Safe Aerospace Podcast

What can 112 released UAP videos actually tell us?

NASA Goddard planetary scientist Ravi Kopparapu joins me to explain what he and Jacob Haqq-Misra could measure in the PURSUE videos, where the evidence runs out, and what better data would make possible.

We examine three clips and discuss why an object's apparent movement across a screen isn't enough to establish its speed. A ship in one frame provides a useful reference, but missing information still limits what can be concluded.

Ravi and I also revisit our work helping establish AIAA's UAP committee and explore his research on habitable planets and technosignatures, possible signs of technology beyond Earth. What would count as persuasive evidence, and how do we keep the desire for an answer from getting ahead of the science?

Read the study: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12445

Subscribe for more conversations with witnesses, researchers, and aviation professionals.

Support Americans for Safe Aerospace's reporting and research: https://www.safeaerospace.org

What is Safe Aerospace Podcast?

What are pilots really seeing in our skies, and why aren't we talking about it?

The Safe Aerospace Podcast brings together military aviators, commercial pilots, air traffic controllers, aerospace professionals, and policymakers to tackle one of aviation's most pressing and least discussed challenges: UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) in controlled airspace.

Hosted by Former F/A-18 pilot, Ryan Graves from Americans for Safe Aerospace, the podcast goes beyond the headlines to explore what UAP encounters mean for flight safety, national security, and the future of airspace transparency. Each episode features firsthand accounts from credentialed professionals, analysis of emerging policy developments, and conversations with the researchers and lawmakers working to bring scientific rigor and institutional accountability to a long-stigmatized issue. The Safe Aerospace Podcast is produced by SafeAero Media.

Suddenly you

see when the grid is rotating.

A fast moving object crossing across.

There you go.

What did you do. On this video?

So now we are looking at video of 113

in the pursuit data release.

We try to obtain the range

and the speed

basically to know what kind of an object

could potentially do that.

We actually use some sort of a

AI analysis.

And also

we did our own equations

to make sure that we did.

Whatever we did is consistent

with what we are seeing.

However,

as you can see from the on the screen,

much of the information is redacted.

One of the work that I'm

I'm doing is techno signatures work,

which is to look for

technology outside Earth.

What do you think's going on here?

What do you believe is happening here?

Do you think we're all spinning our tails

on bird videos?

That's what is motivating me.

I really want to know if there is

someone out there.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome back

to another episode of Americans for

or excuse me, the Safe Aerospace podcast.

My name is Ryan Graves.

Honored to have Ravi here

sitting across the table from me.

I think we've known each other

for about five years now or so, and,

we'll let him introduce himself

here in a moment.

But first off,

I just want to thank all of you.

It's been absolutely wild

to see the response to this show.

There's been a ton of views.

We have a lot of great subscribers,

and I've been reading

as many of the comments I can,

but there's been tens

of thousands of them,

and it's been hard to keep up, but,

keep them coming.

We are constantly trying to improve.

You guys have been providing

some great feedback for us.

So continue to do that.

If you haven't yet,

please, please subscribe to the channel.

It really does help us out.

It really helps the algorithm.

And all of that allows us to go

make more of these interviews.

We have hundreds

and hundreds of these that we can have

if we have your support in making them.

And we're excited to bring these to.

I'm hoping four times a month,

assuming the schedules align.

But there's

a lot of incredible information

out there

that we're super excited to share

you with.

Share with you.

In this conversation,

I'll be introducing you to

Robbie here briefly.

As I said,

we've worked together for a while.

Ravi is a member of the UAP

Scientific Council

and a scientist and his own.

Right.

But he's going to give us

a little background today

on what has been released

through the pursuit program.

Why it may

or may not be as useful as we might hope.

And what other information

might be surrounding that data

that would be more useful

that hopefully we can get our hands on.

So with that, Ravi.

Nice to have you here. Oh. Thanks, Ryan.

Thanks for having me.

It's really great to see you.

Yeah. So let's. Let's go.

You know, way back, I guess.

I think it was 20, 20.

If memory serves,

when we started working together to form

what became the UAP Integration

and Outreach Committee

within the American Institute

of Aeronautics and Astronautics

or the UAP, IOC.

You were my

co-chair for a period of time with that.

Maybe we can start there

just describing how we came together,

how we intersected.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

I think it's 2021, August 6th.

I have kind of I remember that because,

at that time

we've published a few articles, wrote

few articles

supporting the

scientific analysis of UAP.

And thanks to you and your

work on

New York Times,

I think three years before that,

before pre-pandemic,

there was this article about,

you know, fighter pilots

encountering these ups.

And at that time,

we were not too much interested in that.

But then when I read that

and I thought, okay,

these fighter

pilots are actually the scientists

or the astronomers of the field.

So if they are saying

that they have seen something,

there must be something to it.

And then so we started,

you know,

reading a little bit of background

and digging a little bit and seeing.

And then we thought that

there were a lot of,

misinformation and

dismissals at the same time.

And we wanted to write

a few articles about,

hey, you know, it's

okay to actually do some sort of,

some sort of a scientific analysis

on the, on this topic.

If you want to dismiss it

or if you want to believe it,

you actually need

to do something about it.

And that was

when we wrote those articles.

One of them was in Washington

Post in 2021.

And because of that article,

at Stanton from air

asked us to ask me to come over

and then give a talk at one of the AI,

meetings.

And that's when I met you.

And you are also

the speaker,

I think, one of the plenary speakers

for that. Right? Yeah.

And then that was when we met. Yeah.

And that's that's how we kicked that,

that process off.

I've been

I've been chairing that committee,

since it was formalized.

And I've just recently stepped down

along with my co-chair.

I see a look of disappointment

on your face,

but ultimately the time has come.

It was supposed to be generally

a two year appointment.

It was about five years or so.

But I'm proud to report

that the new leadership.

Is off and running

with a lot of steam right now.

And ultimately,

you know, as a leader,

when you create an organization,

I think, you know,

one of the biggest measures of success

you can have

is having that organization

in a place

where you can turn it over to

someone else,

and it continues to expand

and grow with the initial vision.

And I think that's exactly

what's going on.

So my mind me stepping down was,

you know,

the last act of success that we can have

with that group.

And I'm excited to see where

it goes here in the future.

What any

just, you know, maybe just briefly.

Anything else

you want to talk about

from the air side

before we kind of move on

to your background?

I think I found,

extremely skilled and extremely kind

people at AI

and very interested people

in this particular topic, at least.

I'm really glad that

AI as a as an organization

is interested in this topic,

because we need some scientific,

input from experts.

We come from basic sciences, whereas AI

as technical expertise on this

and also scientific expertise together.

And so having that kind of a blend

is really important.

I'm really glad AI is doing this. Yeah.

You know,

I give I give their leadership

a lot of credit

for having the foresight

to engage on this topic

as early as they did.

You know,

I worked pretty closely

with their leadership and,

you know, really their motivation

was, hey, you know, we're

we've been kind of

just doing our thing for,

you know, a number of years,

a number of decades now.

And ultimately,

just like any other organization,

if you don't keep up with the times,

then you're going to fall behind.

You're going to decay

and weather

and not be what you used to be.

They they thought the UAP conversation

and engaging.

It was a way for them to maintain,

you know, currency.

If you will

remain current

in the eyes of the public

on, you know,

interesting, unique challenges

that face the aerospace industry.

And I don't think that's changed.

I mean, that was,

you know, you said 2021,

that I think is as true now

as it was then.

You know,

the conversation hasn't gone away.

The number of problems and challenges

that face

our understanding of this

and the ways that we can help

not just the public understand,

but I think in a lot of ways

help the government understand

what's going on.

Those challenges

are just as numerous today

as they have been in the past.

So we've even seen

new leadership at the air come and go.

And I think there's thesis remains

continues remain correct.

So a lot of props to them

for that foresight.

You don't typically see

large organizations

that are as conservative,

I guess, as an engineering group

make those types of leaps

that early in a conversation.

Yes, I totally agree with everything

useless said.

Your five years

tenure was one of the best

I've had, and I'm

sure next five years or next many years,

I'm really looking forward

to be involved in the A activities

you will be activities.

Well, you know,

for those listening out here,

I get a lot of emails and questions

about how

different folks

with different backgrounds

can get involved.

If you're an engineer,

if you're a scientist

and you're

looking for ways to

improve your understanding

on this,

working on actually writing

papers, building detection kits,

check out

the air UAP, IOC,

the website last check was UAP ioc.org.

And you can send an email

and you can join the monthly meetings

and get involved

with those efforts directly.

I'll still be attending those meetings

and joining the group

just as a member

instead of one of the leadership.

Well, let's let's talk

a little bit about, you know,

what's your professional background?

What's your scientific background?

Why why are we listening to you?

You know, talk about this

from a scientific perspective.

Okay, great.

So, I have so I'm a scientist,

planetary scientist

at NASA Goddard currently.

Before that,

I was a research scientist at Penn State

State University.

And then I did work on various topics,

and I did my PhD from LSU Go Tigers.

And on

Legault Gravitational-Wave

Observatory, it's

the Laser

Interferometer

Gravitational-Wave Observatory,

essentially, to find these gravitational

wave ripples of space time.

And I used to

work at the observatory

and at the university.

And then.

Leo itself, they had their own.

Right.

So there's a Department of astronomy

and physics and astronomy at LSU.

And I did my best over there,

and I used to work at the department,

and also I used to visit the observatory.

We used to have

these things called observation runs.

So they need

they needed people to take shifts

every eight hour

shifts to monitor the observatory

to see how it is going on.

And it was a really great experience

for me as a student at the time to

be part of that group.

And then once I was done with it

and I went to a move

to Penn State for my postdoctoral, work,

at that time, I got interested in,

exoplanets,

and I started working with a few folks

at Penn State

in addition to my own work

on gravitational waves.

And eventually

I moved away from there

to exoplanet work.

What yours is.

So in 2010.

Remind me,

when was the first exo planet discovery?

Oh, okay.

So if you want to know

when was the first exoplanet

discovered around a sun like star?

That was back in 1995.

Okay,

but if you

the first exoplanet

confirmed exoplanet

discovered around any kind of star,

and that was around

a pulsar or a dead star was back in 1992

from Penn State astronomer.

So. Well, okay.

Actually,

that's actually earlier than I thought.

But there was like

this big up

tick right

when we started detecting them,

like pretty pretty often. Yes.

Was that around the time

that you were transitioning this field

you were seeing this

was maybe a more active field

at this time. Right.

So that that's a really good question.

And it all

it's a very coincidental thing.

Around 2008,

2010 was when I started

getting interested in exoplanets

because they were

there's a very drip,

drip,

observational discoveries

of these exoplanets.

But then in 2009, NASA launched

Capital Space

Telescope,

which was

trying to find a bunch of exoplanets.

And one of the main goals of Kepler's

telescope was to find planets

in the habitable zone

around other stars, the place

where liquid water could sustain and,

you know, have life.

Life like ours anyway. Life?

Yeah, carbon based life.

Carbon based life essential.

So they it was launched in 2009,

and that was

when the floodgates were open

for exoplanet discoveries.

And Kepler did an amazing job.

And four years later,

one of its reaction wheels went bad.

And then they somehow NASA engineers,

I give kudos to them.

They figured out how to even

make it work even after the

this problem.

And then we had an extended mission.

And so they were at that time

and thousands of planets were discovered.

And I was like,

oh, this is the exact time

I should get involved.

And that's when I got involved in

exoplanet work.

Let me pull us off

track for a minute here.

So just a fun thought.

Yeah.

You know, I've often,

Sorry,

I've often been a little disappointed

in the primary search

activities of SETI utilizing, you know,

looking for radio waves around stars,

because that was a primary communication

methodology for, you know,

let's call it 40 years, 50 or 60 years,

you know, as human beings.

Radio waves, of course,

drop off at one over R squared,

or is it cuz, you know, it's squared.

Yeah, yeah.

Square non-linearly

relatively limited range.

I can't help but wondering now

that we're almost in a new world here

with artificial intelligence.

You know, in 150 years,

you know,

there's going to be vastly

more intelligence.

I think that would be artificial

than perhaps human. Right.

And so perhaps, like the mistake

of only looking for radio waves,

it might be a mistake

to only look for biological life

like ours in a very narrow

window around a star.

Or perhaps the universe is made up of

much more intelligent life

that's artificial or electrical

in nature, etc., etc..

Where would the search zones be for that?

Right?

So I just can't but wonder if,

you know, we're making the same mistake

again, always anthropomorphizing

what aliens are going

to look like or what,

where we're going to find things,

when every time we have

a new scientific discovery

that breaks

those old molds,

we still continue

to look for what we expected in the past.

Okay.

So I am so glad you asked this question

because and I'm

so glad we went a little bit of track,

but this is one of

the most important things.

And I have I'll address several

aspects of the question that you asked.

One of the first ones is,

you know, city has done

is been there for decades, and we haven't

yet found any confirmed signal.

It's a timescale issue also. Right.

So we have when were the first radio

observations are radio

communications have taken place

maybe 70 years, 80 years? Okay.

That was when back in the 40s, 30s,

maybe 50s. Right.

It's a movie contact is correct.

It was

it wasn't

the airing of one of the Nazi Germany

or the games. 1997.

Yeah, yeah.

So so even if you take that one

and probably maybe 100 years almost now.

Right. So we are about 90 years or so.

Okay.

So the Industrial Revolution

started 200 years ago approximately.

And so we actually started doing things,

inventing technology

that we could potentially,

you know,

use it to build radio communications.

200 years ago,

the whole human civilization,

if you consider

civilization as the

first agricultural revolution

that started probably around

9000 years ago or 8000 years ago,

before that, we are

we were no different than animals,

any other animal on the planet.

And considering that we have done,

even if you take the 10,000 years

of human

civilization

and 10,000 years versus 50 years, that's

that's like me saying, okay,

I want to take a bus in Austin.

And if I stay there

and I waited for two seconds.

Ryan, I haven't seen a bus in this town.

Also,

there are no busses in the Austin,

so this is the time scale problem.

So that's one aspect of it

we should probably look

and look for in different ways

of doing it.

And people you

what you mentioned

about anthropomorphic forces

in the entire thing

about what could a technology look like

if you ask someone, find it.

Years ago in the medieval ages,

what would be an advanced technology?

So your biggest chariot they can

think about

perhaps?

Yes.

And that one to so few

a hundred years ago,

people were building,

they were

thinking that the biggest structures on

the planet were pyramids.

And so they were saying, oh,

we should look for pyramids

on other planets.

And Panama Canal

was one of the biggest things

at that time.

Or we should look for canals.

And this is what happened

when people were looking at Mars.

They saw this

things on the planet and they thought,

oh yeah, they should be.

They probably are,

you know, alien

beings, their war of the worlds,

things like that.

And that's why we should look

for these kind of canal features.

So every generation has their own

impression

of what could an alien

technology will look like.

So right now

AI is the most popular thing.

So we think that

a civilization might be get.

And maybe 50 years ago

radio communications

were the popular things.

And that's when we started

looking for radio communications.

It is really hard to predict what could

a civilization

be using based on our current technology?

We are

minds are not used to

that kind of advance.

I'll say there's probably one thing

they actually are using, which is energy.

Yeah, exactly.

We should focus on the energy

because every civilization,

if it's one, wants to expand,

they have to use energy.

What kind of energy?

Well, a more efficient energy.

And they have to follow thermodynamics.

Basically waste heat.

The waste heat will be there.

And so if we can couple these

two things

energy and wasted,

we have to find some sort of an evidence

of what kind of a signature

we should be able to think about

what kind of signatures

they would be emitting.

Well, even,

you know, just just for fun here.

I mean,

when I hear the word waste,

I think of unused or unprocessed, right?

We might

imagine a more advanced civilization

that has the ability to recoup all that

heat and reuse it. Right.

Is that challenge?

Does that challenge

the laws of thermodynamics?

I don't know, right.

So I'm fortunately from the current laws

of thermodynamics, we know there must be

some sort of a waste

coming out from somewhere. Okay.

And that's what we need to look at

with the current laws of physics

we know of.

And of course,

there's a Carter Chef scale which judges

how much energy

a civilization uses

based off of whether it can capture

near 100% of its Earth's

energy output

or its planet's energy

output, its solar system

vis a vis its sun energy type three.

Would it be galactic energy?

I have, of course, can't help

but wonder if there's more clever ways

to generate or capture energy that

might be on a

scale, on

a quantum

scale, perhaps, versus us

just looking at the great big

glowing

object in the sky and assuming

that's what everyone uses as well.

Yes, I'm glad you mentioned

your scale there.

Is this a scale one, two and three?

Currently,

Earth seems to be around

close to one type one.

Yeah,

I think that's our next goal, right?

We're probably like a 0.4

I would imagine.

Or I think that might even be generous.

Yeah.

You know, I think Carl Sagan

I could be wrong.

Someone can correct

me said we are probably somewhere

close to 0.7 or so of on the scale, so.

Yeah, probably.

But I wouldn't put too much into that

scale civilizations because again,

when they use that much energy,

they should be releasing

some sort of waste heat.

And there were searches

done to look for these.

You know,

there's also this Dyson sphere

where you can collect

all the stellar light

in sphere around it. Right.

There's a Star Trek episode also Trekkie.

And so we

there were some

searches to see this waste heat

coming out of this usage of energy,

and we haven't found any galactic scale

or stellar level scale,

wasted energy resources yet.

We found it.

But then there is even

a fundamental issue

with that kind of thinking as well.

Why would we want to?

If you use start,

you start using this

kind of energy expansion.

You would eventually warm your own planet

to a,

you know, to a place

where it would be really

could be really hard.

And there's a couple of papers

that we published

with my colleagues,

and my colleagues

also did the same

similar work on this one.

And so is it a sustainable

usage of energy to warm your planet

just because you want to use?

Hopefully civilizations might be,

you know, thinking about this

and maybe they'll be clever

enough not to go to this expansive usage,

exponential usage of energy.

Maybe they'll figure out

fusion energy

might be a better option,

a portable fusion energy.

I haven't really thought

about the uses of energy,

like directly

being linked

to the warming of the planet.

I assume that there's energy,

that is

released in the space

around a planet, right?

Or is that it's not at all.

It's because there's just not enough mass

to transfer the.

Yeah.

So the energy of what?

Of heat itself. Right.

So if it would be true if we

if you had no atmosphere,

I mean, we could just radiate to space

and then be done with it. Great.

But then fortunately or

unfortunately we have an atmosphere.

And so when you release

that heat, that heat

gets trapped into these greenhouse gases,

carbon dioxide or methane, or.

So the capture of, of, of our atmosphere

exceed any releases that you know

you have. Okay.

That makes sense.

Everything that will

that's keeping us alive

might be the one that might kill

us if we do that. Yeah. Good.

Okay.

Well, thanks. Thanks for that.

Anything else you want to say

on that front for me?

We get back to your educational

pathway here. Oh, yeah. So we.

One of the work that I'm doing,

I'm doing is techno

signatures work,

which is to look for

technology outside Earth.

And we have several ideas about how

what could we potential technology

could look like.

How can we observe them.

It's more

we want to try to

to be an observational science

when, you know,

can we look for theoretical

a theoretical one? Right.

So we're not just imagining

scale civilizations

but actually looking for those

kind of things, pollution kind of things.

Radio communication.

So there's

the search is going on all fronts

and hopefully I don't know when, but

hopefully we'll soon discover

at some point.

Well, let's, let's,

let's define what a techno signature is.

Yeah. Good.

It's a sign of an advanced technology

that, we could potentially detect.

It's a manifestation.

So I would say that

there is a lot of city work going that

search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Intelligence is hard to detect remotely

or even on our planet.

If you don't see if you actually go do

experiments in there. Right.

So I would

I think there are

there is this notion

in our city community

that we should also consider Ceti,

which is search

for extraterrestrial technology.

Technology is easy

to detect that intelligence.

So that's why we focus more on techno

signatures

rather than intelligence right now.

Can you imagine a

intelligent species

that does not create technology?

Yeah, we have many

that intelligent species on our Earth.

Well, I guess that's fair to say,

but is a measure of how intelligence

something is,

how much technology it makes.

So there are some,

intelligent animals on our planet

that make a few tools

out of the things available around them.

Crows, ravens.

They can make tools,

use tools to get what they need.

Chimpanzees, apes.

They can do it. Some of the

dolphins, they make

tools out of water as well.

And so they use their surroundings

to make tools for their own needs.

So yeah. Okay, okay.

Fair enough.

I'm just trying to

imagine a hyper intelligent species

that perhaps is not progressing

along the technological right

improvement path. Like we are. Right?

We seem to be,

as a species,

inexcusably linked

to technological developments,

for better or worse,

perhaps towards our own suicide of fact.

Right?

I guess, you know,

it's more it's hypothetical, I guess.

But if you thought about it.

Yeah, it is.

So I think you're getting the question

of what is different

between an intelligent species

like humans and other intelligent

species on Earth,

because, you know,

we have intelligence

if you on a broad scale,

the difference is that we

are actually changing the planet

when we with our technology.

And so those are the technological

kind of species or intelligent

techno signatures

that we might be looking for.

So when we look for techno signatures

and when we look for advanced intelligent

civilizations, a planet wide impact

that a technology could create

is what we should be observing.

Otherwise, we would be no different

than any other animal that has some

some sort of

an intelligence on the planet.

Okay.

Let me ask you some some quick

questions here in a row. So

Robbie is looking

through his tools and he detects a,

absolutely conclusive proof

that there are radio

waves of a decodable

intelligent communication format around

Alpha

Centauri.

Or the observation

through an optical sensor of.

No kidding, a craft

flying around a planet,

you know, somewhere else away from us.

Techno signature.

I wouldn't announce it as a technique.

So this is where my scientific,

training comes kicks in

because I

publish a paper based on that analysis.

If I'm really sure that I have seen

something really cool,

then I'll write a scientific paper

and then I'll publish it,

and I'll be very, very careful

saying that what I found,

what my data shows,

and I wouldn't speculate on what.

I agree with you.

Well, tragically speaking, right.

It is like a definitional,

example

that would be an example of potentially

a techno signature, right? Yes.

What about if we observe a craft

or handful of craft coming

towards our solar system, that we're

half of that year away from us?

And as you pointed at our star,

would that be considered

a techno signature. If,

we get confirmation from multiple

lines of evidence and multiple teams,

I would say

that's would be an interesting

and consistent with what you said.

What if.

We looked at Pluto

one day

and saw that

there was a completely bizarre,

unknown foreign

satellites or group of satellites

operating around Pluto?

Would that be a techno signature?

Yes.

If those objects are

not following the natural laws of,

I would say I.

Mean technological satellite,

not just a body orbiting.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

So if somehow we figured out

that if it is technological

and then we again

have a good confirmation on it,

I would be excited.

What if we discovered

that there were some

incredibly ancient ruins on the moon?

Would that be a techno signature?

Yeah, I mean, I would

if we

get a good confirmation

as solid evidence,

I would say, yeah,

if we can date them to,

you know, before our civilization,

then yeah, I would say.

That would be coming all the way in.

Right.

We see a bunch of strange objects

flying around fighter jets

off the eastern seaboard

be considered a techno signature.

We, we have to know

that it is

a techno signature

for using different lines of evidence.

I would I'm trying to be really careful

here.

Yeah.

If it is something

anomalous, I would say

it would be a good techno

signature that we know of.

So I you're making my point to your face.

As I get closer and closer to Earth,

it seems like the conversation

of techno signatures

get more uncomfortable

the closer and closer to earth

that you get, right?

How does NASA view

the study of techno signatures?

So NASA has supported

a lot of work on techno signatures.

It's considered as one of the subsets

of biosignatures.

Techno technology

has to arise from biology.

Even if we say, oh yeah, well,

how about artificial intelligence

creating technology?

But AI has to be created by something,

and someone is a biology

before it creates even more technology.

And so biological evolution

probably is needed and so considers

techno signatures

to be a part of a bio signature

work as well. There's not a fun research.

What's what's the history of NASA

funding techno

techno signature research

within our solar system?

So we have we have a broad portfolio,

as I can't speak for anything

officially from NASA side,

but I would say that

I've we got some projects funded on

looking for techno signatures,

work related to techno signatures

and within.

Related work, some some work related.

Okay.

On theoretical, you know,

expectations of what a techno

signature might look like.

There's also some observational aspects.

They are funded to look for data

in the telescope,

like Kepler space telescope

for within the.

Looking outside the solar system.

Within the solar system.

I mean, we can use,

we can use archival data from

the missions

and look for any kind of anomalies

that we might be looking.

But there is actually,

I don't say particularly for NASA,

but there is

there are several people

in the community,

techno signature community,

looking for any kind of anomalous,

features on moon using the LRO,

the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data

using machine learning techniques.

And same thing can be done

with Martian archival data as well. Yeah.

And so

those kind of things are happening

outside the planet. Yeah.

And then

of course, within our atmosphere,

NASA has been pretty stodgy

in their involvement

in the UAP conversation.

Different term

representing and talking

about the same thing.

Of course, there's

no scientific consensus

that that is the case.

What's your experience been

with the UAP topic

as you worked around NASA?

So I have had a good support from my,

management and everyone.

And so they completely separate,

as is evidence

with the part of the things

that I've been doing

with the UAP work

and publishing papers related to that.

So the management has been at least my

supervisors and the line management

has been really supportive of that.

Do you think NASA in general

is supportive of this conversation,

or do you think it's

generally they're willing to let you

go out on a bit of a lease

to explore something?

Or do you think there is broad

acceptance or not?

Acceptance is the right word,

but openness to this topic.

So as a science topic,

I would say there is a good encouragement

on this particular one.

And also NASA has commissioned a up,

task force

few years ago

collecting different

kind of people around it.

So they have done some work on that.

And as,

as, as the techno signature

work is considered,

this is we

one of the hypothesis

that we want to explore

for the Up

is this techno signature topic.

So in that way,

I would say that

there is some kind of a support for us.

Okay.

The hook.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's let's move on a little bit.

You're now

on the UAP Scientific Advisory Council.

Yeah.

How are you finding that?

It's there are really good

people in there,

and it's exciting

to be part of the People Science Council,

where similar thinking

people are there

with different expertise.

And I'm really glad we have a

good leadership.

In terms of IV lobe, we should be able to

hopefully we'll get some sort of data

that we could analyze.

Yeah.

So that's you know, that's

part of the rationale that I had

for recently joining this committee.

As of a couple of weeks ago.

Oh, I was really, by the way,

I was really excited you were there.

I was super excited that you

you joined the council and.

Thank you.

I, you know, I,

I think I'm the only member

lacking a PhD.

In traditional fields,

I say my experience in the cockpit

might qualify me for something similar.

But, at the end of the day,

you guys are being tasked

with analyzing primarily

what seems to be military imagery.

Camera data, etcetera, etcetera.

And there's a lot

that, you know, can be determined

or ruled out or understood

without having to go

through a laborers process of reverse,

you know,

doing the reverse physics

to try to understand it

from first principles. Right.

How these systems work, how they guide,

how they fuze, how they queued,

how are these systems targeted,

what systems are used?

And I hope to be able

to provide some perspective to the wider

data network

that supports

any one of these tiny slivers of videos

that have been coming out.

And we'll talk about that

more in a minute.

And on the other hand,

at Americans Are Safe

Aerospace, we've been continuing

to receive a lot of reports.

And actually, I'm

going to take a moment here

to talk to all of

you guys out there listening.

I am seeing some incredible

reports in the comment sections.

Thank you for putting that in.

I highly encourage you

to go to Safe aerospace.org

and submit the reports there directly.

Sometimes there's a piece of information

that will follow up

and ask for that

you hadn't thought to include.

That's very important

for helping us understand these cases.

We've been seeing a massive

uptick in report

since we've started this podcast.

We've got 48 reports

just in the past 12 days or so.

So please keep that up. Go to

submit those reports.

Submit them on the comments too

if you want.

But we're going to

probably follow up with you

and try to

get you to push it over to our website

so that we can get that in the database

in front of our analyst eyes,

so that we can fully understand

the details and nuances of the case.

But with that, that quick caveat.

You know, there are

there's still, you know,

veterans and military folks

that come to us say, hey,

I've been capturing a lot of this stuff.

Some of it,

if what they're reporting is accurate

or very highly detailed.

And the exact, you know,

file names

and locations of these are available

for follow up.

And so my hope is that

once the ODI or whomever is,

guiding the conversation

within the Scientific Council

allows the proper clearances

and access

to this information,

then you guys will have some more

interesting data to look at.

And I say more data,

more interesting data

because as a as was concluded,

maybe concludes a strong word,

but as you've identified

in a recent paper

that you've created with your colleague,

you've shown that a lot of these, files

that are being released

to the pursuit program

just simply don't have enough

detail and context.

There are two unbounded to truly draw

any type of,

distinctions from. Is that fair to say?

Would you like to comment on that?

Yeah. So dairy.

There are a few videos

that we analyzed

the from the past year data release.

Some of them,

the at least the few videos

that we looked at

seem to be consistent with

some of the known objects

that we have around here, like birds and,

you know,

and but some of them

we couldn't figure out

based on the available data

because most in fact,

most of the data was redacted

from these videos.

So we could only put ranges of

what could it be,

ranges on the speed ranges

on how far they could be.

And that kind of confuses

what kind of an object

we can make it out.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to take a look

at a couple of those videos

here in a moment.

But first I want to just kind of

provide a little landscape of

how this whole thing works

when people get something on a sensor.

And it's not for every circumstance.

And some of the videos

we're going to see here

might have been more coincidental

than, you know, a fully,

prosecuted target.

But when you're trying to

employ on a target,

right, it's not simply

it pops up on your screen

and you pull the trigger.

There's a process.

This is

somewhat of an engineering process.

And each one of the steps

has massive amounts

of tools and considerations

and resources spent on it.

And the general process

is that you're going

to find something right.

And you might get a blip of something.

A submarine might hear a ping, right.

And you don't know the range of that ping

necessarily off of one of it.

You don't know how it's

moving necessarily.

An aircraft might receive jamming

from a general location,

but you can't tell how far away

that jamming is on that bearing.

Right?

So you find something in the next

step is to fix it.

Like where is that

in three dimensional space. Right.

And then once you're able to do that,

you're going to

then track

that object,

you're going to fix it over time, right,

so that you can monitor it.

What you're done.

Fixing it over time, tracking it.

You're going to target it.

And target doesn't mean

that you pull the trigger.

Target doesn't mean you just miraculously

claim that it's an enemy.

It's a process

that you go through in order

to make an assessment

as the trigger puller,

whether that is truly

something that fits your,

rules of engagement.

Right? Is this,

does this thing have the flight

characteristics of a 737

and did it take off

from a civilian airport?

Right.

And it's flying at civilian air

speeds and altitudes

and on an expected track.

Probably not

something you want to target.

Is this a fighter sized

object maneuvering at 1.8

mark with his nose at me,

taking off from a known hostile base?

Right.

And there's many other tools

that we use and considerations.

And it gets in the classified territory

pretty quick,

so I don't want to get into it too much.

But generally speaking,

there is a process to say, okay,

this is

something that we've

identified as a hostile

and we were going to target it.

And then the next step of that,

that process is to actually engage

that target, right.

That's positioning yourself,

your weapons systems, your,

your wingman and other people

to actually pull that trigger

and support

that engagement until it's concluded.

That's the engaged portion.

Then at the very end.

How do you know what you did

was successful, right?

I have a fighter size object on my radar.

Maybe it's close enough

to look through through

my infrared system.

It's probably not.

I'm going to pull the trigger.

I'm going to engage it.

I'm going to guide that missile in,

and then I'm going to check.

Is that radar contact gone?

Right.

Is it

going off of mine

and my my colleagues radar. Right.

And that's one way to assess it.

If we're attacking something

on the ground.

We do a BDA battle damage assessment.

I think they actually changed

term to be a J.

But I forget what that one means.

They're always changing terms.

All right.

So, hey, did we did

we strike that ship with enough force

to get a mission kill or a target kill?

Right.

If we

drop a bomb on the deck of an

aircraft carrier, no one could take off.

That's a mission kill.

If we sink the aircraft carrier. That's.

You know,

that's a full target kill, right?

So you want to make that assessment

and be able to use that information

for planning, follow up

attacks or things of that nature.

And as is often the case with warfare,

distance is comfort. Right.

And so these

the finding and the fixing

and the tracking

and the targeting

all happens from very far away,

and at least in my personal experience,

is happening with,

you know, our very

sophisticated radar systems.

In fact, the engage is happening.

Of course,

you know,

primarily with our radar systems as well.

And so all that information,

which has to do with a location

fixing, tracking, and really

the object

to something

happening at range

with sophisticated sensor systems.

What has been disappointing to me

with the information

released from the pursuit

program is that information

that's being released

is the stuff at the end of the chain,

which is,

the assessment.

Right? Or

if it's an error server

is maybe the engagement. Right.

We use our Fleer pods to laser targets,

and we drop a bomb and guide

a guide a bomb onto the laser. Right.

So these are not things

that are designed to be,

like super sharp, crisp optical systems.

They're designed to guide a bomb

onto a building in F-18.

We rarely use the,

the flier for any type of, like,

high fidelity imaging type work.

It's just not we do.

There's better systems now,

and I'm sure they're better, but,

they're not the primary tools

for this type of work.

Furthermore,

I really just described one asset to you

utilizing their tools

to go through that process.

But there's often, often a half dozen

airborne objects.

Right. Other aircraft.

There's ships.

And I'll just generally say,

without giving ourselves in trouble,

they're all connected.

Right.

And everyone's sharing information.

And when one person has a radar lock,

everyone else is getting

that information as well.

And so for any one release on pursue,

there might be six other radar systems

that have been observing that object

for potentially 30 or 40 minutes.

Right.

But what's coming out is a clip

that's 4 to 5 or six seconds long.

And as we're going

to discuss here in a minute,

so unbounded that

you can't really tell anything

useful from that information.

So my general question is one,

I understand that this type of radar data

should be classified.

It should not be just fully released.

The question is

why don't advisory boards.

And this is rhetorical.

So I feel like you need to answer this.

But why?

Why does the advisory board

only get this tiny amount of information

that is scientifically unusual

and yet factually, I know,

and I think every operator

that's been in

where I have sat knows

that there's much more sophisticated

data out there.

Why not provide the security clearances

to a group

with the scientific credentials

that is within the UAP

Scientific Council,

so that they can see that data

and have an operator like myself.

Whichever you join,

walk them through this,

what's called the F2, t2, e a kill chain

to show them how these targets

are getting found,

how they're getting fixed,

how they're getting tracked,

and how they're getting targeted

as friendly or enemy aircraft,

because those decisions are being made

based upon all those data.

What's being released isn't the data

that is useful for that type of analysis.

And yet

that's what you're stuck doing

an analysis on.

You're right.

So it's not what we get.

It's what's available

for us to and analyze.

These are this is all publicly available.

Pursue data. Right.

And so one of the main motivations I'm

I'm I hope

I am actually conveying this accurately

based on what I work with our

colleagues in the Science

Advisory Council.

One of the things we want to do

with this

publicly available data

is to develop tools,

analytical tools,

even if it is a redacted

data, to see, okay,

what is it

that we can do

with the minimal information

we have right now?

And we will know what we won't know

what we don't know.

And so that will give us an idea about,

okay, what are the

this is our first time doing

this is not our day job actually. Right.

So this is something

that we are entering into new territory.

When you are entering into this kind of

a new territory where you are the expert,

we have to go

very, very slowly

and try to develop

the tools that we want to develop

with the available data.

If there is more data available,

which is what we definitely need,

we would be more than thrilled

to have that kind of a built in access.

But again,

we would be publishing a paper on that.

And so this kind of

analysis would be out.

And if someone else want to reproduce

and they say, hey, you know,

how do you know you need this, right?

Then we can say, okay,

here are our analysis tool.

Here is the data we can give you.

You go and go and analyze this

and then see

if you can reach the same conclusion.

If you agree with us, great.

If you don't we'll figure out

what's happening.

So that's where I think we we have to be.

Well first too, is that

it's actually not that

complex of a problem

at the end of the day to do this in real

time even. Right.

Like I said, every aircraft

talks to each other.

The ships talk to each other.

It would be relatively trivial

for a defense contractor to build a box,

more or less a modem

that plugs into that network,

that monitors

everything that all those aircraft

and ships are seeing real time,

and basically create an algorithm

to scan it for abnormal radar contacts.

I've pitched this

to several government agencies.

If you're listening.

I know that it's

you don't even really

have to have to build it.

You could just level

leverage a ground based station to,

to plug into and monitor

this type of information.

But it's it's

not some magical process

that requires us to retrofit

an aircraft and,

you know, burn gas all day.

It's simply as simple

as basically plugging into the

to the grid

and just monitoring it

for the information that you want.

I think if the Trump White House,

if Stephen Miller is interested

in actually

doing this right, that's probably

your best bet of getting real time data

on this basically anywhere.

At least the Navy operates

and their force

and others use

pretty much the exact same system.

And it's not it's not only aircraft.

So, just something

I want to put out there.

Well, let's let's get into

maybe we can pull up the first video

first, maybe

just a quick rundown on the paper

that you guys

put out while we pull up the first video.

So, yeah.

So there are a few videos

that we've analyzed

from the pursuit

data release

we downloaded

that few of us investigated it.

So now we are looking at video of 113

in the pursuit data release,

where you can see

this targeting grid on top of it.

And then suddenly you'd see

when the grid is rotating,

a fast moving object crossing across.

There you go.

There's one there.

And then the video.

Let's just stop here for a minute.

Sure. Let's go back to the beginning.

I'll explain what we're looking at here.

Yeah. Right there.

Just pause it right there.

So this is a pretty standard

30 degrees.

Well it's about

a it's not the best dive.

I'll say he's

at about 17 degrees nose down.

But generally he's coming in

to straight for target.

Right now

he's got his picture down at 30 degrees.

At the center of that circle down

there is essentially

where the bullets are going to go. Okay.

There's a tape on that

which we can't really see

right now

that essentially unwinds

to show the range. Right.

And there'll be a point where,

all right, once it crosses this,

this part of the ticker,

now you can fire in the bullet.

You're going to have the kinetic energy,

the need to go

where I say they're going to go.

And then there's a point where it says,

hey, you're too low,

you need to pull out.

What this looks like

is he's coming in a target.

He's like I said,

this is pretty shallow at the moment.

I think he was deeper earlier

at some point.

But he's drawing that pepper down,

and then he shoots

and he's going to pull off,

and then he's going to do

about 120 degrees over bank

and pull back down

to his desired altitude

in like a practice environment.

And then he's going to kind of come back

and do another pass and go down

and he's gonna pull up

and he's going to

loop down to the proper altitude

and kind of keep going down.

That's generally

what we're looking at here, although

it's a little tough

to tell the details on the paper.

I'm not 100% sure the platform here.

It's either

but so it doesn't really matter anyways.

But so that's what we're seeing here.

How are they doing this?

They probably dropped a waypoint

on the target.

So a GPS location

that's showing up somewhere in their HUD,

or they have a visual idea

of what they want to shoot.

Right.

This is a this is a HUD footage.

This is an infrared.

This is basically a black

and white recording of the hut itself.

And so the targeting pod is

kind of a non-issue here.

So what I just talked about

about having radar and doing a target,

you know, X miles away

and all this type of stuff doesn't apply

for this one necessarily.

This was kind of like a a happenstance

type circumstance.

I just kind of

want to put that caveat there.

So let's let's play it again

and see what we see here.

There you go.

And then we see

some little object

zipped right in front of the HUD.

Which one would be terrifying as a pilot.

Right.

So

when you do this, presuming everything

you know, I'm giving my best guess here.

I don't know where this is.

I don't know precisely what platform.

Frankly, the ticker tape on the strafing

gun looks a little strange to me,

and I might be slightly off that.

That is a strafe.

And not just a release,

especially because it's below,

the velocity vector.

Because typically,

at least in 18,

the bullets come out

the top of the nose, right?

So your nose is always

deeper than where the bullets are. Right?

If you have a pod enough 35, for example,

then the ticker would be below

the velocity vector,

which is that

little circle in the middle there.

So there's some things

I'm not sure about here, but

wherever this was,

if this was in training,

I'll say then they're operating

what's called a restricted space.

And, you know, when we operate on

that term

gets used a little loosely

sometimes in the up topic,

a restricted space or,

excuse me,

the area off the coast of Virginia Beach

where our

operating where

we're having these instances people off

often like the Ferdows restricted space.

It's really

not it's a military operating area

where civilians can fly through it.

It's just very dangerous

for them to do it,

and they'll

basically get routed around it by ATC

unless they basically ignore ATC request,

because that's really what it is.

But they're putting themselves in danger.

But when we do bombing and strafing

and all that good stuff at a range,

it is actually a restricted space,

like you will get intercepted.

Potentially you'll get arrested

when you land that type of thing. Right?

So nothing should be out there

that you're not expecting.

No. Cessna is bumbling through.

And to see something

pop up when you're in a

what looks like a 30 degree

dive, just starting that over bank,

would be would be pretty terrifying.

I mean, that's pretty much a near miss.

It's hard to say, obviously,

how far these objects are.

And we'll talk about,

you know, your assessment of that.

But for me, my pilot,

I seeing this happen

and the speed

at which they're going

across the hood,

I would say that

these are probably within 1000ft

of the aircraft that that's just my like,

my eyesight, you know, telling me that.

You mean the rate,

the distance of the object,

the this object from the airborne

instrument is zero, zero feet is one.

Yeah.

Those whatever those two objects are,

if there are two.

They are actually

I think it's a video interlacing.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

when I see

something move that fast across my HUD,

it's not 20 miles away moving at Mach,

you know, 50,

it's probably moving at somewhere

between 100

and maybe 200 knots and 1000ft.

And then my relative motion

adding to that. Right.

Which is pretty aggressive

here, as you can see.

I'll watch it in full time here.

There you go. Yeah.

So I would say

like for me as a pilot,

like, wow, I just had in your mouth like,

that's what,

that's what comes to my mind.

So I'll stop talking now.

What did you

what did you do on this video?

Oh, well, so we tried to obtain the range

and the speed,

basically to know what kind of an object

could potentially do that.

And taking into account the, the air,

air, instrument as well.

However, as you can see from

the, on the screen,

much of the information is redacted here.

And so what we try to do

is analyze this frame by frame.

To see we need to know the field of view

in actual units of,

you know, units of kilometers

or meters or whatever it is.

However, we don't have any of

that information.

So we can do the objects range as well,

the ground speed.

Also, we cannot say anything about it.

And so we try to do this

whole screen analysis by using the pixel.

How many pixels are

there across the screen

and how many pixels

per second

object was crossing across the screen.

And so this is the

that's probably the best thing

that we can potentially do,

given the lack of any other actual

relative value

in terms of the actual units

for the distance

and the speed of the object.

The trick here.

So again, maybe it'd be useful.

That's why I have military Aviator

on your console.

Yeah, many jets have a setting in them

that allow you to set me

with of that velocity vector

that's in the middle,

so that when you are looking at a object

at a certain range, if it's the same size

as the width of your velocity vector,

then you know

the object is at a certain distance

for a normal fighter sized object.

Okay. All right.

And so again

I don't know what this platform is.

It's typically set

kind of set it and forget it.

It's not something

you update every flight.

But if you're going to manual

you would be able to

compare that object

to the width of that velocity vector

in the middle of the circle

with the lines

coming off of it, and say, okay,

if this object was at,

say, 5000ft in front of me,

then it would be this size.

So we do have this kind of analysis

as a plot in our paper

to bound the ranges of the speed

and the sizes of the object.

And unfortunately,

because we were able to only do this

on the pixel level

and the frame level analysis,

it's it's

the bounds are quite large

anywhere from a bird flying to anything,

because it could be very close

to the platform

that you're talking about.

And we don't even know

what the platform is in the first place.

It could

I mean, you could say it's a fighter jet,

it could be a drone,

you know, scouting the landscape.

We don't know.

I don't think drones do dive attacks,

but I could be wrong.

Well, so that's

why your expertise is needed in here?

Because we don't.

The information is very

sparse in this case.

And so

we could potentially do what we could

potentially do is bound the ranges

of the range of the object

and the speed of the object in terms

of what it could potentially be,

and it can be anywhere from

like you just mentioned about Mach

then thing going at very far away.

Or it could be a bird flying very close.

And that's the

those are the best bones we can do.

Did you,

did you come to any like hard boundaries.

So those are the boundaries.

Because that's.

That's essentially

what we could say anything about it.

Lack of any other information.

This was because there is no background

image that we can base it upon different

depending on the scale

to make a scale of the object.

If there is some structure

in the background,

we can estimate the structure size

and then potentially

have some sort of a relation between

how could how large

the structure could be.

And then, you know.

If you know how big the object is,

well,

if you know how far away it is,

then you can say how fast it's moving.

Yes.

What what are the potential

sizes of objects that we know of

that could travel that far, that,

you know, that high speed

and those altitudes?

We could also get

how far the platform, the distance

between the platform

and the object, or the ground

speed of the object itself.

If we know the range,

if we know the field of view,

if you know,

you know how fast the object is going,

all of that information.

As a modern fighter,

which I believe it is,

I have every confidence that is.

Well,

I'll say this, I'd say

it's probably like a

at least a 75% chance that

whatever this object was,

was captured on their radar.

They weren't looking at their

radar during this regime of flight.

They wouldn't have seen it,

but it's very likely

that one they might have seen it

before they even started that dive.

Right.

And while they're pulling out, adjusting,

going across their nose, it's

very likely

that this did appear on their radar.

Yeah.

So you might also notice that when it's

crossing the left redacted box,

we don't see it coming out of that.

Step through that.

So if you go to the.

Box timestamp 52

seconds, 54 seconds or so

or we

could potentially probably be missing.

So by the way this is not an eye

analysis that we did.

We actually used some sort of a

AI analysis.

And also we did our own equations

to make sure that we did

whatever we did is consistent

with what we are seeing.

So for example here,

you can see that object

going into this redacted box on the left,

but I don't see it in in this case,

anything else.

Seems to be skipping a bit.

Do you think it could just simply be that

the relative motion was so high

they just skipped off the screen

type thing. That is consistent with what

seems.

At least that

seems to be consistent with

what do you think?

And I don't know what

that object could potentially be.

Because we don't exactly know

the size of that object.

It's for me

when I see this, I think, okay,

I don't have any explanation for what

this is.

Do what I categorize this

as potential techno signature. No. Right.

It's just,

you know, I fear that if the, the

the government wants to be unhelpful

in this endeavor,

there's a ton of ambiguity.

They can just pump into the conversation

by just having

any silly thing that is not immediately

and pumping it out and saying,

well, this is a UAP

now, and just flooding the zone

with a ton of low quality and big U.S.

BS, for lack of a better word, birds and,

you know, debris or,

you know, whatever this is.

So I don't know

where I'm going with that.

Just that's my fear

in this conversation, right?

I mean. I think I mean, you you you do.

I think at one time we have

a, you know, gentleman, David Gray,

who's literally talking about there

being craft and hangars.

At the other end of the spectrum,

the government is giving us,

you know, a single blob going past,

you know, HUD footage.

I would really like to know

what kind of objects these are.

And I would like to know

a really good data to make an actual,

you know,

analysis and probably conclusions

on what these potentially could be.

But this, this,

this video

at least gave us some sort of analysis

tools that we could put up

in case we ever receive

a good amount of data from,

from somewhere.

I mean, we've.

I've interviewed people on this podcast

and there's,

you know, a dozen more

who have claimed that they have,

you know,

minutes long footage of spheres

that will take up this whole screen

in high fidelity

Fleer footage, optical footage,

infrared footage

that pretty much as clear

as you might want it to be.

I know where those files are.

I provided the locations of those files,

so let's release some of those.

Ryan,

that kind of data is my dream to have.

All right.

Anything else

you want to say about this video?

This is the first kind of,

analysis we did.

This is one of the papers,

the first paper

we published on this particular data

to show how we could potentially do

the analysis.

There is also another,

video.

I forgot the the data number here.

There's also

there's a ship in the background

if you can pull that up.

Let's start from the beginning.

Yeah.

This is another video of pier 149 with

a ship in the background,

and you can see a object

crossing across the screen.

So there you go.

You see this object right away

crossing across the screen.

And then

it's bright and had the bright dot.

We could see what?

We don't know what it is.

We don't have any other kind of data.

However, we now have something.

One more thing in this particular video.

This is again a video,

a ship in the background.

And so we know how big ships could

potentially be,

what kind of ships they are.

Because it's pretty clear in this case.

And so we can estimate

the size of the ship.

And based on that we can actually

see how far or how much.

The, the

potential ranges range

for this particular object could be.

And based on the size of the chip

and how fast the object is moving

across that distance

of the length of the ship.

And we did some analysis on that one.

And again, lack of anything else,

we might be a little bit

tighter bounce on this

on the kind of object uses.

But beyond that we don't

we can't say anything else.

You don't necessarily know

the range of the object from the ship,

although. No we don't.

You might be a little

make some, some good guesses.

Presumably this is white hot.

They have a lot of details of the footage

blocked out,

but based off of the steam

coming out of the top of the ship

being white,

I would assume that this is a white

hot type image.

So this object would be hot

compared to its surroundings, right?

Right. It could be.

I mean,

there are several objects

that would be in the sky

that could be potentially hot.

I mean, it could be a bird, for example,

crossing across the sky.

Do you?

I know you've recently done some work on,

finding flickering or repeating patterns

in some of these small objects

and comparing them to potential.

The flapping speeds of of birds, right.

You can see the change in the IRS

as it's flapping around.

I know you guys haven't done

a formal study on this one yet,

or at least that's my understanding.

But do you

see any of those indications,

any kind of repeating pattern in this?

So now that we discuss

and we are seeing this

on the big screen, eye to my eye

right now,

there seems to be some sort of

a flickering here.

But I have to talk with my colleague

Jacob Mishra and see,

you know,

if he can do a similar analysis

that we did for the new

paper that we published. From

the ship, if we can.

That is a

looks like an extended object

on the on this pixel site because it's,

it's crossing across the frames

pretty fast. Yeah.

So

did you bound the velocity

in this one at all?

Again, there is a there's a

we made a bounded plot on the on this

for this particular object.

Again, it's it could be a bird.

It's useful. Yeah.

It's either a bird

or some sort of

a drone or something like.

Do you guys

have any idea what type of ship

or the nationality of that ship?

So we did.

I have to look at the actual name,

the class classification of the ship.

But yes, we do.

We do mention that in the in the paper.

And probably we,

we estimate the length

to be about 150 to 200ft across the land.

So and based on the. Target right there,

I'm.

See, you are seeing it as a target.

I'm seeing it as a data

I we don't it looks like it's in

of course in the water.

And we don't know where

this potential location could be.

But there was another

in the more recent paper.

Not from this.

There is a flickering,

the flickering of the birds.

I think we kind of

identified where the location

is somewhere near Kuwait.

For that, for those objects.

And we even some of the council

members are very avid bird watchers,

I think, as a hobby.

So they will try to find out

what kind of birds they are.

Why would they would be there

at that location,

what is their migration history

and so on. So that was kind of a fun.

And now that we want

we were looking for birds in this

kind of videos.

But they come out to be like that. Okay.

Anything else you want to say

on this video?

This is

I think

if you if you had only this particular,

access to only this particular

part of the video, not the ship,

there is no way

we would have said anything about it

unless we did the flickering.

Yeah.

Analysis

that I have to ask

our colleagues in the council

and see if we can do

a flickering analysis

to see if we can even more,

better identify this as a bird or not.

This, or I guess, is

a unmanned system.

Obviously.

Perhaps not, obviously, but tracking the,

the boat

and then seeing something interesting

and just kind of scanning here

whether this was on the radar or not.

I don't know.

And, you know,

this kind of gets into

why they don't want to release.

I mean, there's so many reasons why

they don't want to release,

radar data, but

one is

you don't want your enemy

to know how small of an object

you can track, right?

Maybe that is a drone from an adversary.

And they're watching our unmanned drone

at 20 or 30 zero zero zero feet.

Call it.

I'm just making this up ten miles away,

and they'll be like, oh,

he detected and tracked our drone

that we know was such and such distance

and has this radar cross-section.

Therefore, you know,

we'll add that to our data

set that

we know they can track us

at this range, employ on us.

So how would they know that this platform

is tracking their drone.

Because we're releasing them

through pursue.

Okay. Yeah.

All right. Yeah.

Or if we, you know, reacted to it, such

as we turn to go chase it,

to keep it in in observation

perhaps, but.

Yeah, but but primarily because

because of what we're seeing right now

in front of us.

All right.

This is a quite interesting,

video as well.

This is PR 135

where you can see some sort of a tower,

and then you see these objects,

floating across the screen.

And then there's a tracking.

We found that

there is brightness flickering.

And then also

we try

to see

what is the freak

beat frequency or the frequency

at which this flickering is happening.

And we kind of,

figured out that it's

consistent with the birds.

Okay, well, we see

we're seeing a lot of crazy motion

right now.

I would suspect that what this is, is

movement from the camera system

that's tracking it versus

the objects themselves moving.

There's probably

not a way to determine that.

But I would presume that birds

aren't necessarily flying like that.

I don't know what. Your thoughts.

I think. They are.

So there are like we

if you look at our paper we have actual

data on how,

what is the beat frequency of these,

you know, objects

and they

fall somewhere

between 3.5Hz to ten hertz, consistent

with what birds would do at that height.

And somehow one of our

some of our colleagues in the council

figured out

this is at a particular location

in Kuwait.

And this is also consistent

with what kind of birds they could be.

The that location.

There's

probably a mathematical model

that you can come up with that

gives you a confidence level

that, based off of the way

the objects are maneuvering

in relation to each other, it's

consistent with how other bird flocks

fly as well.

We I think we do

mention this in the paper

that the formation sequence

seems to be consistent.

We didn't actually do

a mathematical model,

I think,

but this seems to be consistent with how

they are

clustering together

in their formation flying.

For these kind of birds.

I mean.

I think the most

definite giveaway at this

point is the flickering rate

seems to be falling in the range

of how birds would be.

Birds wings would be flapping.

And this one, I'm

not sure whether this was acquired.

With a radar,

or they were looking at the tower

and happened to see these fly by.

But you know, as a pilot,

radars are getting pretty darn

good, right?

I mean, you have stealth technology

that reduces the radar

cross-section of these craft

to very small size

objects, small enough

where, you know,

your radar would be expected to pick up

birds and other things like that.

I would want to see instead of just,

you know,

we basically have these icons,

you know, call them squares on our screen

with different velocities and altitudes

and a velocity vector

moving around in a group

and very hard to make sense of. Right.

And they're two dimensional.

And then have to look at my other screen

to see the vertical view, right.

And see how these things

are moving vertically.

It would make sense to me

that you would want to bake

these algorithms in and say,

be able to say, hey,

with a high degree of confidence,

these are birds, right?

This is, you know, a seven, three, seven.

This is a MiG or whatever.

Because that's where this is going.

The amount of information

that a pilot receives

has to get condensed down

and formatted

so they can make

timely decisions with it.

And it's not just birds

and anything else out there.

Enemies are employing

sophisticated jamming technologies.

They are

expected to launch drones and decoys,

not just little quadcopters, but,

you know, pretty massive drones that,

call it half the size of a fighter

that are expendable. Right?

And they'll want to send those out,

and some will probably have missiles

and some of them might not.

But it's going to be such a complex

information space.

I think the work that you

guys are doing to develop some of these,

I guess inferences of what

these could be,

could actually be a useful technology to

incorporate

into some of these

either current or future

radar systems and,

and not just the radar system,

but the data that fuzes it together

and helps a pilot actually

make good decisions out there.

I would say that would be awesome

if we could potentially

have that kind of,

usability

for the tools that we are developing

from the council.

I would also,

I think

it would be important

to point out that these

videos, these are all mostly in the air,

many of them infrared.

I'm probably sure that there are other,

electromagnetic sensor observations

as well, not just infrared,

maybe in optical.

And one of the most important things

as a science

analysis is to have multi sensor data

so that you know for sure what at least

you can even more tightly bound

what kind of things we are looking at.

I wish we have that kind of data.

And I'm hoping we would get multi

sensor data at some point.

It's it's a weird regime.

You know,

as much as I talk about radars

and other things,

the bottom line

is that

the mission security around a craft

is an extremely important consideration.

And the way that we fight wars

might actually involve us.

At least aerial wars

might involve us

getting closer than we might do now.

I, I don't really want to get into it

too much.

I don't want to cross any thresholds.

I shouldn't, but,

long story short, is being able to

suss out

what is worth going

after was not whether it's from the radar

or whether it's from a sensor

like we just saw

is continuing

to be extremely important, right?

These aren't

necessarily tools

that are going away in favor

of more sophisticated radars.

There's I'll just say a lot of space

to play across all of these

and obviously can be

a very confusing environment up there

in an actual war, right?

When people are trying to

actually deceive you,

you can only imagine

how difficult that would be,

especially when you're an aircraft

with six missiles on you.

You know,

maybe even if you're lucky, right?

You only got so many shots

you can take there.

And enemy doesn't

have to fool you

that many times,

you know,

before you're basically

just a paperweight up there. Yeah.

So are there any hot spots that

I was just thinking

that we could potentially

think about within the.

I know these are all very mission

relevant and not available publicly,

but if there are some hot spots

within the United States

or around the United States that we,

you know,

civilians can deploy

their own instruments,

then that would be an independent data,

because that's the data

that we can actually share

with everyone,

including the instrument calibration.

What kind of instruments?

They come and go.

It seems some of the hot spots, you know,

I mean,

there was a period of time

where pilots were detecting

objects, spheres

between about 2000

8000ft near LaGuardia for a couple

of months.

Then that stopped.

It was

nearly one of the approach

ends of one of the runways.

You know,

there's kind of your more traditional

hot spots out west that seemed there

always seems to be something going

on, you know, especially around

nuclear facilities or bases.

The short answer is,

I think that's exactly

where the conversation needs to go.

Instead of this retrospective

about what happened

12 months

or eight months ago,

getting out in the field

at some of these spots,

collecting real data

and start that inner cycle right of,

hey, what can we learn?

What new tools do we need?

And start fielding those technologies

and capabilities sooner and sooner.

For me, it's not just, you know,

your scientists

are the greatest respect for you

and what you do.

I'm an operator.

My job isn't to admire the problem

over a long period of time.

My, you know,

my priorities and is to deal

with the situation

x and x and manner as possible.

Right?

And often with incomplete information.

And, you know,

especially when we're

having sightings around

military training ranges

or critical infrastructure

or just commercial air traffic, it's

one thing to understand

that that's happening

and admire it for 12 months.

It's another thing

to get that information

back to the operator, who has to deal

and work in that environment

so that they can mitigate that threat

or that risk, that

whatever that is poses. Right.

And it might simply be

like in some of these cases, birds.

Right. It it might be.

And then you can get that information

back to them

and then train those aviators

and say, here's what not to look for.

Don't you know,

now you don't have to worry

about employing this now.

You're not off mission

because you're looking at something

that you think is interesting.

When it's something prosaic.

And either of these cases,

it's super important for me

personally to close out loop

as fast as possible.

And I think you have to do that

by getting out there

and getting real data faster

and and bring it to the right. Folks.

I completely agree with you.

I'm with you on that one.

More data,

more obvious data that we can have

and multi sensor data as well

because we want to know

and and someone like you

who's an expert in this kind of a

sensor data analysis.

We come from a science background

scientist background to see

how can we apply

basic scientific principles

and analysis tools to do it.

But then there is this kind of

a, you know, perspective

that you can provide.

Hey, you know,

that looks like, you know, a F-18

full of you.

I was like, okay, that's great.

Now, that information is really,

really is what we needed.

So I'm really glad that you are.

You're in the science console right now.

Well, hopefully

it can be a productive council,

but unfortunately I think

it can only be productive

with the amount of with mountain,

the type of information that it receives.

I frankly haven't been overly impressed

with the amount of information

it has received,

especially considering

how much information I suspect

is is there.

But perhaps

we'll wait and see if that changes here.

I would. Be thrilled to have more data.

Well.

Let's let me switch

the gear here a little bit. Yeah.

This is the part that

scientists always hate.

I'm going to ask you about some beliefs.

I know it's a dirty

word for a scientist,

but no scientist

is expected to be an atheist, right?

Every scientist can still have beliefs.

Yeah.

It's separate

from what you can scientifically prove.

What do you think's going on here?

What do you believe is happening here?

Do you think

we're all spinning

our tails on bird videos?

So what.

I'm hearing from people like you,

who I really respect.

And because you are in the field

actually doing things,

and you are not expecting

to see these kind of things at all,

and then suddenly something shows up

and then you can't explain it.

And if I do the same thing,

I mean, consider the roles are reversed.

If I see something out in the night sky

using my telescope

and suddenly report it,

and someone says, oh, you know,

it must be some kind of

a, you know, thing that you did.

How would I feel?

So I want to start from that point.

I want to see, okay, why

you have seen something

and you may have some information

regarding that.

I want to start with that belief.

So I go directly to the sources

rather than going to some sort of

a, you know,

YouTube video of something happening.

I'll say Ryan has seen something.

He's a respectable guy.

So I want to go and talk to him

and then I'll see what

what kind of information

or data that he can provide.

That's the first.

When you talk about belief,

that is a belief. I believe in you.

I believe that you have seen something.

Let's try to figure out together.

And that's

when I bring my science background.

You bring your expertise

back information.

And that's when we work together.

That's the first step. Belief.

I would say I would start with.

Well let me. Okay.

Well let's go on and step two then. Yeah.

Let's be fair here.

Your entire career,

you know, entire career,

but a large majority of your career

has been about finding other planets,

techno signatures.

Now you have an interest in U.P, UAP.

Where does it come from?

I mean,

do you think we're alone

in this universe?

Statistically?

No, I mean,

statistically, of course,

we all understand the big universe, but,

I mean,

you've really shaped your life

around the conversation

of there

being other intelligence out

there is this, you know,

is this an underlying motivation?

Do you want to find the others

that we've always met and to help answer?

The biggest question

I think that humanity has.

Is that what your motivation is?

Of course,

of course I

my motivation is to find life everywhere.

And I want to see how we can,

as a humanity, can find life elsewhere.

We we think

we are with people around here.

I have you as a friend here,

so I know I'm not alone here.

But when you

consider the entire humanity,

we are alone.

And so isn't it

weird that we are in a neighborhood

where there's.

There are no neighbors at all?

And then we are the only people or,

you know, species here?

That's what is motivating me.

I really want to know

if there is someone out there. And.

But that doesn't cloud the judgment.

You have to.

You have to go through the

I mean, I don't want to myself.

Oh yeah, sure.

I want you know,

because I believe I want to go find it.

No, I want to find it. Then I'll believe.

So I'm coming from

my scientific

training comes from that side

and that gives me in check.

Of course,

I know it's it's

it's one of the,

you know,

bias is such a dirty word in science,

and you want

to protect yourself from that.

But then the day we are all humans

and it is such a fundamental,

important question.

It's, in my opinion,

probably one of the reasons that,

you know, they're religions and what,

you know, other belief structures that,

you know,

where we're not the only things there.

Do you think

we'll get an answer in your lifetime

one way or the other?

Whether it's techno

signatures around another star system

or whether an answer to what UAP are.

Personally, if you

if you ask me, not as a, you know,

a scientist everywhere, you know, at a

an organization personally I think.

Yes.

I think

within our lifetime

there might be some clues.

We just talked

about how

poorly we can bounce some problems.

Can you try to bound that any tighter?

Do you think this is something

that we could

with our technology advancement

that we're on now.

So that could happen in ten years

and 50 years?

Maybe that's pushing the boundaries

of your lifetime, 50 years.

But I mean,

that's a very small sliver of time

in the grand scheme of things.

Yes, I think in the next few

I would put a large pound

in terms of my own lifetime.

In the next few decades,

I think there might be a good

because of the kind of things

we are doing.

And then imagine this

many of the discoveries

that we have had, at least

in this

astronomical discourse,

because that's my field of study.

Many of them have been discovered

because,

because of,

not because we are looking for them.

They just happen.

Nature just showed it to us.

And so these are

the surprising discoveries

that we might be able to get.

And I'm very confident that,

you know,

we might be

we might have a good,

surprising discovery pretty soon.

Yeah. Cool.

Well, let's leave it there. Abby.

Thanks for coming out to Austin

and joining me here.

And it's great to run into you again,

my friend.

It was real pleasure,

Ryan, seeing you again.

Thank you for inviting me.

Thank you. Yeah.

All right. Wonderful.

If you joined this episode,

please subscribe.

Please hit that like, button.

We're going to have more awesome

episodes coming to you soon.

Talk to you next time.