Matthew Szydagis

Background

Matthew Szydagis is an Associate Professor of Physics at the University at Albany (SUNY), specializing in experimental particle astrophysics and rare-event detection. He earned his B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2005, 2006, 2011) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Davis before joining UAlbany's faculty in 2014. His early career focused on direct detection of dark matter in underground laboratories, including work on the LZ (LUX-ZEPLIN) experiment—a multi-ton liquid-xenon detector searching for weakly interacting massive particles.

Inspired by science fiction and fundamental physics questions, Szydagis gradually shifted his research focus toward a neighboring frontier: the scientific investigation of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). He argues that instrumental, repeatable methods—not eyewitness testimony—must anchor any credible scientific approach to UAP.

Methodology and Instrumentation

Szydagis leads a team that applies experimental physics rigor to UAP observation. Rather than relying on anecdotes or single-source reports, his methodology integrates multiple independent data streams:

• Infrared imaging: Forward-looking FLIR (thermal) cameras to detect heat signatures
• Weather radar: Doppler data from the National Weather Service to track moving objects
• Radiation detection: Cosmic Watch devices to correlate charged-particle activity with visual anomalies
• AI-assisted analysis: Custom Target Analysis Protocol (C-TAP), which uses machine learning to perform pixel-by-pixel image comparison over time, flagging significant variations while filtering sensor noise
• Reference catalogs: Trigonometric calculations to identify and exclude known objects (satellites, aircraft, ISS)

This framework treats UAP detection as a signal-processing problem, similar to dark matter searches, where false positives vastly outnumber genuine signals.

Research and Impact

In June 2025, Szydagis and collaborators (including Kevin Knuth and Cecilia Levy from UAlbany, and Ben Kugielsky) published a landmark methodology paper in Progress in Aerospace Sciences, a high-impact peer-reviewed journal. The work synthesizes lessons from a 2021 field expedition in Laguna Beach, California, where the team documented and analyzed potential UAP events using their multi-instrument approach. While they successfully explained the vast majority of observations as known phenomena, one ambiguity persisted: bright white dots within a dark spot visible in multiple infrared videos—a genuinely unresolved case.

In November 2025, the University at Albany received a transformational endowment gift from aviation entrepreneur Tony Gorman to establish UAlbany Project X (UAPx), a dedicated academic center for rigorous UAP physics research. This funding represents one of the first major institutional commitments to treating UAP as a legitimate scientific domain at a research university.

Szydagis is recognized as one of the few academic experimental physicists actively pursuing UAP research with published peer-reviewed work, positioning him as a bridge between mainstream physics and the emerging legitimacy of UAP science in academic institutions.