That UFO Podcast
Kevin Knuth: UFO File Drops, Reverse Engineering & The Hybridisation Question
28 May 2026
Chapter 1: What recent UFO file drops has the US government released?
The hybridization program was what was mentioned, creating human-alien hybrids. This is going to be a hot mess. You're not going to have an alien from another planet with a totally different biology be able to hybridize with a human. That can't happen. So if there is a hybridization program, then there are implications to that.
If you can reproduce one of those craft, then you can have UFOs that can probably are capable of interest, sell or travel. It's hard to believe that our military has done this. I don't believe that we have these craft fully reverse engineered. I think that would be silly. to believe.
People I've talked to who have claimed to know about these reverse engineering programs say that there's not been much figured out and that that's what I would expect to be the case. You aren't going to figure out a lot with a handful of scientists who are having to work in secret and not communicate with anyone else. You're not going to get very far.
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to That UFO Podcast. As always, my name is Andy, and returning guest today and a very well-timed guest, I would like to thank, I have Kevin Knuth. He is a physicist and professor at the University of Albany with a background that includes working at NASA's AAMS Research Center.
He's one of the few scientists publicly approaching the UFO topic through data, physics, sensor analysis and serious scientific method. Kevin's been on the show before, and I'm delighted to welcome him back to dig into where the subject stands right now, especially in the light of recent government releases. So welcome back, Kevin, to the podcast. Well, thank you so much for having me.
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Chapter 2: How does missing metadata affect the analysis of UFO videos?
interesting times we live in right now and if folks want to hear all about your background we've done that on a previous podcast and begun to barely tap you know what you know about this subject your thoughts your opinions and I strongly recommend Kevin people check that out we're going to talk about the here and now and get your expertise on that and since we last spoke
In the last couple of weeks, there have been two big drops of files from the US government. And as someone involved in this topic through multiple different disciplines, where is the UFO UEP topic for you right now?
Well, this is certainly interesting and unprecedented. it's exciting because we don't know what's going to be disclosed. We don't, we're, we're still not, I mean, no one really knows what the different, um, you know, I'll, I'll use the word the government, but the government isn't a single entity, right? There's different, um, there's different groups within the government.
So we don't know what, um, each agency knows and we don't know what's going to be released. And, um, So it's quite exciting and interesting, but it's also concerning because we know that they've been keeping this secret for more than 80 years, and there's been outright lying going on for 80 years and deception.
and misinformation and disinformation, so it's very hard to know whether what's being released is going to be real information or not, how much of it is true, and that's going to be difficult to decide.
How much of release one and release two have you managed to look at from the last couple of weeks?
I've looked at a number of videos from release one, and I haven't had a chance to look at much from release two yet. Release one was not incredibly useful. They're clearly not presenting the metadata. And in fact, on some of these videos, you can see it redacted out. So I mean, this metadata basically is the instrument data telling you what the settings are on the instrument.
what the field of view is of the camera, what type of infrared imagery they're using if it's infrared. So is white hot and black cold or is it the other way around? They can switch that.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of a potential hybridization program?
What is the magnification scale of the camera? All of these things have been redacted out. So scientifically, it's not useful at all. Images by themselves typically aren't useful. So images with all the metadata taken out really aren't useful. So as a scientist, I don't find it useful.
It's more just interest to see what these things are showing and what similarities they might have to other things I know about. But that's about as far as it goes.
Just to stick with that, and I'm going to show you some of those videos from release two in a short while and get your kind of immediate reactions and thoughts on it. Having had no real time or, you know, any instrumentation to look at them, you're going to just give us a very quick, you know, Kevin's thoughts off the top of his head.
When you talk about metadata though, that's really interesting because your average Joe, your average member of the public like me,
sees this stuff and I'm generally judging it purely on the eye test of what's put in front of me and is there any context given off the back of it but like you say as a scientist the context you're looking for is the metadata so just to take us there again why is it impossible for you to judge these videos properly without metadata what are the basic things missing that would help you look at these videos properly?
Right, well, I mean, even with metadata, images from one camera aren't always useful. The camera's measuring... angular changes of things. You don't know the distances to the objects.
Without knowing the distance to the object or the speed or the size of the object, you need some kind of length scale to be able to tell how much of an angle corresponds to how much distance and where the object is. So without knowing how far away the object is or how big the object is, you can't determine its speed. which means you can't determine its acceleration.
So when the thing zips off and looks like it accelerates very fast, is that an illusion from being zoomed in so much, or is it actually accelerating at a very high rate of speed?
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Chapter 4: What challenges exist in reverse engineering UFO technology?
That's not clear without a second camera doing triangulation. Now, metadata will only get you so far. That tells you what some of the camera settings are. So it would tell you what the magnification of the camera is. And so that's sometimes helpful to determine what's going on. But usually you would need to really analyze a video of a UIP.
You're gonna need images from multiple cameras taken simultaneously. That would be ideal.
I just spoke to your colleague, Matthew Shigadis, and that was his one wish that he would have a video with multiple angles of the same video. And it's so simple, but it makes so much sense, doesn't it? That so often we get these videos, no matter how poor or incredible in terms of quality, it tends to be that one angle and it really does mess off a lot.
Right. That's what it comes down to.
So do you think there's a danger then with government agencies that right now it appears they're trying to be transparent? Here's a website, war.gov slash UFOs. Here's a directive, a statement from the president, Pete Hegseth, you know, the secretary of war, defense, whatever, is putting stuff out there. Here's files, videos, audio snippets. It looks like transparency on one hand, doesn't it?
But they're still withholding a lot of the information that makes this genuinely interesting.
Yeah, that's part of the difficulty.
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Chapter 5: How does the scientific community view the recent UFO disclosures?
Congress clearly wants transparency, and they've requested specific videos that some of the representatives have seen, those who have classification have seen some of these classified videos. And Representative Luna put out a list of I think 46 videos that, that, that they wanted released.
Um, they had a deadline of April 15th, I believe that just whizzed on by, um, made a whooshing sound like one of Douglas Adams, um, deadlines, you know, Douglas Adams has this great quote. I love, I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by. And that's, that's exactly what happened. So, um, yeah, that came and went. And, um,
In those videos, the representatives found them compelling and those would be interesting to see. But it appears that so while Congress really is pushing, seems to really be pushing for some kind of transparency and the president is supporting them and that's wonderful, the agencies are still clearly dragging their feet. They don't want to release this stuff. And one has to ask this question.
I mean, it's very easy. Let me hold on to that thought and first talk about this. So what are they releasing? They seem to be releasing the most uninteresting videos they have. It's going to be interesting to see how much garbage they got that they can dump on us before they can release something meaningful. And so far, these are clearly the most uninteresting videos.
The first three that came out several years ago, the three Navy videos were interesting, but again, these were videos that were not displaying the amazing characteristics of the objects.
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Chapter 6: What are the potential impacts of government transparency on UFO research?
The Nimitz recording the last 35 frames of that show the object accelerating off and the, and the computer system losing track that we were able to use to get, um, some information about that acceleration. But just the descriptions that the pilots had of these behaviors, these objects were, were quite different. And so, um, and we haven't seen videos of anything like that yet.
So, so they're not really to seeing the important or interesting videos yet. And, um, Right, and I had a thought that I was going to hold on to, and now I've totally lost it.
You're holding on to that thought incredibly tightly. Well, I'll tell you what, let's have a dive into some of those videos quickly from release two. I've picked out six of them here, and bear in mind, like Kevin's just said, you're looking at these generally the first time you've not had a chance. You're saying there's no metadata and surprise, surprise, there is no metadata here.
You're going to see the screens are largely blacked out and redacted across. But I just want your quick thoughts of what am I looking at? And for those on audio, I'll tell you what video is appearing on the screen. So the first one is described as an anamorphous object. And Kevin, I'll tell you what is being claimed as potentially as once you've had a look at it.
I'm just showing Kevin the quick clip of the kind of figure and what's your immediate take?
My first question would be what is going on with the background?
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Chapter 7: What theories exist about the origins of non-human intelligence?
Is this over water? Because it's not clear what the background is or is this into the sky? If it's into the sky, it looks incredibly zoomed in and noisy. So it's not quite clear what's going on. Amorphous object. Yeah, it is kind of amorphous, but one could imagine that those could be several balloons, four or five balloons with a string hanging down. That's very possible.
Especially if the object's really far away and they're really zoomed in, it's going to be very blurry like this. So it's not clear.
well a lot of folks are very excited about this one as a shape-shifting object people are claiming all sorts of stuff there is a few there are a few accounts online including an ex-community note saying that this is a stormtrooper balloon a star wars stormtrooper balloon from 2015 and folks have even done broken down analysis of the stormtrooper balloon how it moves and why various times in this it's the exact shape and
of the stormtrooper and the balloon and i can see it to be honest whether it's that or not but it's just interesting that it's i believe it's in the sky not not over the water and so like you say you're you're gonna go to for this would potentially at a glance be a balloon
Yeah, it could easily be a balloon, yeah. Yeah, that would be the first thing I would try to rule out if I was trying to study this, yeah.
Cool. But again, for anyone going, oh, Kevin and Andy are ruining it, there's no metadata, so it's hard. You're literally still having to speculate as to what this is or isn't because of a complete lack of data surrounding it.
Yeah, yeah. The problem is us looking at this is just also speculation. So you're speculating what this is. I would guess this is probably a balloon.
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Chapter 8: What would a serious UAP data release look like?
To be fair, Kevin. For sure. I took some mild, there's a phrase we have here, mild flack, you know, some mild abuse, all friendly, I'm sure, for suggesting that some of these videos might not be non-human craft.
David Grush himself said in the lead up to the release of these videos, he knew what was coming and they weren't particularly interesting or going to move the needle in terms of what had to be done and what he was doing. So for me, that was very telling. Not that they're all completely uninteresting, but David Grush himself said before this release that He wasn't overly hopeful.
So that was always something that's kept me really tempering my own expectations as someone who puts a lot into Grush. So here's a video of what looks like a sphere moving over mountainous terrain. It looks like Iraq, Afghanistan sort of area, very similar to the Mosul orb. Again, instant kind of thoughts on this one.
Oh, this is a neat video. I like this. Again, I wish there was some kind of metadata so we could get some idea of how big the object is and how far away it is. That would be wonderful. But a second camera, again, would be great. Or some kind of estimate of size if they were able to do that in some way. But without knowing that, it's hard to know what it is.
Skeptics are going to say it's a balloon, and it could very well be a balloon. It's hard to know, right? You know, I would then have to say that if we've got this many videos, if the Navy is busy, or the Navy, the military is busy collecting this many videos of balloons, then we have to ask what our billions of dollars are going towards.
That is one really good argument, though, isn't it, for people who say these can't all be balloons, that surely they are not misidentifying all of this stuff. But that's not to say that there couldn't be And amongst them, we're going to get to this, and you've kind of alluded to it, Kevin, there's a lot of noise and clutter in amongst these releases and these data dumps and document dumps.
A lot of release one was very document heavy, and a lot of those documents contained correspondence and newspaper clippings.
which isn't anything classified literally newspaper clippings of reports or ufo club correspondence and things like that so yeah another video this one was labeled as shape-shifting so i'll put it back to the start of this one for you so objects screaming across the water here has an initial shape that does look indeed to change But I'm curious to see what Kevin thinks of that.
Almost TIE Fighter are kind of star-shaped, like, initially.
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