Charles Buhler is an electrostatics scientist associated with NASA's Kennedy Space Center and the co-founder and chief executive of Exodus Propulsion Technologies, a Florida startup that says it has measured propellantless thrust produced by electric fields. Because such a result would conflict with conservation of momentum, his claims have drawn skepticism from physicists and enthusiasm from UAP media, where hosts present his work as a possible clue to how anomalous craft move.

At Kennedy, Buhler handled electrostatic-discharge problems for the Space Shuttle, International Space Station, and Hubble programs and worked on lunar dust; The Debrief credits him with helping establish the center's Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory, and a 2025 NASA technical paper still lists his Kennedy affiliation. Podcast hosts often call him NASA's lead electrostatics scientist, a title no official NASA source confirms, and some outlets describe him as a former NASA employee. Buhler has said Exodus is privately owned and not affiliated with NASA or the federal government.

Exodus, based in Merritt Island with co-founder Andrew Aurigema, went public at the Alternative Propulsion Energy Conference in 2024. Buhler said devices tested from 2016 produced thrust rising from about a hundred-thousandth to a ten-thousandth of their weight, and the company later spoke of reaching one g for its thrust-producing surface. In a March 2026 interview with Jesse Michels, he described nearly 2,000 vacuum-chamber test variations, said the force persisted after power was cut, and argued the work vindicates the electrogravitics of Thomas Townsend Brown. The company has said it plans an orbital test on a small satellite.

No peer-reviewed paper, public dataset, or published independent replication has appeared. Physicists quoted in coverage point to the conflict with momentum conservation and to artifacts such as air currents and heating, which undid earlier claims for devices like the EmDrive; Buhler himself has said the real validation would be making the device move in space. His UAP profile grew in 2026 when Michels introduced him to Bob Lazar, and when he told podcaster Danny Jones that the Navy's Tic Tac object was far ahead of human technology and described glowing orbs that he says left a Florida beach after he mentally asked them to go, an account without records or other witnesses.

Buhler's significance is as a bridge figure: a scientist with real spaceflight-engineering credentials whose unconfirmed propulsion claims give the UAP community a plausible-sounding mechanism. Whether that bridge holds depends on independent testing or a flight demonstration, neither of which had been reported by October 2026.