Somewhere in the Skies - The Scientific Search for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

On episode 214 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES we are joined by Dr. Christopher Cogswell to discuss the latest Pentagon-confirmed UFO videos, and then we go in-depth on his work with the revolutionary UAP tracking technology, Sky Hub. Cogswell then answers your listener questions. Sky Hub has a specific mission: To connect a network of civilian-owned sensor arrays, use machine learning to catalogue anomalous events, and share this data with researchers. This is done by applying state-of-the-art technology and software to remotely monitor the skies, apply artificial intelligence, and store anomalous phenomena in to the cloud using open-source data distribution to discover aggregate trends. Learn more about Sky Hub at: https://skyhub.org/ Subscribe and learn more about the Mad Scientist podcast at: https://www.themadscientistpodcast.com/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Somewhere in the Skies Subreddit: www.reddit.com/r/SomewhereSkiesPod/ YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at www.CWseed.com Episode edited by Jane Palomera Moore Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague. Welcome everyone to Somewhere in the Skies. As usual, I am your host, Ryan Sprague, and I am so excited today. This is an interview that I have been waiting to do for a very, very long time. We're going to be talking about this revolutionary new project that is headed by one of my favorite people in the quote-unquote UFO community, enemy of UFO. Twitter and just one of the coolest guys I know working on this brand new UFO tracking device. And we're going to talk all about how it works, how you can get involved with this, and everything

else going on with UFOs in 2021. So without further ado, here is the host of the Matt Scientist podcast and on the advisory board, the head of the advisory board for Sky Hub, Dr. Chris Cogswell. Chris, how's it going, my man? Good, man. It's going really well. How are you doing? I am good. I have mentioned on the last episode, I was able to escape New York, and I'm here on the island of Oahu for the umpteenth time. I'm starting to think people probably think I'm like in the witness protection program because I'm escaping to these remote places so often. But no, things are good for me, brother. How about you? Things are going well. You know, I haven't escaped anywhere. as nice as Oahu, but I occasionally make my escape up to New Hampshire still in the mountain. So that's always nice. But yeah, doing well. Dude, give me East Coast, like fall over anything. Like, I'm not a beach guy. I'm not a swimmer.

So, like, yeah, it's great. It's Hawaii. And I feel very fortunate. But I'm not, like, one of these people who's like, let's go, let's go. I like doing this stuff all the time. Sure. Yeah. No, totally feel you, man. Yeah. napping under a tree, in the middle of the autumn, it's nice and crisp outside. You can't beat it. And then you wake up full of bugs, which is... Full of bugs. Yeah.

But whatever. It's fine. We move fast. Exactly. Your pumpkin spice lattes tipped over and someone stole your wallet. Yep. Yeah. That's how it.

You know, it's got to love it. Love it, brother. Awesome. Well, I know we could talk weather and locations for a while, but that's not why you're here. We're here to talk about Sky Hub, which is. so amazing. But before we get to what it is, how it works, how you're involved, for any of our new viewers or listeners, I want to kind of catch them up to who you are, what you do, how you got involved with the UFO topic, and what brought you into this crazy community that we've all

found ourselves in. And yeah, give us the origin story, if you don't mind. Yeah, sure. So I was bitten by a radioactive scientist at the age of 10th,000. No, so I kind of involved initially because so my family is definitely one who tends to believe in more, my family tends to be one that believes in sort of, you know, non-scientific things at times and things that I think the public would think of is sort of more fringe or out there belief systems. But at the same time, my family was very grounded in the sciences and in history and philosophy. And so, you know, my, at our family kind of gatherings, we were, you know, as likely to sort of talk about, you know, religious philosophy and dogmen, whatever, as astrology or, you know, ghosts or UFOs or whatever. So my family was very sort of steeped in that view. And I think it's because my family's made up of immigrants. So when I was a kid, I, you know, was always pushed by my family to go into something technical.

and, you know, do really well in school and learn and everything else. But also, there was always sort of an edge of mysticism and sort of fantasy and folklore, you know, imbued in everything. And so when I got to sort of high school and then to college and then even in grad school, I've always been really interested in why people who are, you know, intelligent, good people can sometimes fall for fall for people who are trying to take advantage of them, whether it's people who fall into cults or people who give money to a psychic

to talk to the dead dead relative or something or even the UFO subject, right? Why does someone pay thousands of dollars to go on a, you know, whatever, an ancient aliens cruise or something? And so that's always been really interesting to me. And at the same time, I've always thought that you have this group of people, this large group of people who are making claims, and the scientific community, the sort of wider public just discounts their stories out of hand, or at least used to discount their stories sort of out of hand.

And I always thought that was really unfair, because, you know, the people who have these sightings, it's not just, you know, crackpots or people who are people who are, I don't know, drunks or whatever, and they come home and, like, I was abducted, right? Like, that's not what happens. It's pilots. It's teachers, it's lawyers, it's mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers. And, you know, people from all walks of life have these experiences. And so for me, another part of it was always the interest in you have this community who claims that something is happening to them. In many cases, something very traumatic and disturbing.

And yet, you know, and they have real effects. You know, they have real negative things happen to them. I mean, we've been at conferences together where people come forward and tell their stories. And, you know, it's a grown man sobbing in front of a room of 100 people that he's never met. You know, that's more than just, you know, again, we might not be able to say what the, what actually happened to that person. But that's more than just someone making up something for attention. That doesn't fly with me. That doesn't make sense.

So when I was in grad school, I started doing a podcast, the Mad Scientist podcast, on sort of this question of the philosophy and history of science and why do people believe these things and is there anything to them and, you know, all those sorts of things. And a listener actually reached out and basically said, you know, basically said something like, you know, you're so smart. Why don't you get involved in? you know, like, you know, and I was like, oh, it's kind of a good point, right? Like, I'm making all these claims and I'm like, I bet I can figure this out in a week.

And, you know, stupid stuff you say on the internet. And then after talking it through with other people who I consider to sort of be mentors to me in the science world, in the academic world, in the industry, and then in the skeptical world, you know, basically everyone said, you know, if you think that that's a route forward to talk to these people and understand them and, you know, work with people who've had these experiences, then you should do it because it's a good, you're coming out of from a good place. Yeah. And that's really why I got involved. And that initially led me to kind of talking to people and, you know, I was lucky to, I was lucky to end up meeting a lot of people who, were very interested in my background and research work and everything else.

And my take on this, that led me to doing work with Mufon for a little while, which didn't turn out so well because Mufon just refuses to learn from their mistakes. And just keeps making bad, you know, worse and worse and worse decisions. But anyways, we could go into that. It's a whole other can of words. It's a whole other show, I know. You know, but suffice it to say that I've tried to be involved in this in a way that lets me retain, obviously retain my own credibility because I have, I need to, you know, I have a day job.

I want to continue working in the sciences and in the fields that I work in, but also still able to do sort of outreach and engagement with people who have had these experiences, who believe these things, and try to get to some sense of what is really happening here. And that, I guess sort of my, I am a very critical voice in the UFO community generally. And so because of that, I have less friends than others do in the community. But I think that the people and the groups that I have worked with and we built have been of a very high caliber. And again, just generally, you know, it's really easy to be on Twitter and say, this is all just people making this up.

But again, you know, the thing I always come back to is if it's all made up, that's much scarier than if it's UFOs. If it's all made up, that means that there is, you know, that means that it would be so easy then for a foreign adversary to start a blog and manipulate the public. You know, and we're seeing some of that with sort of, you know, politics today worldwide with conspiracy theories and anti-vaccination feelings and everything else. But it's a lesson that, you know, it's something that people in the UFO world have sort of been yelling about for decades. I'm not the first researcher to say that, hey, if you can understand why a UFO grifter is able to make money off of their, you know, their, you know, desert getaway packages,

then you can understand how propaganda spreads in a community. And so that's sort of, I guess, you know, so that's how I got to before Sky Hub. So how I got involved with Sky Hub was really, Sky Hub initially was another, An idea for something like Sky Hub has been sort of floating around the UFO community for a while. And actually products or not really products, but tools like Sky Hub have actually been something that was of interest for the military and astronomers and NASA and other kind of governmental groups for a very long time. Actually, since basically the launch of Sputnik, the idea of tracking.

and understanding what's in the skies above us has been of great interest. Public groups that have done this include like CAMs via SETI or other kind of meteor projects or, you know, even weather stations in some way or a type of sky hub or a type of, you know, sky surveillance recognition platform. But the problem with those previous methods have been that they're all very large and bulky and costly and everything else. And my Sky Hub is this big. This is my Sky Hub.

It connects to a camera. I just plug it in. That's my Sky Hub. So, you know, the increases in technology and computer and power and the shrinking of electronic hardware has gotten to the point now that before we had to do with like an entire, you know, like a weather truck, right? you can do with a raspberry pie or a Jetson and some software. So that's really what was what was intriguing to me about the SkyHub project

when the team originally approached me was, you've heard about all these other projects. Obviously, this has been out there for a long time. We can do it for cheaper, smaller, and we will do it in a way that is completely transparent to the public. And that to me was very, very, that was the thing. That was really the hook that got me. involved and maybe want to maybe want to take part in the project yeah well let me let me let me let's

rewind just a little bit chris if you don't mind brother um and that's a really good point i do want to talk you about the transparency uh that you guys are doing over at sky hub but um could you give us kind of i guess the origin of of sky hub before you were approached um who created this who's involved and yeah, maybe kind of walk us through what Sky Hub is, if you don't mind. I know that's a lot to ask, but yeah, maybe give us the origin of how it came to be why you thought this was something you wanted to put your name on. And yeah, maybe a little about the process of what Sky Hub is. Absolutely, yeah.

So there are, so, okay, so to start with Sky Hub, Sky Hub really started as a effort by a group of developers. so software developers who wanted to build a who wanted to build a unit that could capture evidence of objects in the sky above us using techniques and tools that would be beyond

a question. So using machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically capture and categorize objects or images of objects in the sky above us. The initial idea really came from Steve McDaniel, Corey Gaspar, and Adam Allen.

And actually, initially, they were on a team with, they were on a team with Dr. Bob McGuire. That team sort of, that team didn't work out. And so then Steve, Corey, and Adam kind of continued the software development on their own. And then from there, we've sort of built Sky Hub and so I think I was the I think the next person to join the team was probably Richard Hoppth who is our hardware design and fabrication specialist and I think it was me and then David Moore who's our audio engineering and kind of science communication specialist we now have other members of the team as well Paul Wright and Justin Phillips we have over 200 people in our discord who currently participate in and you know

help us develop and answer questions and things like that. But so the basic idea, though, or the basic concept of Sky Hub is, we build a system that is easy to assemble, relatively cheap to produce and build, and we provide the software to run it free of charge to the public. The public then puts the thing together. They buy the stuff from other places. They put it together themselves based on construction, we give them, and then they deploy them out in their backyards and on their roofs and wherever.

And the software, what it does is as an object comes into frame above the camera, it automatically turns on and starts recording the video. And then on the back end, a system using artificial intelligence tells or sort of picks out from those images what is a bird, what is an airplane, what is it insect, and then ultimately what's left behind would be the unknowns. That's, okay, so that was kind of my next question for you, is once the, you know, the recording starts and you start getting that data in,

how exactly does the machine learning play into differentiating these objects? So is it like, okay, we have five different sky hubs out there, monitoring, whatever, let's say a SESNA plane that goes by. Does the machine then know, all right, these are the properties of the SESNA, according to our sort of observational look at it and keep, you know, is it, okay, now we have all of these are Cessna's, all of these are meteors, all of these are blah, blah, blah, and then the true unknown. How does that all work?

So, okay, so just to start, just to begin with, Artificial intelligence and machine learning are buzzwords that are used all over the place to see way more complicated than they are. You're technically any system where a sensor measures a set point and then tells a computer to change something to get back to the set point is doing artificial intelligence. Okay. Right.

So a thermometer, so in your house right now you have a thermometer or a thermostat that measures the temperature in the rooms of your home. And you can set the temperature to be at like 60 degrees, 65 degrees. If you're a weirdo might like me, you set it at 60 degrees. And then you wear a sweat. Right, yeah. If you're like me, you do that and then your wife is wearing a blanket. I know that feeling well. That's one or the other, right?

But that system is a very, very simple version of artificial intelligence, because what it's doing is it is taking a measurement and then changing something, making something happen to get to a certain set point or a certain value. So in many ways, like control systems, control schemes, sensors, those sorts of things with like control systems are a very simple version of artificial intelligence. In our case, the artificial intelligence is more complicated, but it's still basically just, we give it a list of, say, 20 to 30 set points that we say, okay, if you measure these things, it's an airplane. If you measure these things, it's a meteor. If you measure these things, it's a bird or an insect or whatever. So that's basically how the artificial intelligence works. The set points are the things that we're actually looking at in terms of what we want the machine to be able to differentiate between our motion. So in other words, an airplane, if you're thinking about the camera itself is looking up at the sky,

if you think about an airplane as it travels across the frame of the vision of the camera, the airplane will maybe it starts, you know, it starts coming in here. and then it'll fly at a very set path. It takes a straight line path usually. Whereas if we think about something like, you know, Elizondo's five observables, let's say, one of them is like non-ballistic motion, right? So the object bounces all over the place.

We can do things with the video. So the first step is making the camera recognize that an object is coming into frame. then all we do is we measure how the object moves across the video, so every frame where it moves. From that, we can get things like its speed, its acceleration, its direction. We can tell how straight the path is, so is the path tortuous or not. We can tell all kinds of other things like that.

And then we have other sensors too that can tell us, you know, this is an airplane, this is a whatever. All the artificial intelligence is doing is if it sees a, certain number of those things that fit within, say, the bucket of airplane, it marks it as an airplane. Does that kind of make sense in that, in that case, Ryan? Oh, yeah, totally. Because I think, again, it's all about differentiating these objects. That's the point of this until you get to the true unknown. That's always the bottom and the least likely. Exactly. Now, the way that the machine learning works is, if you can give a computer, instructions to say, okay, I want you to measure a thousand videos of an object.

I'm telling you that these objects are airplanes. So I have to know that they're airplanes beforehand. I have to tell the computer it's an airplane. And then what the computer does is it measures those metrics again that we tell it to measure for, speed, acceleration, tortuosity, displacement vector, whatever, those other things. we tell the machine to measure those things and then at the end of it it essentially says okay

well based on the thousand measurements I've now taken of a airplane this is what the airplane profile looks like so airplanes have a velocity between this value and this value and most of them are here and so within 95% confidence I can say that if you have a velocity of this

you're an airplane that's a very simple example we're not going to be able to do it just based off velocity but so that's the way the machine learning works is really it's instead of us giving the computer the set point right we let the computer determine what the most likely set point is for a set of data that is so cool yeah so you know imagine imagine you know Elon Musk gets you know whatever it's a hundred years from now when Elon Musk has turned us all in our robots and we have microchips in our brains or whatever um imagine if your thermostat was able to measure how comfortable you were, right? It's basically you would be telling it, okay, well, I want you to measure for things like, is the person perspore, you know, are they sweating? Are they breathing heavy? Are they red in the face? Or they, whatever? Or measuring your internal temperature maybe. And then changing the thermostat

to fit to where your internal temperature hits the right set point. So machine learning is basically just, again, it's just another kind of fancy way of saying, instead of it being a person or like interns for us or whatever, getting all that data ourselves by doing pen and paper math, we let a computer do it. That's all it is. And so over, yeah, so over time then, and so in that way, then you basically can, if your system is good enough, ultimately the goal would be that we would be able to find the easiest, cheapest, and by cheap, I mean cheap computationally, not necessarily cheap economically. But like, you know, the most accurate measurement we can do with the smallest number of sort of cycles of math we have to do to tell this is a bird,

this is a plane, this is a whatever. Yeah, expediting the process, yeah. Right. And so, and that's really where, that's where kind of continuous machine learning comes in, where after a while, like right now, let's say we have a data set with, I don't know, 10,000 videos of airplanes, right? And that's just a random number. I don't, I don't know picking a random number. I don't know how many, I don't know, whatever. But let's say we get that data set of 10,000. Eventually, with a complicated enough system, you can find other data points that, like,

So, for example, airplanes have, airplanes all give off a signal telling other airplanes or air traffic controllers, hey, we're an airplane, we're in the area. That is like a 100% it's an airplane, right? That's a definite signal that it's an airplane. So we could train our models to say if you get that signal, whatever you're viewing is an airplane and then train it based on that. Right? That's one way to say do kind of continuous machine learning again, where you don't need to, to be inputting all the time videos of airplanes. But yeah.

Yeah. And so it gets more complicated. Right. What I think, and you stress this quite well, is that the public and those involved and those using the program are literally helping to evolve the algorithms, evolve Skyhub. I saw in an interview where I believe you said, you know, This software, this, this device, this technology is constantly evolving. So it's not like Sky Hub is just developed, built, and game over. Like, it's done. This is, this is cool because it is constantly in motion and learning and growing

and helping us to figure out what the hell these phenomena are. And, you know, I've been sent several Skyhub videos. by people who have, you know, purchased what they needed to create Skyhub and get the data out into the cloud. And some of them, dude, have been really compelling. I mean, there was one I recently saw of what we thought might have been a plane and then totally made a 90-degree turn out of nowhere and took off. So again, you're talking about kind of those observables that the Pentagon looked at. So I guess my next question for you would be, what are some of the stuff you guys have come across? I mean, yeah, of course, meteors, probably Starlink satellites are one of the big ones.

But any really intriguing ones that have kind of left you guys over at Skyhub scratching your head so far? Honestly, I think one of the coolest things about this project so far has been just how unexpected the results have been. You know, if you thought to yourself, okay, I'll put a camera outside my house. It's pointed up in the sky. And I'm going to measure, you know, I'm just going to, I'm going to see airplanes probably. I'll see birds.

I'll see airplanes. I'll see some insects, you know, whatever. There is stuff in the sky all the time that, you know, I would never consider or think we're in the sky above my house or, you know. So, for example, I think maybe. be one of my favorite ones is one of the units is out in, um, is out in the United Kingdom. Just give it that. That's as, as close to locale as I want to give. And so the unit is there and it's in someone's garden and they captured somebody,

they captured somebody paragliding over like a residential neighborhood. You know, there's someone paragliding. And if you had asked them at the beginning of this, you know, what do you think you're going to capture? What do you think you're most likely to capture here? I don't think in a million years they would have said they would capture paraglider. Right? Like there's just no, you know, there's no way you would think,

oh yeah, paraglider. There's definitely paragliding going on here unless you know that it's happening. You have no idea. Right. So that's been really one interesting one. Another really interesting one, I think, and you highlighted it here too, we've captured a video of what are potentially drones. I mean, you know, we don't know what these objects are yet that we're capturing all the time.

I mean, a paraglider is easy because it's like there's a guy, you know what I mean? Like it's, you know, unless it's like Batman, it's a guy in a paraglider or whatever. But some of the, you know, most of the objects we capture are going to be points of light in the sky. You know, they're going to be dots of light. And so for those ones, that's really where a good analysis of the motion of them is what's important. But we've captured some, though, that are, you know, it appears that the object comes very quickly in a frame. It goes down straight, then stops. We'll sit there for a couple of seconds and then takes off at another angle.

It just shoots off. We've had a couple of those now. And, you know, my best guess would be that they're drones. But even then, that's kind of interesting if they're drones. Like what, you know, what's going on? Like, who's flying a drone like that at nighttime? And kind of an interesting one. Another interesting one that we've captured,

one of the units is in a fairly, I would say, remote location. And it keeps, it captures a lot of military aircraft because it's near an airport base or an airport base. It's near a, you know, it's near an Airfield or something. Airfield, whatever, military base. That one's captured some really interesting ones, you know, military plans flying low and stuff like that. But also is captured, like, what appears to be an object sort of breaking apart maybe in reentry or something. We're really sure what it is.

It looks like it might be some kind of weather balloon or something. And I know that's cliche to say to, you know, UFO. It's a weather balloon, right? We're captured a lot of swamp gas, Ryan. Again, say Chris is the enemy of UFOs. I'm coming for you guys. It's all swamp gas. Our machine learning module just as one option, swap gas.

The object, it appears like it's tethered to something else. And the thing that it's tethered to looks like it's kind of floating or lighter. But it looks like it's kind of metallic. It's an interesting, again, kind of an interesting video. So, you know, I think just overall we've captured just stuff you wouldn't expect. And, you know, the number of like shooting stars, you know, the International Space Station flybys we've captured. Like, you know, it's just, again, because we're still in very early stages for this. And that's one thing we try to make clear to anybody, you know, people all the time will come into our chat or on our website or whatever, send us emails and say, hey, you know, we want to give you the money to get a,

Sky Hub. And our answer, I think, which is probably frustrating for most people, is, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Before you build a Sky Hub, we need to tell you all these things. Like, we basically tell people a list of reasons why they shouldn't build one yet. You know, we're like, we're like, it's hard to do. There's a lot of troubleshooting. We're still making the software. We haven't really settled yet on, you know, the cameras. And like, you know, just because it's early stages, right? I mean, if you were, if you were designing a, you know, if you were designing any other engineered product,

you wouldn't start selling it before it was ready. Right. You know, so we're, but I think for a lot of UFO people or people that are interested in this, that's something that's a little bit out of the ordinary for the field. Because usually people will start hyping things before, you know, someone will think, like, wouldn't it be great to have a machine learning

method to capture your foes, and then they will hype the hell out of it. And they're on, they're on podcast saying, you know, we're going to do this and all this and stuff. And like, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of effort and it's really hard. And so before we start doing that, we want to make sure people understand that if they are building one, if they're going to buy the parts, if they're going to help us with this, they are developing with us. They're helping us. And just like any other kind of hobby where you're trying to work with a group of people to build something, it might not work. You know, I mean, we've had promising results, but, you know, we're not, you know, we're not ready. We're not ready to be sold in Target or whatever.

We're never going to be sold in Target. Frankly, we're not trying to sell anything. You know, so it's just a different, it's a different, I guess, way of doing things and a different way of viewing this. We view ourselves as a, We view ourselves as a open science or citizen science project. And so what that means is, just like if you were part of a birdwatching group in your local community, you would be going to, you know, going on hikes maybe with other people and chatting with them online and sharing photos and videos and whatever, that's, you know, it's similar to what we're doing here. We're not, we don't charge people money to be part of our Discord or to chat with us or,

We don't even sell like Skyhubs. We don't sell anything. People now can purchase an enclosure that was designed for us by one of our, you know, our hardware designer. But that's mostly a donation to the group. So we try to make it clear, like if you're going to come in and build these things, it's going to be a lot of work. And it's not necessarily the easiest right now. But that's just what designing something like this. takes. Yeah. And, you know, I've, I've seen several individuals who have, you know, taken that

initiative, built the entire thing from scratch themselves, throw it on like their humvies and drive it all out in the desert, which is so cool, man, how remote this has become, which I think, like you showing your own Skyhub there is, things have changed drastically in terms of how accessible these things can be. But because you said you're in the the initial stages still. A lot of it rides on the individuals who are using it, who are creating it. And the open source data is another big thing, very positive thing, I think. We're so used to like, whatever, move on or NASA or the government being so cagey when it

comes to sharing things they've seen or experienced when it comes to unknowns. And I think that's awesome that you guys are putting that out to the public. My question would be, and I know again, this is very, very early in the stages of what you guys are doing, could military or government programs or, you know, agencies, could they use the software and kind of the setup of Skyhub and privatize that data and information? You know, like we have the open source thing, which is awesome. Everyone can be a part of it and talk about what they think it might be. But is there a chance that your technology or what you guys have created could be used, like you said, in the military or whatnot? And we never see any of that data.

So, so first off, all of the Skyhub software is available to download online for free right now. Okay. So if people want to. to, if say some group, forget the military even, if some group decided they wanted to build a private Skyhub software. Right. So right now, the way that the code works is it goes to a public, it goes to a database that, you know, again, we're still early on. So there's not data to share yet, really. I mean, we have videos and stuff.

We put them on YouTube. But in terms of actual kind of data, we're working on getting that pipeline sort of, moving, privatizing it in a way that it's available for the public and all those other things. Someone could, in theory, I guess, go on and change the software so that it goes to a private server instead. And, you know, us at SkyHub have no control over that data and whatever. And so then it just goes out there. Someone could do that if they wanted to. You know, we're, it's part of the danger of making a open source kind of citizen science like project.

is if a company wanted to, they could, you know, they could do something like a Skyhub or something. But because we've done it, and it's available on the internet already for free, and so the code itself that kind of builds it and underpins everything, is available for free to the public. Although some small section of the data might never get to the public, the bulk of the data would. Right? I mean, it's sort of a, think about it like a camera.

camera, right? Camera is kind of a bad example, I guess. I guess what I'm saying is if someone wanted to buy a Skyhub and keep it not connected to the internet, they could also kind of keep that data to themselves. It wouldn't work at this point. But, you know, someone could go in and make a private Skyhub network for themselves. Right. But the technology is freely available to the public.

So even if the military wanted to come on and take it and use it and whatever, the military Cherry would just be putting them in places that the public couldn't. But the technology can never become like, you know. The technology can ever just become privatized by something. Right. It's already out there. That's a good point. I think I understand your analogy of like, even if you threw a photo up on Facebook or whatever, like anyone can download it and then alter it or change it or use it how they want. You know, that's what's scary about Facebook.

You think that stuff, you own that? Sorry, read the fine print guys. but yeah that's a good point it's already out there it's under a creative commons license it's under an MIT kind of software license and things like that so you know people can can download it and use it however they want I mean we're not stopping anybody from using skyhubs right like that's not our goal at all yeah but you know the the software is freely available on the internet so yeah it's a good it's a really good question and frankly if the military came out and if the military came to us and said hey we want to use the sky hub

software, I'd probably say no. That would be tough, yeah. Kind of doesn't feel very good. You know what I mean? Like if NASA wanted to, that would be different, I think. Or if, you know, SETI wanted to utilize this or whatever. Like, those are research. Those are, that's for scientific research, right?

The goal is for this to be done for scientific research. So I guess that's the difference there. The application of it might become privatized or whatever for some, parts of people or whatever, but the software itself, the tool itself, that cat's already out of the back. Yeah. Well, I mean, and I've got some really good listener questions in a little bit, Chris, but this was kind of a big question that a lot of people had, and it befuddles me why they might not be using it. But a lot of people want to know, you know, Skin Walker Ranch, again, this big buzzword, this TV show, this mysterious place.

Why aren't they using Sky Hub, man? I mean, come on. They are like out there every day saying stuff is happening. They're seeing aerial objects that defy explanation. But, you know, we're not seeing that 24-7. They're not monitoring the sky. As far as I know, I could be wrong. But has anything like Skinwalker Ranch or any other companies

approached you guys about using this stuff yet. What's up guys, Ryan Sprague here, and I'm just dropping in to remind you about our Patreon campaign. Somewhere in the Skies is always free to consume, but it's not free to create. So if you want to help the show on a monthly basis, we have tons of rewards for you in return, including shoutouts on the show and website,

bonus content and episodes, and free merge. Want to be my guest or pick a topic for the show? You can do that too. So if you'd like to learn more and to help support the show, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you and keep looking up. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh no.

That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity, which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app.

Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. Yeah, so a lot of people have approached us. I'm not going to give any particular names or anything because I think that would go against sort of confidentiality and just kind of a dick move. So I'm not going to do that.

That's fair. What I will say, though, is that so, A lot of the times the issues come down to, a lot of the times the issues are, there's a couple different issues. One issue is that private data issue that comes up a lot. That is a real issue for some people and some groups and whatever, because especially, let's say, if you're working on maybe a project that you hope to publish a scientific study on or something like that,

sometimes that data you want to keep under wraps before you publish it. Because you don't want somebody else to scoop you, frankly. So that's one area where there has been some discussion about, you know, okay, well, that makes sense and, you know, they're not going to use it or whatever. Another one is that the units currently need to have access to a power source and need to have access to the Internet. You know, and that's why, like the OSCE, Cyrus project, let's say, is kind of an interesting, you know, offshoot of a user trying to make, you know, trying to make a better version of their Skyhub, right? You know, our focus is on getting the software going, making sure that any bugs that are there fixed and making a unit that can work for our initial purposes, which was, you can have it on the roof of your house, you can have it in your garden, kind of near the home. But things like, you know, applying, you know, getting Wi-Fi or something on.

there or solar panels to power it or other kind of power sources or whatever. All of that is kind of next stage development stuff that we haven't even really considered yet because we're trying to focus on getting this stuff done. So, you know, sometimes there's issues of logistics, sometimes it's an issue of data handling. Sometimes it's just people are busy doing other things, frankly. You know? So, yeah, I think that's probably the. the best I can give on that answer, really.

Yeah, absolutely. That makes complete sense. Yeah. Again, it's you guys stressing to people who want to take part in this. Like, a lot of the legwork is on you, which is awesome. You guys apply, you give the software and you collect the data, which is awesome. But yeah, you know, something like Osiris, I can understand, like taking what Skyhub has created, building off of it, and doing your cool thing out in the digital.

desert. So God bless Mr. McGowan for doing that. I give him a kudos. It's a very cool idea. It's one that we would never have considered in a thousand years. Yeah. But yeah, I wish him luck. It's a very cool. It's a very cool application of it. Yeah. It's badass for sure. Well, speaking of videos, I want to kind of transition over to some recent stuff in the UFO, I guess, mainstream and talk to you about these videos released by Jeremy Corbell, George Knapp. We saw these flying pyramids or pizza slices, if people have said in the, um, recently. And we've also got an object possibly submerging into the ocean. Both Pentagon confirmed videos, they are authentic.

They are apparently still unidentified. We don't know that for sure. But, um, in terms of video analyzing. Chris, and kind of what you guys are doing over at Skyhub with constant tracking. What do you make of these videos? And, yeah, everything going on right now in the UFO world when it comes to these leaks, apparently. Are these leaks? What do you think? So I've always been cautious about making claims about any of these things too soon.

I've always tried to kind of give caution, but also always tried to take a pragmatic approach to any of these sorts of releases and things. My issue with the videos, or I guess the thing that I see when I look at the videos, they're interesting. They're very interesting. The way that they've come out is interesting. And I think that the people who have pushed them out also are inevitably part of the story. It's really hard when you are like Corbell and Nap. have kind of, and even Leslie Keene and Ralph Blumenthal and all of those figures,

have kind of inserted themselves into the stories. You know, they've built for themselves their own mythos in UFO, in UFO history and lore. So I think it's really, it's really disingenuous to expect the public or other researchers or scientists or whoever to just take the videos on the, their merits alone when there is so much history and, you know, bad actors and everything else kind of rolled up into the history and provenance of the videos and the intelligence that comes from them.

So that's one thought, right? My main thought has always been, you know, I mean, I'm sure I've said it on your show before. I've said it on many other shows before. for me, the concern has always been that any data that you get that comes from or comes through the kind of standard UFO media sources is fruit of the poison tree. You know, if someone came to me with a, if somebody came to me with a clear cut video of a UFO, I would not be the person to break the story on my podcast.

right? Because it's an important piece of like evidence in history. I would bring it to the best people I could find for it. And so I think that the issue or one of the issues is that before this, the people you would bring it to have made it something, sometimes have made it about themselves or have become part of that story of themselves. So that's issue number one. in terms of the videos themselves, the quality of the videos, they're interesting.

I think actually probably the most interesting thing about them is hearing the people's, especially in the second video released, of the kind of round infrared object or the infrared of the round kind of heat signature dropping into the ocean. That one is interesting because you can hear the people giving the kind of giving a playplay of what's happening to it.

That is very interesting. But in terms of what we would probably categorize them as, I mean, I think it's too early to say. I think it's hard to say, but they don't really appear to have any of the, they don't behave differently enough from known objects to make them interesting. And that's kind of the problem, I think, sometimes with using a,

you know, one question that people have given us, that's a really good question is, well, what if the UFO is just flying, like an airplane. Right? That's a good question, yeah. A question, right? It's a really good question.

And in that case, we're going to get a false negative, right? We're going to measure and say that it's an airplane when it isn't. It's really an unidentified or whatever it is. That's possible. But that's why you give other metrics as well. You don't just base it off of, you know, velocity or shape or whatever. You do other things. I think that the arguments, on the first one of the triangle,

I think the case that it is an object not really in frame is pretty convincing to me, unfortunately. So you're talking like a sort of an apparition of the camera? Okay. Essentially that the object itself, like the object itself is blurry. Right? And unless Mitch Headberg's right and, you know, Bigfoot is blurry. And that's why all those photos look blurry.

It's not really a great argument for why your video is blurry. So I think that one's kind of interesting. But I think, again, would probably be something that we would not consider to be of interest, maybe. The fact that it's a triangle shape is of interest. That would be something we would notice. And our machine would notice, too, the system would notice, hey, this is a triangle. That's different than the shape of a number. normal airplane or an insect or whatever.

But that's also why our system ultimately is the goal is to have two cameras, one for initial detection and then the other one to focus and take a clear image. Oh, that's cool. Which is a really cool thing, and it's like, here I am, like before I said, you know, people come on and hype stuff before it's even developed. We haven't developed for it, but it's something we hope to develop soon. The other one, the other video of kind of the round object that appears to sort of fall slowly to the ocean surface and then dip away.

Again, it's sort of, if we had that video, we probably would think it's interesting. It would be out of the realm of normal things that we'd expect. But I do suspect that, again, if that one I think you just need more, you need more data on. You know, the argument that it's like a balloon or something, I mean, maybe that kind of could make sense. It could be a light piece of metal falling that's been heated and that's why it's kind of the IR flare around it or whatever. You know, all of those, I mean, maybe, but, you know, it's, for me at least, it starts to stretch credulity. like the idea that a the idea that a

single pilot or single Navy service member or whoever that she or he would be mistaken about seeing an object once very quickly and having kind of a frightened reaction and whatever that to me doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility

but that's not what we're really talking about here. We're talking about a group of people claiming to have all seen the same thing over a prolonged period of time at regular intervals. That is not going to just be every morning, everyone on the ship wakes up and puts on their boca glasses. You know, that isn't going to work. And so I think that in that case, we have a much more interesting question ask. But again, the other thing that UFO people don't seem to want to, or the people pushing

this story don't want to really make note of is that a lot of these people have made extreme claims before and been proven wrong. You know, Bob Lazar didn't make a super mega element that let him travel through space. Right? like that, or aliens travel through space. Like that didn't happen. And so it's part of, I think, the problem ultimately of people think that. People at the same time think that science is this evil thing,

keeping UFO world down and making fun of them and whatever. But then also think that UFO or science is this perfect bastion where a single clear photo will get rid of, rid of a hundred years of fraud and con men and grifters. Science is a human endeavor. So you need to think critically is the person who's putting this evidence forward. Have they cried alien before? If they have, don't use them.

They're not a good source anymore, right? Because it sounds harsh, it sounds terrible, especially considering you and I both have podcasts to talk about UFOs. But you know what I mean? Like if you are trying to get the best evidence out there or this story out there in a way that gets taken seriously, you either have to have taken it seriously from the beginning and kind of been consistent with your arguments and everything else and try to stay away from the con men and everything else and whatever. Or you get to be a UFO media celebrity.

You can't have both, in my opinion. You know, you sometimes can. Like, I think your show is a good example here of you, you listen to people's stories, you kind of take their views in, but you're also not really, what's the word? You're also, though, you're almost more like a commentator, right?

So that's, it's a different place in the kind of storyline. If you're somebody, though, who's trying to produce evidence, that requires a different play in this world. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, you bring up so many good points, Chris.

And you do. And I mentioned this on my previous episode of, and I actually heard this from a fellow researcher, Nick Redfern, said, when you are a UFO researcher and you're given videos, you're given documents, things like this, remember, you have to ask yourself, why me? Why did they choose me to give this and say to put this out in the public? So I completely understand that that side of what you're saying. I guess to piggyback off of that in terms of these videos, in retrospect, are these videos something that Skyhub can then look at and analyze in terms of

the software that you've created? So can we put old UFO videos in? Can we put old UFO videos into the data processing of Skyhub and possibly get some answers from them. If you could, I mean, holy shit, man, we would have 70 plus years of videos we can now look at. It's something we've considered before. Right now, the camera, so let me show you quickly, the camera that Skyhub uses currently is a fish-eye camera. So all of the metrics, all of the kind of machine learning, all of the kind of machine learning, all of the stuff that we've built, all the software we've built, has been built with a fish eye camera lens in mind. The other kind of value of Skyhub or something like a Skyhub is

because the camera and the systems are all the same thing or within the same realm of things, right, all of the data can be compared to each other. It's kind of like back in the 80s or 90s when UFO investigative groups would give out, they would give to witnesses special cameras that they use for those sorts of things or that couldn't be tampered with and all those other stuff. So to start with, at this point in time, no, that can't happen. However, it isn't hard to do something or it would not be impossible to do something like that. So there are other, there are machine learning object detection or object categorization tools that are at. out there right now that are available on the internet for free, that people can download it. It takes a little bit of Python or Golang knowledge. But, you know, if I was able to learn those

things well enough to kind of work with the software people for Skyhub, anyone can. I am not good at languages. And so it's, you know, it's not super impossible, actually. Yeah. Coding's not my thing either, man. No, it's really, I've never been good at it, but it's something now that I've actually gotten, I have a reason to learn, right? So it's nice. I can do it more. Um, so what I would say is, you know, for, so it's something we could build. It's something we could. We absolutely could build. It's not the current plan or it's not the current structure that's in mind. However, um, it would not be impossible to build. Yeah. In fact, it might, in fact, it might be easier than, it might even be easier than Skyhub, because Skyhub is using a fish eye lens.

versus just a normal image. Right, right. It's a really good question. Yeah, so many variables would have to be put into play. You know, the camera that was used for that particular video. So much to it. I completely understand that. But you guys have something more immediate.

Right. Still, though, it's, again, like, that is a huge part of... So right now, kind of object detection software engineer or kind of, you know, theory or whatever. The research world is kind of broken up into two major categories, I guess. One would be static object or static detector or static camera. And the other would be like a motion or a moving camera, like a drone or something, or a camera on a drone.

The camera on the drone system has more study done with it, frankly, because I think it's more of interest to a hotter topic. But that is actually probably closer than what we would have to do for something like what you're talking about. Yeah, it's a really good question, though. So, Chris, I want to move to some listener questions that people were really excited to submit.

I know some of these people are directly involved with Sky Hub, either have the software, have been messing around with it, or they're really curious about your thoughts on some of this other stuff. So I'm going to start with Aaron on Twitter. Aaron asks, what do you expect SkyHub to look like? in 10 years. We kind of touched on this what the future of Skyhub is. But yeah, man, 10 years from now, I don't even want to know where humanity is going to be at, let alone Skyhub. But yeah, what do you

think? I was going to say, let's hope for, let's hope that we're all still, you know, civilization is still standing. Also, Aaron has been a huge, a hugely important new member the team actually. His camera is like, his camera is like in the best possible place. It's so interesting. Like, anytime we capture something interesting, there's like a 75% chant it's from Aaron. At this point in time, it's ridiculous.

Dude, he sent me some of the videos. Yeah. And man, those things, I don't even know how you can begin to describe some of the things he's captured so far. But that's what you guys are for. Yeah, I know. He's capturing some really cool thing. which is amazing. So in 10 years,

what I would really love to see is, I would love to see our initial system completed. So in a stable state. So not really, you know, updates occasionally, but, you know, no major updates to the platform. So what I mean by that would be units that are able to do that kind of minimum minimum set point analysis. So, you know, they have a camera attached,

they have sensors attached, they are able to detect objects, categorize them successfully, and there is a pipeline where the public, even if you don't own a Sky Hub, can go and view the videos that are coming out of Sky Hub. And pull the data if you want to do data analysis as well,

if that's of interest for you. So that would be, if we could reach that, goal. And I don't, it's not really, that's, that's not even as long term as 10 years. But if we could hit that goal, that would really be, I would feel like we've done exactly what we've set out to do. In, in terms of further stuff, what I would love to see would be, I would love to see

I would love to see Skyhubs used for other purposes, besides just, you know, detecting airplanes or, you know, those sorts of things. I would love to see a Sky Hub. I would love to see groups develop Sky Hub for, you know, astronomy, for measuring, you know, attaching. There's very cheap telescope systems that can be added to things like Raspberry Pi, say, for example, today. Sky Hub uses the Jetson platform, which is a microcomputer like a Raspberry Pi,

but from NVIDIA. you know, development of something like that on top of Sky Hub, I think would be really fascinating and interesting and add another layer of what it can do. I would also love to really see, I would love to see the units themselves get cheaper and the software get more robust to the point where for you to purchase the stuff you need to make a Sky Hub work, you're spending $100, $200. That really in 10 years, I think that's absolutely doable. Right now, a Skyhub can cost, depending on what you want to put in it and everything else. You know, around $1,000 to $2,000 depending on the cameras you want and how many other sensors you want and all that other stuff. But I think as we develop, you know, every month that we develop, it gets a little bit cheaper. But the hardware really is the area where the cost comes in.

And those are hardware pieces that we have no control over. Right. We're not building our own cameras or something. So 10 years, that's what I want to see. So I want to see a Sky Hub that's fully functional that only cost you $100. I love that, man. Again, it's sort of democratizing the entire experience, you know? I mean, the more people who can afford to do Sky Hub,

the more data we're going to get, the more we're going to understand what we're dealing. with and everyone wins. So yeah, I think that's a really good point. And also using the software and technology you guys are creating for other purposes. I wrote this huge scary article over at the debrief about satellites and how there are satellites right now that can literally zoom into your bedroom and can actually pierce through solid walls to capture images. And that sounds absolutely terrifying and the breadth and scope of these satellites seems very, you know, like privacy breaking. But we have to keep in mind, too, some of these satellites that are monitoring

the Earth 24-7 are being used for really good purposes, such as natural disasters, and being able to get that information out to the public sooner, be like, yo, this fire's coming your way, get out of there, or to better prepare for things like that. So I think that's great that, again, Sky Hub is not just for looking for UFOs or, you know, there's a reason it's called Sky Hub and not UFO Hub or something like that, right? Right, yeah. I think actually you do bring up a good point, and it's actually something I should have probably, maybe it'll end up in a listener question, but the privacy issues,

we take those extremely seriously, and, you know, it's such an important thing. I mean, you know, we're, you know, if you, if you, if someone came to me and said, hey, I'm a UFO researcher, let me put this 24-hour camera on your house, I would tell them to go to hell. You know, I would, they would not get past my lawn. The camera is built to only measure when it detects an object. That's number one. number two one of the things that we are detecting

for at the early stages here are things that we want to tell the camera don't measure this right so for example if you know my unit for the winner

because my enclosure isn't very good or wasn't very good for a long time was sitting here in my office and the most common object my Sky Hub unit detected were my cats. Right? So that kind of thing, we would tell it, hey, throw this out.

Right, if it's a person, throw it out. Or, you know, automatic masking of buildings or surrounding areas to retain privacy. So all of that are things that we're taking very seriously. And again, if you're interested in those kinds of, if you're interested in any of this, but, you know, join our Discord and ask us to be part of the team. because we are, again, an open project, so anyone can join. And so long as you have the time and the desire to,

we're happy to have your help. Cool, man. Yeah, and we'll definitely put those links in for people at the end here. Let's move on to this listener question. Oney on Facebook, long-time listener of the show. So shout out to O'Ne. Thank you for all your support. Yep.

He's awesome, Eddie. The bald scientist. The bald scientist, exactly. He's got a curveball. for you here. I like this one. The Tic-Tac type of UFOs. I'm partial to the nuts and bolts model to explain them, but what gives me pause are two main properties of them. Their apparent lack of interaction with the environment, you know, lack of sonic booms and hypersonic speeds, he says, and even more weirdly, their uncanny ability to stop on a dime, inertia be damned. This is a, you can tell he's a scientist.

Do you know of any material that even theoretically could be manipulated to express both these properties of the Tic Tac? It's a really good question. The reason I think I know O'Ne well enough to say that one of the reasons he's properly asking the question on inertia is, if you guys have ever seen the movie Spaceballs, there's the part where when they come out of Lutia, ludicrous speed or whatever, they stop. And then Lord, you know, Helmut or whatever, Darth Helmut, goes flying, right? Yeah, he kind of wakes up, what's going up? I love it.

So, anyone that's been on a bus that is stopped suddenly, or even in a car that stopped suddenly, and been jolted forward, will know what the problem here is for something like a TikTok object where it is going very, very quickly, then stops. Unertia would suggest that all of the occupants of the Tic Tac are jelly after they hit the side of the wall. So they experience G-Forces and the forces of the wall, all those other things. In terms of the...

We have things that can lessen the effect of G-force, but not materials, but like you, can imagine, for example, like I just gave a stupid, so actually a lot of high schools will do this experiment with their engineering students where you build a protection, a protection device for an egg that goes into a water rocket, right? Oh, yeah, that's cool. I've heard of that. In this scenario, we're the egg, right?

And we don't want to become a goo. So one thing that we could do, for example, inside an object like that or a Tick-Tac or whatever, is, I'm not a, you know, I'm not a civil or an aeronautic aerospace engineer, but one could imagine, for example, an internal cavity that actually is also always in motion. So you have kind of a So like imagine you're on You're on an airplane But you are on You're sitting on a on a on a bike And so

The airplane stops suddenly But you're on the bike And the bike has its own separate stopping mechanism Of the You're inertia You would still stop So the airplane stops And you keep moving

But because you have your own braking mechanism internally to the airplane, you can stop at a good enough speed that you are not impacted by, you're impacted less than, you know, by the G-Force or whatever. That is one potential kind of idea that you could do, right? So there's ways that you can kind of design maybe around that, but again, we're talking like, these are the there's an aerospace engineer someplace listening to this that's being like

these are the ramblings of a lunatic mind you know what I mean there's like stuff you can do I mean you know we we do some stuff like that too with um you can think like with ballistic ballistic vests or stuff like that right those are all designed to lessen

the impact of a ballistic impact on a person or on an object or whatever similar sorts of technologies can be applied to things like an air, you know, a spaceship or whatever. In terms of the ability to kind of, the ability to seemingly not be affected by sheer or the kind of wind drag or stress or things like that that come from being in an atmosphere,

there are surface coatings that can allow you to much significantly lessen drag. There's also ones that can greatly, decrease, you know, the heat generated or things like that. And also ways that you can, besides just not feeling the effect, there are also, again, ways that you can kind of mitigate the force of those things. So, for example, there are nanomaterials that are structured in such a way that heat transfer is limited to a maximum value. because the material is so small in some direction that the quanta of heat energy,

the phonon literally cannot transport through the material. So that would be another thing that potentially you could think about, you know, something like that maybe could happen. But, you know, again, I think that, you know, so there are possibilities there for things that could maybe. be happening. And sometimes I think the answer is less, sometimes the answer is less exotic than we think it is. You know, I mean,

you know, if you painted, you know, painting an object white versus painting it black will change the amount of thermal radiation it gets from sunlight by a huge fact. Right? That's a simple change you can do. So there might be other simple changes we can do that we just don't know of yet because we just haven't had to face that problem with engineering. Such a good point. Yeah, we are we are cursed by our own limitations at times but yeah, that's a good point. Well, Onee, he just leaves this comment too and I'd love to read this even though it's not a question. He puts it really well. Personally, I hope these things are

from other countries and not from out there. You see, if they are from here, at least we have a decent chance of replicating such technology, like you said, and even developing defenses against them, because there is no significant difference in the technological capabilities between countries. On the other hand, true alien tech is bound to be thousands, perhaps millions of years ahead of ours. In that case, there will be nothing we can do if they decide that they are done with us, which I wouldn't blame them at this point, Chris, would you? Oh, no, we are. Yeah, no.

A lot of self-reflection. Yeah, that's, oh boy. You know, I think ONA is totally right, though. If this is another country doing this, I was just, I was watching yesterday actually a documentary on, or a series of documentaries, I guess, on World War II. And they got up to the point where they were talking about the V1 and B2 rockets. and just thinking about how big of a, you know, at the beginning of World War II, people were going into, people were going into battle still on horses, on horseback. And by the end of it, we were having tank, you know, tank only battles.

Technology has changed a tremendous amount just in our lifetime. from to think that a chat like this even talking via video in real time with crystal clear picture when I was a teenager, you know, that in the year 2000, the year 2010, would have been nigh unthinkable. Yeah. You know, it would have been something that we would have like, you know, in 2010, I think we would have been like, yeah, okay, that's probably on the horizon. But when I was a kid, you know, like the first computer we owned was an IBM PC Jr. He used DOS. You know what I mean?

Like our technology has progressed a huge amount. It probably is far outpaced our ability as a species to handle it, really. And so to think that another country who maybe was focusing more on surveillance or stealth or drone building or whatever couldn't have gotten a decade or two ahead of us. I don't think that's that ridiculous to think. And that's the other part of it too. You know, the other answer to One's question from before, what happens to the inertia or whatever?

What if there's no organisms inside the object? Yeah, exactly. What if it's just a robot? What if the Tick-Tac is just a drone? Then we're no longer talking about an organic, you know, being affected by inertia. We're talking about the machine. You know, and the machine is common sense, man. Yeah.

Absolutely. That's how we do it. We don't send men to the moon first. We send out, you know, probes and whatnot to check it out. So that makes total sense. We let our billionaire send people to other plants. Yeah, exactly. Or our monkeys.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, you know, it's not, it's so, you know, the idea that this could be from another country, I don't think is really, it's not out of the, it's not out of the realm of possibility. Yeah, it isn't. And, you know, the concern with that being when you have people like Christopher Mellon or Luis Alizondo or anyone, for that matter, saying, you know, could it be Russia or China? Possibly, we don't think it is. That's troublesome. I think. talked to Micah Hanks about this recently. If it is Russia or China, then those are acts of war coming into a training space for the Navy during a training exercise. Like, dude, come on. How much more of an act of war do you need? So if it is Russia or China, shouldn't we be seeing, you know, the top gun scenarios coming out and Maverick shooting those things out of the sky? And we're not. We're seeing them disappear out of the atmosphere.

supposedly. That's the other part of it that I think is so, the other part of it that I think is so fascinating as well is we, so I guess two thoughts on that, right? The first one would be, you're absolutely right. If this is a, if this is as serious and national security concern as, well, I think it's, our world is so different and so much more diplomatically oriented. than we were, you know, pre the United Nations. Like we, you know, we have evidence of, like, atrocities being committed in North Korea. You know, let's take an example of a country that we don't even have trading a real diplomacy with. Right.

Like, we know that the North Korea is a, is a terrible country where a dictator reigns supreme and is doing these terrible things and everything else. And yet, our military and our military in our, leaders can't act on that because of all these other socio-political concerns and things that we have to consider, you know, these other considerations. So the idea that we wouldn't, you know, to me then the argument that we, if we saw something like this in the sky and we wouldn't go after it immediately, I don't know, that kind of makes logical sense to me. but at the same time it is it is frustrating because you'd think again if we don't know what they are we'd want to find out

yeah exactly you know and we're like you said we're seeing that reflected even right now in israel and everything um there are certain actions you can take and some you can't do to like you said so many socio political issues and whatnot so yeah even if it was chinese or russian would we immediately say okay let's go to war, let's do this, like this is the reason. Or a lot of people think right now that all the mainstream coverage having to do with the military and the potential threat these objects could cause, is this leading up to something? You know, are we trying to boost the military funding yet again with all these possible threats in our skies and our national security being threatened?

I mean, you know, maybe the thing is that too, like, you know, Now, I don't think we really need UFOs to make the case right now that say Russia is an adversarial bad actor who doesn't want what's best for the United States. Right? Like, that's the other part of this, too, that I think is so funny is people, you know, people on Twitter or wherever talking about UFOs will often act like this is the only thing going on in the world. Yeah. And it's not. It is a very small part of things that. Overall, I think, you know, even like, say, Marco Rubio,

Marco Rubio's involvement, you know, from my kind of cynical viewpoint, is a very convenient story to get him out of the news, right? So, you know, I think, so the other thought, the other thought, I guess, I had based on what you were saying, was, so imagine, imagine pre-World War II the V2 rocket is out there and who reports on the V2 rocket being real

is the same person who reported on I don't know a year before had done a report on fairies in Wyoming right? Like fairy folk and gnomes in Wyoming claiming that they were traveling around in ships and whatever

Yeah. And then these rockets come out. They're like, actually, no, it's a military thing. The problem, again, with the message, the problem is not necessarily the message. It becomes the messenger in their history. And it's something that I don't think people in the UFO space have really grappled, or UFO fans, I guess, haven't really grappled with.

You know, I remember when the, when this, first, you know, the first report about this, the task force or whatever came out. And everyone was, you know, people were like on, you know, on Twitter, you know, all excited and everything else. And you had some of the old, you know, older UFO people who'd been involved in this before and seen disclosure come and gone at 100 times and whatever. And they were all saying, you know, hey, this has happened before. And what happened last time was, you know, Linda Moulton Howe's documentary on cattle

mutilations got some normal media attention. And then people started looking into the backgrounds of the players and the actual story and everything else. And it all fell apart. Right? They don't seem to realize that, like, this is, if it is an important story, if it is a real national security threat, if it's a real national security issue that they're working on, why publish a book like Hunt for the Skinwalker? Why do a Bob Lazar documentary? Like, is it serious or is it not?

serious. It's one or the other. And so you can't have it be, you know, it's just entertainment. So, you know, we're just put, you know, that was the thing with TTSA that always really kind of frustrated me was on the one hand you had them coming out saying, no, this is really serious stuff. These are national security issues, everything else. And then you'd ask them, well, why are you publishing a Bob Lazard doc, you know, biography? And they say, well, that's our media arm. I don't know. There's a reason that there's, you know, Northrop, there's a reason Northrop, there's a reason Northropan, doesn't have a media arm that publishes stories on, you know, flying rockets or whatever. Yeah. You know, there's a reason that Raytheon doesn't have a superhero as their logo who's got comic books and movies. And, you know, because it's serious. It's a serious thing. People die. And, you know, so it's so frustrating to, you know, it's the same thing with some of the figures, too,

where you just, you have to say to yourself, you have to wonder again, you know, like Greer recently pushes out this thing saying that Elizando is a, you know, what did he say on his YouTube thing? Elizondo is a... Disinformation agent.

False flag, alien invasion. You know, pending. Yeah. Like, okay, well, then if it's serious, at least Greer has... Greer, I think, at least, has taken himself too seriously his entire...

career. But, you know, again, it's this sort of thing of, you know, is it, is it serious or not? It has to be, it has to be one or the other. I think for a lot of people, the argument of, you know, they're just doing that because it's just good TV or because it's just media exposure or whatever. Media exposure is not the kind of currency of the realm that people seem to think it is for national security issues. It's very strange. You know, there's a reason spies don't go on the history channel.

You know, there's a reason that doesn't happen. It's a little contradictory. Such a good point, man. All right, well, let's move to, I guess, let's move back to Skyhub for just a moment. Our last Skyhub question of the day.

David on Twitter asks, let's see here, what skills or knowledge are you in most need of to help move Skyhub forward? Really good question. So we currently would love developers with skills in Golan, in Python, in C, in Java, any of the kind of, you know, any of the languages that we write the code in currently. It would also be really great or really useful to have people involved to help us.

to kind of take the machine learning and user interface side of things to the next level. So people with experience and database management are building would also be very, very welcome. And also, you know, just people interested and ready to be actively engaged in this. You know, it's a, this is a project where people are working for free. We're spending our free time to build this. because it's a labor of love. That isn't everybody's cup of tea, you know? So, but if you think that it's something that you'd like to be involved in

and it sounds something like something that you think would be a good way to spend a part of your weekends, please reach out to us. You know, team at skyhub.org is the email. So shoot us an email. We'd love to have you. Cool, man. And again, I think it's important to stress that all of you at Skyhub are dedicating your time, your insight, even your own money to making this happen.

And I know you guys have a Patreon as well. And a couple of people were wondering, what is the Patreon for? How can they support you guys? And where does the money go for the Patreon campaign? Yeah, it's a really good question. So all of the Patreon money goes towards development costs. So we actually just put in a order for some Sky Hub

enclosures. So what those are, they are kind of a thermoformed 3D print, or not 3D printed, thermoformed cases where people can build and put their Skyhubs and have an official enclosure, right? A big chunk of the money goes towards paying, frankly, for server cost. So paying for

someplace to put the data. Yeah, man. It's not cheap, I know. No, that, the website, all of those other kinds of aspects and things. And then ultimately the goal would be to have the ability to get professionals working on Sky Hub part-time, right? So paying people, you know, for three hours, four hours of specialty programming work or whatever, where our team can't, you know, where our team can't, what's the word? where our team maybe doesn't have the expertise or the ability to handle a specific aspect or a specific thing like that.

So, you know, it's a great question, though. And another thing that we are, what's the word? Another thing where we are currently figuring out, you know, this is for a lot of us the first time that we have, for some of us, it's not the first time that they've worked on kind of a charity or something like this. for me it really is the first time that I've kind of worked at this high level of a charity or a kind of an organization not charity a non-for-profit kind of endeavor or project and citizen science project being being transparent with the money is also an extremely important aspect of that and so that's another thing that we are you know if we had all the

time in the world, all of this stuff would be done already. We don't. It is a public project, but that's definitely something else that we hope the public will keep us accountable on and keep us moving forward with. Right. But right now, though, like I said, you know, the money is going towards so the building and developing of the enclosures for, you know, environmental conditions more extreme, let's say, than my garden. The development of, you know, or the kind of cloud computing costs and things like that that that we have and the storage costs. Awesome. Yeah. And again, I think that's really important to sort of demystify the whole contribution thing. You know, a lot of people want to know, well, you're not using this money to go on a vacation, are you, Chris?

So it's good to know what is actually being done. And I highly suggest everyone check out your Patreon campaign over there. It's very, very important for something like this. Yeah, definitely check it out. I mean, that's the other thing too. We've toyed with, like, we've toyed with any of the past of, like, trying other. The good news right now is that our need for money, we break even right now. You know what I mean?

our need for money doesn't overcome the amount of money we have every month coming in, which is great, which is perfect. It's exactly what you want to be. But as more of these units come online, as we want to do bigger things or bigger projects with this or stuff like that, you know, it's going to, you know,

that's what the Patreon really is for, to kind of build that base up and make sure that we're ready to operate in the coming years so that there is a Sky Hub in 10 years. Exactly, man. Come out somewhere. I got you. Well, moving to the podcast, my man, before we go here, tell us about the Mad Scientist

podcast. Maybe some of your favorite episodes you guys have recently done. I know you did like a huge multi-part series at time travel, which is so cool, a topic everyone can relate to and find interesting. But you guys break it down, which I love. So yeah, what do you got going on over at the Mad Scientist podcast as of late and in the future? Yeah, so the show that we do is the Mad Scientist podcast. It's me and my co-host, Marie.

And so our show really looks at kind of the history, philosophy, and hard science behind topics that usually come up in science fiction or on, you know, I don't know, just science fiction kind of topics and things like that. But also looking at parts of the science world or science history that maybe we're taught in school but are still really interesting. So my favorite series probably are, we did one on the history of surgery, which was fascinating and terrifying and just really, really fun to research for. We did one, we did one on Robert Bigelow and kind of the beginnings and early time period of the Skinwalker Ranch saga and how it played into Two the Stars Academy and how it

really got us to today. And we did a series recently, like Ryan said, on time travel, which was a lot of fun. And we kind of go into, you know, what is time as kind of a physical concept? What does it mean mathematically? How do we use it in our mathematics? All of those kind of big questions, ultimately getting to, okay, well, you know, what does this mean for time travel? And what does it mean for our ability to go back or forward in time? So it's been a lot of fun. Check it out. We're available on Spotify. Apple Podcasts, Google Play. We're available now on Pandora too,

which we're just available everywhere. So go find us and take a listen. Yep, absolutely. Anywhere you find somewhere in the sky's mad scientist's podcast is there as well. Absolutely. Well, you know, closing question, as always, my man, you know this role by now. Where can we find everything you're up to?

And where can we find Skyhub to learn more? Yeah, so you can find Skyhub at skyhub. org. That's where you'll find the link to our Discord server. So you can come in and ask us questions. That's where you'll find our Git repository. So where you can actually go and download the code and see the interworkings and everything else. You can find us on Twitter. So at Sky Hub 10 is the main Skyhub page. But there's also, obviously, you can follow me in Mad Scientist Pod. You know, follow other folks from the team on Twitter as well. Our Twitter handles are up under the team kind of heading on the Sky Hub website.

And, you know, our next kind of big appearance is going to be at the SCU conference here coming up. We have a video presentation on kind of what Sky Hub is, how it's evolved, the software and the hardware and all those sorts of things. That'll be going up on YouTube after the conference so people can go see it. And, yeah, that's really the best place for people to find us. So I'm on Twitter all the time, probably too much. So you can always find me on Twitter yelling about it. something so we all are man we all are i'm glad you brought up asc u i know you guys are working with them

and also with the uap expedition group who's going out to the catalina island to monitor the activity out there with a tic-tac event took place so that's really exciting i highly suggest the youtube channel where you can watch some of the videos that skyhub devices have captured which is really cool the comments are great hearing everyone say what they think it is and everything in between So, no, man, you guys got a good thing going on. I am so happy to, like, be in this generation that is taking UAP seriously, is trying to put more science into all of this, and trying to understand these phenomena that continue to mystify us, brother.

So thank you for coming on Summer in the Skies. And, yeah, thank you for being a part of SkyHub. I think this is the future of UAP studies, bar none. As always, man, thanks for having us. Always a pleasure. And, yeah, we can't wait. too, can we wait to have some really good videos here that we can keep sharing with you. So we'll talk soon.

Awesome. Thank you. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network.