#324 - NASA Physicist Comes Clean on UFOs & Why We Can't Go Back to The Moon | Kevin Knuth

Summary

Danny Jones Podcast Episode #324

"NASA Physicist Comes Clean on UFOs & Why We Can't Go Back to The Moon" with guest Dr. Kevin Knuth
Release Date: August 18, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this captivating, far-reaching conversation, Danny Jones welcomes Dr. Kevin Knuth—a physicist, former NASA scientist, and UAP (UFO) researcher. Together, they navigate from the story of Knuth’s time at NASA and early AI work, to deep dives into the evidence and mystery surrounding UFOs/UAPs, questions about why humanity hasn’t returned to the moon, challenges facing scientific progress, the plausibility of “anti-gravity” technology, and the struggle to study taboo topics in mainstream science. Knuth shares his personal journey from UFO skepticism to passionate advocacy for rigorous investigation, details some of the most compelling UAP cases, and reflects on both the mysteries of ancient civilizations and the current front lines of scientific inquiry.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Dr. Knuth’s Background and Work at NASA

• Early Career:

  • Started in neuroscience using early AI/machine learning for brain signal separation (before "AI" was common lingo).

    "I've been doing the AI for 30 years, but we didn’t call it AI." (02:00, Kevin Knuth)

  • Shifted to astrophysics, collaborating on detecting exoplanets via Doppler shift and on 3D modeling of planetary nebulae.

• Time at NASA Ames:

  • Four-year tenure focused on mapping and visualizing nebulae, not direct involvement with moon missions.
  • Recalls the excitement of the moon landing as a child—a milestone he feels younger generations can’t fully relate to.

• Moon Mapping Proposal:

  • Proposal for a digital mapping system for future lunar explorers, using data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

    "We wanted to design a digital map that you could use on the moon...so you don't get lost. We didn't get the grant." (07:12, Kevin Knuth)

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2. Why Haven’t We Returned to the Moon?

• Not a Conspiracy—More Mundane Reasons:

  • Cuts to space programs due to the Vietnam War and subsequent economic recessions.
  • Persistent focus on warfare rather than exploration.

    "We fight too many wars. That’s why we stopped." (102:34, Kevin Knuth)

• Missed Opportunity:

  • Both host and guest express frustration and confusion at the lack of progress since the Apollo missions, noting the stagnation of space technology compared to rapid advances in other technologies.

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3. The UFO/UAP Topic: From Skepticism to Scientific Investigation

• Culture at NASA:

  • In Knuth's experience, open discussion of UFOs was taboo, dismissed as “nonsense.”

    "If you brought it up at all...everybody would scoff. 'No, that’s ridiculous. That’s nonsense. We’re NASA. We do real things.'" (06:17, Kevin Knuth)

• Knuth’s Turning Point:

  • Initially skeptical, Knuth recalls a story from graduate school in Montana involving a cattle mutilation, rumors of UFOs over nuclear sites, and a professor's casual mention of the Air Force experiencing missile shutdowns due to UFO activity.
  • Years later, after stumbling onto the 2010 National Press Club testimony of Air Force personnel recounting similar incidents, he shifted from skepticism to concern for the lack of scientific attention on a real security problem.

    "What if this is serious? And we all just laugh it off like a joke... If that's the case, then we've got a real problem on our hands." (15:58, Kevin Knuth)

• Academic Stigma Remains:

  • Only a small number of academics are openly studying UAPs/UFOs, but Knuth became increasingly public after a full house at his departmental talk and in the wake of the 2017 New York Times AATIP revelations.

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4. Standout UFO/UAP Cases and Scientific Analysis

The 1986 Japanese Airlines Incident

• Summary:
  • A cargo plane over Alaska encountered enormous objects—first darting lights, then a “mothership” the size of a stadium—which were tracked on radar for 45 minutes.
• Investigation and Data:
  • Radar tapes confiscated by the U.S. government, but a copy survived thanks to whistleblower John Callahan.
  • Physicist Daniel Kumbay analyzed the data; craft displayed accelerations up to 10,000 Gs and speeds of 250,000 mph—physics-defying by human standards.

    "That thing could get to the moon in 52 minutes." (24:17, Kevin Knuth)
    “The accelerations are insane. And that energy has to go somewhere… There should be a huge explosion and it doesn’t. We really don’t understand what these things do at all… They’re amazing.” (25:01, Kevin Knuth)

Historical “USO” (Unidentified Submerged Object) Reports

• Duration and Documentation:
  • Accounts in ship logs stretching back over 150 years, with disk-shaped craft entering/exiting the ocean—preceding any plausible human technology.

    "Once you know that those cases exist, you can’t just say it’s got to be Russian or Chinese." (26:09, Kevin Knuth)

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5. Theories and Mechanisms: Speculation Grounded in Physics

• True Unknowns:
  • Knuth believes some modern UAPs could be secret military projects, but historical cases rule out all-human explanations.
• How Do They Move?
  • Accelerations/turns observed would destroy any biological occupants; suggests:
    • Manipulation of gravitational fields (“warp drive”)
    • Possible quantum tunneling (macroscopic teleportation)
  • Confesses, “It’s hard to speculate without hard data.” (41:20, Kevin Knuth)
• Time Traveler and "Breakaway Civilization" Theories:
  • Finds “time traveler” solutions difficult due to current lack of scientific framework; open to the notion these are ancient or parallel human civilizations, as well as extraterrestrial.

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6. Science, Secrecy, and Funding Challenges

• Government Ignorance vs. Deliberate Secrecy:

  • Asserts that a major reason for lack of disclosure or scientific progress could be that nobody has solid answers—even in government.

    "I honestly don’t think they know what to disclose. It’s going to raise many more questions that they just don’t have answers to." (46:27, Kevin Knuth)

• Lack of Funding:

  • Most open, academic scientific UAP research is hamstrung by lack of funding; reliance on independent donors and documentary makers (e.g., funding for the "A Tear in the Sky" documentary project).

• "Shut up and Calculate" Era in Physics:

  • Knuth reflects on how 20th-century physics’ “shut up and calculate” mindset led to theoretical stagnation; real breakthroughs have come from conceptual paradigm shifts.

    "We stopped appreciating that real breakthroughs come from conceptual changes rather than just applying math." (36:48, Kevin Knuth)

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7. Anti-gravity and Suppressed Research

• Townsend Brown and “Anti-Gravity” Research:
  • Anti-gravity experiments in the 1950s led to rumors of harassment and suppression; Knuth claims to personally know people in the private sector who've experienced pushback.
• Contemporary Efforts and Harassment:
  • Discusses current independent labs and researchers allegedly being shut down or harassed (e.g., Jeremy Riss in Massachusetts).
• Pervasive Stigma and Fear:
  • The field is rife with unsubstantiated claims and buzzwords; genuine progress would require a robust theoretical link between electromagnetism and gravity.

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8. Revisiting the "Moon Landing Hoax" and Technological Regression

• Moon Hoax Skepticism Addressed:

  • Knuth mentions modern missions have photographed Apollo landing sites, debunking the notion that they were faked.

    "We have the landing sites. You can see the prints [from the landers]. There’s no weather; they’ll still be there a million years from now." (112:00, Kevin Knuth)

• Why Moon Shot Tech Didn’t Advance:

  • Suggests that the “robustness, not power” of early computers was key; subsequent technological trends favored power/miniaturization over robustness.

    "What didn’t last, was the robustness." (101:55, Kevin Knuth)

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9. Notable Experiments—UAPX and “A Tear in the Sky”

• UAPX Group Mission to Catalina:

  • Collaborative UAP study in California using multiple observation stations; showcased in the documentary “A Tear in the Sky.”
  • Early misidentification (International Space Station as a UAP) corrected by solid physics and teamwork.

• Outreach and Collaboration:

  • Knuth is actively involved in the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), citing multinational academic participation in recent review papers.

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10. Material Evidence, Witnesses, and International UAP Incidents

• Physical Trace Cases:
  • Cases of UFO landings leaving scorch marks, altered tree bark, and radiation; Jacques Vallée’s recent published paper analyzing luminous energy output.
• Government Attitudes:
  • U.S. government (and many others) frequently changed or muddied stories on major incidents (Roswell, etc.), fueling distrust rather than skepticism.

    "Government has been changing the story every time and lying every time...What was so serious that they detained the sheriff and his family for five days?" (84:41, Kevin Knuth)

• International Cooperation:
  • Suggests that working with foreign governments (like Chile or France), which may be less secretive, is likely more fruitful than hoping for U.S. government disclosure.

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11. Ancient Mysteries & Academic Stagnation

• Academic Inertia:
  • Both in Egyptology and physics, there is a reluctance to question foundational dogmas, even in the face of anomalies (perfectly engineered ancient artifacts, mysteries of the pyramids).

    "We don’t like changing worldviews. That’s a problem." (122:20, Kevin Knuth)

• Lost Technologies:
  • Cites Roman cement, Antikythera mechanism, and possibly vanished machining tools in ancient Egypt as lost innovations.

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12. Speculation about Ocean Worlds and Habitable Planets

• Water as a Universal Medium:
  • Liquid water worlds may be common; life, including advanced technological civilizations, may prefer oceans for their stable environments and protection.

    "If I was an interstellar traveler… I would bring equipment to live underwater." (70:17, Kevin Knuth)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “That thing could get to the moon in 52 minutes.“ (24:17, Knuth) — on the speed of the Japanese Airlines UFO.
• “I think very, very little is known...I don’t think [the government] knows what to disclose.” (46:29, Knuth)
• “We stopped appreciating that real breakthroughs come from conceptual changes rather than just applying math.” (36:48, Knuth)
• “Once you know that [USO] cases exist, you can’t just say it’s got to be Russian or Chinese… That doesn’t hold water anymore.” (26:09, Knuth)
• “Having watched the moon launches when I was a kid, I always wanted to go to the moon...and what, I turned 60 last month, so, like, I’m probably not gonna go to the moon. It sucks. I would like to.” (103:38, Knuth)
• “It’s not that it’s advanced technology. It is conceptually far beyond us.” (25:39, Knuth)
• “I can’t wait till we go back to the moon… I remember my dad carrying me and pointing up at the moon and saying, Kevin, there are people up there.” (08:51, Knuth)
• “It’s a waste of time [to expect disclosure from the US government]...I’d rather spend time with other governments.” (85:05, Knuth)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:38] — Knuth’s entry into NASA and early machine learning in neuroscience/physics.
• [05:21] — Emotional memory of the moon landing and the foundational awe it created.
• [06:05] — Cultural dismissal of UFOs at NASA and in academia.
• [11:18] — The incident in Montana: UFO rumors, nuclear site shutdowns, and the seeds of Knuth’s interest in UFOs.
• [15:58] — Discovery of official testimony about UFOs disabling nuclear missiles; birth of serious concern and research.
• [21:29] — Detailed recounting and analysis of the Japan Airlines UAP case.
• [25:01] — Physics-defying acceleration and energy transfer problems with UAP craft.
• [26:08] — 150 years of USO reports, undermining 'all-tech' or recent-human hypotheses.
• [33:47] — Stagnation in physics research and the "shut up and calculate" movement.
• [42:34] — Knuth’s multi-author scientific review paper on the current state of UAP science.
• [46:27] — Ignorance at the governmental level and the problem of honest disclosure about UAPs.
• [70:17] — Ocean worlds: why intelligent interplanetary travelers might prefer water.
• [102:34] — Why humanity stopped going to the moon.
• [112:06] — Proofs of Apollo mission landings; moon prints will last millions of years.
• [118:39] — Academic rigidity and dogmatism in the face of archaeological and physical anomalies.

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Resources & Where to Find Dr. Kevin Knuth

• University at Albany faculty page
• UAPx and Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) websites

  “We have our UAPX website...and we’re working with the SCU, Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. You can Google and find us.” (136:23, Knuth)

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This episode is a must-listen for anyone fascinated by the frontiers of physics, the UFO/UAP mystery, and the intersection of science, skepticism, and belief. Dr. Knuth’s measured, open-minded approach combined with decades of scientific expertise makes this an illuminating exploration of where the search for the unknown may yet take us.

Transcript

[Kevin Knuth]

Hi, I'm Kristen Bell, and if you know my husband Dax, then you also know he loves shopping for a car. Selling a car, not so much. We're really doing this, huh? Thankfully, Carvana makes it easy. Answer a few questions, put in your van or license, and done.

[Danny]

We sold ours in minutes this morning.

[Kevin Knuth]

And they'll come pick it up and pay us this afternoon.

[Danny]

Bye bye, Truckee.

[Kevin Knuth]

Of course, we kept the favorite. Hello, other Truckee.

[Danny]

Sell your car with Carvana today. Terms and conditions apply. Kevin, thank you for coming, man.

[Kevin Knuth]

Wow. Thank you for having me.

[Danny]

I think you're the first NASA scientist I've ever talked to.

[Kevin Knuth]

Wow. Okay.

[Danny]

How did you get involved with NASA?

[Kevin Knuth]

How did I get involved with NASA? I had been. My PhD was in physics, and I had done work in studying the dynamics of the human brain in response to auditory stimulation. And I was studying magnetic fields generated by neurons. So magnetoencephalography. And I was interested in how to separate brain signals. When you record EEG by putting electrodes on the surface of the head or do magnetoencephalography, you. Each detector picks up a mixture of signals. So what you really want to know is what signals are coming from which different part of the brain, but you really can only record mixtures. So I'd worked on algorithms to separate mixed signals. And these were AI algorithms. This is in the late 90s, before anybody heard of AI. I've been doing the AI for 30 years, but we didn't call it AI. They were machine learning algorithms. Right. And. And so I was doing work in neuroscience, but my PhD. My original interests were originally in physics. And I got. I was at a neuroscience conference in D.C. and visited two of my friends who were married, an astrophysicist and an astronomer. And so I started collaborating with our astronomer friend there. He was working at the Naval Research Lab at the. At the Observatory. Naval Research Observatory. And he was trying to develop a Fourier transform spectrometer to look for wobbling stars, basically be able to detect Doppler shifts of stars that are wobbling so he could detect planets around other stars. This was before this was popular again. And he was having trouble. He developed his own instrument, and he was having trouble with the data analysis. And he explained what he was doing. And I had already done a lot of use, machine learning and mixed signals. And so we were just having dinner and I said, oh, no, no, you don't want to analyze it that way. That isn't going to work. Do it this way. And explained how to do it. And he excitedly ran up to his computer, up in his room after dinner and came down a half hour later. And he goes, I coded it and it works. Oh, my God. And so he ended up writing a paper together, and so started doing research together. And I went with him to Kitt Peak National Observatory to get images of planetary nebulae and studying things like this. And then by this time, I heard of a job opening at NASA Ames in their intelligence systems division. And I knew some of the people who worked in that area at NASA Ames, and we did similar work. And so I applied for that job, and that's how I got in to NASA.

[Danny]

And how long were you there for?

[Kevin Knuth]

For four years.

[Danny]

Four years and whatever. So. So explain how the wobbling stars were able to help detect planets.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, so as a planet orbits the star, the planet pulls on the star gravitationally. So the planet pulls the star when it's on this side, pulls it this way. And as it comes over here, the star wobbles to be toward the planet. So this. So they done. They. The planet doesn't exactly orbit the star. They both orbit their center of mass. And so the center of mass isn't quite at the center of the star because there's mass out here where the planet is. And so the star wobbles a little bit.

[Danny]

Oh, interesting.

[Kevin Knuth]

And so we, we still use that, the Doppler shift technique to discover planets.

[Danny]

Once you got to NASA, what specifically were you doing? What specifically were you studying there or working on?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, there I was working on studying planetary nebulae, which is what I had been doing with my astronomer friend Arsene Hanjian. And we were trying to develop 3D models of what these nebulae look like. So these nebulae are clouds of gas that surround dying stars. So, you know, really big stars, when they die, they go into a supernova, they collapse and explode. Smaller ones, like our sun, will collapse and then just basic, it'll be bloat into a red giant phase, and then when it runs out of fuel, it'll collapse, start collapsing, and it'll just kind of puff off its outer atmosphere and that'll form a nebula. So we were studying these nebulae and trying to make three dimensional plots of them.

[Danny]

Oh, wow.

[Kevin Knuth]

It was a cool project. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. We would get Hubble images taken over five year periods, and you could actually see the nebulae getting bigger, which was pretty neat.

[Danny]

And how far away was that star?

[Kevin Knuth]

Well, there were multiple stars. So they're, you know, they're many light years away, hundreds to thousand light years away.

[Danny]

When you were at. I mean, when you're at NASA and you're working with all kinds of folks, I'm sure with. I'm sure there's multiple layers of discipline of people with scientists or researchers that are there. Is there any like, overt interest in this UFO topic?

[Kevin Knuth]

Not when I was there. When I was there. Not at all. You know, there wasn't any interest in. Was. If you brought it up at all. And I wasn't even really interested in at that point.

[Danny]

Oh, really?

[Kevin Knuth]

But if I happened, if I happen to mention something about it, you know, everybody would scoff. No, that's just ridiculous. That's nonsense. We're NASA. We do real things.

[Danny]

Really.

[Kevin Knuth]

So, yeah, that wasn't, wasn't a topic of discussion.

[Danny]

How much did you guys, how much attention did you guys pay to them? Did you guys do anything with the moon or any studies of the moon or anything or.

[Kevin Knuth]

No, we didn't do any work with moon missions. Those. Because those had happened in the 1960s.

[Danny]

Right. But I'm wondering if there was any like, any newer research that you guys were focusing on.

[Kevin Knuth]

There were. I was there when we, when we started. When George W. Bush started the plans for going back to the moon and so they started talking about missions like that. And we, we did write a proposal to develop a system. We decided to propose to develop a digital map for explorers on the moon because you don't want astronauts getting lost, Right. They wander away from their car and you get lost, you're screwed when you run out of air, so you're in big trouble. So we were working on. We wanted to design a digital map that you could use on the moon that would be like a.

[Danny]

And you proposed this?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, we proposed it. We didn't, we didn't get that grant, so we didn't do that.

[Danny]

How much would that have cost? Costed. And what, what would go into the. Doing something?

[Kevin Knuth]

Well, I don't know how she would have made. To make the map, but it would have been one of the kind of digital paper maps, kind of like the Kindles were made of at the time. Yeah.

[Danny]

Did you guys have any ideas of how it would be done? Like, did you have.

[Kevin Knuth]

We had some plans for how it would be done. Yeah. We would use geological surveys of the moon to use that to feed the map.

[Danny]

And would you send new, little like new satellites out there or anything like.

[Kevin Knuth]

We didn't have plans for that. We plan to use data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

[Danny]

Oh, okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

You can use those orbiters and then you could use the 3D topography to create a 3D map that the astronauts would see. So they would have a map like an overhead view along with a map of what you should be seeing if you're looking straight this way. And as you moved your position, you would change where you were looking. So you could actually map up to match terrain that you see visually with what was on the map.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's still a nice idea for a map, but.

[Danny]

Oh, it's incredible idea for a map. I would love to see something like that. It's just, I feel like with all of this talk about colonizing Mars and UFOs and interdimensional aliens, there's no one gives a about the moon anymore. I feel like the moon's the moon could use.

[Kevin Knuth]

I can't wait till we go back to the moon. I was four years old when the first moon landing happened. So I remember, I remember it, I remember and I remember it because it was so exciting and I think, you know, we were at my grandmother's house because she had a tv, a little box. A little box that we could watch it on. Yeah. And you know, and I remember everybody telling me, Kevin, this is the most important thing that's ever happened. I remember being told that over and over. So I was amazed. But the thing that I. And it chokes me up when I think about it because it really is pretty amazing really. When we were leaving to go back to my parents house, my dad was carrying me and we were walking down the steps of my grandma's house and he stopped at the bottom of the steps and we looked up at the moon and he pointed up at the moon and he said, kevin, there are people up there. And I remember thinking, wow, that's amazing. Now when I think about it, I think that is amazing. That hasn't happened since, I mean, right. How crazy People younger than me haven't never looked at the moon and thought there are people up there.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

That's an amazing thing to think.

[Danny]

Yeah. Three hundred and something thousand miles away from here. It's such a, it's such a crazy feat. Yeah. Sometimes I look up at the moon at night and I'd just be like, how, like wow. Like there's so, there's so many questions about the moon. And it's such an interesting. Just the, the, you know, the fact that we did that in the 70s and, and we haven't done it since and you know, it would just be so interesting to see if we could get people back on there and, and how. And what, you know, what we could possibly do and what kind of, you know, I'm sure. I'm sure, you know, if we were to colonize other planets, we would probably want to use the moon as like a midway point or like a launch point or something like that.

[Kevin Knuth]

You could certainly use it for a midway point or for construction or of space vehicles. All sorts of possibilities. And for research, of course, too.

[Danny]

Right, right, exactly. So when. At what point, did you start to become so interested in this UFO topic? Because it doesn't seem like a lot of academic, proper academic folks are interested in these things still.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's still a big handful at this point, you know, maybe 10. 10 proper academics. Yeah, it's not that many on that order.

[Danny]

Yeah, so what. Yeah, and I know there. I mean, there's a variety of reasons that that doesn't happen, but what. What got you into it and what made you want to, you know, be so public about it?

[Kevin Knuth]

What got me into it was when I. It was an event that happened when I started graduate school. So I went to. I got my undergraduate degree in Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, the party school, not the big school. And so I got my degree there, my bachelor's degree there, and I went to Montana State for my master's degree in Bozeman, Montana. And it was the first or second week of school there, so I just moved out to Montana. It's my first time living alone and away from home. And there was a cattle mutilation on a ranch near Bozeman where two cows were killed and surgically manipulated. And it was very bizarre. And it was all over the news. There were UFO reports that night, many UFO reports to the sheriff's office. And so this was all over the TV news. And it was. Aliens or satanists were what they were both worried about. We're alien Satanists, Satanic aliens. I don't think anyone thought to put those two together at the time. But yeah, so it was either aliens or Satanists. And so the next day at the university, we were. My office was on the second floor, so we were out in the hallway talking about this. I think the new graduate students were, you know, because you're looking down the barrel of spending four to five years at this school. Right. Of your life at the school. And we have all just moved here from other states or other countries even. So we're all trying to get our heads around what's actually happening here. So there was a heated discussion in the hallway about what was going on, and we clearly Bothered one of the professors down the hall because he came out of his office to find out what all the commotion was about. And we told him, and he goes, oh, yeah, I think he tried to comfort us, but it was not comforting. He said, oh, yeah, this happens from time to time and they'll investigate it and they'll worry about aliens and Satanists and they won't figure anything out, and then we'll just all forget about it until it happens again. And we were like, okay, this is really just messed up. And then, then. And then he goes, but you know what's really weird? You see, he said, I have friends who are in the Air Force. They work up at the Air Force base in Malmstrom Air Force Base up in northern Montana. And they have problems up there with UFOs flying over the nuclear weapons sites, over the ICBMs and shutting down the missiles. And we listened politely when he walked away. We, frankly, we left our asses off because that was the silliest thing I'd ever heard. UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles, you know, and we talked about that a little bit and thought, well, that can't possibly be real because the Air Force would be all over this. I mean, this would be the biggest national security problem in existence that you could possibly imagine. So we just thought it was nonsense. And it kind of was a running joke that year whenever somebody said something weird happened to me, but somebody would go, yeah, but what's really weird is there's UFOs shutting down missiles in northern Montana. And we would all laugh. So that just stuck with me. That was 1988. September of 88. So.

[Danny]

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[Kevin Knuth]

Fast forward what, 30 years and. And we're around 2015. I'm teaching a course in astronomy at the University of Albany in New York. And. And I was preparing for a lecture in astrobiology, life on other planets. And. And I don't have much to talk about. We don't know much about the possibilities of life elsewhere. And so some of my students wanted me to talk about the possibility of aliens coming to Earth or UFOs and things like this. And I was like, I don't even know. This is a real ph. I don't know what I could possibly talk about. So I was just poking around on the Internet and I stumbled on the press conference that Robert hastings held in 2010, the National Press Club, where he had six people who had been on Air Force bases all talking about UFOs shutting down nuclear missiles. The first speaker was Robert Salas from Malmstrom Air Force Base, the same Air Force base. And I saw that, and I thought, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I heard about this when I was in grad school 30 years ago. And I listened to what he said, and I thought, my God. And that happened. His story happened in 1966. I thought I heard about it in 1988 as something that was happening, that they had a current problem. And I thought, this can't be made up because this is just so ridiculous. Nobody would make it up for 20 years. You know, different people wouldn't just continue a silly story like this for 20 years. Years. Unless there was something to it, I thought. And then it kind of Struck me, I thought this must be real and nobody is doing anything about it because they all think it's nonsense. And then I thought, and if that's the case, then we've got a real problem on our hands, right? And so I became, I thought we have to pay attention to this. So I started paying attention, I started researching the topic myself. And the more I started reading I thought, wow, this is actually really interesting. There's a lot here. It's not all nonsense. And, and I remembered back to some cases that I'd heard about. I was, I remember seeing on the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and Connie Chung in 1986 the Japanese airline case where a large UFO the size of, size of an aircraft carrier, basically what, four 747s across followed this airlines for 45 minutes. And I remember seeing that on the news. And I, so the more I read about this, I thought this could actually be a really big deal. This is. And we all just laugh it off like a joke. But what if it isn't a joke? And what if this is serious? So, so I, so I kind of detest the waters. I gave a, put together a short talk on UFOs that I gave to our department, just, just a, you know, Friday to afternoon talk. And, and then it got widely advertised and the whole room was filled. The room was filled beyond, you know, beyond capacity. There were people sitting cross legged on the floor all the way up to the front screen. And I gave this talk on UFOs saying look, these things look interesting. And there were a lot of people were like, yeah, that is really interesting. So I got a lot of support for that from the department. And then it was only.

[Danny]

How many year was this?

[Kevin Knuth]

That was like 2015. And then it was only two years later that Leslie Kane and what Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kane wrote the, wrote the New York Times article about the AATIP program. And when that came out, I was like, yeah, see, this is actually a problem and no one's paying attention and this is dangerous. We are dangerously ignorant about what's going on. And I thought instead of thinking somebody's got to solve this and somebody's got to look at. I thought, well, heck, why don't I do it? Yeah, you know, why don't I try?

[Danny]

I keep going back and forth on what this, on, on my theory of this whole thing, but like the tic Tac thing, a lot of them feel like it's just like, you know, military technology or like super dark DARPA stuff. Or whatever. But then you have stories like that the 60s Japanese airline flight, or in 1986. 86. Is that when it was. Yeah, and I think it was a cargo plane flying through Alaska. And they said that these. First of all, he said there was these two little lights that, like, came up and were darting around in front of them. Like.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, they were little rectangular lights and they were like scanning like this, but shining the light into the cockpit. It was hot.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

And scaring the pilots.

[Danny]

And the pilot just said that he reached into his briefcase to pull a camera out to take a photo of them and they just vanished. And then a couple minutes later, this mothership shows up. That's like the size this. The size of a football stadium or something.

[Kevin Knuth]

It was. Yeah, the size shape of a walnut. It's about a thousand feet diameter.

[Danny]

He drew an amazing. He. He drew an amazing illustration, Steve, of how big it was. He drew a picture of the plane that he was flying compared to the size of the craft.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right.

[Danny]

Which is. You could probably find it on this Wikipedia article or if you type in the guy's name, the pilot's name, and the Japanese Airlines cargo flight.

[Kevin Knuth]

He. Yeah, Kenji Terachi.

[Danny]

It is insanely big. Okay. It's the. Yeah, this little sketch on the top, I think.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right, Those two. Those are the two rectangular things. And then. Yeah, he's another sketch.

[Danny]

It looks like a napkin sketch. You'll know when you see it. But yeah, that, that. That's something, especially in the 80s. Like, something that big is like. I don't know.

[Kevin Knuth]

I don't know. The amazing thing about. The amazing thing about this is that the radar data exists. And you can analyze the radar from that incident. From that incident. They have 45 minutes of radar data. And the. A lot of it was confiscated by President Reagan's scientific team. And the CIA and the FBI, they all came up to confiscate it. But the. But I'm blanking on his name.

[Danny]

Oh, yeah, that's it, Steve.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, the big walnut.

[Danny]

A little bit low quality, but I got it. I got an image of the guy, too. Oh, beautiful. Pull up the. Can you. Can you. Can you blow it up so we could show it to people? Look at that. So. So, yeah, so, Callahan, look at that. That is insane. That thing is like. That's. That's like a hundred times the size of the airplane.

[Kevin Knuth]

Exactly.

[Danny]

You could fit a hundred of those airplanes inside that thing.

[Kevin Knuth]

And so, you know, and so when people, you know, are skeptical of this, I'm like, how wrong can this guy have Been. Okay, so maybe he's off by the size by 20%. For that to become a reasonable story, he would have to be off by so much. Right. And he describes it as it moved in front of the plane. You couldn't see out of the cockpit. The craft was there. I mean, it's terrifying. And he was terrified in talking to the air traffic control. And I would be too. I mean, that's terrifying.

[Danny]

How did the story get out, I wonder?

[Kevin Knuth]

And you imagine. I don't remember exactly how it came got out. It got out pretty quickly and they weren't able to put the lid on it. Yeah. And, and then Callahan had to turn the, all the materials over to Reagan's scientific team and then. But he had kept copies for himself, stashing a box under his desk. And he kept it under his desk for like 20 years.

[Danny]

Who did?

[Kevin Knuth]

John Callahan, who was the FAA chief of accidents and investigations.

[Danny]

Yes, yes.

[Kevin Knuth]

And he kept that material for like 20 years and then released it publicly. So Daniel Kumbe, another physicist, he was a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute, he has a book called Anomaly where he actually analyzed that. In my paper, I analyzed the basic description of what was going on just to get an idea of how fast this thing was moving. But Daniel Kumbay actually worked through the, the radar data. And this thing made multiple jumps from location to location in the 111 sec or so second sweep of the radar. And he estimates the acceleration to be on the order of 10,000 GS. 10,000 with a top speed. So you get a top speed of about 250,000 miles an hour.

[Danny]

250,000.

[Kevin Knuth]

That thing could get to the moon at that speed. That thing could get to the moon in 52 minutes.

[Danny]

How fast does our fastest jet plane go?

[Kevin Knuth]

Our fastest fighter jet.

[Danny]

Our fastest fighter jet fast or fastest?

[Kevin Knuth]

I don't exactly know.

[Danny]

I'm like, what is like, what's like the fastest?

[Kevin Knuth]

Probably not much. Probably 6,000 miles an hour. Probably faster.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

You're not going to get much faster than 10,000. 17,000 is orbital speed.

[Danny]

The F22 Raptor goes to. Okay, 1400 miles per hour.

[Kevin Knuth]

Okay.

[Danny]

Okay. Wow.

[Kevin Knuth]

So they can't, they can't accelerate 200.

[Danny]

Times the speed of that.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Danny]

That's insane. And these things also have to like slow down. They have to stop. They stop on a dime. That's.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, yeah. The accelerations are insane. Yeah. And that energy has to go somewhere. So where does that energy, that kinetic energy first, where does the energy come from? It's coming from their engines. Okay, fine, you can just say that and maybe get away with it. But when it stops, where does the energy go?

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

That's a bigger question. You know, in car you have brakes, the brakes heat up. Right. But in a, with this, this sort of thing, where does the energy go? You've got a ton of kinetic energy to get rid of in fractions of a second. It's no way to do it. There should be a huge explosion when it happens and it doesn't.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah. We really don't understand what these things do at all. And it's not, it's not that it's advanced technology. It is conceptually far beyond us. It's, they're amazing. Really.

[Danny]

Do you think it's possible that any of this stuff could be some like military stuff that we don't know about?

[Kevin Knuth]

No, no, no, absolutely not.

[Danny]

Really?

[Kevin Knuth]

For one good reason. And the reason sitting on your shelf right over there, Richard Dolan's book on USO's. Richard Dolan has a new book on unidentified submerged objects.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

These things have been, yeah, these things have been observed by and recorded in ship's logs for over 150 years. You have reports from the 1800s of a disk coming out of the water, hovering next to the ship and then shooting off into the clouds. That's been going on for 150 years.

[Danny]

Right? Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

You can't. And once you know that those cases exist, you can't just say, gotta be Russian or Chinese that doesn't hold water anymore. It's silly.

[Danny]

Mm, yeah, but don't you think it's possible that we could have got our hands on some of that stuff and like recreated ourselves?

[Kevin Knuth]

So some of the modern day things could be, could be modern secret military technology. That's true. But the cases from the 1800s certainly.

[Danny]

Again, that you can't explain away with technology.

[Kevin Knuth]

So, so you can't, you, you don't get rid of the extraterrestrial or non human hypothesis by just looking at the military technology argument today. The 150 year old cases, you got to give that up.

[Danny]

The 150 year old cases are interesting though, because you have like writings that have been copied from like, you know, some guy on the, on the deck of a ship in the middle of the ocean, probably, you know, half smash on a bottle of rum.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right.

[Danny]

Explaining these things. It was like a sun that emerged from the depths and it was the size of the, whatever it was, you.

[Kevin Knuth]

Know, size of three moons.

[Danny]

Right. So it's like it's it's very difficult to understand and parse and corroborate that stuff because you're looking at.

[Kevin Knuth]

But those descriptions aren't any different than modern day descriptions. And that's what's really compelling about it.

[Danny]

Yeah, that's true. Especially like this. I mean this is like.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, that, that case is really pretty fantastic. And 10, 10,000 g's is amazing. At 10,000 g you, at 1,000 g acceleration, you can get up to 90% the speed of light in about 17 hours because relativity kicks in. So at a 1,000 g acceleration, which we can't imagine doing either, most of you know, an airplane F22's wings will rip off at about 13 GS and most missiles can't. Their frame can't even withstand more than about 60 GS so a thousand GS is well beyond us. But at a thousand GS you can get up to. In 17 hours you're going 90% the speed of light. That's relativistic speed. So relativity kicks in, time goes slower and all that kind of stuff happens. And so going to stars within 50 light years literally becomes a day trip for the traveler.

[Danny]

Wow.

[Kevin Knuth]

Because time's going slower on their ship because they're going so fast. Time dilation because of time dilation. For us, it's going to take 50 years for them to get there and 50 years to come back, but, but not for the traveler.

[Danny]

Interesting.

[Kevin Knuth]

And so the fact that these things have been observed, you know, suggests that maybe that's possible. Maybe you can pull that off.

[Danny]

So I'm sure you're aware of some of the stuff that Ed Witten and or Lewis Witten was looking at, was looking into in town. The Townsend Brown stuff.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, Thompson. Yeah, I know, I know a little bit about Townsend Brown.

[Danny]

There was, there was a. Allegedly there was like a whole lot of quote unquote anti gravity research going on in like the 50s. And a lot of it seemed, seemed to go dark after that where these guys just like stopped looking into it. And there's a speculation that there's maybe like private companies that got a hold of it. And then I think even Townsend Brown tried to like throw people off his scent at one point when he was like studying this stuff and tried to like change a bunch of it to make it confusing so no one would understand it. But Jesse Michaels did an amazing documentary on the, on the whole Towns and Brown thing. And it basically explains that like there's a, there was a lot of people, physicists in the 50s looking into this anti gravity stuff and there's another term for it. There, there's, there was something they utilized with like the B2 bomber with like the skin of it that somehow made it cut through the air better. There was a. What it was, was it the byfield brown effect or there was some sort of technology. I forget the term right now, but it had something to do with it. It wasn't actually anti gravity, but it was like another more primitive form. So first of all, are you aware of that stuff and I'm aware of.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, I haven't spent a lot of time looking at anti gravity research. It's not something I've been interested in. And, and it seems to be something that people don't want to study for some reason. There are, you know, there are always rumors about people who are trying to study it who get harassed and, and worse. So I've heard rumors like this that make me really, I'll stick with UFOs and that's still not entirely safe. So. But that's, you know, people have been.

[Danny]

Harassed looking into anti gravity stuff.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, yeah. You know, of people.

[Danny]

Yeah, like academic people.

[Kevin Knuth]

People in. I know some people in private companies who've done that. Yeah.

[Danny]

Really? So people that you've worked with and studied with and, and, and to some degree.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, yeah. No personally, in one, certainly I know personally. Well, in one case, yeah, really.

[Danny]

Man, I wonder what would get somebody interested in trying to figure out anti gravity, especially like a, a serious physicist, you know, not just someone who's, who's just like a hobbyist UFO freak, you know, somebody who's like really into physics. Like what?

[Kevin Knuth]

And it's a hard topic because there's always a lot of claims. I get, I'll get an email every, every two weeks. I mean every week I'm getting emails about UFOs or something, but I'll get an email maybe every two weeks about somebody's anti gravity work and they've got this great solution for anti gravity. But, and it's always this mishmash of buzzwords, right. Almost the same, the same buzzwords. So you can't really. It's hard to take seriously, especially when, if you're going to figure that out, especially if somebody's doing something like electrogravitics, you would have to have the beginnings at least of a theory of, of the unification of electromagnetism and gravity. So you should have some of that worked out to some degree and that, that I, you know, when I don't see that, that's pretty Much a clue. Okay. This person really probably doesn't know what.

[Danny]

They'Re doing, but yeah, I mean, like, like, like standard commercial airplanes, we're using the same commercial airplanes that we've been using since the 50s. It's amazing that we haven't been able to expound upon that and, and develop. It's like this technology is just stagnated. I mean, physics, you know, I, you know, there's a huge thing within, you know, within physics and string theory and all these things. No one can figure out. Physics. We're step. We're stuck. We have this large hydron collider and we haven't been able to figure anything out. And technology in general doesn't seem to be evolving in the way other technologies are evolving. Like AI, for example, like it's making giant leaps every single week and month. And then on the physical side of it, it's like nothing.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, that's been a concern. I've, I've seen certainly YouTube videos about other businesses talking about this. And, and I suspect a lot of it has to do with the fact that we, I mean, if you look at the last century, you had two giant breakthroughs about the same time. You had relativity in 1905, with general relativity following, what, seven years later or something five years later. And so you've got that whole conceptual change. And at the same time, probably around 1925, you've got quantum mechanics coming in. So you've got these two huge paradigm shifts in physics that appeared. And quantum mechanics was such a big deal that it allowed you to calculate things that allowed you to figure out things that nobody's been able to figure out. Before you could figure out why this coffee cup is orange. I mean, nobody was able to tell you why these molecules are reflecting orange light. But you can do that with quantum mechanics, right? So the, so physics went through this mindset change where, where to make a breakthrough, to make an advancement. All you had to do was to apply the mathematics of quantum mechanics to a problem. You didn't have to understand quantum mechanics, you just had to apply it to a problem and do the calculations to figure out what the results were. So it became this. And Richard Feynman called this the shut up and calculate paradigm.

[Danny]

Right?

[Kevin Knuth]

You know, so stop worrying about how. What quantum mechanics is. Just shut up and calculate, do the calculations and, you know, figure something out. And that's basically what happened with physics. And so a lot of research in physics stopped, especially theoretical work, stopped trying to find a new paradigm, look for inconsistencies and Find a new paradigm to come up with a new breakthrough like on the order of quantum mechanics. And you know, basically assumed that won't happen and just basically resorted to doing calculations. Let's just do, let's throw all the math we can at the problem and see what comes out. And that's what string theory is. Let's just throw math at the problem. It's not understand quantum mechanics better. Let's just, instead of other particles, let's make them strings and then do math. So I think that's been, the mistake is that we stopped valuing, we stopped valuing the, the, the conceptual aspects of physics. Why, why are the laws of physics the way, the way that they are? And so, and so some of the theoretical work that I've done is trying to go back to these conceptual ideas. Why, why are the laws of quantum.

[Danny]

Mechanics and why do you think that's happened? Why do you think that? How did we get there? How do we get here?

[Kevin Knuth]

I think it was just the shut up and calculate philosophy. You could do a lot by calculating. I mean, you could figure out superconductivity by just applying quantum mechanics and come up with superconductivity, which is a breakthrough. So it's a big deal. You can get a Nobel prize by applying quantum mechanics without trying to understand it or trying to go further. Interesting. Yeah. So I think that we stopped appreciating that real breakthroughs come from conceptual changes rather than just applying math. Yeah, you can't just throw math at a problem and expect to make a conceptual change.

[Danny]

And the people that, you know that were working on this, trying to understand anti gravity, what do you do, you know, like what sort of sparked the flame for them to, to research this stuff and if so, how far they were able to get before they got told to shut up. Shut it down.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, I don't, I don't know that. Yeah, I don't know the details actually.

[Danny]

Yeah, it's just so interesting, this whole thing, because I know, I know a gentleman who, Jeremy Riss, who has a. He's a kind of a self taught. I think he's like a bachelor's in physics, but he has a, he's a lab or he has had a few labs in Massachusetts that he's been working at and he has a whole team of people that have been working on this stuff forever. And you know, he's constantly talking to people in the field and trying to understand stuff. And then recently he had like, I think the FBI came and like shut down his whole Site his whole, his whole lab trying to study this stuff because they're constantly like taking, making videos of their experiments, they're doing and posting them on YouTube and doing live streams and stuff like that.

[Kevin Knuth]

He's doing anti graph work.

[Danny]

Yeah, he's trying to. Yeah, he's trying. He's. I mean, he understands this stuff better than, I don't know if he understands it better than anyone, but he's explained it to me better than anyone I've ever talked to. And he's a historian on, on all of the people who have studied it in the past and Very, very interesting guy to talk to.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, that's, that is interesting.

[Danny]

Yeah. Okay, so when it comes to like military stuff. Right. And you seem to believe that this stuff could not possibly be. Could just because of the fact that it's. So it's been going on for so long and the same things are happening now. It doesn't make sense, but we would have to have something close to it. Right? Like if, if we have, with the amount of money that we're putting into military stuff and, and Defense Department stuff and you know, there's essentially trillions of dollars missing from the DOD's receipts, we, we would have had, we, we should have something close to this that, that you would want to keep secret from the rest of the world. So it seems like there's probably a lot of different scenarios here that are happening at the same time.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's probably. Yeah, I would, I would imagine it's possible. It's possible we have something close like this if, if, you know, we, you. We do hear rumors of crash retrievals. And I've heard these from. I mean, we've heard some of these publicly. Right. But, but I've heard private ones as well. And, and, and yeah, it's possible we did figure things out from crash retrievals, if that was what's going on. Yeah, that's possible. Or even just, or even just basic research on their own. I mean. Yeah, that's about that. It is possible that things were figured out, but if you had to speculate about that. Right.

[Danny]

If you were, you know. Yeah. I mean, a lot of this stuff speculation, but if, if you were to try to come up with a theory on how these things maneuver and how they operate, just guess, wild speculation. What, what would you, what would you go to?

[Kevin Knuth]

And that's a tough one. I think about that a lot. And first, an acceleration of 10,000 GS. Nothing's going to survive that inside. So there. It has to be. It can't be regular Newtonian motion, like we imagine it, they're not moving the way we think they're moving. It's not possible at those accelerations. So something else is happening. So are they. So the first go to is using general relativity. So it's creating something like a gravitational field and things falling. A gravitational field. Right. So that's like warp drive concept.

[Danny]

So this is like the thing Bob Lazar explains where the reactor inside kind of like it's making this pocket of space around it.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right.

[Danny]

Where basically if it's moving this way, it's doing the same. It's like it's like bending this.

[Kevin Knuth]

You're moving the space around it and you're just moving space around essentially like.

[Danny]

Object, essentially, like doing that. But that way.

[Kevin Knuth]

But that way. Okay, Exactly. So that's one. That's one solution that's in. That's the most obvious one. The. Another idea would be that it's using something like, you know, in quantum tunneling, when you go from point A to point B without traveling in between. You know, maybe this thing is using some kind of macroscopic quantum tunneling where it's just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, basically teleporting in some way. That's another possibility. Could there be other things happening? Possibly, yeah. It's really. It's hard to speculate without. Without hard data.

[Danny]

What other cases have you looked at that you're really interested in?

[Kevin Knuth]

Other. Other UFO cases?

[Danny]

Or like, other than like the. I mean, we talked about the. The Japan one, but, like, are there.

[Kevin Knuth]

No. Yeah, well, there' and they're interesting for other reasons. The. So we just finished. We just published a paper on the scientific study of UAPs. It's in the progress of aerospace science.

[Danny]

Oh, yes. This is the new paper that.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's a new paper that just came out. It's got, what, 34 authors, lots of good people on it.

[Danny]

How long are you working on this about.

[Kevin Knuth]

For about the last year.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

And it's what I think, 58 pages in the journal and 500 references. So it basically is a summary of. It's a summary of the scientific study of UAP to date. Right. And one of the. So one thing we tried to do in this paper is to stay. We tried to dispel a lot of the myths that are kind of floating around, especially in academia, on UAPs. Oh, it's an American problem. It's an American phenomenon. It doesn't happen anywhere else. Well, that's not true. And then you get the.

[Danny]

This is a. This is a myth. That's floating around in academia.

[Kevin Knuth]

A lot of people say all sorts of ridiculous things about UAP because they really don't know. They haven't really looked at it. Why are there no UFOs seen in Africa? Well, there, there are UFOs seen in Africa. In fact, there's books written about UFOs in Africa, right?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

And, yeah, Zimbabwe.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

And then there's the landing in Zimbabwe at the aerial school. That's. That's well known. Right. And then you've got. Why is there no physical evidence? There's plenty of phys. These things land and break tree branches and leave marks in the ground and leave radiation traces and leave chemical traces and we have chemical traces and some of these are being studied. And in fact, in the same issue that our paper on the new science of UAPS is being published, Jacques Vallee is publishing a paper on the reexamination of tree bark that was scorched by a very luminous UFO that landed putting out hundreds of megawatts of light. Basically burnt the trees in the clear forest clearing. And they restudied the tree part. They actually went and resampled the tree park recently. When does this happen? This happened in. Was it 1965? I think they still have the tree bark. Yeah, well, the trees are still growing. The park's still there.

[Danny]

The burnt bark is still there.

[Kevin Knuth]

Burnt park's still there. Yeah, it's just under layers. Right. So you can still get that. And so they, so they looked at that and were using that to estimate the amount of light that these things put out. So these things put out hundreds of megawatts of light in some cases. And that observation was from a physicist. Physicist was driving down the road in northern. It was near Haynesville, Louisiana, which was actually Arkansas. They were actually north of it, north enough to be in Arkansas. The landing happened and the physicists saw this bright light coming from the forest and was driving with his family on the highway and saw this. And as he was getting closer, realized that the light was brighter than the light on from his headlights. And he did a quick calculation in his head, knowing how bright his headlights were to figure out that this thing is crazy bright and I don't want to be anywhere near it. Right. So he literally stopped on the highway, did a U turn and got out of there and reported it. Right, so reported it. And then investigators came out and found the landing site and found, found the damage done.

[Danny]

Where was this again?

[Kevin Knuth]

North of Haynesville, Louisiana.

[Danny]

Louisiana.

[Kevin Knuth]

Okay. Yeah, just across the border in Arkansas. And yeah, so Jacques Vallee has written a paper on this where they estimate the luminance of these things. So the luminance, the amount of light coming from some of these UFOs is, is on the order of the amount of power of a small nuclear reactor. Why are they making so much light? They're using a whole nuclear reactors power to create enough this light to burn. TRAIN BARK it's not clear why they're so luminous in some cases. Very odd. Is this part of their, you know, their propulsion technology? It could be, I don't know. But then it's basically a waste product.

[Danny]

Do we know anything about any of this stuff?

[Kevin Knuth]

Very little.

[Danny]

This is so such a frustrating topic for me sometimes.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's really frustrating. I think very, very little is known and I think our government knows very little. And I think that's one reason why disclosure doesn't happen faster is because I don't think they know what to disclose.

[Danny]

Really?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, I really honestly don't. Yeah, I don't think because it's going to raise many more questions that they just don't have answers to. So you know one, one government official who's worked on these things and I won't name him, but we had a chance to talk to him, we scientists did. And I asked him, I said how many of these craft are operating in the earth environment at any given time? Just order magnitude 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000. He goes, we have no idea. He goes, I don't know. In fact wrote down the question. Can I write down this question so I can ask it? He didn't know the answer. They don't even know how many craft we're dealing with. And that's the level of ignorance we're at. And why is simple is we've been treating it as nonsense for 80 years and, and it's not nonsense. And when they don't treat it, it's nonsense.

[Danny]

The public has been treating it.

[Kevin Knuth]

The public, I think the government has.

[Danny]

Been treating it that way.

[Kevin Knuth]

I think a lot of them, I mean there's different government agencies and there's different groups in the government. So. So one of them might not be treating, might be treating it seriously, but they're not taken seriously by the others and that leads to budget problems and which is why a tip gets cut. And you're just going to perpetuate this problem?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

Have you ever something that we really ought to just put money into and solve the problem?

[Danny]

Have you ever listened or talked to a lady by the name of Catherine Fitz?

[Kevin Knuth]

No, I'm not I'm not familiar with.

[Danny]

She's very interesting. We had her on the podcast recently. She worked for the Department of HUD under, she got hired under the Clinton administration, and she continued under the Bush administration. And she was basically there to like, clean up all the, all the fraud that was going on and, and with the mortgages and all this stuff.

[Kevin Knuth]

I have heard about her. Yes. Okay.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah. And. And she basically, she was doing the math with, you know, all the money that was going in different. She basically, she's like a math wizard. So she figures out where all the money goes in government, within all the agencies all around the world, the economy, the banks, the dollar, everything. And she basically speculates, and we were talking about. On the podcast, we're talking about DOGE and how DOGE is going in to clean up all these agencies like USAID and they're looking into the IRS and Social Security and all this stuff. She goes, there's $21 trillion missing from the Department of Defense. She goes, if I was hired by the president to go find all the waste, fraud and abuse, I would go straight to the $21 billion that went dark.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And she goes, she noticed.

[Kevin Knuth]

What's the deficit? I mean, that's like two thirds of the deficit. Right, right.

[Danny]

And she noticed that as soon as that 21 dol. Trillion dollars went missing, offshore accounts started ballooning.

[Kevin Knuth]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why would that happen? Huh?

[Danny]

Because money is being moved somewhere to offshore accounts is what she's. What she's basically alluding to there.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right, right.

[Danny]

So. And I think part of her hypothesis is the, the government, the, the top, top, top layer of the government that needs to get done and doesn't want to have to worry about laws, the Constitution, the bureaucracy, Congress, the Senate, all of that. If they want to get done, they need to have their own pool of money that they can. They can operate outside the law and do whatever they want to do, fund whatever they want to fund, build whatever they want to build their own secret military, whatever it is, without having to worry about laws and without having the public know about it. And she speculates that that's probably what happened. And, you know, it gets into whole. A whole nother realm of theories about, you know, breakaway civilizations and all this stuff. But, but that's a whole part of.

[Kevin Knuth]

The swamp nobody's tromped around in yet.

[Danny]

Right, right, right. But like the $21 trillion, I mean, you would imagine if, if you wanted to rule the world, run the world, and, and you had. You have unlimited do some. That no One would know, including these people that we're looking at in Congress and these whistleblowers or anyone who's in the traditional government that we like to think of as the government. They would have no clue.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

What's going on.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, yeah, that's true. So I could see, I can see that.

[Danny]

So, so, yeah, no, it's hard to be, it's hard to be optimistic about this thing. And it's, it's. Sometimes I don't know if you feel the same way, but, but sometimes I feel like I'm just wasting my time and mental energy thinking about it. It. Because it's like no one's ever going to say anything. Like, you can have fun speculating about it all day long, but we're never going to have any objective evidence or any, we're never going to know the real facts about what this stuff is on a, on like a, a verifiable level. Right. Like, there's never gonna be anything that's verified that you can be like, oh, yeah, you're talking about facts. Right. It's all going to be subjective.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right. Yeah. And that's, that's basically why I've wanted to get scientists, scientists in academia involved. Because when scientists get involved and academics get involved, we'll share information, we talk to each other. We will. And we'll make this public. And that's what we do. Well, then you, I mean, and so, and if you can look at the author list on the paper, I mean, this is, we got, we got scientists from what, seven countries?

[Danny]

Okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, Dolan, Jacques Vallee, Jacques Valle, Beatrice is there. Brian Graves is involved. We've got, we've got the French people, Luke Denis and, and, and, and then Iman Aspro from Ireland. We've got, you know, people from all over the country, Massimo Teodorani, Eduardo Russo, all over Europe as well. And so, you know, we're, and we talk to each other and we're working together and we are all trying to figure this out. And that's what, and I, and I think scientists could figure this out. The problem is funding. Right, right now all these different groups. We've got several different international groups trying to collect data on UAPs, and we're all struggling for funding. And you know, the only places that most. You're either going to get it from a very rich donor like, like Avi Loeb did to form the Galileo project, or you get it from making, being funded by a documentary filmmaker like we did from Carolyn Corey who made it a tear in the Sky. Right. So, so we get money, that, those are ways we can get money. But, but if the government or NASA was had grant money available, we would all be applying and we would be getting it and we would be working and we'd be getting answers. And maybe that's one reason why we're not getting money. Right? I think.

[Danny]

Right, right. And your, your, your friends that were studying anti gravity might be just allowed to study anti gravity.

[Kevin Knuth]

I could be too. Yeah.

[Danny]

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[Kevin Knuth]

That was our UAPX group, which was founded by Kevin Day and Gary Vorice. And along with Jason Turner, they were all involved with a Nimitz encounter. Kevin Day was the radar operator. Senior Chief. Kevin Day was radar operator. Yeah. So they all wanted answers as to what these Tic Tacs were, so they formed uapx and they got, they got me involved as a physicist and then my colleague Matthew Shadagas, who I work with at University at Albany. And we formed a team and went out to Laguna beach in California and Avalon on Catalina island and set up two stations to basically monitor the Catalina channel for five days. Watch for UAPs, which 5. It was interesting and there's spoilers here, so if you haven't seen the movie, you might pause. The movie doesn't have. The movie is mainly a documentary of our mission. So it conveys all the real excitement that we had in doing the. Working on this project for the first time, actually going out there with real equipment, trying to really look for these things. And you know, on your first mission, you. What do you learn on your first mission? Typically you learn what not to do. Right. And which is exactly what happened. We learned exactly what not to do, which is why we've gotten better at this. And we, you know, there's early on there's a bright light that's seen from the guys on Catalina moving across the sky. Doesn't appear to be an airplane, very bright. And they contact us in Laguna. And we tried to check it out and we're checking on our apps to see if it's a satellite, a known satellite. And that's not coming up to be a known satellite. So we didn't know what this was, but it turned out it was the International Space Station. Why didn't it show up on our apps? Because the stupid app we were using was off by one hour because of daylight savings time.

[Danny]

Oh no.

[Kevin Knuth]

And so, but who figured this out? One of the physicists did. Matthew Shinaga, my colleague, figured this out. He goes, I think it was the space station and it just disappeared at one point. And he said it disappeared because it went behind the terminator, went into the shadow of the Earth, just didn't reflect light anymore. So he did the calculations, he found the real orbit and was like, yeah, it was the right time and the right direction. And then he did, he actually did the calculations that is in. So we've got a third paper in this same special issue in progress in Aerospace Sciences. This is the third paper's on the UAPX mission to Catalina. So that paper describes, you know, the results of what happened from our study that is featured in A Terror in the Sky. Okay. And that's first authored by Matthew, Matthew Shadagas. And Matthew did the calculations where he took the iPhone images of the object and measured how many pixels and then did the calculations. Well, if this is so many hundred miles away in orbit, it should be this Big. And he comes out to like 111ft across, which is. He was off by a foot on the size of the space station.

[Danny]

No way. By measuring the pixel.

[Kevin Knuth]

By measuring the pixel distance. Yeah. Because he's a physicist. He knows what he's doing.

[Danny]

That's amazing, man.

[Kevin Knuth]

And when. I love it when, when it all comes together like that and I'm talking like, what's his name from the A team. I love it when, when a plan comes together, but that's exactly what happens. And it's. And to have a good physicist on the job is a good thing. It's. You know, I'm reminded of Jon Stewart's quote, isn't amazing what scientists can do when no one makes.

[Danny]

Yeah, right.

[Kevin Knuth]

I totally agree with that.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, just like, you know, going back to what we were, how we were talking about like the evolution of technology and, and, and how like physics has been snack stagnated. Like, you know, look at the Civil War, 1860s, we were, we were shooting muskets. And then within the time frame of a human lifespan, we went from that to dropping fusion devices out of airplanes.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right.

[Danny]

I mean, that's just astonishing level of technological innovation in such a, such a short period of time.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right.

[Danny]

It's just, it's just, it just blows my mind to think.

[Kevin Knuth]

And it's when. And it's those fusion devices that UFOs hang around.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

And shut down and we're worried about.

[Danny]

Right, right.

[Kevin Knuth]

Interesting. And that's another interesting thing that came out in this paper. I found that the. So next week, starting later this week, is the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies meeting. So after this, I'm actually flying to Alabama to go to that meeting. And the SCU team, one of the studies that they did is they studied sightings at military bases, population centers and, and nuclear centers. And they've been, they've studied those from the 1940s through the 1970s. And they have a series of papers on these things, sightings. And they found that the number of sightings at nuclear centers is statistically significantly more higher than the sightings at nearby air base, army or air bases or population centers. These things are clearly hanging out nuclear sites. And in fact, that happens early on. It starts actually when the nuclear sites were being created, when they started construction. Which is really odd because how did they know, how would anyone know what's going to be made there? Right. So it's either clever enough, either clever.

[Danny]

You're either clever enough before the nukes.

[Kevin Knuth]

Were actually before the nukes were actually there. The UFOs were there watching and they stayed watching through like 1952 and then dropped off and never in those levels, never came back. So it was clearly we're watching the creation of these nuclear sites.

[Danny]

Has anyone ever talked about or reported on sightings of these things underwater? Because there's, there's hundreds of nuclear submarines circling the oceans right now that are just loaded with nukes.

[Kevin Knuth]

Well, that's a good question. And that's, you know, the, the two people currently who are looking into that. You've got Richard Dolan's book. Yeah, his first book has come out. He's got two more coming out. So the first book goes from antiquity Back to what, 1969, I think is his first book. And the next book will be in next 20 years or so. And then the third book will be more recent. And you've got Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, who wrote his white paper for the Soul foundation on submerged objects. I think that's the ignored aspect of UAPs. I mean, UFOs, the UFO, the focus has been on flying. But these things go underwater.

[Danny]

Yeah. And the oceans are, are less explored than the moon. We, we, the. I think we.

[Kevin Knuth]

Less explored than Mars.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

We know, we know the surface of Mars better than we know. The whole surface is crazy.

[Danny]

That's insane to think about like 10%, I think, of the ocean floors with that we mapped.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, it's a water planet. I mean, we don't really. It's probably the most poorly named planet in the solar system next to Uranus. Perhaps it should just be called water or ocean. I mean, if you just, I mean, for fun, just take a globe and hold it up so that you're looking at the Pacific Ocean. Right. And it is literally the whole circle. Yeah, it's a water.

[Danny]

One whole side of it, it's completely.

[Kevin Knuth]

One whole side of it is just ocean. Yeah, it's really amazing when you can see, you know, and for anybody who's flown from Los Angeles to Australia or New Zealand, you're really aware of that because it's 12 hours, you look out the window and still water even halfway to Hawaii. Yeah, it's. That's. Yeah, it's a lot of water. And we don't know what's under there. We really don't. It's really pretty remarkable.

[Danny]

Well, you know, it is a majority a water planet, but like us, we are the most intelligent life form that we know of that exists here. We're this upright bipedal hominid that has evolved obviously to survive on Earth. And a lot of these things that we see, a lot of these reports of, like, beings and stuff, they all look just like us, bipedal, upright, walking hominids. And if they came from some other planet, like, what are the chances that they would evolve to look just like us? Right. Like, I think we're one of one of 2 million cataloged species on the Earth, and there's 20 hominids. And out of the 20 various variations of hominids, we're one of the 20. So we're like 0.001% of living beings on this Earth. And we've the. We're the only one that has been able to figure out how to communicate beyond our Earth and develop technology to be able to leave the Earth. So, like, just, just calculating how rare we are on planet Earth, like, we haven't been able to find life on other planets, let alone life that evolved to look exactly like the.001% of life on this Earth. So, like, what is the percentage of, of. I don't know if you know the answer to this, but, like, out of all of the planets that are habitable, are able to inhabit life, how many of them have. Are just complete water worlds or have more water than we have?

[Kevin Knuth]

That's a good question. And we know that about 20% of the planets, 20% of the star systems have a planet in what we call the habitable zone, where you could have, where the temperature is right, to have liquid water, 20%, 20% of the stars. So go out tonight, count out five stars. One of those stars has a planet in the right place to be able to have liquid water.

[Danny]

Right? Okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

Whether it's a rocky planet or a gas planet, you don't know. And so it might not be habitable, but it's in what we call the habitable zone. And water is very common and very probably many of the terrestrial worlds have, have oceans or are water worlds in some way. I mean, Venus used to have an ocean. We know that now. My friend Mike Way, who's at NASA, who I met when I went, oh, really? Michael Way studies Venus and he's probably the Venus expert. And so used to have green oceans, beautiful green oceans. I would love to see something like that.

[Danny]

How long ago?

[Kevin Knuth]

A lot before it got hot. Before the, the runaway global warming, so.

[Danny]

The runaway global warming?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Does he have any ideas of, like.

[Kevin Knuth]

I don't know what the time periods were, but it's, it's billions of years ago. Yeah.

[Danny]

Whoa.

[Kevin Knuth]

But, yeah, so. And so Venus Is interesting that way. Mars used to have liquid water. We know that too. And so, and we know many of the current, you know, moons around Jupiter have oceans under ice, right? So Europa has an ice crust with a 60 mile deep ocean underneath. So a lot of them are ocean worlds. And you could easily imagine that with ocean worlds being so prevalent. Anybody able to come here, if you had life evolve on another planet that could be interstellar, stellar capable and could come to Earth, they might very well be from an ocean world, in which case our oceans aren't going to be that different from their oceans. Atmospheres are horrible. You don't want to. We live on a surface with an atmosphere. It's a really pretty crappy place to live because as you know, the environment changes every day. Yeah, right. Yesterday it's cold and rainy, today it's bright and sunny. Right. And warm. But atmospheres, the temperature changes dramatically day by day, even within a day. But if you go from planet to planet, it's extremely different. So you go look at Venus, you've got 100 times the air pressure on Earth, which would crush you. And you've got a carbon dioxide atmosphere. The chemicals are different. Carbon dioxide atmosphere, and it's about 800 degrees Fahrenheit. When I was working at AMES is when the Magellan probe was studying Venus with radar. And one of the big mysteries that came up then was that the mountaintops on Venus became radar reflective when it got cold. So when it got to like when the temperatures dropped to like 600 degrees or something like this, when it got cold on Venus, on the mountaintops they would become radar reflective and couldn't figure this out until they figured out it was snow. It was lead and bismuth snow. They had metal snowflakes. So vaporized lead and vaporized bismuth in the atmosphere would crystallize and form snowflakes and fall on the mountaintops. You have metal on the mountaintops covering metal snowflakes covering mountaintops. That's amazing. That's what a cold day in hell looks like. Yeah, right. That's really pretty amazing. I would love to see that, but not with 100 atmospheres of pressure. That's horrible. So Venus is a horrible place to live. And then you go to Mars and you've got, you're what, about 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, right. And you've got 1 100th of the air pressure. So you need a spacesuit. So atmospheres vary dramatically. But if you look at an ocean, an ocean, the pressure is only going the pressure changes one atmosphere every 32ft, right?

[Danny]

Yep.

[Kevin Knuth]

So you're going to, you go down 32ft, you're at 2 atmospheres, you know, you'd have to go down 3,000ft. Basically. Our oceans are only about 5,000ft deep. So you go down about 5,000ft, you're looking at, you know, several hundred atmospheres. A thousand atmospheres. Right. On the order of a thousand atmospheres or already of a hundred atmospheres. So it's about. So at the bottom of our oceans, the air pressure, the water pressure is about the same as the air pressure on the surface of Venus. Similar, close. I'm talking orders of magnitude here. And so all you need to do is to get the pressure right. You just go down to the right depth and you'll have the pressure you want. Right. And water is always between 0 or between 0 and 100 degrees centigrade, or between 32 and 212 Fahrenheit. Right. So otherwise it isn't liquid water. Right. So, so the temperatures don't vary dramatically, but atmospheres they do. On Venus it's 800 degrees. On Mars it's 100 degrees below. So you've got a thousand degrees in temperature difference.

[Danny]

So no matter what planet you're on, liquid water is going to be relatively small.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's the same everywhere. The, the biggest difference is really going to be the chemical constituents or biology.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Kevin Knuth]

Biological bacteria or something which could be bad for you.

[Danny]

Oh, that's fascinating.

[Kevin Knuth]

That's the only difference. So, so going from one water world to another would be easy. And in fact, if I was an interstellar traveler preparing to just make a home on another planet and another star system I've never been to, I would bring equipment to live underwater because if I would build, I would bring the, you know, what's needed to set up a home underwater. That's where I'd make my home. It would be the best place. You're shielded from radiation, you're shielded from meteorite impacts, you're shielded from all these things. A lot of protective shielding. Oceans are great places to live. Hablas espanol spries to joy.

[Danny]

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[Kevin Knuth]

About in the real world.

[Danny]

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[Kevin Knuth]

All the. None of these theories seem to work. That's really the problem. They don't seem to describe. Explain all. Well, time travel is hard because we don't have a theory of time traveling. So, so equally, it's equally difficult or maybe more so than the whole warp drive problem. Right. Or anti gravity problems. So I don't. So I'm not sure what to make of that.

[Danny]

Isn't the idea of time travel that you can't travel back farther than when the first time machine was created?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, according to general relativity. So if general relativity is the theory you're going to work from, that's basically what you're stuck with.

[Danny]

Right, Right. So if we're seeing hypothetical time travelers right now, that means time travel has to exist. It has to be created, at least right now.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right.

[Danny]

So. And that's also possible to be the.

[Kevin Knuth]

$20 trillion right there. But that could be the $20 trillion. That could be the $20 trillion.

[Danny]

But then when did that go missing? 1995.

[Kevin Knuth]

But that doesn't explain the reports 150 years ago.

[Danny]

That doesn't explain that. Right. But unless figured out in another planet another way.

[Kevin Knuth]

Unless. Yeah, yeah. So something like that could happen. So they could be extraterrestrial time travel.

[Danny]

Extra. Yeah, you have to have both. It has to be extraterrestrial time travel.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, that's. And that's where these explanations start to, they get messy because the, the, the, the data that, what we know really doesn't have a good explanation. And I think that, you know, we haven't come up with a, with a, with a simple explanation yet that, that describes everything and, and that's what makes it hard. But I think that's also why disclosure isn't easy because all these questions are going to come up with disclosure. And I, I bet nobody has the answer. Yeah, you really have to study these things for a long time with a lot of people to get answers, and it's hard.

[Danny]

What do you make of the idea that. Because there, there was. How long ago was that whole New Jersey drone incident where we had all those drones?

[Kevin Knuth]

It started in late October, I think.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

That went through a.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

End of February.

[Danny]

End of February, Yeah. Just this past year. This exact year we're in right now. It ended a few months ago.

[Kevin Knuth]

And it wasn't just New Jersey. That was, that was actually an interesting thing. You know, the, you know. And of course the FAA comes up with some statement they're testing drones or something, which, that, that's nonsense because they're seen. They were seen off the coast of Oregon and Seattle too. Those were actually in Florida, I think, and, and yeah, they were. And they were seen in about 17 countries. It was global. It was global. Yeah. It's a problem. Again, we don't have a good explanation for what happened.

[Danny]

Yeah. And there was people trying to speculate it was like non human and like. But if it was, it wasn't. They weren't traveling in any kind of crazy speeds. They weren't making maneuvers.

[Kevin Knuth]

Some of the sightings in Seattle, off the coast of Seattle and Oregon were sounded like non human craft, but those were more isolated. There was a lot more going on in New Jersey, but partly because it was. It's populated. And I think you've got a lot more misidentifications happening.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

You know, I remember seeing photographs of, of craft and I, My brother is very good with airplanes. I sent him this. I said, what do you think this is? He goes, oh, this is this kind of helicopter. And he sent me pictures of this helicopter. And yeah, it matches that helicopter. So there were a lot of misidentifications again.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

And a lot of UFO enthusiasts would say, well, it wasn't really a helicopter. It's disguising itself as a helicopter. And I was like, oh, please. At some point we have to.

[Danny]

It wouldn't be that hard.

[Kevin Knuth]

Just calm down.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

Actually collect data on these things so we can actually figure this out instead of just guessing all the time.

[Danny]

Yeah, I can't imagine it would that be that hard to send somebody up there to figure out what the hell they were. I mean, if we wanted to know what they were, somebody could have figured that out. Very easy.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah. And actually Ben Kugielski from our UAPX team, he's a pilot and he actually performed some flights over New Jersey in that area to Try to see if he could see these things from the air and just Weren't successful.

[Danny]

They weren't successful.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, he just didn't see any, that's all.

[Danny]

Oh, really?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, I saw they weren't that common, but they were, they were common enough that people were seeing them. And you've got several million people in the area. Right.

[Danny]

So Right. Field shut down their, their runways because of these things. And there was even one that crashed. I think we found. We found something, Steven, if you remember, we found like a photo of one that allegedly crashed. And it was. It was like we, we tracked down the company and it was a company based out of somewhere in the northeast that was manufacturing drones that were powered by. I can't remember the name. It was some, some sort of chemical that was powering these drones. I want to say hydrogen, maybe Hydrogen powered drones. But like it showed like a police officer holding like a couple police officers holding. This thing was like the size a quadcopter that was like the size of this table.

[Kevin Knuth]

Wow, that's amazing.

[Danny]

Maybe, maybe it had six propellers on it or something like that. But it looked like something, you know, standard. Didn't look like anything crazy.

[Kevin Knuth]

I think what was going on was more standard. Things were happening in New Jersey. There was a lot. There's a lot of activity. There's a lot of air activity in the area. I'm pointing outside as if we're still there. I live in New York, so it would be for me, it's just over that way. But not from Florida.

[Danny]

There it is. NYPD recovers massive drone found abandoned. Click on that.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, that's cool.

[Danny]

Okay, so it was the New York Post that posted on it in the tri State area. Scroll down. Police recovered a. Yeah, that. That was the one we found for sure. Go out. The two year old boy swept massive drone apparently abandoned in the Brooklyn. In a Brooklyn Navy Yard. Photo obtained by the Post shows the NYPD officer holding up the unwieldy aircraft, the body of which appears to be more than five feet in diameter. Cops responded to the email tip alerting them to the presence of the drone, which they found on the sidewalk on 5th street between Market street and Morris Avenue.

[Kevin Knuth]

Wow, so it was actually found in Brooklyn. That's crazy.

[Danny]

But there was. Yeah. Look at that thing.

[Kevin Knuth]

They.

[Danny]

But remember when we were looking at it, we were. They were able to track down the name of the company.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

That manufactured them. Yeah, I'm trying to find the manufacturer. Ammonia. Look, officers were investigating passengers. Passersby said he worked in the building. That houses the headquarters of the drone's manufacturer, which he identified as Amagi Inc. A sustainable energy startup working using ammonia as a renewable fuel source, including aerial vehicles.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Danny]

Ever heard of that before? Anything like that before?

[Kevin Knuth]

No, I haven't. Yeah. And that's. I mean, that's something to be. I'm. I'm glad to learn this because it's good. It's important to be aware of what's in the air if you're going to study what's in the air. Right.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

You have to learn about all these things. So. And I think especially around New Jersey, that was hard because there were. I'm sure once the. Once the reports of these, you know, unknown objects were coming out, a lot of people, you know, with. Who own drones are like, now's a great time to go fly my drone. They send up their drones, and the next thing you know, it's a mess. Right. So.

[Danny]

But I think we have. I mean, I think the United States military had to have known what that was or else there would have been some sort of, like, state of emergency or they would have been getting rid of. If it was, it couldn't have been a foreign actor. They wouldn't let it stay up for that long. Even, like Trump was talking about it because they were flying over his golf course.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right.

[Danny]

And they were flying, like, over some sort of military base in North Carolina. And they. They simply would not allow that to be there if it was something they didn't understand or weren't aware of.

[Kevin Knuth]

I would think. I would hope so. But.

[Danny]

Yeah, and I think there was also some sort of.

[Kevin Knuth]

You have these things flying over space, basically shedding no nuclear missiles, and no one did anything about it for decades.

[Danny]

Not those, though.

[Kevin Knuth]

But not those things.

[Danny]

Yeah, those. Those were something that were really unexplainable.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right. Yeah. I mean, that. And that's part of what makes these things complicated. And I. An unidentified object could be many things. Right. And a lot of them can be conflated. And that's makes it hard.

[Danny]

There's some, like, even going back to Roswell, Right. Like in. In 1947, when. When that thing crashed. Like, we still don't even know what happened with that. Right. There's still, like. So, yeah. On. On what happened. There's like, you know, there's. There's a handful of different theories of what happened, and no one can agree on anything except for the fact that it probably wasn't a weather balloon. Right. There was allegedly. There was the. The guy who wrote the book on Roswell Day, after Roswell, he explained.

[Kevin Knuth]

Is that Corso's book?

[Danny]

Yes, of course, that's Corso's book. You know, he explained there being Kevlar and Velcro in this crash. Like clearly man made technology that was, that was found that, you know, no one ever talks about that. Like if this was some sort of, you know, interstellar craft, why were they using Velcro and Kevlar?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, well, I thought he had mentioned he had. He was claiming that they developed Kevlar from what was found in the craft. But I didn't know about the Velcro part. Yeah, yeah, I haven't, I haven't read his books. I don't know those details. I'd seen an interview with him. Right, yeah, no, that, that's, that whole thing is a real mess because you've got, you've got the US government coming out with multiple statements throughout the years, changing the story every time. Right. And you know, one of my favorite ones from the early 1990s was that was an Air Force statement that said it was, they were testing a Mars lander and the disk was the back shell of the lander. Well, who's testing a Mars Lander in 1947 before. Ten years before Sputnik?

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

That's ridiculous thing to even say. Doesn't make any sense. And so clearly a lie. Right. And, and then after that, you know, came out, they, they came up with Project Mogul. But Project Mogul is a weather balloon problem. What they were trying to do with Project Mogul is they were trying to, they wanted to put radio radio detector, radio wave detectors up so that they could detect the electromagnetic radiation from nuclear explosions from Soviet bomb testing. Right. So. But the problem is he wanted to hold these balloons at something like 50,000ft. The problem with balloons is you let the thing go up and the balloon goes up and up and up. And as the balloon goes up, the air pressure outside goes down, so the balloon gets bigger and expands and eventually breaks and the thing falls. So they. So Project Mogul was about trying to figure out how to maintain a certain, certain altitude for a balloon. And so they were releasing test balloons, right? They're trying to be up at 50,000ft. And then the claim is that the balloon that was launched in early June, or. Yeah, the balloon that was launched in early June was the one that crashed on Mac Brazel's farm or ranch in Roswell near Roswell, New Mexico. But the problem is that when you look at the records of the New York University professor who was running Project Mogul. They didn't launch a balloon in June. They couldn't launch. The weather was bad, so they didn't launch. Yeah. So there was no balloon up. And had they done it, if had they done it, it would have been an illegal thing to do because the conditions weren't right to be able to monitor the position of the balloon. It wouldn't have been a good experiment anyway. So they didn't even have a balloon up. We have those records. We. So we know it wasn't Project Mogul, but the. And but Kirkpatrick at an arrow comes out with his report and says again, it's Project Mogul, which we know it's not. So when we know the government has been changing the story every time and lying every time. So what. What actually happened? It's a good question. I mean what, what was so serious that when the military found, when the army found that the sheriff of in the area went to the ranch to look at the debris himself, they found that out and they detained him and his family for five days. What warrants that? A radio balloon experiment. Really?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

That's hard to believe.

[Danny]

This is the paradox of trying to rely on the government to give us any sort of confirmation about any of this stuff.

[Kevin Knuth]

Exactly right.

[Danny]

This is, this is the paradox of it because you know, they have been clearly trying to deceive and you know, muddy up the waters of this topic forever.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

So trying to rely on them is something that's, you know, it's futile. It feels like it's just like.

[Kevin Knuth]

I think it's a waste of time.

[Danny]

I think so too.

[Kevin Knuth]

Plus there's, plus there are other governments on the planet, other governments who actually know things. So let's work with them. Go down to talk to the Chileans. Maybe they'll talk. They've collected data, they've collected information. You know, I'd rather spend time with other governments than wasting time with this one.

[Danny]

But a lot of those governments are subservient to the US government and that is a problem. Yeah, I've heard stories that this whole topic, there's like zero stigma when it comes to this stuff in like Russia for example, like even like, like the government and the population, they're all into like esoteric UFOs, astrology and all this stuff.

[Kevin Knuth]

And they're open, they go through waves like we do. And we talk about that Russia a little bit. In our paper we didn't have the, the French co authors worked, produced a lot of the material on the Russians. So we Talked about that in the paper. And they, they had gone through phases where they would start studying UFOs and then somebody would say that's ridiculous and they would shut it down and then they would start up again and shut it down. Kind of like what happens here goes up and down a good bit.

[Danny]

And who, who, who were the, the folks that you got the information from in Russia? Like were there certain.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, those were from documents from.

[Danny]

Oh, actual documents.

[Kevin Knuth]

Actual documents, yeah. Yeah. So we learned a little bit about what went on there, but a lot of it's not known. I mean the Soviet Union was pretty tight lipped about everything it did. So. Yeah, I don't think like the US Government, you're never going to find out what the Russians knew.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's a problem.

[Danny]

Right? Yeah. And then, you know, there's lots of cases that happen in like South America where like even stuff that Jacques Fillet has written about that's like, like really frightening stuff. And I'm sure you're familiar with James Fox's documentary about Brazil.

[Kevin Knuth]

In Brazil.

[Danny]

The, like the, what was the name of this, the town in Brazil again?

[Kevin Knuth]

There's, there's the, it was like the.

[Danny]

Roswell of Brazil basically. But they, you know, they explained that crash and there was like multiple witnesses. And the next day the US Air Force came down, right. And landed there and supposedly took these bodies away that, you know, and they claimed it looked like it was like two arms, two legs. It looked like a demon, smelled like a demon.

[Kevin Knuth]

The description sound like sulfur. And everybody thinks it's a demon.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

And so they're always great descriptions. Yeah, it's very funny.

[Danny]

That was Virginia. Virginia.

[Kevin Knuth]

Virginia, Brazil.

[Danny]

Yeah. You know, and it's like then like the stories like that are the ones that like that just doesn't fit into any.

[Kevin Knuth]

They're. We are weird. Yeah, they're weird. And then they're, there's, there's the explosion in Ubatuba in Brazil where they had, they saw a disc coming in. The fishermen, these fishermen saw a disc coming in that then pulls up, looks like it's going to crash into the ocean. It pulls up just at the last minute and then just explodes and then left debris. And they collected debris and that's been analyzed by multiple people by this point and.

[Danny]

Oh, has it?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, that's almost. Yeah, it's magnesium.

[Danny]

We have it, we can look at it.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, yeah, it exists.

[Danny]

And it's like, I don't have it.

[Kevin Knuth]

In my position but.

[Danny]

Or is it like locked away in the government?

[Kevin Knuth]

No, there are Other. Other researchers have it. I don't know. I know that Robert Powell from SCU has studied it and wrote a paper on it with Phyllis Buddinger, who's a physical chemist who's worked on a lot of cases.

[Danny]

Is that kind of stuff's material. Is that kind of material something that would be able to be created on Earth?

[Kevin Knuth]

Earth. It was very pure magnesium, which would have been very hard to purify back when it exploded, which I don't remember exactly what the date was, but.

[Danny]

But not impossible.

[Kevin Knuth]

But not impossible, probably. Yeah. But it would be very expensive and very hard. So it's hard to imagine that somebody made a craft of this and then it blew up. And. And that's one heck of a story still.

[Danny]

It is. It is one heck of a story. But some of this stuff is like, you know, when. When you have things that you have people talking about, demons smelling like sulfur, running around the woods and getting people sick where they're, like, dying. I think one of the cops that handled the thing died, allegedly. It's like, wow, this sounds like some character.

[Kevin Knuth]

I had a weird synchronicity involving a UA. UFO cry landing I knew about. I had heard. Heard about the. This landing that happened in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, where people describe it as the UFO was just left there, Doors open, keys in the ignition is usually how people describe it, which is just as, you know, saying that it's just there unoccupied. And a lot of, you know, UFO people will say that it was gifted to us or something, which I don't. I. I was like, gifted. Are you serious? That things. A Trojan horse, they've got. I wouldn't trust it. But. But anyway, yeah, people have weird ideas about what's all going on. Weird belief systems. And so. And I'm more suspicious and skeptical still. And so. So I had heard that story and that, that and that in. The story I heard was that it landed in Mexico and the American government. Government went in and grabbed it. Right. Just stole it and took it. And that's the story I heard. And I. So I knew this. This story and I didn't know many of the details, so I was flying out to Los Angeles to film our scenes with William Shatner for A Tear in the Sky. And I landed in LA and I was. Had an Uber driver driving us up to Castle Studios in Burbank. And I'm chatting with the Uber driver. He wants to know what I'm doing. Oh, I'm very excited because we're going up to film some Scenes with William Shatner for this documentary on UFOs. And he goes, oh, UFOs, that is so cool. You study them? Yes. And, and he goes, yeah, my dad, he goes, I'm originally from Mexico and my dad was a Mexican general and he handled a lot of top secret stuff in Mexico. And he, oh, he used to tell me some crazy stories, but I was, I was really young at the time. I was like 13, 14. So I didn't believe half of them, so I didn't take them seriously, but now I wish I had. And, and, and he said, yeah, he told me once that, about this UFO that landed in Chihuahua. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm gonna hear the story from the Mexican side, right? I couldn't believe it. I was like, what a strange coincidence. I'm in the car being driven by the son of a Mexican general who had access to all this top secret stuff, and he's telling me the story. So he goes, yeah, this, this, this UFO landed in Chihuahua and they sent a team in. They had a guy in the back, you know, some distance away with a radio, and the rest of the team went in to investigate and they all died. And they didn't know why they died, and they didn't know what to do. The guy radioed back, panicked, you know, the whole team is dead. I don't know what to do. And they call, they called the Americans to come down and take this thing. So we didn't just steal it, they Mexicans called us to come help them with it. And so then he goes, so then the Americans came in, and the Americans came in and they, they got the craft and took it away. And that's the story he told me. And I was like, yeah, it's the same story. I know, I know the story, but from the other side, right?

[Danny]

So it's like crazy, man.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's like a weird confirmation, right, that, yeah, this probably really happened. Yeah.

[Danny]

Isn't it funny some of the stuff that you can learn from Uber drivers?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, yeah, he's just the, the guy driving my Uber while I'm filming a UFO doc on my way to film a UFO documentary. What a weird coincidence.

[Danny]

How many people did he say died?

[Kevin Knuth]

I don't know how big the team was. Yeah, he didn't say.

[Danny]

And they all died from becoming in contact with this thing.

[Kevin Knuth]

They all came in contact with it and died. I don't know why. Oh, yeah, he didn't know why. Yeah.

[Danny]

Now that's something.

[Kevin Knuth]

That's one hell of a gift.

[Danny]

That's Some of the stuff that. Yeah, yeah, right. Good Lord. Now there's been studies on people that have come in contact with these things, right. And had problems. Right. Like. Like problems with their brain radiate.

[Kevin Knuth]

Well, radiation burns. And our. Yeah, that happens. Just burns from the luminosity alone are bad. Right. So that's a problem. But there are people who have had radiation burns and radiation sickness from being in contact with these things.

[Danny]

And do we know how many people roughly or like how many people were involved?

[Kevin Knuth]

No, I don't know if there's the Cash Landrum case where they actually got cancer from radiation contact. There was the. What John's. John Burroughs who was involved in the. In the English. The case in England with the landing at Rendlesham Randlesham Forest between Bentwaters Air Force Basin. Yeah, right, right, right there. Yeah. So John Burrows was. He had. He had health problems from being in contact with radiation there and he had problem. He sued the. The Air Force. If I remember right, he sued the Air Force for his medical records because his medical records were classified having come into contact with this. So.

[Danny]

Wow, that's so bizarre, man. Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

When you really dig into this, it's an. It's not at all boring. It's really interesting and it's complicated. There's a lot going on. It's not. It's not a simple blow offable thing, you know.

[Danny]

I feel like NASA has to know more. NASA has to have some idea.

[Kevin Knuth]

I would like. I would think so too. Yes. Yeah.

[Danny]

I mean just think about like the, like.

[Kevin Knuth]

I mean, I know, I know Astro. Astronauts have seen things. I talked to. I got to meet. I met and talked to Alan Bean who was on. On the moon on Apollo 1314.

[Danny]

Oh, really?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah. No, no, Alan Bean was in 12. He was in Pal. Yeah, he. He's now since passed away unfortunately. But he. I was very lucky. They. The documentary in the Shadow of the Moon, the Ron Howard film on the moon landings.

[Danny]

I haven't seen that one.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, it's excellent. They spent most of the time is interviewing the actual astronauts and they had a premiere showing at the Rose Hayden Planetarium in New York City. And I being at Albany or the chair of our department, had tickets to go see the premiere showing and he couldn't go. So I just gotten done teaching the astronomy class and I came into the office and. And he said, Kevin, you teach astronomy. Would you like to go see this? And I was like, wow, when is it? And he goes, tonight. And I was like, it started like 7 o' clock or something. And it was like 2 o' clock in the afternoon. I was like, holy cow, I've got to leave now if I'm going to go do this. So my wife couldn't go, sadly, but my postdoc Dennis Kinshaga could go. And so me and my postdoc drove down to go see the premiere showing of the Moot documentary. And I didn't have time to even look at the brochure. I just hopped in the car and we went. And we're driving. And he goes, have you read this? I said, no, I haven't even looked at it. He goes, it says, stay afterwards for a reception where you can meet the astronauts. And I was like, what astronauts? And he goes, I don't know. It doesn't say. And I was like, well, they're not gonna be shuttle astronauts. If it's a Apollo film, they're gonna have to be Apollo astronauts. And he goes, yeah, it looks like Buzz Aldrin's gonna be there. And yeah, it was. I mean, it was Buzz Aldrin and Edgar Mitchell was there and Alan Bean and Harrison Schmidt was there. And, oh, Harrison Schmidt was wonderful. He was the only scientist who's ever been to the moon. He's the only geologist who's ever been to the moon. Who's been to the moon. He was in Apollo.

[Danny]

Harrison Schmidt.

[Kevin Knuth]

Harrison Schmidt. He was in Apollo 17. The picture of the astronaut standing next to that giant boulder, I think is a picture of him.

[Danny]

Okay. And he was a. What was his. He was a geologist.

[Kevin Knuth]

Geologist. Okay. Yeah. And he. Oh, he talked. He was so nice. He talked to us for a half hour. Just me and Dennis talked to us for. I mean, we weren't excluding anybody, but he was. He was talking about what it was like to be on the moon and the canyon. They were at Taurus Littra, which is a big canyon. He says it's wider than the Grand Canyon. You're standing on the edge of this giant canyon, bigger than the Grand Canyon, with the Earth in the sky. And he's. He's in tears describing this, and we're just like, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm hearing. Hearing what the moon is like from somebody who's been there. I mean, it's really amazing.

[Danny]

How old was he at the time?

[Kevin Knuth]

I don't know how old he was. He looked quite young. But. Yeah, but they all told amazing stories. They all told craziest stories about things you never hear about, which was really spectacular. Like Alan Bean, when we talked to him, he Was describing what happened when they launched. He said There was Apollo 12. They all had their. NASA was getting kind of cocky and there was a thunderstorm and they decided to launch with the Apollo.

[Danny]

Oh, wow. He's only 37. When it, when he walked on.

[Kevin Knuth]

When he walked on the moon. Yeah, right, yeah. So they decided to launch in a thunderstorm. And he said, we had just cleared the tower and the. And the module got hit by lightning and it took out the power. So all the electricity went out. And he said that they had the option to abort. He goes, we can abort and. Or do we just ride this thing blind into orbit? You know, the thing is designed to just rock it into orbit, right? So it would have just. They were hoping it would just still go into orbit. So they voted to just ride it into orbit. So they rode that thing into orbit blind with all the lights off. It was dark, pitch black capsule in a rocket going into orbit. And they got into orbit and they had to then get their flashlights out and try to power everything up again, get it working. Hopefully get it working so they could get back, back home if they need it. So they're. So they were able to get the power restored. But when they rebooted the computers, the navigation database, the navigation system put them at the launch point rather than in orbit. So they had to program their position and orbit into the navigation computer manually. Manually. So they could get their position and orbit from ground control. But they couldn't get the orientation of the spaceship. Ground control couldn't tell the orientation of the craft, so they had to manually get the orientation of the craft. And they did it by sighting stars. They made a rectangle out of masking tape and put it on the window and measured where it was. And then they did that on the other window. They got a star lined up on that window. And then they lined up, they put another rectangle up where another star that they could identify was on the other window. And they measured the positions of those rectangles and sent that information down to Houston where they then calculated the orientation of the spaceship. Whoa. I mean, it was these guys. The reason they pulled it off in 1960 is because they were 1969 or I guess that launch was what, 70 would have been 1970 or something. But the way they pulled it off, because they were brilliant and, you know, I'm not sure anybody today could pull that off. You know, really, it's tough. I mean, nobody, we rely too much on computers and calculators and everything for everything. Right? Nobody's gonna be able to identify a star. You'd have to get on Google to get a star map. And you know, people, you know, but the astronauts could look out the window and tell you what stars were. They knew things. This. Yeah, they were well educated. They knew what they were doing. Brilliant.

[Danny]

You know, that's a, you know, that's an interesting thing, is that you. The, the technology during the Apollo programs is one of the only technologies that just never expounded upon itself and never grew, never wasn't doubled or even able to advance in the way other technologies are. Like, you know, you know what I mean? Like, look at, look at cell phones and the way cell phones has have evolved since the first cell phones and you know, vehicles, every, every single type of technology, computers even. And then the Apollo technology that was used to launch the astronauts to the moon is the only technology that we haven't been able to increase its ability or even duplicate it. It, you know, 50 to 60 years later. It's just so, I mean, some of.

[Kevin Knuth]

It, it was, it was, they were early computers. Right. So they were. But they were robust. Yeah, they weren't, they weren't, they weren't powerful, but they were robust. Right. And that's the, that's the cool thing about them and that's what didn't last, was the robustness. Right. Because to make them more powerful, they have to become. You have to make everything smaller. So it has to become less robust.

[Danny]

What, what, what. Why do you think that we haven't been going back? Because I would just imagine like in, in, in. In the opt. In. In the perfect world, we would have kept going back ever since, every single year developing new, new technologies, faster ways to get there way, you know, building bases there.

[Kevin Knuth]

We fight too many wars.

[Danny]

You think that's it?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, we stopped because of Vietnam. Vietnam was too expensive. And then we had the recession in the 80s and the. Then.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

And then for what? For the last 20 years we've been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and I mean, we're always fighting wars. Yeah, that's what humans do. It's awful. Yeah.

[Danny]

I mean, but like even we're always.

[Kevin Knuth]

So excited about the next one, but. Yeah, we never think about the amount of damage it does and the toll it takes and the, you know, it's, it's a big problem.

[Danny]

It's just, it's mindblowing to me, you know, because the first, the first mission to the moon is like the greatest achievement of humankind ever, you know, and just the idea that we would be so Naive or whatever. Whatever you want to call it to. To not want to invest more money into that and to just scrap it. It's just like if you were. If I was watching this movie a hundred years from now, I'd be like, what the. The are you people doing?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, that's true. I. I feel the same way. And yes, have. Having watched, you know, the moon launches. When I was a kid, I always wanted to go to the moon and, you know, and what. I turned 60 last month, so, like, I'm probably not gonna go to the moon. Yeah, it sucks. I would like to.

[Danny]

Well, I think. Wasn't it. Isn't there a planned. A man mission, a manned mission that's planned to go happen soon?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, they were supposed to go next year.

[Danny]

Isn't it Artemis.

[Kevin Knuth]

Artemis, yeah. Which I think was kind of done wrong. I mean, it's. Artemis is what, the sister of Apollo. Right. So it's. That's the idea. And they were gonna have the first woman on the moon. And when I saw that they had one woman, the first woman. Okay. They were gonna have the first woman on the. On in the mission. And I was like, jesus, just make them all women. I mean, it's Artemis. I mean, they should all be women going to the moon. Why not? All right. Plenty of good women.

[Danny]

Was Artemis a girl?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, she's the sister of Apollo. Oh.

[Danny]

Oh, okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah. The idea was. I mean, I love how we name it in Greek mythology. It was. It was artisan Artemis and Apollo. And Apollo was sent into the heavens. Right. So they're separated.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

Or Artemis ascended in the heavens. Right.

[Danny]

She's the.

[Kevin Knuth]

She's the moon.

[Danny]

Right, Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

And she's represented by the moon. And the whole point of Apollo mission was to reunite Apollo with Artemis. It was quite a beautiful idea.

[Danny]

Oh, wow.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

I love how all these NASA people are so obsessed with the ancient Greeks. They want to rename everything was. It wasn't there there. I was recently Lear learning about some of some like NSA rockets or NRO rockets that were launched out of Vandenberg, and it was. Oh, God, I can't remember what it was now, but they named them all after, like, ancient Greek goddesses or something like this.

[Kevin Knuth]

That's great. Yeah. Well, there are rules for naming. Astronomers have rules for naming features on planets. So all of the features on Venus are all goddesses.

[Danny]

Really?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Why do they do this?

[Kevin Knuth]

They. They. Well, they have some kind of consistency and. Yeah, and naming and all of that. Like, all of Uranus's moons are all named after Shakespeare. Characters. Wow. Miranda and Uriel and Ariel. Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

Also.

[Kevin Knuth]

And I think the. The volcanoes. I think volcanoes on IO are all on Jupiter's. Jupiter's moon IO are named after blacksmiths or something like that. Famous blacksmiths from.

[Danny]

There's volcanoes on Jupiter's moons?

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, yeah. Jupiter's moon IO is the most volcanic world in our solar system.

[Danny]

Whoa.

[Kevin Knuth]

Tons of volcanoes always going off, really blowing into space even. It's amazing. Yeah. The pictures are amazing. Yeah.

[Danny]

Are there any other moons that you're aware of. Of that are. Have the unique features that our moon has with like the distance to the sun that perfectly occludes the sun the way our moon does?

[Kevin Knuth]

No. No. I don't know.

[Danny]

You astronomers make of the moon.

[Kevin Knuth]

That is a weird coincidence, right? It's a pretty amazing coincidence. And it seems almost. Probably pretty. It's probably pretty unique in this. In the galaxy even, I would imagine for that to happen. I mean, you could be anywhere around a planet and arrange yourself so that it would block almost perfectly. Right. But not from the surface. And the moon moves away from the Earth. So that's not going to be like that forever either. And it wasn't always like that. The moon used to be a lot closer.

[Danny]

How far do we know how. What the speed is the Moon is moving away from the Earth?

[Kevin Knuth]

I should know. This was a Trivial Pursuit question. We were playing Trivial Pursuit at home once and it was a question and I got it wrong because I thought it was a centimeter and I think it's an inch. I think it's an inch. Inch.

[Danny]

An inch.

[Kevin Knuth]

I should know this. It's an inch. Yeah. Thank you.

[Danny]

The Moon is currently moving away from the Earth by approximately 1 1/2 inches per year.

[Kevin Knuth]

1 1/2 inches per year. There it is. Thank you, Google.

[Danny]

The retreat is due to tidal forces and gravitation. Gravitational interaction between Earths and the moons.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yep. Energy. Energy getting taken up by our oceans, so.

[Danny]

Oh, energy from the oceans.

[Kevin Knuth]

Well, the moon pulls on the ocean, so it loses gravitational energy by pulling on the ocean. So it's.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

And angular momentum exchange, actually.

[Danny]

Whoa.

[Kevin Knuth]

So inch and a half per year. That's what it was. Yeah.

[Danny]

So do this math, Steve. Find out how close the Moon would have been a billion years ago. If it's doing one and a half inches a year, would it be a billion? Yeah, do the math. Do a billion times 1.5 and see how much closer be. So it's. It's 300 and what, 50 million?

[Kevin Knuth]

There's about 200. About 200. It's around 200.

[Danny]

200,000.

[Kevin Knuth]

60,000 miles away.

[Danny]

260,000 miles away right now. So yeah, you would have to do. You would have to do.

[Kevin Knuth]

You can figure out how many if you figure out how far it moves in a million years. So it's going to be a million inches. Inches, Right?

[Danny]

A million.

[Kevin Knuth]

So about 1.5.

[Danny]

1.5 million inches. Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

1.5 million inches per year. And how many, how many, how many feet is that going to be? Let's say it's, let's say 1.2 inches. And then we basically have. So it's 1.2 million inches per year. Is. Gives you about 0.1 million. So about a hundred thousand feet per year. A little more than a hundred thousand feet per year.

[Danny]

A hundred thousand feet per year.

[Kevin Knuth]

How many miles is 100,000, 5,000 miles per. 5,000ft per mile. So you're probably looking about. So what is that going to be about 2,000 or 20,000? I'm trying to the 20,000. So about 20,000 miles difference every million years.

[Danny]

20,000.

[Kevin Knuth]

And that's going to change as it moves away because the gravitational force falls off as one over squared. So it won't be constant.

[Danny]

Oh, so it's not constant.

[Kevin Knuth]

So it's not as simple. You got to use some calculus to get the right. Oh, wow. But you're looking at something like 20,000 miles per year per million years.

[Danny]

So as it gets farther, is it going to start moving faster or is it going to start slowing down?

[Kevin Knuth]

I think it should slow down. It should slow down because the interaction gets weaker. So.

[Danny]

And also our moon is the only. Correct me if I'm wrong, but ours is the only ones. A perfect sphere. Like, a lot of them are potato. Are potatoes. Right?

[Kevin Knuth]

Right. Oh, a lot of the small ones are potatoes shaped weird shapes. Yeah. But the larger ones are pretty. Pretty spherical.

[Danny]

They're all pretty. The larger ones are pretty spherical.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah. Gravity makes things pretty round.

[Danny]

Yeah. All right, I take a quick pee break and I'm gonna tell this guy to turn off his blower. We'll be right back. We're back. We were. Yeah, we're talking about the moon. One quick. One more thing that just popped into my head. You ever heard of a guy I asked this to? Like? Almost everybody here heard of a guy named Hal Po.

[Kevin Knuth]

No.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

I think I would have remembered that name. That's all I have remembered. Remembered having heard that name.

[Danny]

Yeah. I heard a crazy story about this guy who allegedly worked at NASA who was in charge of mapping the moon. And his name was Hal Pon Meyer. So I've asked probably 50 different people that have come on the show if they've ever heard about him, and they never heard no. Okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

I had this guy on the podcast. I'm sure you're familiar with this guy, Bart Cyberlar, who wrote the whole. He had, he. His whole identity is revolved around proving that the moon landings were for. Were fake.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, wow.

[Danny]

Yeah. And he. One of his biggest, one of his biggest pieces of evidence that he shows or tries to prove that they were fake is because we can't get through this. This radiation belt called the van out, you know, the Van Allen radiation.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right.

[Danny]

So he says that it's impossible to send a life form through there and get back, back, and we can't do it. And it's so thick or whatever that no one will be able to survive. And on top of that, he's like, oh, the moon's too. It's like 250 degrees Fahrenheit or something. Maybe it was more than that.

[Kevin Knuth]

And like the sunlight, well, the surface temperature changes dramatically from sunlight to non sunlight.

[Danny]

And the shadow, it goes like below 200 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever. And he's like, how could the lunar lander stay there for that long? Blah, blah, blah. And like, you know, he, he's done a bunch of crazy documentaries trying to show all this evidence of how it was forged and like when he came in.

[Kevin Knuth]

Except the Japanese probes now have photos of the landing sites.

[Danny]

The Japanese probes have photos of the landing sites now.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, really? See the landing sites and you can.

[Danny]

See the, like the prints from the. Really? After all this time?

[Kevin Knuth]

Well, it didn't. There's no weather. It's not going anywhere.

[Danny]

Right. There's no weather.

[Kevin Knuth]

Million years from now, they'll still be there exactly the same. Well, they'll be covered with more dust. Yeah. It won't change. It'll change as more meteorites hit the moon and create dust. But that's it. Right?

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

We'll eventually be buried in dust, but that's, but the meteorite. Right. The, the cratering rates so low now, so.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

So it's not going to happen very much.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

Take a long time.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

The, the, her society will be gone and erased from the Earth and that'll still be on the moon.

[Danny]

That long?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, it'll. Yeah. There was a study out of. It's another NASA study that estimated how long it would take for evidence of our civilization to disappear. And it's something like 20 million years for all evidence.

[Danny]

That long?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

I would imagine it'd be shorter.

[Kevin Knuth]

Well, I mean most. That's all. Almost all the evidence would be gone. You'd still have something.

[Danny]

The Washington Monument would probably still have.

[Kevin Knuth]

Chemical evidence, but that's it. The. That's it. Yeah.

[Danny]

You. I would imag. I would imagine that like you know, New York City, all the skyscrapers. I think somebody was on here one time and told me, I mean like, that's as far as my evidence goes. Somebody told me at once that the skyscrapers would basically be disintegrated in something like 50,000 years or something like that. And all that would be left as far as like buildings from us would be like the Great Pyramids, which weren't from us, and like the Washington Monument, the Hoover Dam. Big kind of like.

[Kevin Knuth]

So you've got to go to geological time scales to get rid of those. So.

[Danny]

Yeah, right.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah. So that, so that paper is the question was, has there been another civilization before us that we didn't know about? Oh, and that's possible. If it's, if it's older than 20 million years ago.

[Danny]

Yeah, probably 20 million years ago. Why would it have to be that old?

[Kevin Knuth]

Because. Because you would still have evidence of it. So it takes about, It'll take. It would take about 20 million years to get rid of the evidence. Geologic time.

[Danny]

Oh, okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

But you could have something that was older than that that you would never know about.

[Danny]

But we do, I mean, we do have evidence of that. We don't know how it was constructed. Right. Like, oh, that's Stonehenge. Things like this, like we don't have any. I don't know if you saw, but that guy Zahi Hawass just went on Joe Rogan Rogan's podcast. He's like the head of antiquities for Egypt and it was an eye opening conversation. It was like very dogmatic. Like didn't. Wasn't open to any of like any explainable theories of how some of these stones were moved or.

[Kevin Knuth]

Stones are huge. Have you been to Giza?

[Danny]

I've never been to Giza.

[Kevin Knuth]

No. They're ginormous. I mean you. To climb up. I mean one of the stones is like this is five feet high. I mean this is. These are giant stones.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

You know, you want to climb up the pyramid. It takes some effort because they're not small. Small. Yeah.

[Danny]

And inside of the pyramids too, like in some of like the chambers, from what I understand is there's, there's massive pieces of granite like like blocks of granite that weigh, you know, hundreds of tons that were supposed to be. And the conventional explanation by the Egyptologists is that they came from the Aswan quarry, which is like 500 miles away. So these Egyptians would have had to move, you know, first of all, cut these giant stones, these granite, the hardest, one of the hardest stones on Earth.

[Kevin Knuth]

Earth, right.

[Danny]

And move them 500 miles, then raise them hundreds of feet in the air inside these pyramids. And, and yeah, I would love to.

[Kevin Knuth]

See this done because it would have been spectacular.

[Danny]

And the conventional explanation as to how they cut this granite was with pounding stones and copper chisels. That's the archaeological evidence of tools that they had during that. I think it was the early dynastic pyramids or when the, the early dynastic Egyptians that built those. And there's just so many, so many unanswered questions. And you know, this kind of goes to, you know, this conversation that we've been having a little bit because it's, it really exposes the dichotomy between academic institutions and sort of like, you know, self taught people who, who are just looking at this stuff, questioning it from, from, you know, a self educated standpoint. Right. Because there's, there's, there's just this clash of people who spend their lives studying stuff in an academic sense, who, they don't just study the fascinating mysteries they have to study. They have to start from like the ground level to figuring out, you know, doing a lot of the boring work along the, along the way to understand the, the foundations of these societies or these technologies or the history of this stuff and not just necessarily being like, oh, wow, crazy, you know, pyramid. It must have been aliens. Would you have, you have people coming from that, from that perspective and kind of like reverse engineering from there, figuring out, okay, you know, let's just say academic. The academic consensus is this was built with copper chisels and pounding stones and moving it with ropes and pulley. Well, how do you explain these perfectly cut saw blade marks in this granite or these scoop marks out of this granite. Looks like it was melted with some sort of chemical or, or these. Have you seen these? These are, these are granite vases that were found in the bottom of the bent pyramid that were.

[Kevin Knuth]

Is that a real one or is that.

[Danny]

This is a 3D print. It's a perfect. They were scanned. A gentleman who lives close to here, Matt Bell, he bought a bunch of these off the antiquities market and they were supposed to be made around. I think the carbon dating for them is like around 2500 BC. So like 4, 500 years ago, something like that. And that is the, that's when the cons, the, the academic Egyptologists say they were using copper chisels and pounding stones. But this thing is perfectly symmetrical. They measured it with a light scanner and they brought it to a huge aerospace corporation in the us, One of the top aerospace companies, and they measured it with one of their scanners. And the diameter of this thing from bottom, from the top of the lip to the very bottom of it is perfectly symmetrical. Within the dv, the biggest deviation in symmetry there is, is like this, less than the size of a human hair. So, so, so how did they do that with that technology? This is a mystery. This is something you won't get a reasonable answer from, from somebody in, in academic Egyptology. So.

[Kevin Knuth]

Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

[Danny]

You know, this kind of goes to our whole, like, astronomy versus aliens and, you know how, you know, academics are kind of, they kind of stray away from this stuff.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah. But although I, although I, I. People are clever, we really are very clever. And, and unfortunately, we don't know all of the technology that was always used. Right.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

And I think that's part of the problem. We don't have records of all the technology that was developed.

[Danny]

And if they were using some sort of like, like ancient chemical slurries or something to make stones stone soft, we probably wouldn't have evidence of that. Or if they had metal tools, power.

[Kevin Knuth]

And technology gets lost.

[Danny]

I mean, if they had toasters, we wouldn't see them. We wouldn't have, we wouldn't have any evidence of toasters.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, that's right. I mean, and technology gets lost. I mean, the Romans learned how to make cement. Right? So you've got the, what is it? The, the Pantheon, right, has. Is a cement dome, right. It's Roman cement, it's solid, but it's still there. Right. And, and when Brunelleschi wanted to make a dome for the, the cathedral in Florence, they didn't know how to make cement, so they made theirs out of brick. Right. They had to go make it out of brick, but. Because the technology for making cement was lost. But yeah, you know, so we don't know a lot about. And then you've got what is the, the anti cathera mechanism? And. Oh, yeah, I'm pronouncing that. Right.

[Danny]

The Antikythera that actually was found in the shipwreck. Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's found in a shipwreck that actually has gears, you know, several hundred years before Da Vinci's Gears. And it's. So we didn't know they had gear technology back then. We have one example of it.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

And so was that one artisan learned how to make gears and use them or is it a widespread technology? And so that's our. Those. Because you can very often have. Have gifted artists and come up with their own technology and maybe make that vase like that.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

But. But then that gets lost when the person dies.

[Danny]

Yeah. So. And they don't have.

[Kevin Knuth]

I mean, so somebody's. I think a lot of this technology is a complicated thing and complicated stories and, and not all technology that gets developed is widely used. It's not all. And not just because it's a secret in the government. It could be just a few people just know how to do it.

[Danny]

Right, right. And the, and you know, all the records that we use to learn about the. That was happening thousands of years ago in antiquity is, you know, is written down. The. I mean, think of the stuff that before we had the written word, what was going on and how were they able to keep records of it and how can we study that? Because even the written stuff now is all copies. Yeah, it's all been copied and copied and translated and you know, it's been thousands of years. So it's just like we're playing this game of telephone, trying to get the most, the most accurate possible picture.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah.

[Danny]

That we can. But some of these things don't. Some stuff just doesn't add up. And there's people that are in these, you know, some of these ivory tower institutions that just aren't going to let go of it.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah. You get these, these simplistic pet theories that just won't go away. Yeah, that's true. True. And you really, that's really why you have to look at all the data. You've got to explain everything. And if you can't explain why that vase is so symmetric, you've got a problem. Yeah, those are the anomalies, right?

[Danny]

Yeah. But it's like, it's so, it's such, it's so disheartening when you just. It's. It's like human beings, they just like we prefer to argue about who's right versus like trying to maybe have an open mind and maybe look at this from a different angle and try. But it's like we don't want to rewrite history though. You know, that's the thing. We don't, we don't, we don't want to undo all of that.

[Kevin Knuth]

That's part of our worldview. And we don't like changing worldviews.

[Danny]

Right.

[Kevin Knuth]

That's a problem.

[Danny]

Yes. And, you know, this is, this is one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is the, the way humans have evolved forever with the development of technology and how it's changed us. Like, before we had the written word or our ability to store our memory off outside of our brains, I'm sure that we had. I mean, I imagine we must have had a far greater degree of sensory abilities to, to sense other things in nature that we may not be able to sense now or things that have atrophied. Right. Because it's. It's obvious. I mean, I would imagine that our memory wouldn't. Our memory had to have been far greater back before we were able to store our memory and store things on. On phones or on, on. In writing and stuff like this, this with technology like you were alluding to before, how now, you know, when the Apollo astronauts were able to figure out the stars, to figure out exactly where they were before, they had the ability to just like, figure it out on. With AI and a computer, you know, they were, they, they had. Their minds were. Whoa. What the. What was that? This thing just fell off. I'm gonna say that. Leaf blower hero. Is. Is that thing really loud right now? It's getting loud.

[Kevin Knuth]

Loud, yeah.

[Danny]

All right, let me go talk. To be sure to remember your thoughts because you stopped in the middle.

[Kevin Knuth]

Give him 20 bucks.

[Danny]

Yeah. No, I imagine that with like, technology, the evolution of technology in relativity, the. To the evolution of human beings, I would imagine that technology is eventually going to compensate for a lot of our abilities and a lot of, like, the function of the brain. Right. Because like, how I was explaining, like, I think ancient humans probably had far more sensory abilities than we do now. Like how now we become more lazy, rely on AI and technology to do all these things, including compensate for our memory. So I, like, wonder how that is going to affect us.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, I suppose you could still look at that with some, Some existing cultures that still pass things down verbally. Right. That would be interesting. People who study that probably would have a lot to say about our memory and, and, yeah. How that works and how they were able to encode cultural information that way. That's interesting.

[Danny]

Yeah, Yeah, I would be. It would be. It would be interesting to see a study on, like, you know, I know there's a lot of. There's a lot of people right now that are, you know, there's a lot of uncontacted tribes that are Just completely disconnected from the rest of the technological world.

[Kevin Knuth]

Right.

[Danny]

You know, just like imagine the civilization that we have now, like in the most advanced metropolitan cities on Earth, you know, you have Dubai, and simultaneously on the other side of the world, you have people running around naked. You know, so, like, couldn't it have been. If you go back 50 to 100, 200,000 years, it wouldn't it be possible that there could have been two types of civilizations there? Maybe a really advanced one, and maybe a not so advanced one that saw some sort of. Of some sort of catastrophe coming or could have foreseen some sort of cataclysmic events coming and they were able to like, escape or go underwater or whatever.

[Kevin Knuth]

It's one of the theories for what the UAP are. Right. And being underwater too. We don't, we don't know who creates these things and who these people are.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

Are they humans from the future? Are they humans from the past? Are they.

[Danny]

Are they both?

[Kevin Knuth]

Both? Are they humans that broke off of the rest of us for at some point in time, a lot of. Or. Or they extraterrestrials, you know, through all those possibilities too?

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah. So what were you. You were explaining briefly on our break. You have a friend who, who's your friend that had that nuclear.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, yes, my friend Matthew.

[Danny]

Are you kidding me?

[Kevin Knuth]

Haha. Fooled that Danny Jones.

[Danny]

Take this. You got to be kidding me. Before you took another break, I was asking you about your friend who came up with that nuclear.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, Matthew. Yes.

[Danny]

Yeah, Matthew.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, we were. So we were. Especially after our Catalina mission, Matthew and I were brainstorming about how we might be able to get the attention of UFOs. How could you. How could you get. Get some of their attention and have them come and check you out? Right. What could you do? You know? And so we started with simple ideas. What if we went out in a boat and just let off a bunch of fireworks and then wait and see what happens? Right. Or something. But yeah, that's not that interesting. And that happens a bit. And they're probably not interested in that.

[Danny]

But scoot this way just a little.

[Kevin Knuth]

So.

[Danny]

Yeah, there you go.

[Kevin Knuth]

So. So the question is, what. What are they interested in? Well, they're interested in our nuclear weapon sites. Right. So. So how do they, how do you think they detect them? Well, there's really only, you know, two main ways you could do it. You could detect gamma rays coming off of them. You know, unless there's lots of shielding, in which case the only thing you can't shield are Neutrinos, right? So maybe they can detect neutrinos, but that's hard to imagine because neutrinos don't interact with very much, which is why we use giant tanks of water to try to catch a neutrino, right? So. So we were thinking, yeah, it'd be cool if you could get. Then what if we had. If we had a small. Small nuclear reactor. We could have a small nuclear reactor, start it up, and whatever it pumps out, you know, the radiation it pumps out, they'll see it, and they'll come check it out, and then we can study them. I mean, we're just brainstorming and, you know, kind of like you would if you were 10 years old, right? Just coming up with crazy ideas and what can you do? And neither one of us would dream of taking a nuclear reactor out into the public somewhere to try to. I mean, highly illegal, highly dangerous, and highly dangerous for us and everybody. You know, you don't. You just don't do things like that. So. So we were just brainstorming, and. And a few weeks later, he comes. Matthew comes to me. He goes, I have this great idea on how we can make a nuclear reactor. I'm like, but we can't really use that thing. He goes, no, but the idea for a nuclear reactor is kind of cool. You got to listen to this. So he explains to me he's got this idea for a lithium fission reaction. And of course, my first thought is what most physicists would think. Well, you use fission for heavy nuclei, which. And iron's the most stable. So fission is when you break apart a nucleus, right? So uranium, you. You give it a neutron, it becomes unstable and breaks apart, and you get energy from that, but it makes two smaller nuclei, so you break apart big ones. And plutonium is the same way. So I was like, well, lithium, that. Lithium comes, you know, right after helium, right? So it's very light nucleus. And I said, well, lithium. You mean fusion, right? And he goes, no, no, no. Fission. Like, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. How does this work? He goes, you can. You could actually. You can actually get that. If you add neutrons, you can have nuclear fission. You can have them. The nuclei will break apart into tritium, which is heavy hydrogen. And then this. Tritium is a. Is a radioactive gas, which. Two good things about it. One is it only has a half life of 25 years, not like 25,000 years, like something like uranium or plutonium that you have to bury and hope that nobody goes there for the next 25,000 years. But this only has a half life of 25 years and it's hydrogen, so it escapes to space basically. And so that's very nice. And you could actually use the tritium in other nuclear reactors as well. So. So you could actually collect the tritium and use it. So this is a cool reactor. And so he actually set up, set out to actually build, build this thing and he, and he did it. Yeah. I mean has a, he has a lithium crystal that he got and he's.

[Danny]

The what?

[Kevin Knuth]

It's a, it's a, it's a lithium fluoride crystal that he got and, and he is you. It's a subcritical reaction, so you have to add. It only works while you're adding neutrons. It'll keep itself running for a little while, but it dies down. It doesn't. It isn't going to blow. It's not possible for it to blow up, which is the other good thing about it. So he likes to call it instead of the demon core, which is what they had with plutonium. Right. That was actually dangerous. He calls this the angel core, which is a kind of a nice name. I like that name actually. Yeah. So it's. So he calls it the angel core because it's not dangerous. And, and he has done already done experiments activating it with neutrons and. Yeah. You can get the thing running and producing energy. Pretty amazing. Yeah.

[Danny]

And how much. And you were explaining so like the side. As much that stuff you could fit in like a little mug like that would last.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, it was something like the PC has. It's about the size of this coffee cup. And he's. And if I remember right, I don't. I'm not misquoting him. But it was something this big could produce enough power to power your house for a million years, which is amazing. I mean it's a game changer. It's a huge deal.

[Danny]

And what, what is standing in his way from implementing something like this or.

[Kevin Knuth]

Like, oh, you need money to do the tests. You need money to do tests. You need to figure out how to get the energy out of it. Because the energy is coming in, coming out and in the form of, you know, high energy particles. So you've got to convert those higher energy particles to electricity to be able to use it and so on. And that's, that's the classic problem from nuclear power. Because nuclear power you get. You have to couple this 21st century technology with 18th century technology, Steam engines. Right. You use the high energy powers particles to heat up water, boil Water make steam and you power steam engines. So nuclear power has been pretty crummy because you can't couple this nuclear technology with, you know, mechanical technology easily. And so he's been working on that as well.

[Danny]

Yeah, something like that. I mean, it's amazing that more funding and research and, and focus isn't going to things like that that could literally change the trajectory of humanity.

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, there's been, I mean, man, the little focus that's been. Has been in fusion research, which is reasonable, but, but you should be funding other things too. I mean, you have to. You. And typically you've got two types of fusion research that's been done. You've got laser and, you know, laser confinement fusion, where you shine laser beams on hydrogen pellets and get them to implode. Or you've got magnetic confusion fusion or magnetic confinement fusion where you hold a plasma and a hydrogen plasma and a magnetic field and you pinch it with the magnetic field and make it compress it and make it fuse. So you've got those two different types and they compete for funding. Right. So almost all the funding goes to those things. There had been some funding. Some, some work done actually at RPI had been done in Sono fusion, which is with air bubbles in air bubbles in purified water. You can actually use sound waves to compress them and you can get fusion that way. And so that can be done on tabletop. And there had been some research done on that and that got nixed by competitors and a lot of drama. So that was done at RPI for a while.

[Danny]

Oh, wow.

[Kevin Knuth]

But, but a lot of these are ideas that really haven't been explored because there's no money to explore them because the money goes to the money. The little money there is goes to the big ones, you know, laser fusion or, or magnetic confinement fusion.

[Danny]

So yeah, it's just shocking that like there's like, not people out there with an exorbitant amounts of money like, like Elon Musk type people who would be willing to throw money at something like this. That could change the paradigm. Yeah, that would be worthwhile, you would imagine. Frustrating.

[Kevin Knuth]

It is hard. I mean, when you're making new discoveries, you really have to explore lots of possibilities. And this is what nature does when, you know, you can see it in evolution. The Precambrian explosion, right. This is the explosion of the evolution of many types of life forms in the Precambrian era. You know, when you read the first, you know you had the first animals, right? There were many different kinds and Then most of them die out because they don't work. And then the ones that survive are good ones and they keep going. Right. And they evolve. And that's. That's how you should do it.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

And that's what you saw with the bicycle. The bicycle gets invented and what happens, you get an explosion with many different kinds of bicycles. You got bicycles with giant wheels in the front, giant wheels in the back, which didn't work well. So the. You only saw a few of those and you try everything and see what works. And the same thing should be happening with other technological advances, like, you know, like nuclear power.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Kevin Knuth]

Should try. Try some of these other ideas, put some money into it, see what happens.

[Danny]

Yeah. Fascinating stuff. Kevin, thanks again for coming and doing this, man. I really learned a lot today.

[Kevin Knuth]

Oh, yeah. Thank you for having me. This has been great fun.

[Danny]

Where can people that are listening or watching find out more your research? Do you have a website or any social media stuff?

[Kevin Knuth]

Yeah, I have a website at the University at Albany, so you can search for me there and my colleague Matthew Chidagos does too, so you can search for both of us there.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Kevin Knuth]

We have our UAPX website, which is right now we're working more closely with scu, the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies and. All right, so you can Google and find us.

[Danny]

Fantastic. Oh, look at that.

[Kevin Knuth]

There's our uapx.

[Danny]

There we go. Amazing. Well, we'll link it all below and hopefully we can get to the bottom of this.

[Kevin Knuth]

All right, thank you so much.

[Danny]

Again soon.

[Kevin Knuth]

All right, that'd be great.

[Danny]

Good night, everybody.