When Kevin Knuth was invited to join a professional scientific team to hunt down and study UFO’s, he didn’t even hesitate to accept the offer.

Why would he? He’s been interested in these strange unexplained phenomena for most of his life — going back to his youth when he watched “In Search Of,” with Leonard Nimoy, and back to his graduate student days when a professor of his mentioned how UFO’s had been causing air traffic issues for a nearby ICBM nuclear base.

“You don't have something stupid like that, that persists for literally 60 years straight from the 1960s to today,” Knuth says. “There is evidence these things exist and scientists should be studying them.”

Knuth used to work at NASA Ames in California studying exo-planets. He’s done a lot of work with machine learning, quantum information, quantum mechanics, and even robotics over the years. Today he is a physics professor at the University of Albany, New York.

Some of his published papers and columns have titles like “Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles” and “Are we alone? The question is worthy of serious scientific study.”

So, between his life-long interest in the cosmos and his professional experience studying them, it’s clear why Kevin Day reached out to recruit him for his new startup: UAP eXpeditions. Knuth was the perfect candidate for the job; an ideal addition to Day’s growing team of venture capitalists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, ex-military officials and scientists who are determined to find and study Unidentified Arial Phenomena — aka UAP’s (which are exactly the same thing as UFO’s).

“[Day] wanted to put together an expedition, to go look for these things and he wanted to have some scientists onboard to assist with that,” Knuth recalls. “I thought that was a very interesting idea.”

Interesting, indeed. Knuth had been invited on a quest; on a mission to study, what many believe to be alien technology (and maybe even life) here on Earth.

That’s just one theory, though. Some people think these things are from the future; others say they’re from another dimension entirely, and still others claim that they’re coming from the deep oceans, from an Atlantas-like civilization.

No one has a clue. All that’s known for certain, is that these UAP’s are real; they’ve been captured on FLIR cameras by US Navy fighter pilots. The government has admitted that these things exist and regularly interfere with their air-space. We know that there are thousands of videos of UAP’s, from around the world without any explanation about what they’re doing, how they work, where they come from, or what they are.

Which is twhat UAP eXpeditions hopes to change, according to Knuth. The venture is entirely devoted to finding these things, studying them and publishing their results for the world to see.

That’s huge. Up until now, this has been something that the government has had sole control over: our knowledge of and ability to study UAP’s (UFO’s, whatever). They’ve had secret programs going on for decades, that are exclusively meant for UAP research — and whatever they find, gets locked away in a classified folder.

But The People want answers. And now, the free-market is taking things into its own invisible hands. This private startup, UAP eXpeditions, is taking the reins of UAP research and they’re going to get some answers.

Hopefully.

A breaking levee

2019 has been a watershed year for UAP enthusiasts.

Both Bob Lazar and Commander David Fravor spoke on the Joe Rogan podcast, detailing their first-hand experiences with [alleged] extra-terrestrial technology. Millions of internet weebs pledged to storm Area 51 and things got tense. Then, the Navy conceded that the leaked FLIR videos of UAP’s were, in fact, real.

It seems as though the levee is breaking, with regards to this once-laughed-at phenomena. Whether it’s intentional or not, we’re going through what might be described as “soft disclosure” — a slow, gradual unveiling of one of the greatest mysteries of our time. Videos, photos and information is leaking through the government’s dam of secrets and spreading and people are starting to ask more serious questions. Questions like: What are these things doing here? And, why isn’t anybody actually studying them?

“It's not acceptable to have prominent scientists on TV who basically throw their hands up and say, ‘Well, that could be anything.’”  Says Knuth. “Figure out what it is! That's our job. That’s what science does.”

When an unexplained mystery presents itself, scientists should be the first to leap at the opportunity to get to the bottom of it, instead of brushing it off as woo-woo bullshit. Knuth is right: this is a legitimate mystery that deserves legitimate research. 

Fighter jets, UAP’s and grey whales

In 2004 Commander David Fravor encountered a tic-tac shaped UAP while doing Navy training exercises off the coast of San Diego.

He was directed by the USS Princeton’s radio operator, Kevin Day, to investigate a strange areal phenomenon. Fravor, along with another pilot, hopped into their F16 fighter jets and took off to go check it out.

The ensuing engagement has gone down in history as one of the strangest stories in US Naval history: The Nimitz encounter.

“When they arrived, they didn't see the UAP at first, but they did see a disturbance in the water,” Knuth recounts. The disturbance, according to Fravor, resembled a submerged 737 airliner. “Their impression was that it might be a downed aircraft.”

That’s when they noticed it: A small, white tic-tac shaped craft flying back and forth over the submerged object. Fravor descended to check it out, and the UAP, that tic-tac thing, ascended to meet him.

It’s an incredible and wild story — and it’s backed up by video footage. When Fravor finally returned to the USS Nimitz, confused and perturbed by what he’d seen, another pilot went out to go capture some FLIR camera footage of the thing.

That footage has puzzled people around the globe since it was released in 2018.

Kevin Day, the founder of UAP eXpeditions and the radio operator who sent Fravor out to investigate that strange craft, had been watching these things on the radar for a while when that incident occurred. Knuth says that Day had tracked around 100 of these things over a two-week period and described them as “migrating” south. They seemed to be moving from Catalina Island to Guadalupe Island, according to Day.

“When he said the word ‘migrate,’ that kind of resonated with me,” says Knuth. When he had worked for NASA Ames, he’d flown over the Pacific coast many times and he had likewise seen 747-shaped objects down in the water. But it wasn’t planes — it was whales. Gray whales that migrate annually, along the exact same route that these UAP’s are reportedly following; through the same patch of ocean that Fravor was flying over.

“So I thought: well, Maybe these things are actually studying whales. Maybe that's what they're doing,” says Knuth. They clearly weren’t interested in the Nimitz. They weren’t trying to engage aircraft or other ships. “So the question is: what the hell are they doing?”

Studying whales? Perhaps.

It’s just a theory, though, Knuth says. Just one hypothesis that he and the rest of the team at UAP eXpeditions plans on putting to the test when they finally hit the high seas in search of UAP’s.

UAP eXpeditions: The plan

So where does one start, when going out to hunt for UFO’s? How do you make a plan to track and study one the most elusive phenomena on the planet?

You start with satellite images, says Knuth.

“We're going to first look at and monitor those regions that we're interested in with satellites to see if indeed the UAP’s are still present,” Knuth says. “And then, if we can find them, discern where would be the best place to park our research vessel.”

Analyzing so much satellite imagery will take time, though. They’ll start this next spring, and whenever they’re done with that, they’ll enter the second phase of the study: field research.  

For that second phase, they’re planning on outfitting a research vessel with FLIR cameras, HD cameras, radar, a light bank that one of Knuth’s associates constructed (specifically to communicate with/draw the attention of the UAP’s), and a lot of other scientific tools.

And they don’t just want to find these things, they are actually going to try and attract them.

“That expedition, its purpose will basically be to obtain ground truth, to see from the ground what our satellites are actually picking up.”

It would be the first expedition of its kind (at least, from the private sector). And the data that they collect could change our perspective about our place in the universe.

“Whatever we learn is going to be published in scientific journals. We're going to do science,” Knuth says, firmly. “Hopefully we can actually collect some useful data and we can learn something from that. That would be very exciting.”