On UFO research as entertainment

Or, How Do You Inject Drama Into Algorithms?

Guerilla photography inside the SCU conference at Rocket City Tavern — fight da powah!

Riddle me this: if you’re on a scientific expedition and you stumble across what might be the remains of a dire wolf – not fossils, but an actual bone-in fur carcass – what’s your next move? The hulking, late Pleistocene carnivores enjoyed a 100,000-year run before succumbing to the Ice Age recession. Now here you are, looking at a suspicious mammalian cryptid hung up in a tangle of branches in a creek. What do you do?

Well, if you’re a member of Brandon Fugal’s research team on the trail of anomalies at Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, you remove the beast’s jawbone. Then you leave the rest of it in the water because the stench is so disgusting. You take the jawbone to a biologist for an informed opinion. The biologist compares its dental structure to that of a dire wolf. Quick-cut facial reactions of the biologist’s small audience give producers just what they’re looking for – Shock, Wonder, and Concern. But a dire wolf is just one possibility, the expert cautions. Let’s sample the DNA.

But anyway, yeah, to reiterate: you leave the putrefying remains – potential evidence of something that may have escaped extinction, sort of, at least until now – floating in the water. Just, yeah, leave it there. It’ll probably be OK.

We’re midway through Season 5 of History’s “The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch,” and we’ve yet to get a positive ID on the meat. Maybe they’re saving the reveal for last. But it’s the reverse of how old-school research usually works, you know, gathering enough data on the front end to pursue a hypothesis before you hang your evidence on the line. Then again, Skinwalker Ranch with its complex history of UFO and related paranormal activity isn’t your average vinegar/baking soda balloon experiment.

On the other hand, maybe the cable giant History – a joint venture between Hearst Communications and Disney’s General Entertainment Content division – really has figured out a drama-driven way to hook Joe Sixpack on science. Certainly the shot-callers with the “Skinwalker Ranch” series have enough resources — helicopter turbulence, rocket launches, big-machinery drilling – to manufacture suspense.

However, at the May 31-June 2 gathering of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies conference in Huntsville, Alabama, I wanted to talk to folks who bring a critical eye to taboo science without the constraints of cable-show contract obligations. SCU’s eclectic speaker lineup of accomplished researchers is, after all, drawing some serious attention.

A haven for the camera-shy

During SCU’s last in-person conference in 2022, then-unknown intelligence officer and future UAP whistleblower David Grusch slipped in under the radar. Following his explosive congressional testimony last summer, many attendees (me) went swiping through their photo galleries to see if Grusch was tucked away somewhere in there. This year, responding to visitors getting antsy over maybe having their anonymity blown on social media, SCU banned photos inside the Rocket City Tavern, the conference venue. Which, for total transparency advocates (me), was a buzzkill.

Nevertheless, there’s no better place to dish about cloak-and-dagger goings-on so long as it stays in Huntsville. Keynote speaker/NewsNation journo Ross Coulthart, for instance, told listeners about a special forces operator’s claims of employing an uncategorized offensive “weapon” to take out UAP in an “avaricious effort to be the first to secure an advantage with their technology.” Although he conceded he couldn’t confirm the story, the scenario made for a grim and solemn moment. He called it a “moral stain on what should be one of the greatest moments in human history – first contact.”

After getting a few more details from Coulthart over a quiet breakfast, I had to agree – if the story is true, it’s a five-star mindfucker. And I’ll be running the other way if it ever breaks.

If.

Anyway, one of the things I wanted to know, given the standards of open-source evidence championed by SCU’s published papers, is what attendees thought of how History was handling the dire wolf investigation. One tried to be polite. A few snickered. Another nearly blew his supper as he doubled over at the table. “Oh my god!” He was so animated I thought he might rip his hair out.

Begging the question: What role can or should entertainment play if it claims to promote cutting-edge science? Given its outlier status, is it reasonable to assume the UFO/UAP investigation can go full throttle on Capitol Hill without a nudge from popular culture, however formulaic its presentation? Without popularization, will peer-reviewed analyses alone be sufficient to keep the pols engaged? Can pioneering science operate within ratings-gimmick demands and retain its integrity?

Documenting crimes against knowledge

It's worth asking, because it’s hard to imagine so much of the material on SCU’s agenda fitting into the reality show model. Take, for instance, Doug Buettner, deputy chief scientist at the Acquisition Innovation Center – look it up, these guys are players.

Buettner focused on a 2022 UFO incident involving two commercial aircraft and five pilot witnesses, submitted with photographic and video evidence. A thorough investigation involving multiple sources, disciplines, geometry and star charts pointed to a Starlink satellite train. Buettner’s deconstruction, by the way, was far more detailed than anything the Pentagon’s AARO has released on its “resolved” cases. But his goal wasn’t so much to demystify an increasingly common misidentification as to advocate for a systematic model to eliminate prosaic clutter.

So: How would you sex that up to engage America’s corroding attention span? Or how would you stage spontaneous reaction shots and bass-drum sound effects for what Beatriz Villarroel brought to the table?

For the past seven years, the Swedish astronomer has been studying the “vanishing stars” phenomenon, in which bursts of nocturnal light detected by telescopes disappear when rephotographed moments later. For obvious reasons, Villarroel has zeroed in on wide-field sky surveys prior to the 1957 Sputnik revolution; so far, she and her team have identified 83 “potential candidates” for these extremely rare anomalies. The most surprising of the lot were caught on film on July 19 and 27, 1952 – the exact dates when UAP overflew Washington, D.C. The result was a firestorm of media demands for answers. The CIA responded, six months later, with a secret panel that urged a debunking campaign against eyewitnesses.

Ominously, Villaroel noted that acclaimed UFO debunker Donald Menzel, a brilliant astronomer and WWII cryptographer who went on to forge connections with America’s top intelligence agencies, was named Harvard Observatory director in October 1952. Without consulting his peers, Villaroel stated, he ordered the destruction of 550,000 of Harvard’s wide-field photos, or roughly one-third of its archives from 1952. Then he suspended the Observatory’s photo surveys from 1953-1967 in a curious decision known now as the “Menzel gap.”

How does the thankless monotony of sifting through thousands of plates for additional evidence compete with soft white blips that disappear into and pop out of a Utah mesa? Or dire wolf remains? Or any other commercial-break cliffhangers? More to the point, how do you make the science of clarifying anomalies compelling to Joe Sixpack?

Now, for the reality check . . .

In 2021, led by a couple of Navy veterans who participated in the bellwether 2004 Tic Tac Incident, a band of researchers calling themselves UAPx trucked multiple state-of-the-art sensors into southern California in hopes of writing the handbook on a UFO data acquisition project, or UFODAP. Applying a range of integrated modes, from infrared cameras to radiation detectors, UAPx triangulated its field stations around Catalina Island, long speculated as a source of the Tic Tac phenomena.

UAPx’s weeklong efforts were chronicled in the 2022 documentary, “A Tear in the Sky.” Although the doc hyped some puzzling images, researcher Matthew Szydagis and fellow SUNY-Albany physics professor Kevin Knuth tried to tone it down during their subsequent report to SCU two years ago. The verdict, they cautioned, was still out.

During this month’s conference, Szydagis was more confident. Unveiling a paper being prepped for peer review, the team reported no slam-dunk anomalies. A “fuzzy spheroid” crossing the sky, for instance, turned out to be the space station. The image had initially stumped investigators only because the ISS-tracking website hadn’t auto-switched from Standard Time to Daylight Savings. And for all of its impressive capabilities, UFODAP’s beta edition was inadequate to confirm a transient “dark spot” as a wormhole, the centerpiece of “A Tear in the Sky.”

In short, Szydagis said, any renewed effort would require an even more diverse array of sensors to probe the target area for everything from ultraviolet signatures to electromagnetism. It would require greater redundancies, greater synchronization between systems, more backup batteries, sky maps and complete satellite schedules. Yet, the project had been a success, he insisted, because it sharpened the blades for even more precise operations to come. It led to new software that can now analyze terabytes of data in “20 to 30 minutes,” versus taking “hundreds of hours.” Who knew that Doppler weather radar data could be such a valuable open-source asset?

‘We own our mistakes’

“Are we embarrassed by that?” Szydagis said as he reviewed slides of resolved images – a paraglider, a drone, a “non-uniform correction” in the camera – initially suspected of being anomalous. “No, we are proud, we own our mistakes. We look critically at our own data. Because we don’t let (skeptic) Mick West or Metabunk take care of things for us. We clean our own house.”

What was the value, then, in raising collective expectations with a documentary built on incomplete results?

“It showed how science really works,” said Szydagis after his presentation. “In real life with something like this, you fail 99 out of a hundred times. It teaches the value of patience and perseverance, which are probably in short supply right now. And it’s still great drama. Because you have team members who disagree with each other and arguing things out to get to the truth.”

What about a reality show like “Skinwalker Ranch”? The dire wolf segment is obviously just a single dot in a constellation of datapoints that include bizarre GPS readings, orb videos, bursts of transient gamma radiation, mysterious Lidar/GPR artifacts and the recovery of potentially exotic metals. Yet, there’s no formal data for establishment science to evaluate.

“I know (Skinwalker researchers) Erik (Bard) and Travis (Taylor) and they’re very careful scientists. But that’s a very different kind of show” from “A Tear in the Sky,” said Szdagis. “There’s definitely the possibility of something potentially anomalous going on there, but they can’t spend a lot of time talking about all the controls and extra procedures they’re bringing to the project – they have to keep it entertaining.

“It’s similar to watching poker on TV. They’re not gonna show the boring hands, only the exciting ones.”

Well, here’s hoping America’s programming geniuses figure out how to thread the needle between holding the audience and mangling the process. Assuming, of course, it’s not too late for that already.

Dear god, please let it be a dire wolf.