UAPs Are Out There. This Physicist Is Convinced They’re Not Human—And He’s Trying to Prove It.

6 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Kevin Knuth shifted from skepticism to serious UAP research. He investigates UAPs and thinks UAPs may represent a real scientific and security concern.There have been reports of UAP activity near nuclear sites, as well as sightings after nuclear disasters. Knuth says these deserve further study.Knuth’s simulations indicate that it’s worth taking seriously the idea that extraterrestrial visitors may have been on Earth for some time, since Earth would be hard to find by chance.In the fall of 1988, not long after I arrived as a graduate student at Montana State University in Bozeman—after a night of many reported UFO sightings—two cows were found on a nearby ranch, killed and surgically mutilated. The next day in the physics department, a group of us graduate students were excitedly discussing the gruesome event and the rumors on the local news that UFOs had something to do with it. Apparently, we were a little too loud and excited, because soon a professor emerged from his office, ready to tell us to keep it down.But when he found out we were talking about the cattle mutilations and UFOs, he couldn’t help but join in. He said friends who worked at the nearby Malmstrom Air Force Base reported that UFOs regularly flew over the installation and interfered with their nuclear launch facilities, shutting down flights of intercontinental ballistic missiles. We listened politely because he was a professor, but as soon as he walked away, we couldn’t help but laugh.More than three decades later I was teaching a course on astrophysics at the University at Albany (State University of New York), where I became physics professor in 2005 after working as a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. During a lecture on the possibility of finding life on other planets, my students asked me whether it was possible aliens had ever visited Earth, maybe conducting their own search for extraterrestrial life. When I started poking around the internet for anything to tell them other than the usual Fermi Paradox and Drake Equation, I was stunned to stumble upon a YouTube video of a 2010 press conference featuring former Air Force officers and personnel, some from Malmstrom Air Force Base, talking about UFOs shutting down nuclear missile sites.That’s when I realized UFOs—today we call them Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs)—might not be as laughable as I thought when I was a graduate student. Instead, the whole thing struck me as a very serious matter. If such incursions at nuclear weapon sites have been happening for decades, and no one has acted on them because they assumed it was nonsense, we might have a serious problem on our hands.So, in 2015, after a career of working on “respectable” science like astrophysics, quantum information, and machine learning, I decided to make an unconventional pivot. I began to analyze the existing evidence of UAPs, working through the problem like the trained scientist that I am: pencil, paper, lots of math, and my own machine learning software. Studying photographs, video, and radar returns of the most credible UAP encounters (like Japan Airlines Flight 1628 and the USS Nimitz Encounters), I was able to estimate their minimum accelerations and speeds. I estimated that some UAPs had been accelerating at several thousands of g’s (most of us would black out at about 5 g’s) and traveling 40,000 mph, about the same speed as the New Horizons probe to Pluto is going right now.Why does everybody always assume UAPs are alien spaceships? It’s pretty simple: because some of them travel as fast as spaceships!But the universe is vast, and there are about 300 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, each with their own planets. How likely is it really—even if they’re out there somewhere—for aliens to find and visit Earth, an infinitesimal needle in an inconceivably huge haystack?The UAP topic should be covered with seriousness, accuracy, and proportion. Serious coverage does not require sensationalism, and skepticism does not require ridicule. To get a realistic handle on how possible interstellar travel and interstellar colonization would be, I decided that I should simulate the process. I wanted to demonstrate how a spacefaring civilization might travel between star systems by, say, putting up a base, traveling to the next star system, putting up another base, and on and on until they found us. You can think of this as diffusion, and it’s not unlike watching how fast and far a drop of cream can spread in your morning mug of coffee.I simulated ten million spacefaring civilizations. Each one had a given starting location, a lifetime, and constant spacefaring technology—which includes maximum accelerations and speed, as well as a maximum time tolerance for the length of an interstellar trip. Each civilization also has a parameter called resilience, which reflects the probability that they will be able to find a habitable location in any given star system.Using these variables, I was able to estimate that the probability of an interstellar-capable civilization visiting Earth is about 0.000405 percent. That means that out of all of the spacefaring civilizations in the galaxy, only about 0.00009 percent of them will physically encounter our planet. Not only is interstellar travel difficult, but Earth is hard to find.My simulations also suggest that if there are extraterrestrials present on Earth today, then they probably found Earth a very long time ago—more than 1.7 million years ago (on average about 1.2 million years ago). This makes sense, given that UFOs have been observed by humans since Roman times.Another powerful piece of evidence that we aren’t alone is that UAP sightings tend to occur the day following a nuclear disaster. It happened after Fukushima; it happened after Chernobyl. Whether aliens are monitoring our technical progress, helping us prevent existential disaster, or simply gawking like humans beneath the Aurora Borealis, they must be close by—on Earth or at least in our solar system—to get here so quickly.Carl Sagan once dismissed UFO sightings by arguing that there were simply too many of them, that interstellar spacecraft wouldn’t be “arriving every other Tuesday.” He was absolutely right. They appear to show up so often because they’re already here.Sagan also said that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and that’s just what my colleagues and I are now trying to find through our research group, University at Albany Project X (UAPx), a collaborative effort to study UAPs through rigorous data collection and high-tech sensors.Fortunately, UAP research is taken much more seriously than it was when I was in graduate school. When I first started researching and writing about UAPs, I fretted a lot. I thought I was going to get myself into hot water. But I have been pleasantly surprised by and grateful for the positive feedback I’ve gotten, especially the support from my university, where I have received several awards and generous support from donors.The topic has opened up considerably since The New York Times’ 2017 article on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. I am now a member of the U.S. UAP Scientific Advisory Council that is working to help the U.S. government resolve the nature of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena through rigorous scientific methods. Recently, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman revealed that NASA has UFO imagery that it cannot explain, whereas previous administrators have essentially said, “nothing to see here.” The UAP topic should be covered with seriousness, accuracy, and proportion. Serious coverage does not require sensationalism, and skepticism does not require ridicule. The scientific method requires that we follow the evidence and then draw conclusions.I think there’s a growing sense that we should, at the very least, know what—and who—is flying in our skies. If it turns out not to be an alien spacecraft, that’s fine, but we’d all be safer if we figured it out. Of course, doing so would also present an unparalleled opportunity for humanity to enhance our knowledge, our technology, and our understanding of our place in the universe.Kevin H. Knuth, PhD, is a professor of physics at the University at Albany (SUNY) in Albany, New York: home of UAPx (University at Albany Project X), which focuses on the scientific study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. He is a former NASA research scientist, having worked at NASA Ames Research Center in the Intelligent Systems Division designing artificial intelligence algorithms for astrophysical data analysis. Ashley Stimpson is a freelance journalist who writes most often about science, conservation, and the outdoors. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, WIRED, Nat Geo, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbia, Maryland, with her partner, their greyhound, and a very bad cat.