I don’t know about you, but when I think of Star Wars, or any sci-fi for that matter, I think of life from outer space. On that point, my life changed a few days ago thanks to a physicist friend, Kevin Knuth, (brother of mighty Josh Knuth cited throughout this page).

A little background. Keith and I are long time friends of Rocky and Ann Knuth. We have a lot of common ground. Keith and Rocky are both artists, we were home-schoolers of our kids, and are families have intersected repeatedly for decades. One of those intersections, for which I am ever grateful, is Dungeons & Dragons (which we still play with our grandkids). Rocky’s oldest, Kevin, is a few years older than Maggie and was the Dungeon Master of a group in which she played when she was late grade school and early middle school aged. They got along well and Kevin was so kind.

When faced with our little math wizard preparing to enter college at age 14, we asked Kevin to tutor Maggie over the summer because she wanted to skip pre-calc and take calculus right away. He did. She did.

Fast forward to 1980’s. Our family is enjoying dinner at a local restaurant. At that time, I was a manager at Mercury Marine. Kevin was our bus boy. I was so happy to see him and told him to contact me as his gifts were being wasted. I know genius when I see it and I saw it. I said I would give him a job. He did. I did.

Among his many contributions to Mercury, most notable to me was his creation of a predictive mathematical model for our company’s extended warranty program using signal interference whatever...I still don’t understand it. But he spotted all sorts of cheating, double dipping, and critical trends that saved us a bundle.

Today, Kevin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at SUNY, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Entropy (MDPI). He is a former NASA research scientist having worked for four years at NASA Ames Research Center in the Intelligent Systems Division designing artificial intelligence algorithms for astrophysical data analysis. He has over 20 years of experience in applying Bayesian and maximum entropy methods to the design of machine learning algorithms for data analysis applied to the physical sciences. (This all makes whooshing sounds in my head).

His current research interests include the foundations of physics, quantum information, inference and inquiry, autonomous robotics, and the search for and characterization of extrasolar planets. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed publications and has been invited to give over 80 presentations in 14 countries.

On May Day, Kevin invited Maggie and me to attend a virtual conference of scientists from around the world. Flies on the wall, (or should I say flies on the firewall).

You may have heard about this topic due to the recent declassifications of UFO data by countries around the world and more recently, just last week (April 27th) the U.S. government de-classification regarding the very topic of this particular discussion. (read more here). Here is the essence of the invitation we received from Kevin...

UNIDENTIFIED AERIAL PHENOMENA (UAP) UPDATE

At the end of 2017, it was announced that the United States government had been studying Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), which appear to be structured craft, in secret for over a decade through the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification (AATIP) Program. Shortly thereafter, three official US Navy videos were declassified and released. The US Navy both confirmed their authenticity as well as the physical reality of UAPs. It has also been disclosed that, at times, the US Navy has had to deal with near daily encounters, which have interfered with military operations.

Since that time, I have been working with Senior Chief Kevin Day (US Navy (ret.)), who had tracked approximately 100 UAPs over the course of two weeks in 2004 from the USS Princeton (a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser) in the Nimitz carrier group. Senior Chief Day’s radar tracking resulted both in valuable information about the flight characteristics of these UAP as well as one of the released videos. In this talk, I will be very pleased to introduce Senior Chief Day who will recount his experience tracking UAPs while on the USS Princeton as part of the Nimitz carrier group in 2004. I will summarize our results in characterizing the flight characteristics of UAPs based both on Senior Chief Day’s radar detections and the infrared video obtained from an F-18 fighter jet engaged with an UAP.

More recently, I have worked with Senior Chief Day to found UAP Expeditions (UAPx) Inc., (http://uapexpedition.org/), which aims to collect electro-optical data of UAPs in an effort to study them. I will describe these efforts and the alternatives that we are exploring.

Finally, since the extraterrestrial hypothesis is slowly becoming the most plausible with the acquisition of more data, I will present the results of Monte Carlo simulations of extraterrestrial civilizations to determine precisely the characteristics we expect of extraterrestrial visitors or, more probably, extraterrestrial inhabitants here in our Solar System.

May the Force Be With Us