Can UFOs Bend Space-Time? Physicist Explains

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:01]Hi everyone and welcome back to that UFO podcast. As always, my name is Andy and today I'm joined by Dr. Matthew Shidagas. He is an experimental physicist and associate professor at the University at Albany SUNY. His work focuses on particle astrophysics, dark matter detection, and rare event detector technology. He's also involved in bringing a more rigorous scientific and data approach to the study of UAP, including his work with UAPX and the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.

[00:00:31]Matthew, welcome to the show.

[00:00:35]>> Good to have you on. Finally, you're a name that I have seen pop up for many, many years whenever I'm looking at guests and events and speakers of these events. And it's through no fault of anyone's but my own that I've yet to invite you on. So, thank you for accepting first time of asking. And I've given you an introduction there, Matthew, but I'd love you to start off with a little bit of your background because it's fascinating and what it is you actually currently do.

[00:01:01]>> So, uh, as you said already and I'm an associate professor of physics at, uh, U Albany Sunni, um, in New York in Albany, the c in Albany, which is the capital of New York State, um, in the US. And um so I I teach I do research and my my day job is the experimental search for dark matter but as you know I've been dabbling with UAP with my colleagues professor Kevin Kenuth and Cecilia Levy at University of Albany and um it's been a wild ride to say the least as the stigma has decreased in the topic and it's become more mainstreamed and it's become uh easier to talk about working on this you area which is still so called you know like >> just a quick heads up folks I've got Professor Kevin Kuth coming back on the podcast it's been a couple of years he's joining me later on this week and it's a fascinating time for the UFO subject and I want to ask can you just clear up for me what is an experimental physicist when it comes to it so it means for example I'm not a theoretical physicist which is a very common misconception I'm not a straight theorist you know I'm not any kind of theorist And so a lot of people when they hear the word physicist or scientist but more so the word physicist they think of somebody who who only thinks ideas but that's a separate class or subfield of physics that's you know equally valuable but that's not what I do. An experimental physicist is someone who builds things. So this is not a perfect analogy, but if we want to use an analogy with with careers that your audience might be more familiar with, I'm I'm more like an engineer than a mathematician. For example, a theoretical physicist is more like a pure mathematician, but an experimental physicist is more like an engineer. So I don't just think ideas or use computers.

[00:02:57]I do that too, of course, but I also use wrenches and screwdrivers in here.

[00:03:01]>> Yeah. Yeah, that that makes sense. And right now again, I'm going to get you to answer this for me. I'm one of those folks who understand when I hear dark matter, I get these crazy images in my head, but I don't really know what actually is. So for those who don't understand, like myself, what exactly is dark matter and what does your current research involve?

[00:03:22]So, it's a hypothetical form of matter that has indirect observational evidence for it from astronomy, but no solid um direct evidence or identification of what it is. So, we know that there's more mass or more matter than we can see, for example, shining in stars or made of ordinary atoms. And we have multiple independent pieces of evidence for that from a strong astrophysics and cosmology. And so, we don't know what it is. So it's not like for example, you know, the Haze Bzon or a photon or something. We we don't have like a specific target we're aiming for. We just know there's something out there.

[00:04:01]And so I work on the LZ dark matter experiment which is very mainstream, you know, has nothing to do with UAP. And I'm sure some of my LZ colleagues are horrified if they know that I go on these UFO podcasts, you know, and talk about, you know, UFOs and UAP. It's a very mainstream straight lace experiment that uses liquid xenon deployed deep underground in order to look for dark matter because the idea is that dark matter could pass through the earth um but could interact rarely with our detector and produce a detectable signal. So we're just looking for a very rare interaction. And the reason we use xenon is because this is just a general particle detector. So, we have to go underground to get away from naturally occurring cosmic radiation like cosmic rays on the surface of the earth and other sorts of naturally occurring radiation.

[00:04:51]>> It's funny you say that. Would you feel your colleagues aren't the most susceptible to talk about UFOs, UAP? Is that due to stigma or just their nature?

[00:05:03]>> Um, stigma taboo and and has has um has influenced everybody. I wouldn't say it's in people's nature because I don't think that would be fair to my colleague because I think it's just a stigma and the taboo goes back so many decades that people have been taught so often that this is nonsense. And you know the old saying if you hear a lie repeated enough times you begin to think it's the truth.

[00:05:26]So I don't blame people for even for for making fun of me for doing it because really it's the culture. It's a scientific culture and so it's really not their their fault that they're >> I I've done a few radio appearances here in the UK in the last couple of days because of the files release and in the UK were kind of late to the story or the media here were late to the story because on the Friday when the the dump happened it was local elections and it was a big political day here in the UK.

[00:05:56]>> Yeah. I heard no it got it got smashed.

[00:05:59]It got smashed all over. So >> yeah.

[00:06:03]Yeah, >> he's the most boring man on planet Earth. He really is. Um, I've heard I've heard from John Oliver actually.

[00:06:12]>> Yeah, Starmer's I don't do politics.

[00:06:16]Every politician's the same to me, but yeah, it was it was a big day in terms of that. So, the media never touched the whole files dump thing. Um, so it's been I was on a a show last night and the host was it's the worst experience I've had on a radio show and I've done so many I'm really fortunate they called me to do these things quite often and the guy had no time for the UFO subject.

[00:06:37]Some of the pauses you could hear the disdain in his voice, not just disinterest but disdain for the topic.

[00:06:43]And that was disappointing to hear even in this time when when it's when it's reaching shores when you've got something a little bit different happening. But yeah, when you're working in a field like dark matter, um you're looking for something that's difficult to detect, but potentially for multiple reasons, very, very, very important.

[00:07:01]Does that shape how you think about the UE subject, too?

[00:07:11]Yes, it does. because um dark matter is one of those things that uh also uh used to be laughed at and still is by people like you know chemists or dense matter physicists will or even astronomers who don't work on it think oh whatever it's nonsense it's made up even to this day and so um there are there are some analogies even though I've said dark matter's mainstream yeah it wasn't always that way and there are still people including you bigname people in science and physics or in astrophysics um who think it's nonsense.

[00:07:49]>> Why is that?

[00:07:50]>> There's definitely a lot of similarities. Again, I'll put it this way. As a layman, if I was a scientist, I would find all these potential huge discoveries, whether it's non-human intelligence, dark matter, you know, the universe and all all these incredible mysteries, all these particles being found, things that J James Webb is finding. Why does it seem so often scientists don't seem to want to pursue scientific discovery?

[00:08:22]That's an excellent question. Sometimes it's because of um being comfortable.

[00:08:27]We're comfortable with our current knowledge and paradigms and so we get uncomfortable when if there is a paradigm shift which is unfortunate because scientists should be excited about new possibilities, new discoveries. I definitely am. I mean that's why I became a scientist. I became a scientist to have my worldview challenged not to have them confirmed repeatedly. So that's and that's an excellent point but we can't paint everybody with one brush.

[00:08:52]remember I mean there's me here talking to and also my colleagues like Kevin and Cecilia here at Albany and lots of colleagues I've met through you know UPC SCU um you know that is having this conference in Toronto um in July like there are people open-minded people out there so we shouldn't paint all you know even academics or PhD scientists with the same brush but you are right that there's kind of like an old guard a conservative old guard always part of but but there's another reason potentially maybe patience so discoveries take time. So, it took a long time, for example, to discover gravitational waves. And dark matter has been taking a long time. And I've been made fun of by dark matter skeptics like, "Oh, you told us it would have been it was supposed to be discovered 20 years ago." Well, I didn't say that. I was a kid. You know what I mean? Like, I was in college or whatever. But basically, um, so part of it is patience is that the bigger the pot the bigger the discovery is, it can it may take longer and be more difficult to achieve.

[00:09:49]And so part of it is like I said the discomfort about about new ideas which is I know totally backwards but also patience. People just are so impatient nowadays. We live in a culture we want everything now now now now. And sometimes discoveries take 30 50 80 years or hundreds of years of trying and failing. And that doesn't mean that that thing you're looking for doesn't exist.

[00:10:11]Sometimes it does and you're wrong.

[00:10:13]>> How did you then searching for transferred over to the world of UFOs?

[00:10:24]Well, it was it's more that it's it's much more so that I have a general skill set by being a PhD scientist, experimental scientist. So, I do have some specific skills like radiation detection that I carried over, but really it's more like a um a generic skill set. So for example, as a grad student, I worked on a particular type of dark matter experiment called a bubble chamber. And I learned about image processing, video processing, and obviously using that for UFO images and photos. So it it's really about having a general skill set. And also by being an academic, having a PhD in a STEM field, I learned how to learn, not just learned knowledge, but in graduate school more so than college, it wasn't just about filling. It's not about filling heads with facts with advanced degrees like masters and PhD. It's about actually learning how to learn. And so that's really what I'm taking is the scientific method in general and knowing how to learn and sort of the generalized skills I have. It it's not like that. Does that go back to childhood or was it much later?

[00:11:33]You go back in childhood watching unsolved mysteries, Star Trek, the next generation, you know, by aliens. But Unsolved Mysteries, there would be like, you know, you know, murderer, kidnapper, racist, aliens, you know what I mean? It was just like mixed in. It mixed in like and so that that kind of helped reduce the stigma, you know, in my own mind, you know, in my own like head canon or ontology that this was something male, right? It was just part of, you know, life. you know, the Unsolved Mysteries was the original true cruting, you know, show before internet and podcasts with, you know, Robert Stack in a trench coat.

[00:12:09]And then on Star Next Generation, right, there's aliens on the ship. They meet new aliens every week. So, so that really helped a lot. Um, but then as an adult, what really confirmed things or like brought the interest back in a sense was >> those two shows you mentioned, Unsolved Mysteries and Next Generation. I used to watch those both with my grand when I was a kid.

[00:12:29]>> Yeah. late late night. And then this was when Next Generation was first being shown on UK television. I would watch it. So yeah, takes me back.

[00:12:43]>> Yeah, I watched it live. I'm pretty sure it was 5 or no, maybe 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday nights when I was a little kid in Chicago. And I remember like at 5:57 getting really excited and like waiting for the show to start. Yeah. I I didn't watch as a kid. I had the triorder.

[00:12:59]remember for one Christmas I got some of the figures. I had the triorder.

[00:13:03]>> I had the phaser. Yep.

[00:13:06]>> Yeah. I had I had some really cool I was such a geek. I think many folks listening to this or watching this can can appreciate that. Um and in terms of the subject then in 2017, what were your thoughts when you first saw that article? You see Alzando come forward, then the names like Put Sean, the people that start speaking out about UFOs.

[00:13:32]Well, honestly, my first thought was I knew it because of childhood. I'm like, I called my wife over. I'm like, look at this, you know, read this. I'm like, I knew it. I knew it. I knew those bastards at the Pentagon, you know, in the US was still studying this and they lied about it. And I'm like, I knew it.

[00:13:48]I knew it. So yeah, in my gut, but this is not scientific. It was just a gut feeling, right? My gut was there was something there. That there was a there there, you know, like Eric Davis likes to say, there was a there. And so I was like, damn, I knew it. Those bastards, they're hiding. They're hiding stuff.

[00:14:04]>> And you say it was a gut feeling then, but then the scientist must take over.

[00:14:08]And you're looking for proof. You're looking for evidence. And for you, what does evidence mean to you first off?

[00:14:20]Well, there are several key uh key factors which is you need high quality evidence. So, you know, another blurry photo or video is not going to cut it.

[00:14:29]We need to know what the metadata is and ideally you want scientists taking data.

[00:14:34]So, for example, setting up shop at alleged UAP hotspots, right? It's not enough to even get something from a you know quote unquote trusted source like mil like military government. You need you need it's better to get your own data and reproducible data. That's why hotspots if they are if they are a real thing are so critical because you want reproducible data and you want high quality data. You want multiple you one thing that's missing from all the current releases and I've repeated this on every podcast I've been is for once just once I would like to see the same object from at least two different angles at the same time because then we can triangulate we can better figure out the size obviously more angles are better but at least two we always get one only one photo one video did someone else see it from a different distance away from a different angle and then we can really determine whether we high, you know, anomalous speed, anomalous acceleration. So, there's no mystery as to what will constitute evidence. It's very very obvious, but it's just it's not getting through, you know, even with the recent release that like and but some of the time it's because that's all they have, right? is the one one photo or one video from one angle, but you really need multiple perspectives and different different types of sensors, you know, not just visible light or even infrared, but electromagnetic um you know, sound evidence for you right now in order to classify >> for UAP UFOs. Is it a video? Is it a file? Is it data?

[00:16:07]>> To me, there is no single smoking gun. I mean, I could point at the Nimics, Tic Tac, and gimbal videos, but the thing is, you know, again, like I said, the met a lot of metadata has been stripped and we have only one angle. I don't think we should think of it as like what's the one, you know, biggest piece of evidence because I would rather think of it as like a whole story where we have unproven bits and pieces that go back decades if not centuries or millennia even if we count a classic historical pieces. But basically it's just these little pieces here and there you know Rendles and Forest you know Patch Landram Falcon Lake taken by themselves each of them are easy to laugh at and dismiss you know that's ridiculous ship land in front of you but when you take it all together is really hard for me to make the claim that 100% of it's all nonsense and let me be clear I am not by any stretch of the imagination claiming that truth is by majority absolutely Absolutely not. You know, 10,000 people can be just as wrong as one person. That's not what I'm saying. But at the same time, when you have trained observers, credible weaknesses going back years, decades, and you have radar and infrared data, that that doesn't prove it's alien spaceships or or NHI, but it does in my mind provide strong evidence that something is happening. And it's worth answering the question about what is the phenomenon? Is it a clata phenomenon?

[00:17:32]What would you need if if your colleague at the LZ >> said, "Matthew, bring us in a presentation. We're going to give you the day. Let's talk about this UFO thing." Would you have the data right now to show that group of folks that you think you could convince them there's something here worth investigating, or do you think we still need more?

[00:17:58]Um, I think we we we still need more because as I just said, I can't show them a proven smoking gun of something interesting or analous because what we have right now is not sufficient. And because what we need is, like I said, we need observatories that observe um objects that are behaving anomalously from multiple angles. We don't have that right. That being said, I do absolutely think that if we take it take a look at the historical body of decades of evidence that there I would absolutely be able to convince a couple colleagues.

[00:18:35]I already have, you know, Kevin convinced me and then I convinced our colleagues Cecilia and you all like we've convinced colleagues before, but it's not a uniform thing. I can't give a presentation to like 250 LZ dark matter scientists and they're going to come away saying oh yeah that's no you know maybe I could convince a few but you know again human beings are all different right that we're not monolithic and people also have there's an emotional visceral reaction deep in the brain right back in the in the lyic system even where people if you're told repeatedly something's ridiculous and you absorb that into your worldview you may have a visceral emotional reaction instead of a logical rational one. And a lot of scientists have this problem.

[00:19:19]Scientists are not Vulcans like from Star Trek or androids. Like we're human beings with emotions too, just like non any non-scientist, like any human being.

[00:19:28]And so sometimes people react emotionally still and they close their minds and they close their eyes and ears and refuse to.

[00:19:35]>> And you mentioned those files that have just come out.

[00:19:38]>> Good time to talk about them. Is there anything in there that's jumped out to you in terms of of anything that you would say advances the case for this is better evidence, this is a better data point?

[00:19:56]Not really, but this is only the beginning. So, I've heard that we need to be um patient and so I think that again, you know, you usually don't get multiple photos or videos. I could be wrong when I said earlier there are zero such cases but most of the time you don't get multiple photos videos of the same object or incident from different angles since again you know blurry photos that are really hard to say and you know a lot of the data is still blacked out we don't know how far away the object is how fast it's moving it's all we have to guess or you know and from one perspective that's almost impossible to do and so it's not and also I'll be honest you haven't I'm too busy with the work my semester is wrapping ing up. I've got a final exam to give this week. I don't have I didn't have time to comb through everything yet. Not at all. The most interesting I saw thing I saw was the Apollo 17 photo.

[00:20:45]I'm like, "Oh, UFO on the moon." You know, I've heard that NASA astronauts have been CEOs and and we've seen some examples like that in the past, but some of my like, you know, hardcore UO colleagues who are much much older than me and been doing this for decades, they were really unimpressed because a lot of those were things that were already released, pre-released or leaked or, you know, that snuck out of the archives already over the past few decades. So, so yeah, but I think we need to be patient. I'm cautiously optimistic and uh but but I'm really more interested right now in um the fact that we had these congressional hearings that people have stopped talking about where we had um witnesses like the whistleblower David Gush. I thought, you know, again, he didn't have the physical evidence proof to show us, but I thought that was pretty compelling that there's this guy saying under oath that, hey everybody, there are, you know, crash alien spaceships, you know, not necessarily alienated with some form of, you know, non-human intelligence, you know, other universes or something. But I think that that's not a joke anymore at least. And we should consider, >> do you feel at this point to test these claims? we're going to get those multiple angles videos, the 4K video, the pictures of bodies, or is that something that perhaps many folks would theorize or hypothesize? And I know those words, I listened to a few of your interviews are different things. Folks expect perhaps the intelligence behind this phenomenon is going to have to present itself for people to truly believe and see it. Or do you think we're going to get some some better releases from the government?

[00:22:22]I think we may get better releases, but I've said for a long time on podcast that I don't want us to pin all of our hopes on that. And so that's why, you know, I we've got uh UAPX, for example, recently rebranded it. You as you Albin Project X, that was Kevin's idea. And so we've got that academic group. We've got um which is, you know, similar to, you know, Galileo project. It's an academic uh group, academic collaboration. We've got um there's you know professor uh Westwaters at Wellington College and so there are people who are building observatories with cameras to try to do this multiple groups. we went from zero to like too many over the past you know half a decade and so and so I I I think you may get um uh grassroots maybe civilian you know with s with like um I I don't mean citizen scientist I mean actual PhD scientists but academics who are starting take it seriously and taking data and so yeah I I would worry about not being able to get all the data immediately from the the government I'm cautiously optimistic anti-gravity 0 plasma fusion spaceime engineering.

[00:23:30]>> Exotic propulsion is a popular one these days. As a physicist, how do you approach claims like those?

[00:23:41]>> Uh well, the vast majority are are just um garbage nonsense. And the reason why I know that is for I can I can take this happened to me once before. I could take 10 seconds with somebody who had claimed they have their theory of anti-gravity where I asked them a couple pointed questions. It was clear they didn't know any math or physics. And so it is very improbable. I'm not saying it's impossible. It's very improbable that you know that Joe Sixpack is going to discover space-time engineering in their garage. You know that's possible. I mean, you know, Wilbur and Orville ride were were bicycle mechanics and they and you know, thanks to them, we have flight, you know, and you know, airplanes taking off, you know, at the beginning of 20th century. So, I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's really improbable. There are just so many crazy ideas out there. Now, that being said, there are definitely um there are ideas for exotic propulsion that are reasonable and are worth pursuing. I taught a class on exotic propulsion twice for SUOPS the society for UAP studies um another organization similar to you know SCU that has this conference in Toronto in July scientific uh coalition for UAP studies. So in suitups I taught this class on exotic propulsion. There are ideas they are worth funding and pursuing. However, um also we need to the humility to recognize that potentially if there are real NHI out there, they might have things that are so many centuries, millennia, millions of years ahead of us that good luck figuring it out. You know what I mean? So I feel like sometimes we jump the gun and we're like, "Oh, we're going to have something that's 10,000 times better than airplanes overnight."

[00:25:13]That's not if you look at history and the history of science, technology, engineering that just doesn't happen.

[00:25:20]And I mean like discovery of NHI might change that and might you know accelerate that. When you look historically there are technological also economic factors that prevent things from just you know overnight we have a new um a new technology. So a lot of these ideas that get thrown around also the terms are also misused. So, for example, anti-gravity. Okay, who cares about anti-gravity if I'm in the middle of nowhere in outer space? If I'm in interstellar space, far from all gravitating bodies like stars and planets. Okay, what good is anti-gravity? You see what I mean? So, some of these terms just get thrown out without critical thinking.

[00:25:58]>> You know what I mean? They just tossed out there. It's like anti-gravity would be great for a new kind of airplane, but how does it end up with spacecraft?

[00:26:07]Exactly. like I no one's ever explained that to me. How does that get you a better spacecraft? And so I think when people say terms like that, they really mean things like space-time engineering, which are still crazy speculative ideas.

[00:26:20]However, they are grounded in at least some exotic possibilities.

[00:26:24]>> So with where we are in terms of physics, understanding of physics, >> how far away are we from these types of technologies that we're seeing in the sky that people are reporting? Is it something that is generational leaps away? Is it something that you perhaps would have to be gifted from another species or find and reverse engineer? Is is that how do we bridge that gap?

[00:26:53]So, it's complicated. There is no one correct answer for that. I mean, I could throw out some random number to you like, oh, they're thousands of years ahead. But first of all, that would be wrong cuz we don't have a clue how any of the ships work. And repeatedly I get emails nonstop from people say, "Hey, I figured out how UAP work." "Oh, what's your education?"

[00:27:14]"None." "Oh, what's your degree and no degree?" I'm like, "Okay, why why am I going to listen to your crazy email?"

[00:27:21]You know, I get these emails non-stop and Kevin gets it even even worse. Yeah, I'm sure this one guy in his mom's basement has solved UIP. Yeah, good.

[00:27:28]Great. Good luck with that. So I think that that that that the claims of oh they use X technology or Y are grossly overstated and are with such confidence and if you talk to the actual you know if you talk to people like David Brush or you're talking to people like Eric Davis who by the way is adjunct faculty now he's not in person he's not full faculty at University of Albany no one seems to care UFO twiners not going oh my god like no one's freaking out um that Eric that Kevin and I working you know with Eric Damis it's like but the people like these guys they are a lot more humble when you ask like oh you know how does the tech work and they like yeah we don't really know because the question you asked about like oh how many leaps ahead we don't know cuz depending what are you talking about high speed high acceleration what aspect visibility like there's literally a minimum of five or six but more realistically dozens of aspects you could ask me about you know and the other thing is is technology doesn't just magically progress progress linearly across all fields. So what you need to keep in mind if for example we're talking about extraterrestrials and interstellar travel. Okay, it's not good enough to have anti-gravity or spaceime engineering. What about navigation? What about shielding? See, so that it's not like one question like oh how far are they on propulsion? That doesn't happen in a you know that that's not how it works at all. So, for example, on Earth, do you know what year we knew how to make airplanes? I'm talking about on paper.

[00:29:03]>> Take a guess.

[00:29:04]>> 1700s.

[00:29:07]>> Further back.

[00:29:12]>> 1500s.

[00:29:12]>> Back more back.

[00:29:19]>> No, that's too far. Well, unless we talk about Da Vinci, but I'm talking about actual physics. Are you familiar with Isaac Newton and his great landmark work philosoph philosophia?

[00:29:30]Yeah. 1687. So thanks Newton's laws of motion and gravity. We can build a plane. So I'm going to ask you when took us so long.

[00:29:39]>> Imagination technology.

[00:29:41]>> No, the planes in 1700 17 problem. It was a solved problem. Right.

[00:29:49]I'll tell you why. Because science and engineering are two different things.

[00:29:52]Just because you know how to do something doesn't mean you know how to build. And so we've been making a lot of assumptions. First of all, we make the assumption that oh UFOs are NHI. That's not the case. There's plenty of hoaxes, misidentifications, you know, um you know, and and um Mick West, as much as I disagree with him on so many things.

[00:30:10]He's he is sometimes right, maybe even more than some maybe. And people just like um catch things that are mundane.

[00:30:18]Airplanes, drones, helicopters, birds, everything. And but also but if we do have advanced craft operating atmosphere, we always make the assumption there's new physics, there's new physics, new physics. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why? Why can't it be new engineering instead? Why couldn't it be that somebody out there has figured out how to better apply Einstein's theory of general relativity, for example, or quantum mechanics or both? Why does it have to be new exotic physics? Like, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of physics we don't understand, and there could be new physics, but I'm always confused. Why is everybody like 99.999999% people in the UFO space always like no physic no new physics no physics and I'm like um I have a question what about new engineering and I just get blank stairs I'm like what's wrong with taking stuff we know from 1905 or 1916 like Einstein's work and applying that because we don't know how to apply that yet as a species we don't have the engineering for that so before we start screaming new physics I always want to take a step back and ask what about new engineering engineering materials in new ways we haven't thought of that doesn't ne necessarily mean new physics like dark matter that's new physics there's plenty of evidence for new physics but I worry that we slap that label >> I wonder then with all of that said how do you view the Bob Lazar story where allegedly Bob and others have been working on craft reverse engineering element 115 how do you view that through your lens I view it negatively unfortunately potential disinformation and misinformation because what Bob says doesn't make any sense from the point of physics like element 115 has already been discovered it's not stable like it has none of the properties he claims I could go on for hours and hours and I'll just get angry emails from people who believe in Bot Lazar and his story and I just I just can't get behind it because it doesn't have that it doesn't have any rate of truth to it and quite the opposite from some of the physics and and chemistry says doesn't really work.

[00:32:22]It's not really plausible but at the same time he often stops before going too far as implausibility. So it's a really tough one and I hope to be proven wrong. I hope I'm wrong about um Bob and that he's sincere, but I just there's so many holes in what he says that we would take the rest of our time here and I don't think you want to go for another a half hour debunking Bob Lazar. You know, I've gotten in trouble for that already.

[00:32:46]I I've been uninvited from like conventions cuz people would ask me about 115 Lazar in the audience and I was so negative in my response that people get angry. But this is what I was telling you earlier is that not everything crazy is true. Some of it might be. That's why I'm here, you know, that's why I'm going to the SEO conference in July, you know, in Toronto because I think some of the crazy might be true, but I think there's a bangal between this much of the crazy ideas are true and this that that's a big >> and I think that's totally fair. And I think I've always said people should be able to hear other opinions, other perspectives, agree, disagree, and and their opinion should be malleable. I just like to hear from your perspective what that story is because Bob Lazar divides opinion across the board. Um, fascinating story, some incredible stuff, but even I can see there are holes, there are issues, >> there are things across the board, not even the stuff I understand that you would, but even some basic things that you have to go that's not right. But we don't know why that is necessarily. Um, >> yeah. Why didn't some random professor at MIT remember him? You know what? The men in black are erasing memories now and nobody remembers where he went to school. Like it's just it's really insane. But at the same time, I hear stories like, you know, um David Fraver is like good friends with Bob Lazar and I don't know what to think, you know?

[00:34:08]It's just really tough and it's a tough one. Um and and so it it's it's complicated issue and I would love to be proven wrong. Um I would love for Bob to send me a sample of 115 to confirm his story. You know what I mean? He claims he has a little bit left. like there just so many gaps and holes and he's been on Jesse Michaels for example and Kevin has and I just I don't know what to do because I want these crazy stories to be true but wanting to believe you know like Moulders and having the scientific >> I don't even know then if this question makes sense but one listener asked if anti-gravity drives existed would that automatically mean the ability to travel through No, because as I said earlier the way like anti-gravity just means okay you can lift off for example easier from the earth's surface okay big deal you know what I mean like we already have anti-gravity >> called an air right it it's literally anti-gravity it uses Burton's principle and Newton's third law that's anti-gravity you know if I hold a paperclip with a magnet That's anti-gravity. He right technically, you know, like but when people say anti-gravity, the vast majority of people who use that term are non-scientists and have no clue what they're talking. So like we already have anti-gravity like you know I can hold something with a magnet. I can ionize the air, right? It's the Bfield Brown effect. I can have a ship ionizes the air. It's it's standard physics. No mysterious physics. It's cool. It's cool engineering, but it's not new physics.

[00:35:43]But again, I'm skeptical. How the heck does that help you travel through space, let alone through time? Um, it just nice. It maybe it's a different way of of of generating lift, but we already have ways of canceling out gravity.

[00:35:55]They're just not sexy. Nobody cares because they've been around for decades or centuries. So, when people use that term, they mean a new form of anti-gravity, something that we don't already have. And don't call it that because it's boring, right? Airplanes are boring now if they're old. So nobody calls an airplane anti-gravity, even though from a scientific perspective that's exactly.

[00:36:17]>> So if we did have the sexier version, I'm guessing what they're trying to get as some kind of device that would allow the craft because you're quite right and I even under I'm guilty of everything you've just said. I am clearly not a scientist, right? I am an I'm an idiot podcaster. Um but that this idea of anti-gravity, you're quite right. And even I'm thinking now, well, that just means a craft in a bubble that lets it go up. You could put it around an airplane, a train, a car, a taxi, a a kid's bicycle, and a bubble would just let it float up. But then, like you say, how does it move in space? How does it then travel? How does it navigate? So, if we've got this magical device that allows you to do all that, would that then in your mind also allow time travel?

[00:37:03]Possibly. So, but but we would have to replace the terms anti-gravity with something else. And this is what Hal Budof uses. You know, people consider him crazy, but he's a he's a PhD, you know, physicist. And Hal uses the term space-timetric engineering. You know, he's not the only one. He said that's a much better term, but it's not understood by non-scientists, and that's okay. But that's a far more rational term to use. And so, if you did have space-time engineering, that might allow for time travel. I have to >> have to clarify that. So this was the listener question, right? There's some nuance to my answer because it depends on whether you have access to something called negative energy. If you have only positive energy, you can only time travel to the future, not the past. And so I can't just say, oh yes, definitely.

[00:37:48]So the best I could say is probably because you know, well, if I know, right? The problem is is that a lot of people will go on podcasts like yours.

[00:37:56]I'm not picked on anyone particular.

[00:37:57]I've not I don't know who your past guests are to be completely honest. And so I'm speaking in general is and skeptics do this too. will go on and on as if they know everything. I don't I could be wrong about things I say. And I think it's important to have the humility to recognize that. So, I'm not going to answer the question, oh yes, definitely. Or no, probably. My most honest answer is probably, but travel to the past is much trickier than the than the future. We know how to time travel to the future. It it's easy. Go really fast, you know, and come back to Earth.

[00:38:26]Unfortunately, that's not what most people want. They want to the pass when they ask question because they want to go meet Caesar or Jesus or something.

[00:38:34]And so most people when they ask that question they want pass and that's tricky that would require an even extra special additional layer similar advanced space engineering to be able >> the idea of time and I've heard you discussed you know time no one can tell you what time is we just use it and it was a really interesting idea and your discussion around that the idea of missing time when it comes to this phenomenon when people claim abductions or I was traveling along the road and all of a sudden my 10-minute journey took 2 and 1 half hours, but I don't remember going any further. How does that work with this phenomenon for you?

[00:39:09]Is that an aspect that you can even begin to try and understand and work out what might be happening?

[00:39:20]Well, some people would say it's a symptom of of spaceime space metric engineering, but some of it may be psychological. And I don't mean like, oh, everybody's lying and fake.

[00:39:31]That's not what I meant. I mean that it can also be if you have a blackout because of trauma, you know, a traumatic event, then there's also psychological aspect to missing time. It's not necessarily technological.

[00:39:43]>> Um, but but yeah, these these stories are very interesting. I don't dismiss them, but I want to test them and I know how hard that would be, right? How would you do things after the event? A lot of people don't claim to be repeat abductees or contactes or experiencers and I would love to be able to test whether you know there are their reproducible experiences. So, but I think um yeah, I I tend to focus more on the nuts and bolts like we've got, you know, ships flying around out there that could potentially be from um ET or from another form of NHI that we don't understand or haven't classified. I think that it's very um I try to keep an open mind but at the same time I worry that there are so many people who want to you know publish a book and become famous that not every single story is true or correct and so I'm very I'm very cautious when it comes to those stories because we only have the eyewitness accounts and in those cases we don't have the corroboration of radar and infrared like we have >> so as someone you say Matthew you're a nuts and bolts guy and that makes sense.

[00:40:44]How do you feel when you hear folks mention, including people like David Gush, the idea that these these beings or entities or these craft may be interdimensional, that it may no longer be as as easy as a craft traveling from A to B?

[00:41:04]Yeah, that's a really good point. And actually um this is this is one of those things that I I need to write like a a paper about because there may be some just confusion of terms in a good-hearted way you know um you know David Grush is not a scientist you academic and so I want to take seriously what he says but we might need to change terms so we can establish quite robustly using physics this is going to confuse and upset a lot of audience members that there are only three spatial dimensions there are no extra dimensions and the reason we know that is because the gravitational force drops off as one over like the the weak gravity gets weaker as as the as the distance squared. So what I mean by that is if you're if you're if you are twice as far from the earth, gravity is four times weaker for and so that's that power that squared power that comes from the number of dimensions minus one. And so you can show that mathematically that a force that travels in all dimensions would drop off as the number of dimensions minus one. Electricity acts the same way. It drops off as the distance squared. And we've done all kinds of tests on small scale, large scale to look for deviations. you don't see any.

[00:42:14]And so I think when most people um talk about extra dimensions, they're referring to something slightly different than how businesses use the term. So there could be other planes of existence like other universes, parallel universes. This is mentioned in cosmology and quantum mechanics and that's often conflated with the word dimension. And everybody does this. Star Trek does this all the time. And I love Star Trek and they constantly mix these terms of alternate dimension, parallel universe. But I think at this point it's going to be too hard to fix it. And so at this point we're going to be talking about interdimensional forever. But I think what we're actually talking about is a literal like a separate uh universe which is not the same as just another direct new direction in which to move.

[00:42:57]So the analogy that's always used you know is flat land. Imagine we always we lived in flat land. There was another direction to move and here here are the NHI hanging out in this other direction.

[00:43:07]And I don't think it's as simple as that. I think it's a bit more nuanced.

[00:43:11]And there's also exceptions to what I said. What if string theory is correct and there are more spatial dimensions and there's somehow there's somehow an exception to what I just said about the rule of gravity and stuff. So I'm open-minded enough to again recognize where I could be mistaken. But right now it's looking like what we call interdimensional may really be a a different word that might be better because when physicists and mathematicians use the word dimension, we specifically refer to a direction in which to move and I think that that's not quite a good match for that none explanation. I think yeah, ET is not the only explanation for NI and Russia said this many times, but I just I want to try to change the language. you know, maybe I can um convince people, you know, reach out to people, try to bang this drum, but it it's kind of like theory versus hypothesis. This is one of those things where I just want to give up and hit and throw my >> I mean, I I realized in researching this interview and hearing you speak on multiple different platforms. I use a lot of these terms completely wrongly and interchangeably.

[00:44:18]I don't think I'm going to remember after this interview. I'll try my best for you, Matthew, to to to use the correct terms, but it is difficult. And you're right, people are so far gone.

[00:44:27]And when I say interdimensional, I probably do mean a different reality.

[00:44:32]Someone lives over in Earth 678 point B and they're popping over to Yeah, like Marvel. That's it. Yeah. Multiverse.

[00:44:41]>> Like Mar Yeah, like Marvel.

[00:44:45]Yeah.

[00:44:46]>> Or does DC have the same thing? I don't remember. Marvel has Exactly. That's what I'm talking about.

[00:44:54]You're like man in the high pencil. That kind of stuff. To me that yeah, that is a lot more reasonable than saying there's another direction in which to move which we can't see because we've looked for that. We've tested for that and it does not they they don't that these new directions to move don't seem to exist. So people for example use string theory to make this case. They don't realize that in string theory and other grand unified theories not only are they unproven but also those extra dimensions are tiny. So unless the NHI is like this big, here goes subatomic, it it's just not going to work. No, but there's other possibilities. And I think Russian, you know, talked about by, you know, inflation of smaller dimensions to bigger. So that's why I'm saying I want to be humble enough to acknowledge where I could be wrong where there could be people in the null. But at the same time, I can't just turn off all of my, you know, scientific critical thinking and just accept. Before we finish up and talk about the upcoming conference in Canada, >> I've got to ask you about the the big story in the news right now is around the scientists that have gone missing.

[00:45:57]There are some tenuous links. There are some interesting links. There are some that are probably people are connecting dots that may not be there. But as a scientist working in in the UFO field, how do you view this particular story of folks going missing?

[00:46:18]I think um we should let the investigative processes go forward and I think it's premature to jump to a conclusion and I think um recently uh David Grush said it best where he was concerned about maybe you know one or two or more cases but he excuse me he also mentioned um not connecting them all right this was on you know news nation recently that this came up you know I was on news past week and I think we have to be uh uh careful not to conflate where there might also be unrelated cases but at the same time that there could be a clue that is real and and is worthy of investigating to check for foul play and things like that. So, I I I I don't want to be uh dismissive, but at the same time, I'm I'm worried. It's kind of like, you know, the New Jersey drone where maybe there was like a real thing, but then people just started pointing at every airplane. And so, I I worry that there could be like a slippery slope kind of effect that happens with these kinds of things. So, I think we need to be careful and I think it's it's premature to jump to conclusions on that. And I wonder on the same basis are there legitimate national security mechanisms around certain technologies that people should know about without jumping to conspiracy. So you can be working on X and it has Y implications but it's not alien tech.

[00:47:46]That's right. I mean there's plenty of things you know nuclear fusion quantum computing. I mean the list goes on and on of you know exciting new AI platforms or something where you could have foreign adversaries has nothing to do with NHI or aliens who are interested in that. At the same time I do acknowledge the exotic possibility you know as as you know Russia's that that be some connection to you know UAP whistleblowers getting you know target and things like that. Um I I I've been in this for too long to dismiss everything immediately. But at the same time, you know, you know the old saying, my my brain is not so open that everything falls out. I I want to apply rational scientific um thinking as does as Brush said. He was very measured when asked about this.

[00:48:32]>> Speaking of measured and rational, I've hosted multiple folks over the years from SCU, including Rich Hoffman, Kevin Kuth, and others. Rich in his wonderful bow tie has come along on the podcast on a few occasions and now yourselves. So that the conference is being hosted in Toronto, Canada July 24th to 26 this year. Um can you just talk about SCU what it is and what people can expect from the event?

[00:49:02]>> Yes, I've been many times. Absolutely.

[00:49:04]So yeah, as you said, it's being held July 24th, 26 um at the Marriott Eaton Center in Toronto um in Canada and the conference is going to be bringing together international and interdisciplinary scientists also non-scientists, you know, policy experts, people like um Christopher Melon, who's a former US defense intelligence official. He's going to deliver the keynote address. But what's really great, my favorite part of the conference is when you actually when you have academics and PhD scientists who are engaged and talk about their work from the STEM and hard science uh perspective looking at datadriven analysis. So um I've been to several of these now both in person in Huntsville, Alabama and um the original venue as well as online you know during the pandemic and all that. And the conference is hybrid. Um I believe so people can also attend remotely if they have to. But it is nice. I I've met great people there. It's really to me the most important thing about the conference is people. I've met you know big names in UAP. Some of them, you know, I'm not uh uh a huge, you know, recognizable people. In other cases, people never never heard of before, but that, you know, that did incredible discoveries like I would meet, you know, a neuroscientist who discovered migraines, you know, like just people from all these different disciplines who are interested in the topic and bringing their, like I said earlier, general skill sets. So there are plenty of non-academics like Rich Hoffman, Robert Powell, but I love the fact that they have attracted PhDs. So I think I believe the latest number and I heard from Robert Powell, something like a third of SU membership holds advanced degrees in their field, you know, PhD, masters or similar. And I I I love interacting with those people.

[00:50:52]Um, and there's always always the enthusiasts also there, you know, in the audience who are non-scientists. And I do my best to not, you know, laugh at questions that, you know, maybe use the word dimension wrong or something, but I try to be um, uh, uh, kind and answer any questions I get during my talks. So, yeah, I've given many talks there. Kevin has given talks there. This time, unfortunately, I only have a short talk, 15 minutes. That's because, you know, and I understand this, they need to bring in diversity of speakers. It's not just me always talking or Kevin was talking, but I did warn Robert and I said, "You know what? In my talk, I'm just going to have a bunch of bullet points and I'm going to say, look, this is a three-hour talk that I'm crunching out at 15 minutes so you can read up on all the stuff that's been happening at University of Albany here, here, you here, here, and there." You know, I'll link to like YouTube videos of my previous SU talks and things like that.

[00:51:41]But really the the fact that I had to get scrunched out in 15 minutes points to the fact that this is a growing interest globally, right? That they're getting too many speakers of names and people can check that outu.org.

[00:51:58]The link will be in the description.

[00:51:59]Matthew, it' be great to get you back on because like you say, you're a very busy guy. Not only have you got the conference coming up, you have a day job. You have the side aspect of this working in the UFO field. you've got LZ exams and just life in general still has to be lived somewhere in amongst that too. So, um I'll let you go and watch Unsolved Mysteries and NextG reruns for the rest of the day if you want to take some time off, but thank you so much.

[00:52:22]And is there anything you want to leave people with as a message?

[00:52:28]I wish Well, oh yeah, I can't take any time off. I worked like 3 400% time. That's not an exaggeration, is bad because I have too many projects, but I don't know which one to cancel or ramp down on. I can't I can't remove my mainstream scientific effort because then no one's going to take me seriously on UAP if I don't have at least one mainstream effort where I'm publishing papers. So, it's really hard finding time for everything. Um, so I guess the thing I want to leave with viewers is to just not be offended if you send me some email with your UFO video and I don't respond. I I can't. We already have organizations like SEO that exists, you know, that can analyze, you know, photos, videos of historical cases.

[00:53:11]They've been doing a great job on publishing on their website.

[00:53:14]Unfortunately, I don't have time and my colleagues, we we are focused on collecting new data. We don't have time.

[00:53:20]So, I I don't want anyone to be offended when they look up my email and they send me their great UFO video and I'm like, but but I don't have time to do your story justice. there already exists other organizations other than other than UPX focus on historical data. So we need to work together and because we're also overworked we just need to respect the fact that different organizations different people have different expertise and different scopes. So let's just be you know kind to each other and there's you know also so much toxicity in this field. That's why earlier, even though I disbelieve Bazar's story, I was trying to be at least polite because I really think there's too much anger and hatred flying around right now and in homing them attacks and this is not helpful to anyone, right? We should use reason and rational arguments to get at the truth. That's how science is going to progress. That's how we're going to answer the UFO question. It's not going to be saying, "Oh, my favorite person is, you know, Corbell or my favorite person is Christopher Mel."

[00:54:19]it. That's not how we're going to move forward is picking favorite people that we like hearing talk. That That's not how I always like to give the guest the last word. So, I'll cut it off point so people will hear the outro sting. Um, if you let me just hit end recording.