The new science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP)
Kevin H. Knuth · Philippe Ailleris · Hussein Ali Agrama · Eamonn Ansbro · Phyllis A. Budinger · Tejin Cai · Thibaut Canuti · Michael C. Cifone · Walter Bruce Cornet Jr. · Frédéric Courtade · Richard Dolan · Laura Domine · Luc Dini · Baptiste Friscourt · Ryan Graves · Richard F. Haines · Richard Hoffman · Hakan Kayal · Sarah Little · Garry P. Nolan · Robert Powell · Mark Rodeghier · Edoardo Russo · Peter Skafish · Erling Strand · Michael Swords · Matthew Szydagis · Gerald T. Tedesco · John J. Tedesco · Massimo Teodorani · Jacques Vallée · Michaël Vaillant · Beatriz Villarroel · Wesley A. Watters
Summary and citation · read the original at the source
In one page
Kevin Knuth of the University at Albany and thirty-three co-authors — physicists, astronomers, anthropologists, aerospace engineers, a Navy pilot, a Stanford pathologist and the veterans of several national investigations — set out the documented history of scientific work on unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena and the standards a serious study needs. They review roughly twenty government studies from 1933 onward in Scandinavia, wartime Europe, the United States, Canada, France, Russia and China, several private research programmes, and the field stations running today in Ireland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the United States. Their point is not that the phenomena are explained. It is that they can be, and have been, investigated with instruments, and that this is a global record rather than an American story. The second half is a working manual: use many kinds of sensor, separated in space, synchronised in time, with the significance thresholds particle physicists use. The authors then argue that the field is moving from case files to calibrated instrument data.
Why it matters hereChapter 1 is the site’s evidence ladder, and this is the most complete published account of what has actually been measured, by whom, and to what standard; chapters 8, 9 and 11 depend on the reported flight characteristics — lift without wings, transmedium travel, extreme acceleration — being treated as data to be collected rather than stories to be argued about.
What it claims
01The authors review approximately twenty historical government studies dating from 1933 to the present, in Scandinavia, wartime Europe, the United States, Canada, France, Russia and China, along with several historical private research studies and current scientific research efforts in Ireland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the United States. Their stated conclusion is that the common view of these phenomena as an American story is mistaken, and that they can be, and have been, scientifically investigated.Abstract; Sections 3 and 7
Published and peer-reviewed02The paper adopts the five observables identified by the United States AATIP programme as the working definition of the phenomena of interest: positive lift without flight surfaces, sudden or instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic velocity without signatures, transmedium travel, and low observability or cloaking. A sixth, biological effects on humans and animals, is sometimes noted in close-encounter cases.Section 2, What are UAP, the numbered list of observables
Published and peer-reviewed03The authors state that the majority of reports are misidentifications, that between four and forty per cent remain unidentified after careful investigation depending on the source and quality of the reports, and that hard data exist showing speeds above Mach 40 to 60 and accelerations of hundreds to thousands of times the acceleration of gravity without the corresponding sonic booms or fireballs, together with luminous power sometimes exceeding 100 megawatts. They add that such cases may require novel physics, or at least new engineering, and that more data are needed to characterise them and rule out observational error.Section 2, paragraph on the unidentified residuum
Published and peer-reviewed04The recommended methodology is the equivalent of multi-messenger astronomy: many different instrument types, spatially separated, with at least two of each sensor type and two or more distinct sensor types. The UAlbany-UAPx convention adopted here treats a coincidence between detectors at three standard deviations as an ambiguity requiring further study and reserves the word anomaly for five standard deviations, the threshold high-energy physics uses, always defined against a stated null hypothesis of accidental coincidence.Section 10, opening and quoted UAlbany-UAPx recommendation
Designed, not yet built05Precision is part of the standard: because video frame rates can reach 300 frames per second, time synchronisation better than three milliseconds is desirable, and instrument positions and orientations should be known to the order of one to ten centimetres, most easily maintained with a local positioning system. Infrared imagery is singled out because many of these objects are reported as extremely cold, sometimes near minus 50 degrees Celsius, and because temperature, spectra and polarisation together can inform the lift and propulsion mechanisms involved.Sections 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3.1
Designed, not yet built06What to watch: the authors argue that the decisive change came in 2021, when academic programmes — the Galileo Project, Würzburg’s IFEX, the UAlbany-UAPx collaboration, VASCO and ExoProbe — began moving the field away from forensic case-report work toward reliably calibrated, well-characterised and accurately synchronised instrument suites, and that only long-term, well-funded, transgenerational university research can produce the data on which a resolution could rest.Section 11, Conclusion
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paerosci.2025.101097The licence was checked on 2026-09-08 and no Creative Commons statement exists for this article: Unpaywall reports the record closed with no open location, and the Crossref record carries only Elsevier’s subscription and text-mining user licences, not an open licence. The authors’ preprint, arXiv:2502.06794v2 (30 March 2025, astro-ph.IM), is posted under the arXiv perpetual non-exclusive distribution licence, which is also not a Creative Commons licence. So no text is reproduced here. The summary, claims and locators were written from that preprint read on 2026-09-08; its section numbering matches the published article, which is Progress in Aerospace Sciences, volume 156, article 101097, June 2025.
How to cite it
Kevin H. Knuth, Philippe Ailleris, Hussein Ali Agrama, Eamonn Ansbro, Phyllis A. Budinger, Tejin Cai, Thibaut Canuti, Michael C. Cifone, Walter Bruce Cornet Jr., Frédéric Courtade, Richard Dolan, Laura Domine, Luc Dini, Baptiste Friscourt, Ryan Graves, Richard F. Haines, Richard Hoffman, Hakan Kayal, Sarah Little, Garry P. Nolan, Robert Powell, Mark Rodeghier, Edoardo Russo, Peter Skafish, Erling Strand, Michael Swords, Matthew Szydagis, Gerald T. Tedesco, John J. Tedesco, Massimo Teodorani, Jacques Vallée, Michaël Vaillant, Beatriz Villarroel, Wesley A. Watters (2025) The new science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP). doi:10.1016/j.paerosci.2025.101097
Where it sits in the curriculum
The evidence ladderInertial mass reduction and transmedium craftPlasmoids, charge clusters and the orbsGravity control and superconductors