Guest:

Matthew Szydagiz is a professor of astrophysics at the university of Albany, a founding member of UAPx, a regular on the History Channel's *The Proof is Out There*, and a member of SCU.

Topics:

- Thinking through the most common objections to serious UAP research.

- UAPx's first research expedition to Catalina Island, where they attempt to observe UAP.

- The technologies and methods UAPx employs, and how they're refining their work going forward.

- Whether the search for dark matter was doomed from the start.

- Whether the ET hypothesis is the most plausible explanation for UAP.

- Which works of science fiction are best at thinking about the anomalous, and the future of humanity.

Links:

- Matthew Szydagis' faculty profile at University of Albany: https://www.albany.edu/physics/faculty/matthew-szydagis

- Matthew's profile on UAPx: https://www.uapexpedition.org/drmatthewszydagis

- Matthew's work at Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Matthew-Szydagis

Guest Info:

Bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff has spent nearly two decades covering politics, technology, and national security, and is now recognized as one of the nation’s most prolific and wide-ranging journalists and historians. His award-winning work—including nine books on topics ranging from presidential campaigns, Watergate, 9/11, and cybersecurity, to D-Day and the U.S. government’s Cold War Doomsday plans, as well as dozens of magazine articles, essays, podcasts, and documentaries—uses history to explain the story of today, illuminating where we’ve been as a country and where we’re headed as a world.

Topics:

• How do you decide when to trust government claims about the UAP subject when they admit they’ve lied to the public about it in the past?

• What are the most plausible first-contact scenarios?

• Is it plausible that a reverse-engineering program could be hidden within the government for decades without detection until now?

• Is there a middle path between total skeptics and total believers in the UAP phenomenon?

Links:

• Garrett’s Website: https://www.garrettgraff.com/
• Follow Garrett on X: https://x.com/vermontgmg
• His book UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here–and Out There: https://shorturl.at/V8fUF

Guest Info:

- Doug is Deputy Chief Scientist of The Acquisition Innovation Research Center. Early in his career, he created the very first aerogel used by NASA. Doug is a member of SCU.

Topics:

- What tech systems do we need to do a better job sorting mundane UAP from genuinely anomalous ones?

- Doug walks us through the steps and tools used to definitively identify a UAP as a party balloon.

- He talks about his project of purchasing and studying anomalies at a piece of land near Skinwalker Ranch.

- We argue over whether studying UAP is like studying dark matter, and whether dark matter is even “real”. (pt 2)

Links:

- Doug Buettner’s publications on ResearchGate.