note / May 11, 2026
Charles Buhler on force, not energy
The American Alchemy interview is strongest when it stays with the experiment: thrust claims, ion-wind controls, vacuum tests, and a theory that is still being argued over.
video sourceAmerican Alchemy: Charles Buhler interview on YouTube
Why this one matters
Charles Buhler is not presented as a random anti-gravity hobbyist. He says he leads NASA's electrostatics lab at Kennedy Space Center, while stressing that the propulsion work is not a NASA project.
That distinction matters. His authority is in electrostatics. The claim being made by Exodus is private, experimental, and not settled physics.
The interesting question is not whether the interview sounds exciting. It is whether the force survives the usual ways these experiments fool people.
The claim
Buhler says his team has seen small but repeatable thrust from electrostatic devices without expelling propellant. He talks about millinewton-scale forces, roughly 2,000 test articles or variations, and setups that can be turned, flipped, boxed, shielded, and tested in air or vacuum.
The large claim is not a finished spacecraft. It is a lab effect that, if real and scalable, could matter first for satellites, orbit maintenance, and low-gravity environments.
He is careful on one point: he does not like calling it anti-gravity. He does not claim to know that he is bending spacetime.
Why ion wind is the first fight
Any high-voltage lifter claim runs into the same objection: ionized air can create ordinary thrust. That is not exotic. It is moving air.
Buhler says the Exodus tests try to remove that explanation. He describes enclosing devices, grounding them, using Faraday cages, reversing orientations, using scales, pendulums, spinners, rotators, and doing high-vacuum tests.
One part of the interview is useful because it is boring in the right way: he keeps returning to false positives. Attraction to walls, fields leaking outside the device, field emission, charge escaping, scale artifacts. This is where the story should live.
The scale demo
The interview includes a walkthrough of a small thruster on a scale in room air. The stated voltage is about 480 volts. Buhler says the device produces about 0.1 grams of apparent weight change, corresponding to about 1 millinewton of thrust.
They then flip the device. The direction of the scale change flips too. That does not prove the physics, but it is the kind of control you would want to see first.
The stronger version is the vacuum example: a dual thruster pack in a spinner orientation, operated through Bluetooth inside a chamber, with grounded transparent walls around the device. Buhler describes physical movement in high vacuum and about 2.5 millinewtons of inferred thrust.
The unfinished part
The experimental claim is cleaner than the theory. Buhler tries to connect the effect to quantum electrodynamics, higher-order perturbation terms, scalar photons, and the fine-structure constant.
David Chester pushes back on that section. He does not dismiss the experimental work. He does warn that some of the QED language may not be right, especially around virtual photons, scalar modes, and momentum conservation.
That exchange is useful. It separates two things that often get blended together: “there may be an unexplained force in the apparatus” and “this proposed theory explains it.” The first can be interesting even if the second is not finished.
The UFO material
The interview also goes into Buhler's UFO experiences: a childhood sighting near Brewster, New York, and a later Cocoa Beach incident involving lights over the ocean that he says moved closer, split, rotated, and seemed to respond to him and his wife.
Those stories are interesting background, but they should not carry the article. The stronger material is the lab work, the controls, and the argument over what would count as a real propellantless force.
Where it gets serious
The next useful thing is not another podcast claim. It is a clean public test package: exact geometry, voltage, current, materials, shielding, chamber pressure, raw scale or displacement data, and video of the full run.
If Exodus can show the same direction change after flipping the device, in vacuum, with the power and measurement gear isolated, then the argument gets harder to wave away. If that package never appears, the story stays in the same place as a lot of exotic propulsion claims: interesting, but hard to use.