Initial results from the first field expedition of UAPx to study unidentified anomalous phenomena
Matthew Szydagis · Kevin H. Knuth · Benjamin Kugielsky · Cecilia Levy
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In one page
In July 2021 physicists from the University at Albany joined the UAPx group for a week of instrumented observing at Avalon on Catalina Island. Matthew Szydagis, Kevin Knuth, Benjamin Kugielsky and Cecilia Levy report exactly what the equipment recorded and exactly what it could and could not settle. They ran visible-light and infrared cameras plus radiation detectors, and collected about an hour of triggered visible and night-vision video, more than 600 hours of continuous far-infrared video, and 55 hours of radiation data. Most of the odd things they caught were identified. One was not: at about four in the morning on 16 July a diffuse dark spot appeared in one camera, with white dots emerging from it, at nearly the same moment as the highest-energy particle event of the whole trip. They list ten ordinary explanations, show that a second camera would have eliminated half of them, and turn the experience into a standard the field can use: two of every sensor, three sigma for an ambiguity, five for an anomaly.
Why it matters hereChapter 1 is about what counts as evidence, and this is the paper that puts a number on it for this subject — the particle-physics thresholds, the sensor redundancy, the control sites; chapters 8, 9 and 11 need field data of exactly this kind, taken by instruments rather than witnesses, before any claim about how these objects move or what they emit can be made to stand.
What it claims
01The July 2021 expedition deployed both visible-light and infrared cameras together with sensors for non-electromagnetic emissions, and returned approximately one hour of triggered visible and night-vision video, more than 600 hours of untriggered far-infrared video, and 55 hours of background radiation measurement. A pixel-subtraction method, augmented by other simple methods, provided the initial identification of objects crossing the cameras’ fields of view.Abstract; Section 3, Instrumentation and Equipment List
Published and peer-reviewed02The primary remaining ambiguity is a diffuse dark spot with no well-defined edge that appeared in the visible and near-infrared camera at 3:57 in the morning Pacific time on Friday 16 July 2021, with white dots emerging from it during a camera slew and a new white dot appearing between two frames at 3:59:24, possibly coincident with the highest-energy ionizing-radiation event recorded on the trip. It has so far resisted prosaic explanation.Abstract; Section 5.1, timeline for 16 July 2021; Figure 5
Published and peer-reviewed03The authors evaluate ten ordinary explanations for that event — among them a fall-streak hole in cloud, a star field or gull flock seen through a hole, an evaporating water drop, a fly on the dome, a cosmic-ray shower lighting up camera pixels, meteor break-up, camera noise, dynamic level resetting, nearby military testing, and city lights reflected in the dome. A correlation map suggests the dark spot itself behaved like the cloud cover and so is likely atmospheric, but on that reading the white dots remain unexplained.Section 5.1, the numbered list of ten null hypotheses; Figure 6
Published and peer-reviewed04In 205,920 seconds of Cosmic Watch livetime with 89,220 individual detections, most high-rate excursions matched increased solar activity that week as recorded by instruments on the SOHO and GOES spacecraft, while at least four single-interaction high-energy events stood out against a control data set — two at 43 megaelectronvolts and two at 40 megaelectronvolts.Section 5.2, Radiation: Counts, Energies, and Systematic Uncertainties; Figure 10
Published and peer-reviewed05The authors state the outcome plainly: with one possible exception the ambiguous observations proved identifiable, none can at this point be classified as a true anomaly, and the results are best labelled null. They count as the expedition’s real successes the stress-testing of equipment in the field and new infrared analysis software fusing human quality assurance with interpretable machine learning.Section 7, Conclusion
Published and peer-reviewed06What to watch: the standard they propose for the field. Use at least two of each sensor type and two or more distinct sensor types, treat a coincidence between two or more detectors at three standard deviations as an ambiguity requiring further study and reserve the word anomaly for five standard deviations, define significance against a stated null hypothesis of accidental coincidence, and add separated sub-sites, redundant communications, periodic clock synchronisation, measured instrument positions and angles, target-rich and target-poor control areas, and analog instruments such as an electroscope alongside the digital ones. The authors say replicable non-null results will take years.Section 6, Discussion; Section 8, Future Work
Designed, not yet built
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paerosci.2025.101099The 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. The authors’ preprint, arXiv:2312.00558v4 (28 June 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 in full on 2026-09-08; it is the version submitted to Elsevier and its section numbering matches the published article, Progress in Aerospace Sciences, volume 156, article 101099, June 2025.
How to cite it
Matthew Szydagis, Kevin H. Knuth, Benjamin Kugielsky, Cecilia Levy (2025) Initial results from the first field expedition of UAPx to study unidentified anomalous phenomena. doi:10.1016/j.paerosci.2025.101099
Where it sits in the curriculum
The evidence ladderInertial mass reduction and transmedium craftPlasmoids, charge clusters and the orbsGravity control and superconductors