KK Kevin Knuth On Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

“I feel bad about raining on this guy's parade of his cool UAP photo, but that's my job as a scientist. We've been ruining all the fun for, what, 400 years now.”

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

Context

Kevin Knuth has just shown a UAP photo that turned out to be a seagull the photographer hadn't noticed. His point is that most reported sightings are not alien craft.

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Transcript

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating Around 05:57 into the episode

Kevin Knuth

…And the fastest way to catch mistakes is for you to catch them. Physicists often bring a unique perspective that you can't get anywhere else. And so this talk is basically that. I'm asking the question, how anomalous is anomalous when it comes to UAP? And I'm going to focus on energy and power.

Speaker 4

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Kevin Knuth

…didn't notice it while he took the pictures because he was taking a picture of the boats in the background that I have covered up. And that's actually a seagull. This is the same picture. And the person was taking a picture of the ships here. I've cropped it a bit. We can zoom in. And maybe still not obvious what it is. It's not obvious until I do that. Now it's pretty obvious what this is. I feel bad about raining on this guy's parade of his cool UAP photo, but that's my job as a scientist. We've been ruining all the fun for, what, 400 years now. And that's really what we've been doing. It's very funny. I work very closely with Matthew Shadagas and Cecilia Levy, both professors at the University at Albany. And I work with them under UAPX and our UAPX group. And we've looked at many cases at this point, looked at photographs. Matthew's been analyzing materials and we have discovered more, as Matthew puts it, he puts it quite well. He's…

Brian Keating

That's right.

Kevin Knuth

So I'm going to focus here first on speeds and accelerations. There are many cases where we can measure speeds and accelerations and sometimes with radar. Herman Oberth, this grumpy looking gentleman here at the bottom of the picture, was a German father of modern rocketry. He was the mentor to…

Brian Keating

Everything he shows rests on one assumption. And at the end of this conversation, I'm going to push back on it.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

“UFOs have been observed going from air into water and from water into air pretty seamlessly. Humans can't do that very well. The craft that we have that does this is a seaplane. A seaplane, I love that example, because a seaplane is neither a good plane nor a good boat.” — Kevin Knuth, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

“People are sloppy thinkers that are true believers. They do their cause a disservice because they don't include error bars. … The sign of a good scientist is what error bar he or she can assign to it and the breakdown in that error in terms of systematic and statistical errors.” — Brian Keating, Into the Impossible With Brian Keating