Peter Reali is Project Development Director for the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies and a founding member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' UAP research group. His published work includes forensic analyses of controversial cases—including the "Rubber Duck" UAP video, where he applied engineering principles to evaluate what the footage actually shows versus what people claimed it showed. His research papers tackle questions like how to build optimal electromagnetic signature detection systems and what we can actually determine about flight characteristics from existing sensor data.

Peter calls himself a "nuts-and-bolts" researcher—not in the sense of dismissing anything that challenges conventional physics, but in insisting on methodological discipline. Start with what the instruments recorded. Work outward from there.

We talk about what that approach means in practice: how he evaluates claims about recovered craft, alleged abductions, and theories ranging from extraterrestrial origin to interdimensional beings to something stranger. We discuss the Rubber Duck analysis and other cases that have withstood his scrutiny, what $10 million in research funding could actually accomplish, and why the hardest part of UAP research might not be the physics—it might be convincing the scientific establishment that the question is worth asking.