To Go Where No One Has Gone Before: the SCU “Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena” Conference (AAPC) 2022 - Day Three (Part One of Two)

In recent days there was a minor buzz in the news, amplified for a fleeting moment on Twitter, about “mysterious lights” in the sky over San Diego, about a two-hour drive from where I live in Los Angeles. (I always get the feeling that all of the UFO action ends up being somewhere else. Oh well.) This news buzz (which I’ll get to in a moment) prompted me to reflect on a couple of things, if the reader will permit me a personal aside before we get to the main dish:

First, I haven’t been as diligent with this blog as I had been for the past two or so months, primarily because I have been busy with other projects (a larger essay on the problem of high strangeness and the paranormal as it arises in connection with the UFO phenomenon). Also, because I really hate (like, really) the Google Blogger platform and so I find myself hesitant to work with it. Google Blogger is really terrible (formatting it is a nightmare if you veer from its default settings). But it’s free. Suggestions for migration greatly appreciated!

Second, because of my involvement with a number of other projects I have going on, I realized that I dropped the ball for my review of the SCU’s AAPC 2022, a conference which I really (well, for the most part) enjoyed. So, I’d like to finish that out with a review of its final day, the day where UAPx got to detail some of their very preliminary findings (which Kevin Knuth humorously referred to as “initial preliminary”), and where John Alexander took the AAPC on a wild magical mystery tour of all things strange and uncanny. I am in this post only going to focus on UAPx because there is a lot to cover. In a subsequent post I’ll tackle the John Alexander behemoth (which came in somewhere in the ballpark of 600 slides, give or take), because it will return us to a topic of interest in the blog as a whole: the question of high strangeness and the paranormal as it relates to the UAP/UFO phenomenon (and a warning: Alexander doesn’t really explain what that connection could be, so much as he just suspects that, somehow, “consciousness” is involved in a fundamental way. Oh boy…)

But let’s get back into gear…

First, the “mysterious” San Diego sky lights: it got me thinking, as I was reviewing the UAPx session from AAPC’s Day Three, how tedious and boring actual scientific work really is. You come into your scientific work with a difficult question you want answered, or you encounter a problem that you find compelling. You want to know what’s going on. You want the truth. You want an explanation. And you want an understanding of the nature of the problem that leads to its resolution. When you freeze this moment of puzzlement, of questioning, it is actually quite complex, quite subtle. There are really two scenarios in play here, and while we might distinguish between them, they are really always mixed up.

There are those phenomena which might appear to some to be strange, but which happen in plain view of anyone. These kinds of phenomena are very rarely truly anomalous. Most of the phenomena that are so easily visible by almost anyone have already been (or can easily be) handled by the various sciences at our disposal. They may not even require a scientific investigation to uncover their origin or their causes. This situation, of course, closes down our horizon of mystery, and we might pause for a moment to reflect on this fact as a kind of unique existential circumstance that has befallen us in the “modern” era.

The “known” world has grown wide and has therefore enclosed us in a space of assured, even prearranged meaning—frequently determined by scientific or other intellectual authority. This is the very condition of modernity itself, and we might choose to interpret it as a condition of disenchantment with the world. Such is a topic of ongoing debate for those of us with a more philosophical inclination. Under this condition the world, and the things in it, generally lacks mystery. I would prefer to say that under this condition, where meaning is circumscribed by science and other intellectual authority, the world can present to us as uninteresting, banal even. Perhaps it’s this condition we reject when we insist on mystery and are overtaken by the urge to persist in the mystery of something. We want the world (things) to be interesting.

Maybe the unfortunate fact is that what mystery does remain can only be encountered within the context of a science, where nature is studied closely and with instrumentation that takes the human observer far outside of its own native territory of experience. (We should add that art is a kind of skill of the uncanny: it takes us from the domain of the familiar and launches us back into a space of mystery, of interest. Art is thus ontological as much as it is aesthetic.) In science we find a whole other domain of interesting phenomena that can be appreciated only under the special circumstances a science can establish. The bizarre rituals of animal mating, or insect communication. The intricacies of plant life. The interrelationship between the human organism and the many billions of microbes that inhabit it. Or the complexities of high-energy physics, or stellar formation. Such realms of experience are rarely accessible to us as we go about our daily lives. This puts scientists in the very odd position of being like mages with keys to unlock worlds occupying the same space and time but unobservable without special training or equipment.

UAPs, however, occupy a space of experience in between: between the public, or the “exoteric”, and the specialized or “esoteric”. The San Diego Sky Lights, first seen a couple days ago (on the night of Monday June 27^th), was a phenomenon witnessed by dozens if not hundreds of people. It was a generally accessible event, “open to the public” as it were. A simple question presents itself: what were those lights? They seemed to be out of the ordinary: first appearing as a pair, then a triplet, two pairs, then five, then a sixth one appears. Quite puzzling, eerie even. They were silent and fairly stable in the nighttime sky (although they eventually faded away).

The immediate reaction is to try to classify the phenomenon. Well, of course they appeared luminous so “lights” was a good descriptor. But that’s very general. What was it specifically that was luminous—what was the object that was giving off the light? Were the objects themselves lights—a kind of fire in the sky? What was the source, the cause of the lights? Now we are asking after the nature of the phenomenon itself, and that requires some more digging. Since no immediate answer was forthcoming, the label “UAP” or “unidentified aerial phenomenon” was soon invoked. This label of course has connotations far beyond the innocuous label ‘lights’, and the various videos uploaded to YouTube, Twitter and other social media sites banked (quite literally) on just that: these were UFO UAPs—like the spacecraft-from-another-world kind. And yet “UAP” is meant only to designate an airborne phenomenon which is simply not immediately identifiable—it’s not meant to designate alien spaceships. But that’s the connotation it has, and so right away saying “UAP” (or using the older term “UFO”) means alien spaceships … which means a lot of YouTube views. You get the picture.

Any seemingly strange aerial phenomenon should be called a “UAP”. But it shouldn’t stop at that, of course. Labeling isn’t explaining. The phenomenon requires further investigation. And you have to start with the obvious. You have to make some phone calls to local military bases, to the Coast Guard, to the police—anyone who might have the capability to light up the sky in the way these objects did. After all, these luminous objects were not all that mysterious: they didn’t seem to be performing incredible aerial acrobatics like the more classic UFO/UAP does. These faded in, and then faded out, sometimes even seeming to “rain” down and into view. They actually looked (to me at least) more like very well-contained (and not very explosive) fireworks (we’re nearing the Fourth of July—so not an unreasonable description). Their patterning was certainly odd, as they seemed to keep close formation. But other than this, not very strange at all. So, once the shock of seemingly strange, hovering lights-in-formation subsides, the most mundane or prosaic of explanations should be tested.

The obvious candidate: military-grade flares—there is after all a very active naval base down in San Diego. And this is indeed what was revealed this morning on the news: Local news agencies contacted various local officials and the it was the Coast Guard who finally confirmed that, indeed, these lights were flares being fired from naval vessels conducting a training exercise (with expired flares, a FoxNews article curiously points out) off the coast of San Diego on the night in question. Mystery solved. The UAP becomes an IAP: fully identified and explained.

This is where the story ends or should end—but not of course in actual fact, since there is always a residual of credulous “believers” insisting on a “UFO” interpretation: that these lights are not of human origin, but something far more troubling. You see the problem almost immediately if you were to ask “well, should we take the word of the Coast Guard at face value?” This is where the rabbit hole of conspiracy starts to appear: with the faintest whiff of doubt about the truthfulness of the authorities who tell us “nothing to see here!” It’s a kind of doubt that is innate, perhaps even endemic, to the American psyche. After all we are the land of QAnon…

Well, we should follow up with a query to the U.S. Navy (which I have personally done—still awaiting confirmation!), to double-check the veracity of the story. But maybe the guy (or in my case, the woman) you get on the line doesn’t have a clue about so recent an event, or doesn’t have the talking-points drawn up, or hasn’t been officially directed in what to say to the public (maybe the operation is classified to some extent?), and so what you get is some mild but suggestive dissimulation, adding fuel to the conspiracist fire. Maybe. And so on. This is just how it goes…

I do expect the story of the “mysterious” lights to end here: with a relatively mundane explanation. Most—which is to say upwards of 95 percent—of such UAP cases end like this: in prosaic identification. End of the mystery. What is more interesting, of course, is that remaining percentage of cases that can’t readily be explained. But the unfortunate circumstance which science has found itself in regarding the UAP enigma is that it always seems to get to the story after the fact. Thus, the complaint that a science of UFOs, if there is such, is one wholly confined to the analysis of reports, rather than actual phenomena at first hand (“first order” phenomena we might say)—something that J. Allen Hynek often lamented. This is the circumstance which UAPx, the UFO/UAP data-gathering group founded by former Nimitz officers Gary Voorhis and Kevin Day (both of whom have provided first-hand accounts of what they saw on their instruments during that now-famous UFO encounter) wishes to change.

On the morning of Day Three of the SCU’s AAPC, UAPx presented what amounted to a fascinating insight into what actual UAP research looks like: hours, days of tedium calibrating and fine-tuning scientific instruments, setting up cameras, interfacing equipment with computers, traveling between different observation sites, negotiating personalities, troubleshooting and problem-solving technical faults—all the mundane stuff that is an ineliminable part of the doing of science, of “investigation” … but which is washed from most accounts of the thing we call “science”. It’s messy.

What was especially challenging for UAPx is that there is little established experimental protocol to guide and govern the whole operation. They had to not only collect the data but also to establish their own methodology for its collection and for the monitoring of their instrumentation—often on the fly. They also had to develop the methods they’d later be using for the all-important post-expedition analysis of what they managed to record. There is no UAP investigative manual, no well-established research infrastructure or well-tested system to smooth out their expedition. There isn’t even a theory to guide their data-gathering efforts, which might give a clue as to exactly what they should be looking for. The problem is we don’t quite know what the hell it is we are looking for, except that there are a number of historical reports that contain suggestions and clues as to what physical characteristics might be associated with a UAP event. In other words, they were building this almost from the ground up. It’s a truly pioneering effort on their part. And we can’t forget this aspect of what they were doing as we review what it was that they presented in their two-hour talk.

Though I have almost ten pages of extra-long legal pad notes, I’ll try to summarize what I think are the most salient points. What explains my special focus on this particular presentation is simple: as valuable as all of the other intellectual work presented at the conference is (and it is immensely valuable), UAPx is devoted to what is the most essential aspect of any science of the UAP phenomenon that will be worth that name: they are bringing the science to the UAP, deliberately looking for the evidence, armed with an arsenal of instrumentation that will help establish the phenomenon with definite physical characteristics (however anomalous they may be) within a shared, democratic space of information. It will be data whose provenance, as UAPx’s Matthew Szydagis very rightly and very pointedly asserted, will be absolutely unassailable. Whatever other strangeness there may be to the phenomenon, with data such as UAPx is endeavoring to obtain, we will have an anchor in the world that science—conventional science—knows. We may end up having to depart, perhaps very radically, from that world current science knows (and with which it is comfortable), but we will be able to do so knowing exactly where the anchor has been dropped, and what the ground underneath of it looks like. If there is woo-woo, we’ll at least know it begins with something any conventional scientist must accept. It is this grounding on the side of the conventional that is the key step in moving into the liminal zone of deep scientific anomaly which is the hallmark of the true UAP.

Kevin Knuth opens the lecture with the tongue-in-cheek remark that what UAPx is about to present are “initial preliminary” results: results which in the main have yet to be filtered through the process of “eliminative induction”. This, as Prof. Knuth rightly claims, is one key method by which any science works towards reasonably likely hypotheses about the nature, origin or causes of anything. Science often tries to rule out possibilities before it puts forth any positive thesis—at least in the more evidence-driven, data-based analytical sciences like the life or medical sciences. Or—and this is perhaps a more apt analogy—like forensic science, which is essentially how the science of UAPs currently operates. In UAP science, one is in a sense trying to recreate the scene of a crime, or at least attempting to lure the perpetrator back onto the scene to record evidence that would establish not only who it was that committed the crime but also how the crime itself was perpetrated. UAP science as it is being created now—yes, being created—by teams like UAPx (and we can add the Galileo Project here) is neither an experimental nor a theoretical science. It is forensic: collecting the evidence of unquestionable provenance that can be submitted to the jury of other scientists, which would establish the phenomenon either as definitively anomalous and in what specific ways it is anomalous (as many expect it to be, if the history of UFO forensics is any indication—something Knuth briefly touches on early in the talk), or else amenable to some conventional explanation that has hitherto remained unforthcoming. Once it is clear what exactly the character of the anomaly is (should such be firmly demonstrated in the court of mainstream scientific opinion by the relevant data of unquestionable provenance), then and only then can a theoretical science of UAPs begin, for now it would be clear exactly what the set of data is with respect to which we must theorize.

Prof. Knuth informs us that UAPx had gathered over 900 hours of infrared data alone, and that this data has yet to be fully and carefully worked through. So, the purpose of the talk was to do two things, really. The first was to provide a sense of the methods being used to process and analyze the data they’d gathered over their five-day expedition in and around Catalina Island (their main operation was based just at the California coast in Laguna Beach, due east of the Island). The second was to highlight a few of the most interesting findings they discovered thus far—with the all-important caveat, again, that the more prosaic or mundane of explanations have not yet been inductively eliminated. In other words, the data they obtained during their expedition may very well still turn out to be nothing but rather ordinary phenomena that appeared anomalous: things like equipment artefact, glitches, bugs in flight or other known phenomena. In light of this, we must proceed with caution in what we take from the talk.

Before discussing the equipment UAPx had at its disposal during its five-day mission (in July of 2021), and the methods used in the post-expedition data analysis (still ongoing of course, even after a year), Prof. Knuth tackles head-on the issue of the “aliens” hypothesis, known in ufology as the ETH or “extraterrestrial hypothesis”. It is exactly what it says: the hypothesis that the anomalous aerospace phenomena being seen across the globe performing these extraordinary kinematical acrobatics (right-angle turns, shockingly fast accelerations with ostensibly destructive g-forces in the thousands, velocities in excess of Mach 50, and so on—in a number of cases clocked via ground radar) are not naturally-occurring phenomena, hoaxes, or radar glitches but are in fact structured craft of some kind under the control of some nonhuman—alien—intelligence of unknown origin. That’s the ETH: a rather extraordinary, game-changing and epochal hypothesis if true. It’s not exactly the hypothesis NASA is reaching for anytime soon—but it’s one that Knuth, a former NASA scientist himself, insists is “reasonable, rational, logically defensible and justifiable, given existing evidence”. Or at least that was the question a slide on the issue posed.

The ETH is a hypothesis that has to be put on the table as quite possibly the simplest and most reasonable one that can account for what we are seeing in the genuinely anomalous UAP cases on record. In the preferred language of the Galileo Project: the genuine UAP may very well be best explained as nonhuman technosignatures. Prof. Knuth provides some motivation for this:

If, as the evidence now firmly shows, one out of every five stars has at least one planet in the so-called habitable zone (where conditions are right for liquid water to exist), then that means there are lots of chances for life to have evolved (billions of chances). The implications are clear: it’s more likely than not for there to be some kind of intelligent life somewhere. This is a well-known argument, one usually based on the famous “Drake” equation well known to ufologists.

What Knuth adds next, though, is key: very simple analysis of existing UFO data (whether it be from the now-famous 2004 Nimitz encounters, or from 1950s-era radar data from which none other than Dr. Oberth himself deduced UFO velocities) shows that the speeds of these objects put them in the range of spacecraft. In other words, as Knuth so pointedly remarks, if asked why one jumps to the conclusion that these are spaceships—the answer is simple: because these objects move as spacecraft move. (He reminds us that the New Horizons probe that flew past Pluto, the fastest human-fashioned object yet made, is currently moving in the Mach 50 range.) And that was precisely the point made in Knuth’s 2019 Entropy paper, criticized, he says, in a New York Times op-ed for being “simple”. Yes, so simple that anyone with a basic knowledge of college-level (or even advanced high school-level) physics could have done the calculations. So, he asks, why haven’t those scientists who know the physics, but who wax skeptical, done their homework on such simple-to-analyze evidence? (I can only imagine that Knuth was here taking a shot at the blowhard Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an outspoken “critic” of the UAP “craze” who, each time he “criticizes”, reveals his total ignorance of the actual facts—the best cases.)

So, it’s looking like the ETH isn’t all that unreasonable a hypothesis after all, as uncomfortable as it might be for some. But science isn’t about what’s comfortable to you. It certainly wasn’t comfortable for religious dogma of the 16^th century, and it’s looking like we might very well have a repeat of that in the 21^st—with the added irony that it’s scientific dogma this time around (or at least those ontological dogmas that surround the conduct of the sciences) which the evidence for UAPs is likely to disturb. (We’d then be at the farcical stage of the repetition of history, to borrow from Marx’s correction to the Hegelian observation that history repeats itself.)

The energetic Prof. Matthew Szydagis now takes over the mic, and, after pointing out what is by now (hopefully, at least) obvious—that the times are a’changin’—indicates that with the efforts of groups like UAPx we are finally able to exit the self-reinforcing vicious circle of UFO/UAP dismissal. Why are UAP not being taken seriously? Because there isn’t good evidence. But why is there no good evidence? Well, because UAP aren’t being taken seriously! Rinse and repeat, and you have the status quo for about seven or so decades. Those from inside the mainstream academy, like Knuth and Szydagis (colleagues in the supportive physics department at SUNY Albany), or Loeb (Harvard) and Kayal (Würzburg), who are willing to actively seek out and analyze the evidence for UAPs, are the agents of change here—aided, of course, by the sudden cultural shift touched off by the journalism of writers like Leslie Kean and her colleagues at the NY Times. The X-Files theme, Szydagis remarks, isn’t being played as much in the increasingly common UFO/UAP stories we find today in the mainstream press…

We won’t bother to list all of the various equipment that UAPx brought with them on their SoCal expedition of July 2021, but there was plenty—although, as they readily admit, it was still not ideal. Instead of bringing in a lot of different equipment (which they could not afford to do in any case), they decided to focus on at least three kinds of instruments: various infrared cameras; visual wavelength (which is to say ordinary) cameras; and radiation detectors (but not your grandma’s Geiger counter, which only gives you the amount or dose of radiation present: theirs was the much more modern device able to measure the energies of the incoming particles). They had specific reasons for choosing the equipment they had, besides choosing the right amount of equipment manageable for the number of skilled team members they had with them (certainly a factor to consider, as the equipment is fairly complex). Given that in a number of famous UFO cases the presence of anomalous radiation was suspected (the Cash-Landrum case was mentioned, for example), it was clear that some sophisticated radiation detection equipment was a good bet for their first expedition. Since UFOs/UAPs appear variously in both the visual and infrared footage that has already been gathered, it was obvious that both kinds of camera would be needed. Thus, the team had both low-level light imaging equipment (night-vision), and different kinds of infrared cameras (including military-grade FLIR).

The team’s strategy was simple: starting with radiation anomalies, they would seek out (if only in later data analysis) coincidence events: events where there was a radiation anomaly correlated with some simultaneous visual and/or infrared target of interest (let’s call them “TOIs”). But how should a “target of interest” in the visual/infrared data be defined? This presented the team with quite a challenge: an image-processing challenge, to be specific. They had to develop algorithms that would be able to sift through the countless hours of footage to pick out interesting visual or infrared targets picked up on their cameras, as opposed to the many uninteresting targets like bugs or birds. Since they’re not interested in planes, birds, insects, or people—all known phenomena with a characteristic visual signature—they had to effectively train their software to return only the “anomalous” targets. It was this kind of software “training” that forced the team to develop a rather effective catalogue of knowns—essentially a set of controls against which any of the visual or infrared TOIs could be compared. Thus, if anyone wishes to argue that a particular TOI is a bird, plane, and so on, the team now have a catalogue of what those knowns actually look like on their instruments.

In this way the team would be able to couple the radiation data with the visual or infrared data and come up with a set of interesting (and anomalous) coincidences. These, finally, would be the target of deeper analysis. So far—and again, this is an “initial preliminary” result—there are about four such coincidences of interest (maybe we can call them “COIs”?). Prof. Szydagis lists them:

(1)   a “potential radioactive atmospheric ambiguity”—something highlighted as the most interesting (or at least tied for it). This is what the documentary being filmed at the same time was named for: “A Tear In The Sky”, since there was a strange “hole” that appeared in some of the camera footage, correlated with a potential radiation anomaly.

(2)   “slow-moving monotonically-glowing spheroid potentially captured from multiple angles using multiple sensor modalities”

(3)   objects “raining” down from the sky into the ocean which don’t look like known FLIR camera glitches.

(4)   transient lights in the sky, on the island and on the ocean.

The first and the second COIs take up the bulk of the subsequent talk.

It was early on the morning of 16 July 2021, at about 4am local time that a radiation anomaly in the range of 40 MeV was picked up on their instrumentation, an event that was curiously preceded by a smaller but still apparently anomalous radiation event, that time in the 20 MeV range. In itself, the detection events are not necessarily remarkable, and they are still working to determine the extent of the anomaly: could there be a perfectly natural explanation? Solar activity, as it turns out, was rather elevated during their expedition (a coronal mass ejection or “CME” event was in fact occurring at some point during that week , which would have naturally elevated radiation levels at or near the surface of the earth, and so this is one major factor they are considering). What is interesting here, of course, is that roughly around the same time their cameras (apparently using “CCD” technology) activated and started recording. In the images they captured was found a strange “hole” in the sky (seen in two separate recording events a short time apart), within which could be seen a cluster of white, bright “dots” of some indistinct kind. A starfield was ruled out because of the density: you can’t really get that kind of starfield density that close to Los Angeles, so what is their source? It’s possible that the solar activity occurring during that time could explain some of what they saw and if so, this would actually constitute a discovery in itself, as Prof. Knuth points out (and in private communication he relates that they are looking to publish some of these results in a journal that covers solar physics). But even if solar activity could explain some or all of the seemingly anomalous bright dots that appeared within the “hole”, what would explain the presence of the hole itself? Their “initial preliminary” analysis indicates that whatever it is, it is something having to do with the clouds and not, e.g., instrument artefact. Prof. Knuth explains their method for determining this to be an analysis of the structure of correlations within the image: as the image changes in time, they designed a false-color correlation map that shows you what pixels in the image are behaving just like the pixels that constitute the image of the hole. If the hole was somehow instrument artefact, Knuth explains, you’d expect there to be correlations between the pixels of the hole and other seemingly unrelated pixels imaging other objects (like the boat lights clearly visible in the ocean towards the bottom of the image). Their correlation map seems to show that in fact the changes within the hole itself are only correlated with changes occurring in other parts of the cloud—suggesting that we’re not dealing with artefact but with something about the cloud itself.

So much for checking to see if it’s the instrument itself that can be the cause of the anomalies. What else can we say?

As far as the cloud “hole”, which is seen to somewhat rapidly disappear and smooth out to become just more cloud: it could be a natural atmospheric phenomenon known as “fallstreak” or “hole-punch” clouds. This phenomenon was cited as a possible explanation for the hole that suddenly appeared over the C terminal at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in a famous UFO incident in November of 2006—except in that case multiple witnesses, from different vantage points, some of whom can also be heard over ATC comm channels (and on the phone), claim to have seen a grey metallic “disc” of some kind hovering over the terminal, which suddenly accelerates upwards through the clouds, after which a hole, clear through to the blue sky above, is left behind. In this UAPx incident, of course, no disc or other obvious source for the hole is seen, so the puzzle is a bit more challenging. The main problem with the “fallstreak” theory is that the right atmospheric conditions have to be present. At an elevation of about 1500 feet and at around 90 or so degrees Fahrenheit air temperature, it would seem that conditions for fallstreak are not right. But it’s an open question and as Mr. Altman, the third member of the core science team at UAPx details, UAPx is still gathering the relevant background data that would help rule this sort of explanation out (or further support it). As Altman works through the various background data that is still outstanding but necessary to complete a thorough analysis of their own data from that five-day expedition, he mentions a curious gap in the public satellite imagery for the period of time during which this anomalous cloud event was captured on camera: the relevant Maxar images are missing. Altman speculates that quite possibly there was some kind of black ops mission going on, but further investigation is required. Surely this is yet another juicy bit for the conspiracists…

The second—a “close second” Szydagis says—most interesting event recorded was the “slow-moving monotonically-glowing sphere potentially captured from multiple angles using multiple sensor modalities”, to quote UAPx’s purposefully circumspect language. This event, Prof. Szydagis tells us, occurred at about 21:20 local time the evening of Wednesday, 14 July 2021. A somewhat “fuzzy glowing spheroid”, seen changing direction, was captured, potentially, on: night-vision goggles, at least one cell phone camera and on the video camera that was ever-present during their expedition. (We can’t forget that UAPx got sponsorship, and thus funding, from a film company wanting to produce a documentary about their UAP data-gathering efforts—the film that would eventually, in May of 2022, be released as “A Tear In The Sky”). During this event their specially-constructed, equipment-loaded UAP intercept vehicle, called “O.S.I.R.I.S.” (“Off-Road Scientific Investigation & Response Informatics System”), was dispatched to get a different vantage point from which the UAP could be seen and recorded. Eerily, they report that their on-board Wi-Fi system went down, and, immediately following the encounter, the vehicle (an SUV of sorts) experienced a general breakdown. A curious coincidence…

The two-hour long UAPx presentation concludes by noting what could have gone better, what other instrumentation they should have had (and will have on future expeditions), and what their plans for future work are. They are careful to point out that what we have witnessed here is the way real science works: it’s messy, tedious and, for any single data-gathering expedition, thin on exciting discovery (except in this case they seem to have lucked out with at least two coincidences of interest). Real scientific work is boring, to put it simply. And discoveries are likely to be determined in the weeks, months and even years after the data is gathered. We await those results. Patiently.

And with this more sober, more “conventional” romp through the messiness of actual scientific investigation, we now proceed into the Funhouse of the strange in Part Two of our Day Three review…