When asked why humans reject evidence of the presence of extraterrestrial life on Earth, Kevin Knuth, an associate professor of physics at the University of Albany and a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist, attributed this to "human arrogance."
"It happens over and over again in human history," Knuth said. "It's hard to believe, so it's easier not to believe it."
Until a month ago, it was hard to believe that a pandemic would disrupt the United States economy and fundamentally change the lives of every American. Now millions, if not billions of people are leaving their homes wondering how what was once impossible has become their reality.
Knuth's history of UFO interest is no different. When he was in Montana, after two weeks working on his master's degree, a local newspaper report of two cattle mutilations near the school campus caught his attention.
"We actively discussed this among the students," Knut recalled, "scratched our heads, trying to understand what a crazy place we were all in."
After hearing one of these conversations, the physics professor offered students information on UFO sightings at a nearby nuclear facility as a means of continuing the discussion, but students, including Knuth, largely ignored it.
“When he left, we laughed because it seemed so funny,” Knut said.
However, the experience never left him, and decades later, when his student at UAlbany asked a question that sent Knuth to an internet search for answers, he came across a video in which researcher Robert Hastings discusses the intrusion of an unidentified object into a nuclear facility., including on the site mentioned by Professor Knuth, and he began to reconsider whether to take UFOs seriously.
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“Something really could have happened,” Knuth said, “and it could have been dangerous, so attention should be paid to that. There is nothing wrong. We have to study this."
Knuth raised the case of John E. Mack, who was the head of the psychiatric department at Harvard and began investigating the UFO abduction allegations, for which he interviewed hundreds of people who said they were victims of close, extraterrestrial contact.
Harvard responded to Mac's research by assembling an anonymous group of researchers who will investigate not only the scientific credibility of the study, but also Mac's competence as a practitioner, which Knuth said is tantamount to an attack on academic freedom. Ultimately, Harvard dropped the investigation.
Although Mack never argued for the existence of alien beings, he admitted that a multitude of facts presented him with something that he could not otherwise explain but an extraterrestrial presence.
“I would say that there is a compelling, powerful phenomenon that I cannot explain in any other way, it is mysterious,” Mack is quoted in a BBC report published in 2005, a year after his death. "However, I cannot know what it is, but it seems to me that it requires deeper, further investigation."
Discussing the lack of UFO research and UFO encounters, Knut said that interest in UFOs fell victim to "circular logic" when many scientists did not touch on the topic, as it seemed unscientific, which led to reinforcement of the idea that the interest in UFOs was exclusively the prerogative of pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists.
Now, however, Knut is feeling a shift in confidence after the US Navy acknowledged that naval footage of "unidentified aerial phenomena" that was widely publicized in 2017 was "real" and truly inexplicable.
Knuth and his colleagues also use the term “unidentified aerial phenomena,” or UAP, in contrast to the more popular “UFO,” which Knuth said was a deliberate attempt to avoid the stigma of UFO research.
“People see UFOs and turn the page,” Knut said. And these people will miss the very real science that people like Knut are pursuing through strange observations that have been made around the world and throughout history.
Before the coronavirus hit, Knut was scheduled to give a lecture at the Carey Institute for Global Good in Rensselaerville, where he would present the results of his latest study of the acceleration models of some of these unidentified ships - 5,000 times the acceleration of gravity and point to the unnatural and inhuman origin.
“This is real data,” Knut said. "Now it needs an explanation."
Knuth said he is not entirely committed to the concept of these observations as evidence of extraterrestrial life, admitting that there are two working hypotheses that he puts forward as he studies each incident.
First, the encounters are made by aliens. Another, known as the "Wakanda hypothesis" for the eponymous fictional kingdom in the Black Panther comic series, is considering the possibility of an earthly civilization with "extreme technology," Knuth said.
“In my opinion, this suggests that we have missed physics somewhere,” Knuth said of how he reconciles the still relatively unpopular field of UFO research with more mainstream branches of science.
To this end, Knut is a member of the UAP Expeditions and the UAP Research Coalition. UAP eXpeditions will soon lease two vessels to navigate the Pacific Ocean, considered a UFO hotspot, close to where the infamous paranormal encounter with USS Nimitz took place in 2004.
"There were scientists who were interested in this all the time," Knuth said, "but they were afraid of becoming outcast in the world of science."
Knuth is also working on simulations that help him predict where these flying vehicles might originate from within the universe, conclusions that Knuth said were only preliminary due to the rudimentary nature of the simulations.
Nevertheless, Knut is pleased that he is contributing to the development of human knowledge and in a subject that may one day prove to be critically important, however unexpected its real origins may be.
While acknowledging that most UFO sightings are the result of misidentifying explainable phenomena, Knuth said there are still "3 percent of cases that have no explanation."
“Whatever it is, we don't know it [scientifically],” Knut said. "And shouldn't we know about this?"
