Ross Coulthart’s latest Reality Check is not another whistleblower. It is a working physicist.
Kevin Knuth, professor of physics at the University at Albany (SUNY) and a former NASA Ames research scientist, sat down with Coulthart at the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies conference in Toronto. Knuth is editor-in-chief of the journal Entropy. In 2019 that journal published his team’s peer-reviewed analysis of the 2004 Nimitz Tic-Tac – thousands of g, no sonic boom, no exhaust, no heat signature.
On the show he says AARO already had a copy of that paper two months before then-director Sean Kirkpatrick told the Senate that no such peer-reviewed work existed.
The Paper Kirkpatrick Said Wasn’t There
The paper is Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles, Entropy 21(10), 939 (2019), with co-authors Robert M. Powell and Peter A. Reali. It is still on MDPI’s site. Knuth, Powell, and Reali took public Nimitz kinematics – the object dropping from high altitude to a hover above the water, then accelerating away – and asked what accelerations those numbers imply if they are taken at face value.
They were not reconstructing a classified radar tape. They used figures already in the public Nimitz record: a descent on the order of 80,000 feet in seconds, a stop over the water, then an acceleration that would crush a human crew in any aircraft we fly. The paper’s conclusion is that those numbers, if accurate, sit far outside known propulsion.
The answer is not a drone. It is accelerations in the thousands of g, with no boom, no plume, and no infrared bloom of the kind a jet engine makes. That is the line Knuth walked Coulthart through at the 21-minute mark.
Kirkpatrick, while running AARO, told senators the office had not found peer-reviewed analyses demonstrating those kinds of extraordinary flight characteristics. Knuth’s account on Reality Check is that AARO had the Entropy paper in hand roughly two months before that testimony. AARO has not issued a public correction addressing Knuth’s timeline.
Malmstrom, and a Spacetime Hypothesis
The conversation then goes to Malmstrom Air Force Base in March 1967, when Echo Flight Minuteman missiles reportedly dropped off alert while witnesses described a glowing object over the site. Knuth treats that as a physics problem, not a campfire story. If a nearby craft is warping spacetime, he argues, the missile’s inertial navigation could fail without anyone having to “hack” the silo.
That is a hypothesis. Knuth presents it as a hypothesis. It is also the clip NewsNation promoted: whether Malmstrom was caused by UFOs warping space and time.
He is not a random podcaster inventing propulsion. His Albany page lists information physics, Bayesian inference, and exoplanet work. From 2001 to 2005 he was a GS-14 in NASA Ames’s Intelligent Systems Division. The Malmstrom remarks sit on top of that résumé, not instead of it.
What Else He Put on the Record
Knuth described sonar from a New Zealand Navy frigate showing an object about 800 feet across closing 2.5 kilometers in 25 seconds underwater. He said UAPx, where he is vice president for science and technology, is putting radar and radio-frequency sensors into the field in Connecticut. And he repeated a limit the UAP Science Advisory Council has already acknowledged in public: it has been told it will see unclassified material only.
Asked what he wants most, Knuth said he would like to stand inside one of these craft, and that he has spoken with people who say that is possible. He discussed NDAs and crash retrieval in the same stretch. Those last lines are testimony about conversations, not a document drop.
Coulthart also let Knuth talk about personal experiences – a childhood episode in Wisconsin, a night in Albany when he and his toddler both saw a figure at a bedroom gate, and 1988 Montana livestock cases. Those segments explain why Knuth stayed with the subject. They are not the reason to take the Entropy paper seriously. The paper is.
| Time (episode) | Topic |
|---|---|
| 2:51 | Childhood premonition, Wisconsin |
| 17:17 | Malmstrom missile shutdowns |
| 21:51 | 2019 Entropy Nimitz analysis |
| 23:26 | Kirkpatrick’s Senate testimony |
| 35:42 | UAPx sensor network |
| 40:21 | NDAs and crash retrieval |
| 42:09 | Transmedium cases and sonar |
| 52:03 | UAP Science Advisory Council |
The interview does not replace Haqq-Misra and Kopparapu’s PURSUE velocity paper, which showed the 2026 file dumps still lack range. Knuth’s 2019 work was on a different dataset: the Nimitz numbers that Navy pilots and radar operators already put in the record. One paper says the new videos cannot yield speed. The other says that if the Tic-Tac kinematics are real, the accelerations are not human-aircraft accelerations. Both can be true at once.
Sources: Ross Coulthart on X · Knuth, Powell, Reali, Entropy 2019 · University at Albany faculty page · NewsNation / Reality Check
