Physics Professor: How Much Power Does a UFO Really Need?

November 11, 2026 · 45 min

Show notes

Most UAP probably aren’t alien spacecraft. A physics professor says so himself, and in these slides one UFO photo turns out to be a seagull while a colleague’s analysis of crash debris found more Earth dirt than he expected. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation.

I sit down with Kevin Knuth, a physics professor at the University at Albany, who walks me through his slides on one question, how anomalous is anomalous when it comes to UAP. He answers it with energy and power, because some sightings leave enough data to work out how much power a UAP would need.

I push back on whether every sensor is giving a true signal, not an artifact or a hallucination, and the debate carries over to my podcast conversation with Kevin.

What you’ll hear:

A radar return that is also visible puts a bound on the dielectric constants.
Systematic error can’t be estimated without knowing the true value, so the acceleration comes out as a probability distribution.
At 99.9% efficiency, a craft drawing 1,000 gigawatts would still shed about a gigawatt as waste heat.
The night NASA put an astrophysicist on climate science, the book he bought was a kids’ book on clouds.

“I’m asking the question, how anomalous is anomalous when it comes to UAP?” Kevin Knuth

CHAPTERS

00:00 1,100 gigawatts and 10,000 Gs

04:24 Oberth and the 1954 radar claim

06:54 The Nimitz drop and a 5,400 G estimate

13:40 The Japan Airlines case of 1986

23:22 What 1,000 Gs would mean for interstellar travel

25:22 The time dilation catch: four days for you, 80 years on Earth

26:32 Transmedium travel and underwater objects

36:36 How bright can a UFO be?

41:30 UFOs in trouble: Ubatuba and Council Bluffs

42:18 New engineering or new physics?

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Featured Guest:

Kevin Knuth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kknuth/

Kevin Knuth on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06794

Kevin Knuth at the University at Albany (Scholars Archive): https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/physics_fac_scholar/58/

My books:

Losing the Nobel Prize (memoir): http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA

Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://urlgeni.us/amzn/TLANPW

Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://a.co/d/hi50U9U

Galileo’s Dialogue (first-ever audiobook): https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un

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