini 11 astronauts. I think it's a mock up to show what the astronauts saw and. But that didn't photograph.
- [96:19]
American Alchemy Host
Was that officially published in some NASA thing?
- [96:22]
Kevin Knuth
No, it wasn't officially published anywhere, which it was found in. Scott Simpkinson was a NASA engineer.
- [96:29]
American Alchemy Host
Okay.
- [96:30]
Kevin Knuth
He was actually the first engineer hired by NASA.
- [96:34]
American Alchemy Host
Whoa. I think.
- [96:35]
Kevin Knuth
And his nickname was Scotty. Everybody called him Scotty. And I can't help but think, is there any connection between Scott Simpson, Scotty and Scotty and the Enterprise? I don't know. But he was very well known. Right. In the 50s and 60s, so there might be a connection there.
- [96:52]
American Alchemy Host
That's fascinating. Well, it sounds like he's kind of as insidery as it gets.
- [96:57]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah.
- [96:58]
American Alchemy Host
And the fact that he, you know, you find in his, in his records.
- [97:01]
Kevin Knuth
Some of the spacecraft, I mean, designed.
- [97:02]
American Alchemy Host
Some of the spacecraft. So if there's some sort of, even if it's an artist rendition where they're.
- [97:06]
Kevin Knuth
So he had, he, he had, and he had a collection of his NASA files. He and his secretary, Emily Erdel had a collection of, of their NASA files. And, and then when he died and she died, they were made public and they were put to auction and Ed Wilson bought them. And that's. Wow. That's how he discovered the lithograph amongst them.
- [97:28]
American Alchemy Host
Well, if there's a painting of a UFO in that photo and it's found in his records, that implies that there's almost institutional NASA knowledge of the fact that the Gemini 11 astronauts did see a UFO.
- [97:41]
Kevin Knuth
I saw something, I think. Well, and, and they. That's what's said in the transcript.
- [97:46]
American Alchemy Host
So even if it's painted on, it's like this inside joke or way to commemorate this very real event. It's not this way to record.
- [97:53]
Kevin Knuth
Way to record what happened as best they can. Yeah.
- [97:56]
American Alchemy Host
That's fascinating.
- [97:57]
Kevin Knuth
That's so interesting why none of this is mentioned in the NASA Commission's report? I have no idea. Did they not? Maybe they didn't know? I mean, it's possible they didn't know.
- [98:06]
American Alchemy Host
I don't know. Speaking of NASA obstruction, Three Eye Atlas, you know, we have this Manhattan sized object that is now come around back around the sun and it is headed towards Jupiter. It's going to pass the Earth December 19th. So this might be out by the time, you know, it's already sort of passed. So what do you think's going on with this object? You have like most of the astronomical community basically like ignoring it or saying it's, you know, it doesn't matter or whatever. And then you have Avi Loeb going crazy going on literally every single podcast that exists saying, you know, 40% chance that this is an alien craft. And, you know, it could be, it could be a harbinger of, you know, either The Messiah or, you know, it could be an invader or something. So what's going on?
- [98:58]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, that's.
- [98:59]
American Alchemy Host
I mean, and then NASA as is is did this stupid gaslighting press conference where I was honestly a little skeptical of some of avi's statements. I felt like he was like extrapolating and you know, jumping to conclusions. But I ended up. I wanted to side with Avi after watching this gaslighting NASA first.
- [99:16]
Kevin Knuth
NASA press conferences are the absolute worst. You want to geek out a little bit, Tom. You were geeking out so expertly, Nikki, to begin with, embracing. So that was, that was fabulous. I mean even when I was at NASA, you wait for this press conference. Oh, there's going to be some exciting news about something and it's not very exciting.
- [99:34]
American Alchemy Host
No.
- [99:35]
Kevin Knuth
And you're always. And part of the problem is that your expectation for excitement from NASA is way too high and unreasonably high. So that's part of the problem. So I can't. Not all the blame should to NASA for that. But, but the press conferences are, are always quite boring. I mean, part of it also is science is kind of boring. And if you're giving a. So if you're giving a press conference about science, that might be kind. That, that's often kind of boring.
- [100:03]
American Alchemy Host
But you should expect a photo that's better resolution than what amateur astronomers are taking of Three Eye Atlas. It's like this fuzzy.
- [100:10]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, it's hard. If you've got, you've got a, you've got a spacecraft in orbit around Mars designed to image the surface of Mars and you're trying to use it to image something much further away. That's tough.
- [100:20]
American Alchemy Host
Right. But then crowdsour. If you're the official government body and you get billions in funding every year, then find the, the amateur astron where they can do it and do it work with them contra you have the money.
- [100:31]
Kevin Knuth
Like that would be nice.
- [100:33]
American Alchemy Host
That'd be nice.
- [100:33]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah. I, I mean, I'm not surprised that we can't get a good image of it. That's, that's hard to do. I mean, Three Three Eye Atlas is, is weird and I don't know. I mean, I mean, why the Astronomical society won't or community won't recognize that is kind of strange. I mean, maybe are they kind of quieted by Avi being so loud about it being possibly an alien craft that could be part of it? They don't want to get into this mess. But it's a weird thing. I mean, yeah, great, easy to say comment, but when it came back around, from around the sun, if I'm remembering right. I mean, these are numbers that I not horribly invested in remembering. But it was only like 4% water vapor as it came back around. That's hardly any the things comets are. Dirty snowballs. They're made of water. 4% water. Well now, what is this thing? It's got iron or it's got nickel, but no iron. Iron. Iron and nickel come together. I mean, they're next to each other on the periodic table. To separate iron and nickel, you're going to need some weird, some difficult processes to separate these two. Meteorites. Metal meteorites are always iron. Nickel meteorites. Iron and nickel come together. So now you've got something that's nickel and not iron. This is a weird thing. And it suggests some weird processes that went into its formation.
- [102:06]
American Alchemy Host
It has an anti. Tail. Not just a tail.
- [102:07]
Kevin Knuth
It's got a tail and an anti. Tail. It's. Yeah, there's. There's a lot to worry about here. And, and I suspect, I mean if from, from a practical standpoint, clearly this is something that we don't know much about.
- [102:24]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [102:24]
Kevin Knuth
And so just claiming it's a comet and throwing up your hands and walking away is stupid. Just. Just flat out stupid and ignorant to say it's an alien spacecraft. Well, I mean, yeah, that's. You don't have a lot of evidence for that either, so that's tough too. But it is something we ought to study. And I remember there were several people who were saying, well, it's not worth studying. I'm like, no, this is an interstellar object that tells us what the conditions are like around another star system. Yeah, this is something you should study if you're gonna spend money to study another one of our asteroids or over something from another star system. What's. There's nothing reasonable about that.
- [103:04]
American Alchemy Host
That's the problem with this whole conversation around UFOs is you have on the one hand most conventional astronomers not even looking at the data set. Often around. Like I see these guys, I think this Piers Morgan just had on this guy, I think David Kipping or something. He seems like a really good.
- [103:19]
Kevin Knuth
Oh, I know David.
- [103:20]
American Alchemy Host
You know, David seems like a really. Actually I, I loved his episode on Rogan.
- [103:23]
Kevin Knuth
Exoplanet guy.
- [103:24]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, exoplanet guy. Really smart on that dimension mention. But like this data set that we're talking about with UFOs showing up around nuclear weapons just like totally ignorant of it. And like he's talking about UFOs but it's like, as if they have to be things that are traveling from, from space. And I don't even think he's probably familiar with a lot of the NASA cases, you know, because these seem like anecdotal, small sample size, you know, conspiratorial things. I would argue that the nuclear thing is a ubiquitous global pattern.
- [103:53]
Kevin Knuth
It's a huge deal that you have.
- [103:54]
American Alchemy Host
To contend with as a scientist.
- [103:56]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [103:57]
American Alchemy Host
So you end up with these people who like, again, don't want to knock him, like super smart, conventional guy, but is mired in kind of current astronomical data around UFOs and just won't really look at it. And it's all relying on, you know, it's all like, well, if the government has something, they should release it or something, but can't look at the open source stuff. And then on the other side, it's people who are sure that it's extraterrestrial. They're here, they're starseeds probably, you know, and we have all these. And it's like you're jumping super to conclusions. You're not just following the evidence.
- [104:29]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, yeah.
- [104:30]
American Alchemy Host
So it's those two. It's. There's no like, middle path of like, this is the evidence.
- [104:34]
Kevin Knuth
It's like dealing with a scientific. It's like a scientific community with bipolar disorder.
- [104:38]
American Alchemy Host
Yes.
- [104:39]
Kevin Knuth
It's like. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, it's. It's really difficult. The, I mean, the best the quote that comes to mind is from Stanton Fried Freeman, who said, if you're a scientist and a professional, you need to do your homework before you open your mouth. Period. That's it. If you haven't done your homework, if you haven't researched it, then you have nothing to say, you have nothing to share. And you can't go with the excuse that I hear time and time again. Well, that's mostly nonsense. And I don't have time to read nonsense. Well, then why are you finding the time to talk about, to argue against nonsense? You can find the time to argue against nonsense without looking into the nonsense, but you can't find the time to research it. And my first response to that, first, it's not nonsense. This is something that. This is a phenomena that people have seen for centuries. Centuries. I mean, you had Richard Dolan on and he just put out a book on UFOs in water, underwater UFOs. And his case is going back to the 1800s. These are the same things. They're coming back to Columbus, of light coming out of the water, hovering next to the ship. Following the ship and then taking off into the clouds. Same things.
- [105:59]
American Alchemy Host
Yes.
- [105:59]
Kevin Knuth
And for since the 1800s. And this nobody in the 1800s is making this up to sound like what somebody reported last week.
- [106:08]
American Alchemy Host
No, totally. And you have third world places now, like in third world countries where, where it's like these people like Virginia, James Fox just got back, you know, from Brazil. He keeps going back and like this whole town, uncorrelated, disparate sources, they all report this cigar shaped, Tic Tac like object crashing and, and three beings coming out, you know, two of. One of which was captured and, and taken to a hospital. And everybody working at the hospital says that they saw the being. And one neuroscientist who's still alive to this day goes on record, says he's staring the being in the face for four months minutes.
- [106:42]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah.
- [106:42]
American Alchemy Host
And this guy's alive. And you have this whole town. There's a saucer in the town, dedicated UFOs. What they. None of these people are making a penny. Some of them were offered briefcases of cash to shut up about this thing. So, so like why, like, explain to me why they would lie. Like, it's ridiculous. It's actually absurd.
- [107:00]
Kevin Knuth
I wish I could see a UFO so somebody could offer me to shut up.
- [107:03]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, right. Yeah, I'll take it.
- [107:05]
Kevin Knuth
That's a good deal. Maybe that's what's happening with some of the scientists.
- [107:09]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah, well, maybe, maybe because I want like somebody like a Neil Degrasse Tyson. You know, like he goes on these podcast tours and he's just, he'll just. It's the same thing over and over again, which is like no high resolution imagery. And you know, it's like, you know, why don't we have. And we're, you know, why aren't we drowning in imagery? Because we have all of cell phones or whatever and you have, are any.
- [107:31]
Kevin Knuth
High resolution pictures of quasars, right? I don't think so.
- [107:34]
American Alchemy Host
But they exist.
- [107:35]
Kevin Knuth
But they exist.
- [107:36]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah.
- [107:36]
Kevin Knuth
I mean, we don't have high resolution pictures of exoplanets either yet. David Kipping and I study them.
- [107:41]
American Alchemy Host
Yes.
- [107:42]
Kevin Knuth
I mean, come on.
- [107:43]
American Alchemy Host
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [107:45]
Kevin Knuth
I mean, why.
- [107:46]
American Alchemy Host
Or ask the average person to why.
- [107:48]
Kevin Knuth
Is it a scientist, when they come to this topic, they throw their brains out the window and then open their mouths? It's, it's, it's maddening.
- [107:55]
American Alchemy Host
Yeah. I think there's some sort of. Well, I think unorthodox and independent thinking don't scale with ideas. And so there are a lot of people that can be shepherded into bad frameworks and not even looking at certain stigmatized topics because ideas are fashion statements and those are bad fashion or whatever. Even though they can like do well on an SAT or something. And so that I think that's a really, you know, not well understood thing. And so you think of this priestly citadel as like infallible when it comes to thinking about these things. But, but in fact, they can be shepherded into, you know, in some ways they can be shepherded even more easily because they think they're so smart, they think they can't be tricked or something.
- [108:38]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [108:38]
American Alchemy Host
And it's just, I don't know, I think it's sad because you, there are all these first principles argument. So you can, you can, you can go at, you know, Neil Degrasse Tyson with around, you know, red shifts and blue shifts and you know, gravitational perturbations that will like, you know, cause issues with general optical photography, you know. And, you know, it's like he wouldn't have anything to say after that. He would just say, well, it can't be. It can't be. So like there's, there's, that's, that ends the conversation with a person like that, you know, so it's, it's like extremely frustrating.
- [109:08]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [109:08]
American Alchemy Host
I'm sure you deal with it because you have to straddle academia and this sort of more, you know, crazy world.
- [109:15]
Kevin Knuth
Of UFOs been in numerous discussions where the academic person I've been talking to just throws their brain out the window and stops thinking. You know, just you talk. If I talk about something else, another scientific topic, they're fine. But this, they just seem to stop thinking. It's very, it's very odd.
- [109:32]
American Alchemy Host
You're in upstate New York. Do you think you're in the general vicinity of Stony Brook University? Do you think they have anything to do with UFOs?
- [109:43]
Kevin Knuth
I don't know of anything going on at Stony Brooks.
- [109:44]
American Alchemy Host
At Stony Brook. Okay. Because they, yeah, they have, I don't know, a bunch of interest. Interesting. They have like differential geometry stuff going on. And you know, they have Jim Simons, it's like a big guy there. Yeah.
- [109:55]
Kevin Knuth
No, Stony Brick has a great physics department, but I don't think they do.
- [109:58]
American Alchemy Host
Anything with ufo, with UFO stuff. Okay. Because David Spergle, who's Jim Simons, you know, foundation guys. Jim Simons is like runs you just passed away, ran the best performing hedge fund in the US over, you know, a 30 year period. Period Renaissance Technologies, the medallion fund. And before that he was an NSA code breaker and Also like a brilliant physicist who's contributed a lot to fundamental physics and like Yang Mills and you know, interesting stuff. So my former colleague Eric Weinstein has suspected that maybe he has something to do with the UFO question or something and that there may be the renaissance technology is sort of printing money and then they're putting it towards, you know, the ufo, the UFO question. And I honestly, I thought all of that was kind of conspiratorial and ridiculous until 2022 happened. There's a NASA UAP panel and then David Spergel who's, you know, Jim Simon's top science advisor, runs the science foundation.
- [111:00]
Kevin Knuth
Yeah, he wrote, he, he was the main author on the report on the.
- [111:03]
American Alchemy Host
NASA UAP review panel.
- [111:05]
Kevin Knuth
Right.
- [111:05]
American Alchemy Host
So I'm like, what's going on? Is, is there some sort of connection there?
- [111:08]
Kevin Knuth
That's a good question.
- [111:09]
American Alchemy Host
I don't know because we were just talking about all the weird NASA data and that seems, seems to be like, you know, it seems like it might be suppressed or something. So yeah, who knows? Well, this has been a pleasure, Kevin. I really love talking to you and yeah, I wish you the best of luck with all of your interesting work at University of Albany.
- [111:27]
Kevin Knuth
Oh, thank you.
- [111:28]
American Alchemy Host
And is there anything you'd like to plug or anything the audience can help kind of promote or support that helps you out?
- [111:35]
Kevin Knuth
Our work at UALBANY would be great to support. We, we just got a generous donation from a, from Tony Gorman who's a local businessman and that has really given us a big boost and we can always use a little more boost. So if anybody wants to donate tax free to some to UAlbany for our work on UAPs, that'd be awesome.
- [112:02]
American Alchemy Host
That's awesome. And yeah, one of the few academic institutions that is actually systematically looking into this question.
- [112:08]
Kevin Knuth
So yeah, so we're basically Matthew Shadagas and I and you know, we were original members with uapx and now UAPX has been, has been disbanded and moved to UAlbany and it's now UAlbany Project X and Matthew Shadagis and I and Professor Cecilia Levy has joined us as well. So.
- [112:31]
American Alchemy Host
Awesome.
- [112:31]
Kevin Knuth
And we're. And the grant, the grant, the gift we got has created an endowment which will fund us in perpetuity, gratuity to some degree. So we have, we are here to stay.
- [112:43]
American Alchemy Host
Wow. Love it, it's exciting. Well, excited to see, you know, as you make breakthroughs on a go forward basis and would love to have you back and really appreciate you coming out here.
- [112:52]
Kevin Knuth
Thank you so much for having me.
- [112:59]
American Alchemy Host
Alchemist. Did you enjoy that? If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy Magazine we just launched on some substacked. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video with weekly articles exploring all of the strange, forgotten and conspiratorial corners of space, history, and high weirdness. So join up today at our free or paid tiers on Substack. I am including the full link in the description of this video.
- [113:32]
Kevin Knuth
It.