Dead Cows, Aliens, & Ghosts: A Former NASA Physicist Connects Them All

Today on Keating's Razor, and I'll just acknowledge right up front for a series called Keating's Razor, it might be a little too appropriate. Almost as if it's a suspicious coincidence that we're opening a Keating's Razor video with a story about surgical precision allegedly being applied to cattle in 1980s Montana. I didn't plan it that way. The universe did. So let's get to it. Where's the beef? When people are abducted by gray aliens, there were 60% of the people reported around the world that they were given babies to hold. Why would anyone report that? They may have a mindset, Earth is their planet, right? And we happen to live here. I don't think anybody is ready for this really. Today's claim, Kevin Knuth, a working physicist, a former NASA scientist, a member of the physics community I respect. He believes aliens are very probably in our own solar system. He's written a paper about the so-called Tic Tac event, and he's done the math on the Nimitz encounter. And there was a cattle mutilation in Bozeman on a ranch. That night there were 100 phone calls to the sheriff's office about UFOs, and then you have this cattle mutilation where there were two cows that were killed and surgically manipulated. It was very bizarre. He traces all of it, the whole arc of his research, back to a story about cattle mutilations in Montana that happened in 1988. And he told it all to my friend Mayim Bialik recently. And here's what most people missed about that interview. Mayim, throughout the interview, was running the exact same methodology I'm about to apply. So this isn't going to be a Brian versus Kevin. This is going to be about two scientists looking for truth using one set of inference. Does it make the Keating's razor cut? Let's find out. Every claim gets a close shave. Some survive. Most don't make the cut. Before I slice and dice anything, I'm going to tell you what's not weak about Kevin's case. Because a lot of people who rolled their eyes at UAP research haven't actually heard the steel version of it. Kevin is not the caricature of some armchair physicist. He's a tenured professor of physics, a decorated educator at the University of Albany, the State University of New York, my ancestral homeland. He spent years at NASA Ames Research Center. He publishes about exoplanets in top astrophysics journals like the Astrophysical Journal. He teaches Bayesian inference and mathematical physics. And he's worked on exoplanet detection, actual exosolar planets found by actual telescopes in actual peer-reviewed venues. This is a man who's a real scientist with a real track record, real peer-reviewed publications, and you should set that down as a fact before we go any further. Kevin's argument on the UAP question runs like this. Claim 1. There are sightings clustered around nuclear sites going back to the 1940s, before nuclear bombs were even loaded. Claim 2. The speeds and accelerations reported in some of the encounters with unidentified aerial phenomena, including encounters with multiple instruments, multiple platforms like boats and aircraft with trained observers are extraordinary. I have friends who work up who are in the Air Force who work up at Malmstrom Air Force Base in northern Montana and they have problems there with UFOs flying over the nuclear missile sites and shutting down our nuclear missiles. He estimated the Nimitz tic-tac physics himself and the numbers do not look like weather balloons, swamp gas, or the planet Venus. Claim 3. Cross-cultural patterns reported in abductions shows up from Nepal to Congo to Chicago in cases from before the internet even existed. When people are abducted by gray aliens, 60% of the people reported around the world that they were given babies to hold so they would have some medical tests done, some things medically done to them, and then before they were sent back home they were given babies to hold. And I was like, wait, why would anyone report that? That's bizarre. And so that was one of the surprising things. But it turns out it's 60% of the cases from Nepal to Congo to Chicago. It's again something, and these are old cases, so these are things that you wouldn't expect. And lastly, when you irradiate alleged crash debris with neutrons in a lab, sometimes you get something extraordinary. Something genuinely strange. And Kevin himself, in his own words, when Mayim asked him about it, an experience he had, he said, I don't say that because I don't know. And when Mayim pressed him about a personal experience he had, he was careful to relate the fact that it was his own personal experience, not a documented scientific fact in a laboratory. He said, I don't say that because I don't know what the hell a ghost really is. Are you comfortable with saying I'm a physicist and I saw a ghost? I don't say that because I don't know what the hell a ghost is. I can't really say it was a ghost. That's a careful man. A true scientist. He's not a true believer. He's a true scientist. He doesn't say what it is. He says something happened. This is a real physicist with real data doing the real work, being careful with his language. But not overly careful. But we have to be careful too. And with Keating's razor, it turns out that Mayim did some of the hard slicing for us already. The subject today is something that's near and dear to every animal lover on earth. It takes us back to 1988. Kevin Knuth had been at Bozeman, Montana in graduate school for one whole week. All of a sudden, two cows are found mutilated in a field outside town, surgical looking incisions, organs removed, no tracks, no blood. Now, cattle country takes these things seriously. And within days, the local sheriff's office logs roughly 100 phone calls from people about UFOs. A senior physics professor in Kevin's own department wanders out of his laboratory, makes a comment connecting the cattle to the wave of UFO reports near Malmstrom Air Force Base, the missile silo shutdowns, the lights over the launch facilities, all of it. That comment becomes a running joke in the physics department. For many people, it stays a joke. But 27 years later, Kevin watches a press conference by Robert Hastings. Now, Hastings is a journalist who spent decades documenting Air Force veterans testimonials about strange sightings, including UFOs at nuclear sites. And Kevin realizes the joke back then wasn't a joke. The professor in 1988 had been telling him something that he was too young, or perhaps unwilling to hear. That moment, that retroactive realization, is the moment Kevin's research pivoted on a dime. From there, he writes the Tic Tac paper. From there, he starts thinking about UFOs and UAPs as serious physics questions. And here's the first cut in Keating's razor. What Kevin had in 1988 was a story. What he had in 2015 was a second story that resembled the first. That's so far not evidence, but that's a pattern. And pattern recognition is, ironically, something that Kevin himself recognizes. He acknowledged this on Mayim's show, that humans are wired to find patterns, even when no such underlying causation exists. Humans like to find patterns, and we are wired to recognize patterns. And sometimes that means we will create patterns where they don't exist. And when we're talking about this kind of data, it's very tempting to piece it together into a pattern that points to there are aliens. He said it, and Mayim and I agree with him. But I want to apply it to his own experience, and see where it takes us. Now I want to take just a minute to tell you what this series is. Because if you're new here on my channel, you've just watched the first four minutes of a series I'm calling Keating's Razor. It's going to be a new, continuing series on this channel. So I owe you a quick explanation of what you've gotten yourself into. On every episode of Keating's Razor, a claim will get a close shave. Some will survive, but most don't. But all get a fair hearing. We'll approach it scientifically. We'll use evidence, data. We'll test hypotheses. We'll use induction, deduction, and even a little abduction. We'll give a green light if the claim holds up, yellow if it's wounded but not dead, and red if it got sliced through and didn't survive the cut. Today's claim, you can probably guess where I'm going, but the verdict isn't in at this point. The work to get to the verdict is the point. That's what the Keating Razor is. Now here's what this is not. I'm not interested in dunking on people, or participating in crank-to-crank warfare. There's plenty of YouTubers who will spend a full day or week of their lives explaining why someone's stupid, or doesn't deserve to be listened to, or is a grifter, or is a fool, and only they should be listened to. God bless them. That's not what I'm here for. Keating's Razor is for serious people interested in serious science. Working scientists, but curious laypeople. Credentialed researchers, and people with a passion for understanding more and wanting to go deeper, even if they didn't have scientific training in their past. Kevin's not like that. He's a NASA scientist. He's a professor. He's an educator. Future episodes will look at people whose work I've studied for a long time. Again, targets, or dunking, or poking fun. That's easy to do because they put themselves out there. Now sometimes it's unavoidable. I'm going to disagree with certain claims, and these people that I disagree with are often very smart themselves. They deserve a steel man before they get the cutting verdict. That's the rule of the show. Steel man first, cut with steel second. Verdict comes last. We try again next time. We often tell our students that all questions are good questions, but that's not always true. In science, not all intentions are good intentions. Not all scientists are trustworthy, and the ones who still get things wrong are the ones sometimes that get the most attention. The Razor is the tool that I use to figure out which is which. Subscribe and you'll catch every one of these cliches. Okay, now back to the cattle mutilation. But that's also selection bias, right? Because if they were to say, we'd like you to report alien sightings near dairy farms, you know, I can't go back in time, at least not currently, and say, well, if we had been looking at dairy farms, you know, maybe, and again, I'm devil's advocate here, maybe people who think that they're seeing UFOs will see them anywhere you tell them to look. That's very possible. Yeah, that right there. That's a scientist instinct, fully intact. Mine is not in the lab anymore, but it's impossible to take the lab out of the scientist. She studied neuroscience and has a PhD from UCLA. She caught the selection bias before Kevin could even finish his thought. And she pushed it even further than I would have into the priming question. What do witnesses do when you tell them where to look? That's neuroscience, not astrophysics. It's her methodology being applied to UAP data in real time. Kevin nodded, he kind of had to because she had him dead to right. You don't get a PhD in neuroscience and interview some of the brightest people on the planet and forget how to ask whether a correlation is truly a causation. Mayim asked it, Kevin answered it, but his answer didn't survive the question. And to give him his due, he recognized it. Now, for my atheist friends like past guest Richard Dawkins, you've heard of God of the Gaps. It's an old theological problem. Every time science explains some unexplained phenomenon, the apologist retreats. Lightning isn't divine wrath, it's electricity maybe interacting with cosmic rays in the upper atmosphere. Disease isn't from sin, it's from microbes. Mental illness isn't possession or witchcraft, it's in neurochemistry. Each gap closes and the deity has to relocate to a smaller and smaller region. A tinier and tinier gap. I want to introduce a parallel. Aliens of the gaps. Same move, different ceiling. Every time we encounter something we cannot immediately explain, an unusual sensor anomaly, a strange movement caught on camera, a coincidence and correlation between sightings of eyewitness testimonials, weird patterns around sensitive sites, cultural patterns that appear around the globe. The inference jumps not to we don't know yet, not to let's design a probing experiment that we could falsify, but rather to therefore non-human intelligence exists. And that non-human intelligence is visiting us, interacting with us. Now, the problem isn't that aliens are impossible. Aliens are real or they aren't. That's an empirical question, one we can approach with the tools of epistemology. But aliens as the answer to every unexplained pattern in your data set? Well, that's not necessarily science. That's apologetics with a flying saucer. So let's apply this to Kevin's specific cases. Let's go back to the Malmstrom Air Force Base shutdowns. Kevin himself acknowledges that guidance malfunction in 1960s nuclear control systems is perhaps a defensible explanation. Soviet spoofing using electronic warfare is another. Aliens is a third hypothesis. Now, that's just three. Three hypotheses. The third one is the one that the data supports least. The 60% cross-cultural pattern in abduction reports, the babies, the medical procedures, the gray figures, those are cultural impressions that transmit via film, via comics, via the internet, etc. There's a whole communion template that Whitley Strieber published in 1987. I remember that. That's a hypothesis. Sleep paralysis, universals across human neurology, that's also a hypothesis. It's generally shared encounter with non-human intelligence. That's another hypothesis. Again, three options. Now, to his credit, Kevin admits he initially didn't want to think of the least probable alien abduction phenomena as being the real explanation. But then he encountered data, and he updated, however, towards the rarest of the three available hypotheses. Now, that's exactly the move that the Keating's razor is designed to catch. And the materials work? Matthew Zygdagas, a serious experimental physicist, also at Kevin's institution, University of Albany, has been running the actual neuron activation analysis, neutron activation analysis, on alleged crash debris. And Kevin, to his enormous credit, quoted Zygdagas directly on Mayim's show. So Zygdagas says, I have analyzed more earth dirt than I ever would have imagined. Not strange material, earth dirt. That's the most important sentence in the entire interview. Just quote Matthew here. One day I asked him how it was going and what he's found, and he goes, I have analyzed more earth dirt than I would have ever imagined, basically. And that's one of the problems we're finding here. You know, the UFO community is thrilled that we scientists are involved, but in a lot of ways, we ruin everything. We ruin all the fun. And because we find out that most of these things are not that interesting. And so most of these material he's analyzed, it's not interesting, and clearly not alien. The honest result of years of material science research, the irradiation, the probing, the sensing, is that the materials are not exotic. That should update Kevin to the downward position, but it doesn't appear to. So they were actually moving military equipment around to get UFOs to come. And that would typically happen within 24 hours. So light travels 186,000 miles a second. That's a self-undermining trick, and Mayim walked Kevin right into it. But gently. She didn't argue even against the alien hypothesis. She argued you can't have it both ways. Either the constraint applies and the speeds are impossible, or the speeds are possible and the constraint doesn't always apply. That's not skepticism. That's basic logic. And again, she did it without raising her temper or voice. With humor, she even made a joke about the aliens being hangry. We can all relate to that. Or maybe they were fighting with their alien wives over which direction to turn. But then Mayim asked a killer question. So your solution to my question is they live here. They have to live within one light day of this, of Earth. What's a light day? So that basically puts them in our solar system somewhere. So they have to be somewhere in our solar system and very possibly here on Earth already. The Soviets, when trying to study some of these objects, would make military maneuvers, especially naval maneuvers. So they would perform these large naval maneuvers that would typically just confuse the United States. But what the Soviets were doing is they would make this large naval maneuver and then UFOs would show up and they would study them. So they were actually moving military equipment around to get UFOs to come. And that would typically happen within 24 hours. So light travels 186,000 miles a second. So for a UFO to get here in 24 hours, the light would have had to travel out information some distance and then they have to travel back. If we're talking about us communicating with aliens and them receiving information enough for them to act on it and then show up, why on Earth do they have to follow our information timescale of how bits and quanta travel through the universe? This is exactly how you should run an interview. And I take notes whenever mine does one of these tour de force interviews. After making the joke about hangry aliens, she asked the question that broke the entire light day argument. That's not platforming. That's interviewing. She takes her guests seriously and with respect, even if she might disagree with them. And even if she agrees with them, she'll push back where necessary. So where does all this leave me? Honest concession first. I don't know that aliens are in here. Nobody does. I'm a cosmologist. I spent my entire career looking at the sky for signals from outer space. And in theory, I should be one of the first people to know if there were a credible signal of alien visitation using non-human technology in our very backyard. If we can sense the wispy signals of the Big Bang that happened 45 billion light years away, we can certainly detect things in our atmosphere on Earth. I'd be the first person to shout out hallelujah. And I know that the inference structure that Kevin uses is the same inference structure used by every gap-filling explanation in the history of theology and apologetics. The razor doesn't cut Kevin. The razor is going to cut the inference move. There's a difference. Now, in her long conversation with Kevin, Mayim caught the inference move many, many times. She caught the selection bias. She caught the light speed contradiction. She caught the night-day anomalies. She pushed Kevin on the hallucination question. She drew the hard line between banal pattern fallacy and the meaningful phenomenon of pattern detection. Every one of those is a razor in motion. She didn't call it that, but that's what she was doing. And here's the part most people missed. After the newsletter, Mayim, in her substack newsletter, told her audience about it. And she didn't write it as a gotcha or the way that a publicist would or an alien would. Promoting the episode, hyping it up, promoting the guest, and hyping the guest up. Maybe I would do that. But she wrote it as a researcher. And she was candid. She asked her substack readers, and I'm paraphrasing, how much evidence do we actually need to have before we believe something? And then, this is the line that got me. She wondered, in writing, whether Kevin's whole perspective as a researcher might be different if he hadn't had that one experience back in 1988. That is the razor. That is exactly the cut I'm making in this episode. The first in the Keating's Razor series. Mayim got there first, in writing, on her own platform. And you should definitely subscribe to it. You'll find me there soon. The framework that I'm calling Keating's Razor is the framework that was in motion. The most honest thing that Kevin Knuth said in his hours with Mayim was about a personal experience he had. And his exact words were, I don't say that because I don't know what the hell a ghost is. He's describing an encounter that could sound paranormal. That sentence is the entire scientific method in words. In 14 words. Kevin had it. Mayim had it. The problem is, the framework didn't get applied to the Keating. Are you comfortable with saying, I'm a physicist and I saw a ghost? I don't say that because I don't know what the hell a ghost is. I can't really say it was a ghost. So the data is real. The speeds are interesting. The materials work is rigorous. The cultural patterns deserve study. Every one of those questions survives a close shave. But the inference, therefore, that non-human intelligence is responsible for all these phenomena, for cattle mutilation, for nuclear reactor shutdowns, for the strange motion from the perch of a base less than one light day outside of Earth in our solar system, that aliens operate on. But the inference that, therefore, non-human intelligence is operating from a base, from a perch within one light day of Earth in our solar system, well, that doesn't survive. Kevin Knuth is a real physicist. The scientific method survives. The data can survive. Mayim saw it. I'm here to give it a name. That's the verdict. It doesn't survive the close shave. We'll try again next time on Keating's Razor. I'm Brian Keating, the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego. And each week, we're here to never dumb down science, make it accessible, and always give you the facts on both sides. Now, one of the things that fascinates Mayim are near-death experiences. And I'm generally a skeptic of near-death experiences. But there's absolutely 100% sure, beyond any reasonable doubt, that a near-death experience led to the Nobel Prizes. And how that changed science, and how it affects you, is the subject of my video here. Subscribe so you don't miss it. And if you came from Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, you already know the rigor that we give. We just gave it a name, and you'll enjoy it. Welcome to the research. Welcome to Keating's Razor.