Matthew Szydagis

UAlbany dark-matter physicist who led the peer-reviewed paper on UAPx's 2021 field expedition and joined the UAP Science Advisory Council for instrumentation.

Current role: Associate Professor of Physics, University at Albany (SUNY); member of UAlbany Project X (UAPx); member of the UAP Science Advisory Council (instrumentation and data collection)

Former roles:

Postdoctoral researcher, University of California, Davis (2010–2014)

Background

Matthew Szydagis is an associate professor of physics at the University at Albany, SUNY. He took his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2010 and was a postdoc at UC Davis until 2014. His main field is the direct search for dark matter with the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment in South Dakota, and in 2011 he created NEST, a widely used simulation package for noble-element detectors. Alongside Kevin Knuth and Cecilia Levy he applied the same instrumentation habits to UAP, first through the non-profit UAPx and, from November 2025, through UAlbany Project X, an academic programme endowed by businessman Tony Gorman. In June 2026 Avi Loeb named him to the UAP Science Advisory Council for instrumentation and data collection, as reported by DefenseScoop. The council is advisory only: it works from unclassified data, its members hold no clearances, and it has no published charter or budget.

On the record

2026-07 – SCU 9th Annual Conference, Toronto (24–26 July) – talk "UAPx Reborn Within the Academy". SCU programme
2026-06-13 – named to the UAP Science Advisory Council (instrumentation and data collection). DefenseScoop · Loeb roster on X
2025-12-02 – The Debrief – on the endowed relaunch: "UAPx is a phoenix being reborn" and "We no longer have to just work on this for free in our volunteer time". The Debrief
2025-11-05 – UAlbany – named as part of the physics team receiving Tony Gorman's endowment for UAlbany Project X. UAlbany
2025-06-04 – UAlbany release on the journal papers – "it's critical that future study of UAPs follows a rigorous, repeatable method" and "we did not find evidence indicating that UAP have anything to do with non-human intelligence". UAlbany
2025-06-02 – Progress in Aerospace Sciences 156, 101099 (preprint December 2023) – lead author, with Knuth, Kugielsky and Levy, of "Initial Results From the First Field Expedition of UAPx to Study Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena", covering a week in July 2021 around Avalon, Catalina Island. Most ambiguous events were resolved. One dark spot in the visible/near-IR camera around 4am on 16 July was "possibly coincident with ionizing radiation that has so far resisted prosaic explanation." The paper proposes 3 to 5 sigma criteria for future UAP claims. arXiv
2025-01-27 – arXiv, later Progress in Aerospace Sciences – co-author on the Knuth-led review "The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP)". arXiv

Timeline of involvement

2021-07 – UAPx field expedition, Catalina Island and Laguna Beach, California
2023-12-01 – expedition results posted to arXiv
2025-06-02 – paper published in a Progress in Aerospace Sciences special edition
2025-11-05 – UAlbany Project X launched with the Gorman endowment
2026-06-13 – named to the UAP Science Advisory Council
2026-07 – presents "UAPx Reborn Within the Academy" at the SCU conference in Toronto

Relevant links

Part of the Key People in Disclosure series. Verified 2026-10-10. Spotted an error? Reach out.