The Why Files: Operation Podcast - Basement #010: Marc D'Antonio | UFO Propulsion, The Fifth Dimension, and 40 Billion Habitable Worlds
Episode Date: April 6, 2026Marc D'Antonio is an astronomer specializing in exoplanets, MUFON's chief photo and video analyst, and the CEO of FX Models — a visual effects company whose clients include Hollywood studios and d...efense contractors. He co-developed an advanced UFO detection system alongside Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects legend behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner. Marc operates two remote observatories in Arizona, where he livestreams the night sky to audiences around the world and conducts real exoplanet transit research. He is a recurring on-screen analyst for History Channel's The Proof Is Out There and has appeared across numerous television productions covering anomalous phenomena. He has done project work for the U.S. Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and has spent decades applying genuine scientific rigor to one of the least scientifically respected fields in existence. MARC D'ANTONIO LINKS www.skytourlive.org tiktok - skytourlivestream X - @skytourD Facebook - Marc Dantonio Kick - marcstls Instagram - skytourlivestream twitch - stlsw Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Today we've got Mark Dantonio.
He's an astronomer, Mufon's chief photo and video analyst,
and the CEO of a visual effects company that builds stuff for Hollywood and defense contractors.
He also co-developed a UFO detection camera system with Douglas Trumbull.
He's the guy who did the visual effects for 2001, Blade Runner, Star Trek, Close Encounters.
I mean, he's a legend.
Yeah, so he gets paid to analyze UFO footage and make UFO footage.
It's like hiring a counterfeiter to authenticate money.
I love it.
At nine years old, Mark had a missing time experience on a school field trip.
He came home terrified of the night sky.
So what did he do?
He asked his parents for a telescope.
He turned that fear into a career.
So the aliens scared him, and his response was,
I'm going to find you?
It's not a career, that's revenge.
This guy's like a nerdy Charles Bronson.
Today we're covering exoplanets how life spreads across the universe,
and what Mark heard on a Navy submarine,
that the government won't talk about.
I always spend some time with semen.
Stop that.
What?
And Mark has a theory that might explain how UFOs actually move,
without engines.
And I'm telling you, it's a good theory and backed by real science.
There's also a three-night encounter at his house
involving knocking a flash of light
and something in his sinus that he can't explain.
And neither could his doctor.
It sounds like his doctor skipped the alien biology classes
in med school, huh?
I had a great time hanging out with Mark.
He's super smart and also very funny.
And I'll prove it.
Let's go down to the basement.
Mark, welcome to the basement.
Wow, AJ.
So good to be here.
Thank you.
I'm so excited to have you here.
It's so much fun.
It was a great time.
It was a long time coming, right?
It was.
Yeah, yeah.
It's really cool.
Good to be here.
Thanks, man.
So you have a super long resume and a very wide breadth of experience.
But I want to start with age nine, got your lunch, you get on the school bus.
Oh, okay. We're going there now.
Let's do it.
Okay. So, hey, so check this out.
Age 9, you're in third grade.
Okay, you're excited. You're going on a field trip to a pond.
Yeah.
Okay. How much fun, right?
I got my mother gave me a bag lunch with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
and some of those fluorescent orange crackers with peanut butter in them, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I get on the bus with my bag lunch holding in my hand, okay?
And I sit down on the sea, you know, making the squeaky sounds in your shorts
because I was wearing shorts.
just near the end of the year.
Okay.
And we get to the pond.
We're all getting off the bus.
Next thing you know,
I'm getting back on the bus.
Wait, what's going on?
I still have my bag lunch.
I'm holding it the same way.
Okay?
And the kids are bouncing around, like, what's going on?
So I say, when are we going to the pond?
And I turn and look, and they're like,
ah, you idiot.
You know, how kids are.
Slap, push, punch, you know.
We've been there all day.
Where were you?
Where were you?
I don't know.
Oh, I don't remember the day.
It was the first true missing time I've ever experienced.
I had never experienced anything like that.
I didn't know what it was.
So I just sort of stayed quiet in the bus, got back to the school, walked home.
I was what they call a walker.
Well, hang on, do the kids know you were gone?
Were you just?
Oh, yeah.
A couple of them said, where were you all day?
So they were aware that you were not there?
They were aware I was not there.
Okay.
And I don't know.
To this day, I don't know where I was.
You have no memory of what?
No memory.
You ever thought about doing regression or something to figure that out?
Yeah, I haven't.
I'm a little concerned about it.
First of all, let me just finish the other part.
I got home with that lunch.
I put it on the counter and my mother says,
why didn't you eat your lunch?
We love our moms, right?
And so I said, I don't know.
She goes, okay, well, go outside and play.
I'll call you for dinner.
So I went outside and play to my friend from next door.
I distinctly remember a weird feeling coming over me out there
and then next thing you know, I'm on the ground in convulsions and seizures
and I'm banging my head in the ground, bang, bang, bang,
but it wasn't me.
Here's the weird part.
I'm doing this and I'm looking at the ground seeing little red ants running around
going, oh, check out the ants.
Look at the ants, but I'm still hitting my head really, really hard.
Hitting ants and thinking, wow, I'm hitting the ants, hey, I'm squashing the ants.
And it wasn't me.
Well, they called the ambulance, of course.
They put me in the ambulance.
It still wasn't me.
Wasn't you, meaning you weren't in control?
You're kind of just watching it happen?
Exactly.
I was a passive observer watching this happen.
It wasn't really me.
So guess what?
I'm watching this.
I'm in the ambulance, and I say to the ambulance drivers,
I say, hey, can you run the siren?
Right?
So you're not frightened?
No, I was like, this is cool.
And they put on the siren.
I'm thinking, wow.
cool they're put on a siren for me I wasn't worried at all I should have been worried yes I
wasn't AJ I didn't have a worry in the world I have no idea why I wasn't worried
I get that hospital the doctor sees my head has a bump on it of course because I was
banging my head in the ground right oh it's okay he had a concussion okay so take him
home we'll have the nurse pluck out the dirt that's embedded in his forehead okay that was
the worst part. That hurt like you can't believe. They're plucking dirt out of an abrasion.
If you get an abrasion, imagine plucking dirt out of it. The pain is, ah, that's just painful.
Makes people have jelly legs, right? So anyway, that was the worst part. I just wanted to go home.
Well, hang on. What did mom say? Where were you? Teacher, chaperone? Well, no. She never knew
that I missed all that time. You didn't tell her. I never told her. Of course. We were not going to tell her.
No, I'm not going to get into time. Well, you're going to take me to a psychiatrist now? No.
No.
I'm not going to the doctors again.
The hospital was scary to me.
So I didn't want to do it, man.
So I ended up going home, and the worst part was, besides picking out that stuff out of my forehead,
I know that's nasty sounding, was that they wouldn't let me sleep for the night.
Because the doctors told him, keep them awake.
Right.
And my mother, of course, going overboard, you can't sleep tonight.
You're going to have to stay awake.
And that was the worst part because I was really tired.
And, I mean, and anyone.
It has seizures and convulsions, knows that afterwards, you're fatigued.
Your body has just gone through this tumultuous muscle tensing and relaxation.
Tensing.
It's like doing a workout in like 25 seconds, 30 minutes, whatever it takes.
And so I was just totally fatigued.
I couldn't even sit up in the table at the hospital.
I kept wanting to fall over.
And so that's probably why the doctor said, don't let him fall asleep.
Keep awake.
You know, like, okay, Marky.
Okay.
And Marky, that's what they call me.
So is this missing time because of seizures or did something else happen?
Just speculate.
My speculation is something happened.
Okay.
I came home perfectly fine.
If I was having a seizure, I would expect I would be dirty, filthy,
have problems with abrasions from having done it.
I had nothing.
Nothing, AJ.
Nothing on my body indicated anything until I had that seizure before dinner,
pounding my head in the sand.
okay with that there are people listening who have the same experience what would you
would you tell them to seek medical help keep it quiet what do they do do do I look like a
good example okay I didn't I've never sought medical help I've never tried to do a regression
you know I'm sure I'll get offers to do regression but you know what I'm kind of scared of
that okay I'm that's a fair answer I'm not I'm not gonna lie I'm not like some big brave
guy it's gonna say oh course I'll do it you know I'm scared of it when you're nine did you
think this could be an alien abduction or did you not have that frame of reference?
It wasn't there quite yet, but here's what happened after that.
Unlike any other time, after that, when I got home from the hospital, when I went out to play
the next day, it was fine.
When night came, I was completely afraid to go out and let the stars see me.
Right.
The stars.
Wait a minute.
The night is usually frightening to people.
It wasn't a night.
I didn't care about that.
but the stars were scary to me.
Something I felt was looking at me.
I mean, that's how I was putting it together as a nine-year-old.
It was scary.
So I literally, and I think you may know enough about me to know that sometimes I attack things head on.
And even as a nine-year-old, I kind of did that.
It doesn't mean I'm brave and, oh, look at him go.
No, no.
It just means I was scared.
And sometimes you attack things when you're scared.
When you're scared, you punch back, right?
I'm scared.
Bang, you hit without thinking.
So I did in an intellectual way.
I actually, I told my parents, I want a telescope.
I want a telescope mom and dad.
You're afraid of the stars, yet you want to see more of them.
I want to see more of them.
And I said, I've got to know what's going on.
And I was scared of death.
And the first time I went out there looking at them, I was literally like this.
And I felt, this is so stupid.
It's just a star.
You know?
I didn't even know what stars were at that point.
At the point at nine years old, I thought, well,
Were they alive?
Were they something?
What are they?
Points in the sky?
Yeah, we know there are balls of hot gas.
Oh, okay.
That's what I knew of stars back then.
But something's pulling you to look.
But something was making me.
Making you look.
Yeah.
I looked at the moon first.
Oh, I'm comfortable with that.
This is the moon.
All right, so I'll check out the moon.
Wow, look at the creators, mom and dad.
Look.
Show them the creators.
Wow, that's nice, Mark.
Mammer, do your homework.
Okay, Mom.
All right.
So then I looked at star clusters,
and I saw these beautiful clusters of stars.
I wonder if there's anyone looking back at me right now from there.
What an odd thought.
Is it? I don't know if it is, unless I'm odd also.
Yeah, but duh.
That's why we get along.
I think we get along.
But yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I think that.
You're wondering who's there.
Who's looking back?
Yeah, and so that persisted.
And so starting around age 9, just as I reached age 10, I had to have surgery back then,
heart surgery. It was very big to surgery and had a
New Haven Hospital. And I started
embedding myself and looking at the telescope because that's what I
could do. I couldn't do any kind of athletic stuff. They wouldn't let me.
Doctors were way over-conscious and conservative back then. They wouldn't let you do
anything. This is because of a heart condition? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they had to fix the valve problem, right? Like in your car.
Right. So, you know, fix the valve. So they fixed
the valve, and now they basically have to recuperate. So
I didn't even, they wouldn't even let me climb stairs.
I had to walk and I had to go to a special school that was all one floor.
Okay.
It was weird.
So anyway, they're overcautious.
But I sunk into the telescope and I started looking at stuff.
And the more I looked at stuff, again, still fearful.
Okay, I began to think, I got to figure out what's going on out there.
You know, I'd say, it's scratching my head.
This is something crazy out there.
What is this?
I'm going to figure this out.
I'd grit my teeth and I'd,
forced myself to look at something that's scary in the sky,
and I'd say, I'm going to figure this out.
Now, was it just a mental thing?
Maybe.
But guess what it did?
It turned me into an astronomer.
Because at age nine, I said to myself,
I'm going to be an astronomer.
Well, doesn't that lead us to you writing to JPL as a nine-year-old?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yeah.
I actually...
I mean, this is very...
I don't know if you know how weird you are.
In a great way.
In a great way.
I'm out of here.
No, no, you're right.
I mean, I definitely feel that I am a little weird sometimes.
But I just mean this.
I try doing a good way, man.
And you understand.
Yes, most of us don't have this third or fourth grade experience.
We're writing to JPL.
So can you, what did you send to them?
To NASA?
While recovering from the surgery, I was bored.
I would look at my telescope, but during the day, what do I do?
I'd read books.
I'd read books.
And I realized, we need a space station.
We need a space station.
I didn't know that NASA had space stations on the docket and thoughts.
I didn't.
So I created them.
I actually built, I created a space station plan.
Okay?
It was like eight pages of torn out notebook paper.
What, blueprints and...
Not even, it's just notebook paper.
I drew, you know, by hand.
And I drew space stations.
I made two dumbbells in an X configuration that were rotating at just the right speed
so that you get gravity, Earth gravity, in these dumbbells.
You're a nine-year-old figuring out how to do one G with centrifugal force?
Absolutely.
And how did that happen?
I don't know.
Okay.
But I did, you know, again.
It happened during that pond experience.
I was, wow.
They gave you the seed.
Oh, okay.
That's scary now.
All right.
You're making me think.
Well, all right.
We'll keep it happy.
No, that's all good.
All right.
So I built this space station plan, and I put in rotation to have Earth gravity.
I didn't call it 1G.
I didn't know what that meant.
Okay.
I said, this will make, if it's rotating, you know, we'll get Earth gravity, okay?
And because there were things out there in the literature talking about space stations, rotating, and stuff like that.
So I put it together.
It made twin dumbbells in the next configuration.
and the access hatches where, you know, as you get closer, you get zero G at the center, right?
Well, I didn't know that, okay.
I just think you climb a ladder to go to the next one.
I'd never put that part together, but it was rotating with Earth gravity at the ends.
I had pigs in there, had cows, okay?
You know, pigs for meat, cows for milk.
I mean, I did all that stupid stuff that just obviously is impractical.
But I also talked about cleaning the air.
How do you clean the air?
You got to clean the air inside your space station to get rid of carbon dioxide.
I knew that because I read books about what we exhale.
So I also figured there has to be a way to get rid of carbon dioxide out of the air.
So this box here is the thing to remove carbon dioxide.
All right, and replace it with oxygen.
Now, we don't do that part, but we do scrub CO2, right?
So I didn't know what that was, but I said it's needed for a space station
because we're going to otherwise get the oxygen.
Of course.
The animals are going to need it too.
Right.
You know?
So anyway, I did this whole stuff.
I wrote it all up and I draw all these pictures, arrows everywhere.
And pencil, a notebook paper with blue lines.
I love it.
I box it up and I'm put in a folder, actually.
And I sent it down to NASA.
And the NASA person that read it, most of had a field day.
Okay.
He was a NASA scientist.
He read it.
And for whatever reason, it struck him.
He actually wrote back to me.
me, not...
Who was he? What was his name?
I'll tell you. I'll tell you in just a minute because that's
part of fun. I don't want to step on the punchline.
No, no, no, no, you're fine. You're fine.
But, so this NASA guy
writes back to me and he provides me
with this giant box, which I
said was my space box. It was full of
cloth mission patches from missions. It was full of books.
It was full of models.
It was full of all the stuff I could dream
of if you're a space nut.
Yep. And I labeled it spacebox.
I had it for decades.
Tattered, worn, many of the things got lost the time,
but I still had the box with a few things in it left.
And in my space station plan, in the Manila envelope,
he read every page, every comment,
and he circled things in little callouts,
and he wrote things like, this is a good idea we do this,
meaning the carbon dioxide thing.
He says, it's called a CO2 scrubber,
and we do this now.
Good thinking.
Wow.
And then he wrote me a letter, okay, which said,
Dear Mark, your space station plan, I read with enthusiasm.
I just love that line.
Wow.
I had a scientist read something I wrote with enthusiasm.
I didn't think I'm nine.
I'm thinking I'm an adult, right?
That's how you think.
And then he says, stick with the, they called it back then the manned space program, right?
Stick with the manned space program because you've got our future.
You know, and he signed it, his name, Bert Lee.
Gentry Lee.
Gentry Lee today, and probably retired by now,
but he is JPL's head engineer,
the outer outer space robotic missions directorate.
Yeah.
And I literally said, I can't believe this.
Okay, this is cool.
And now back then, he was just a NASA scientist.
So let's jump ahead 45 years.
Okay.
I remember Gentry Lee,
I should write him and find out if you're not.
remembers this. He won't, but I'll do it anyway. I wrote him. He writes me back. I don't remember this,
but that's the kind of stuff I did. He says, we should stay in touch. This is so cool. And it's really neat.
Now, I was in Pasadena because I was at a conference out there. Right. And I was presenting, so I was
presenting for A&E, so I couldn't leave. I didn't have a car. But I wanted to go to JPL in the
worst way to see if he was there, to make an appointment, to meet with him and say hi to him.
finally after all these years. I didn't get that chance yet. But man, that guy single-handedly took a
nine-year-old kid and cemented that he was going to become an astronomer.
That's a real gentleman to do that, to take that time to do that. He was amazing, you know.
And I've always given him kudos for this. We've talked about this, I think, in the past.
I know your brother and I talked about it, Gino. You know, for me to get where I am, I've stood on the shoulders
of giants.
None of it is, I can't say it's all me.
You know, I don't have that kind of ego.
You know, I've stood in the shoulders of giants.
I was helped along the way, and I never forget who helped me.
And I always make sure I name them and give them that credit that's due them.
You know, so that's how it works, you know.
But it's so cool, you know.
And so here I am some weird astronomer guy who believes UFOs exist
and believes that we might have alien life on our planet.
How the heck did that?
So the nine-year-old kid goes into astronomy, and do you start building telescopes?
Yeah, I actually started making a reflecting telescope, which I never finished because I was grinding the mirror.
But as a nine-year-old kid, I was also very much unable to focus.
So I was grinding this mirror with a friend Mike, and we're grinding it in his basement.
and I'm like looking around and thinking, man, you know,
hurry up and finish.
Let's get this thing so we can look at this guy.
So the mechanics of making a telescope weren't so exciting to me.
Using them and looking at stuff, amazing.
And I said, but wait, I want to take pictures with them.
And I'm thinking, how do I attach my camera to a telescope?
Now, I didn't know that they have adapters.
So I made one.
You know, no lie, out of a paper towel roll,
and the camera I built out of nothing.
I built it out of cardboard.
You built a camera.
I built a camera.
A one-shot camera using the instomatic film they used to have was film camera.
You know?
And he used a screwdriver to wind it to the next picture.
I figured that's about right.
And so I would actually make this camera and then I had the cardboard attached to this paper towel roll in the telescope.
I had no way of focusing it.
So what I did was I figured, well, here's where the film is.
And that's got to be where my eye.
eye is. So I look where my eye is. I took my mother's ruler and I went like this. How far away am I,
you know, from the eye piece? And so I got pictures, but of course they're blurry, you know,
crappy photos, blurry. But you could see the kind of the star and you could see a sort of a moon crater,
you know, but it wasn't, it wasn't unsuccessful. But I figured I wanted to take pictures, so that's
how I did it. I couldn't afford a camera. How do you end up building basically a missile silo on
front lawn.
Years later, let's talk about, you know, you're doing astronomy.
I wanted to do astronomy, but I wanted also to share it.
You know, I took my astronomy into public outreach.
I felt that that is a rigorous application of astronomy is how we're going to leave the planet
eventually.
You know, astronomy, physics, astrophysics, okay, and maybe even cosmology, okay, is how we're
going to get there, all right?
So I wanted to be an astronomer to do that
So how do you do that?
Well, you have to bring other people into the discussion
You know, you hear people talk who are in a university
And they're over your head within five minutes
You know, and you're like, well, what about the people that are watching over here?
How are they going to?
They're not going to get it.
So I made it my effort.
I made an effort to make it so that I take the complex
and make it digestible, okay?
Because even if you don't understand all the science,
you should still be allowed to be in the discussion.
That's why you're perfect for TV is because you'd make it accessible to all of us.
Maybe, I guess, you know.
Maybe that's why they found me.
Who knows?
Okay, but the point being that if you can make something like that digestible,
well, okay, it's a commodity of sorts, but I don't think of it that way.
You know, I don't go after opportunities, you know.
I mean, this came from someone else, you know, and I said, oh, I'll do it. Sure. That sounds fun.
You know, all good. So, but the point being that when you make it understandable to people,
they start asking questions, and they always start the same way. This may be a stupid question
and go, no, no, stop. There are no stupid questions. If you don't know, you don't know. I was you
once. Just ask. And they're set at ease. And they ask their question. Well,
the black holes really suck.
You know?
Right.
Like, yeah, that's sort of true.
But we don't understand gravity yet.
We just know that they do.
Yeah.
And then they go, we don't understand gravity?
Oh, that's another discussion, you know.
So, yeah.
So obviously, you know, obviously that's very important.
So tell us about the dome that you built.
Yeah.
I just love the story.
Well, so I wanted to be able to bring astronomy to the masses like we're talking about.
And to do it, I needed to have a telescope that was always accessible.
I did not like the inconvenience of having to bring it out.
150 pounds of telescope.
Mount it, align it with the north star so that I could make it properly follow the stars
because you have to do that for telescopes for those who don't know.
And by doing that, what I did was I bought a dome for my front lawn.
It was the only dome in the entire town of Terryville, Connecticut.
it's this big giant white minion on the front lawn.
Okay, I dressed it up as Stuart the minion, in fact, for Halloween.
Okay, and people are stopping going, look at Stewart, ah, banana.
You know, they're taking pictures of this giant minion on the front lawn.
How big is, because my HOA won't let me put up a flag.
How do you get a dome?
How big is this thing?
I don't have an H.O.A.
That's fine.
It was an eight-foot diameter.
Okay.
Okay.
So it stood about maybe eight feet tall, eight feet wide, you know, it was really, really nice.
Okay.
I think they called it a standard two meter dome.
But anyway, I put my computer in there, the telescope was in there,
and it was protected from the weather, mostly,
except when we had violent winter storms,
it ripped the shutters off and filled the whole thing up with snow.
Telescope, computers, a whole nine yards.
But luckily it was cold, and I took everything out,
and I blew it out with my air gun,
and managed to recover perfectly, right?
So it wasn't perfect solution, but it was great.
And so I'd go in there.
It'd be February.
It'd be like minus three outside.
And it has to be minus three inside, too.
You can't heat a dome because there's a slot.
And the warm air would go out and do this to the view.
Ah, you need to keep everything the same time.
You have to be ambient temperatures outside.
And when I worked in a parallax program in a big observatory,
we had a 20-inch refractor that was like 35 feet long.
massive dome. You'd have to open the dome hours before you're ready to start doing
observations of nearby stars, okay, to gauge their distance. And when you did that,
it could be 10 below zero or 5 degrees and you got to be in 5 degree weather. Not only that,
you had to also work in a dark room in the dome at the same temperature to develop all those
plates. It was actually glass plates because back then Yale University could actually measure these
glass plates with a what's called a measuring engine back then that's how they did it then now it's
all digital thank you okay but it was crazy so i'd be in there so i'm used to the cold hate the cold
you know and the gloves are never good enough right you can't use heated gloves because it gives
off heat and heat causes you have problems with your image so you've got to be the same temperature
just breathing can be a problem in a small dome right so anyway i built the dome the summer months
great. I had broadcast stuff in there. I broadcast to the internet and I would actually stream
it on YouTube. And that was the whole Sky Tour live stream thing, right? And so people would come in
and they still do from all over the world and just watch as I produce the universe live in real
time. And we produce these images for people. And I say for people because everything we image
I give away. We have a server at skyturelive.org. They can go on there and go grab the images
we took a week ago. Even if they couldn't attend, they could see what we took.
The streams are a lot of fun. They are. And you have another
observatory in Arizona? I do. I have two there. And can, can you control that remotely?
I do. You do? Yeah, because I had the one on the front lawn in Terryville, Connecticut.
Right, the minion. And a minion. And I controlled the minion with Wi-Fi.
They go, oh, okay, network. Network for a period of time. And then I realized, you know,
that way I could be inside the warm house while doing it. That's a huge leap from being in 20-degree weather.
because I'd be saying, and this is the, oh gosh, you know, I forget because I'm so cold.
And people are saying, oh, we're feeling pain for you right now.
And I was like, oh, see, that's the wrong thing.
Wrong message.
So I ended up working out the Wi-Fi thing.
And then I'm inside.
Wow, what a difference.
I have a warm room now that I'm working from.
Then I realized, I want to put these in Arizona somewhere.
So I convinced the friend let me put one on his land.
And that was the first one in Arizona out in the Sonoran Desert.
You write on 14 miles of dirt roads after the pavement to find the observatory.
Are you triangulating objects like Avi's doing with the Galileo project?
Interesting, you mentioned that, because the other observatory in Arizona is in Benson, Arizona, which is 220 miles away.
So if we image the same object from both telescopes, we could indeed do that.
okay as long as you know the exact look angles and exact position and altitude of the telescopes
we can do the calculation we haven't but we can and that was precisely why I wanted to have them
separated like that because if you see something in the sky in fact you can you know I I talk to
Avi's team as Ezra Kelderman was on his team I talked to Ezra and several of his team
members because I wanted to offer them a Galileo site.
So I have a potential Galileo site for them, if they want to ever use it and so forth.
But I was also talking to them because I could maybe help them automate some of their
processes.
After all, I had the right software to be able to control my dome out there.
And that's not even a dome.
It's just a flat roof, where the roof comes off, much quicker to acclimate that way.
And so I wrote a control program.
does housekeeping stuff, turn on power, move off the roof, do this, do that, check the temperature, blah, blah, blah. And so that all works great. So then when I do the actual work, I'm in Connecticut, 2,600 miles away. And I thought, you know, this is a far cry from my front lawn. But if something went wrong on my front lawn, what would I do? I put on my hat and go out and fix it. Can't do that when it's out in Arizona. So I had to make it bulletproof as best.
I could. Sometimes we lose power for a bit. Everything gets upended. I had to have back doors to be
able to shut things down even though. That only happens when you're live, by the way.
Oh, yeah. Isn't that weird? How did you know that? There's been times where I get in and
welcome everybody, welcome to sky their live stream. Hey guys, Mark DeAnonio here, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And all of a sudden, it's all gone. It's like, it really fills your heart with fear.
when you lose connection. But what I did was I circumvented that by having a secondary internet.
The internet out there was okay. In Benson, we're sharing it with nine other professional astronomers
on that plateau out there. And sometimes the internet goes out, and then everybody's out of the water,
including me. So I put a Starlink in. So now I'm connected to Starlink. The backup is the regular
regular internet they provide.
So I'm paying an additional 120 a month
for the peace of mind to know that from 2,600 miles away,
I won't lose connection to this telescope.
You've got to have it.
And the bitter irony that you're using Starlink,
the bane of every astronomer on the planet.
I've said that so many times.
You have to do it.
I'm taking pictures of these beautiful nebulae,
and depending where we are in the sky,
and the thing is, a typical session, for instance,
I'll be sitting there looking at objects in the sky,
And I've got people from all over the world watching, right?
And I've been a performer all my life.
I started as a magician early on.
I do a lot of talks.
I speak all over the country.
I'm very comfortable in front of cameras.
I'm very comfortable in the sets.
I'm very comfortable.
I know my marks.
I know it were to be.
And that just came with time, right?
So all that said, I started to think, well, you know,
I can't let any dead air occur.
I've got to fill the space with something.
So I put music in the background, some of which I make myself,
okay, and others of which I use from like the YouTube galleries.
I hate those.
But, you know, I haven't mixed in all my own stuff yet.
But it makes it a show.
It really does.
You put on a show.
It's a production.
Yeah, it is.
It really is a production.
You're right.
And, you know, you want to add other things.
I used to have other overlays and things, but I'm one person doing eight things at once
all the time.
And that makes it really hard.
Now, I'll tell you this.
With a friend of mine, partner who was also a,
magician we built a robot together and the robot would work at trade shows and go and talk to people
we actually worked an inauguration in Washington a robot robot okay and the robot gave uh it was at the time
it was uh president's daughter and we're giving her a tour of the smithsonian which president
it was clinton okay so it was chelsea okay okay and we had her sign the robot and all that stuff
whatever. So anyway,
it was an opportunity.
And electronic data system, EDS,
Ross Perrault's old company,
brought us down.
I said, we would like you to take Chelsea around the Museum
of American History. Okay.
So the museum escorted her around,
talking to her, interacting with their friends.
Now, what no one knew
is that I was inside that thing.
No, you were in the machine.
I love it.
Now, being magicians, though, AJ,
being magicians, we figured out how
make this large thing look small.
Clever use of black and white colors allowed us to make it look impossible for a regular
size human to fit in there.
This is your VFX training as well.
Yeah, it was.
Absolutely.
Okay.
And so I ended up doing this, escorting her around.
Can we hire you to do parties or anything?
Because that would be super fun.
They have.
I've worked in Phoenix.
I've worked all over the place with this.
silly thing. Okay. What did you name it? Sammy. Okay. Sales and merchandising inform.
I knew it had to be something like that. Yeah. And, you know, it was sort of like a follow-on
from the craze with Artur D.2 and Star Wars and all that. And believe it or not, we called George
Lucas to find out if he would have any problem with us doing this. And the response we got from
his people was, go for it, more power to you. Now, you can't do that.
anymore. But we're grandfathered in.
You are? Oh, hell yeah.
So Disney's lawyers can't talk. Good for you, man.
Grandfathered in. Good for you.
But you know, I don't do a whole lot of it. You know, I don't do a whole lot of it anymore.
I'm an astronomer. I don't have time to sit inside a can and run around, but it's a lot of fun.
It sounds it.
Unless you roll over or something on the ground that smells pretty bad because then you have
air conditioning that's pulling in from the ground. It's like, you know, we had that happen
to.
What drew you to exoplanets? Everybody loves exoplanets.
I know.
So what did you ask?
What drew you to specializing or how many are out there?
How do we find them?
There's like about 5,200 known ones right now.
But that's a low number, but we got to understand that that's in a small area of sky relatively.
When Kepler went up there, Kepler's like a laser beam.
It would focus on one star at a time.
Is there a planet crossing in front?
Are we seeing a light curve where the light dips a little bit and then comes back up?
Are we seeing that or not?
Okay?
And then came along tests, transiting exoplanet survey satellite.
It looks at like a 96 degree by, or 96 degree by 24 degree field, something like that.
And it's not a laser beam pointing a star by star.
It's looking at whole swaths of stars and saying, are any of these transiting?
Okay.
Okay.
So the idea was, I should be able to find thousands more.
Well, the test candidates are still being studied.
There's thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them.
And I'm working with a group with what's called Las Cumbres Observatories,
and we have time on big telescopes to actually do transit studies,
and I'm working with a kid who knew nothing about astronomy
and has come a long way.
It's a kid Kyle.
You know what?
I give him kudos.
He would always say embarrassing things about astronomy
me and things we're looking at when he was first starting.
Now he's an exoplanet scientist in his own right
because he managed to do the diligence,
and I'm really proud he's done this.
And if he hears this, he's going to say,
oh, he talked about me.
You're paying it forward.
Yeah, but I am.
I mean, because the thing is, I helped him
to understand what was going on.
I would advise him, and he's taken it to heart,
and he's worked really hard.
So I don't have an ego.
I don't care.
You know, I mean, who cares?
Someone has to say it, right?
Someone has to study unidentified objects.
Someone has to study planets around other stars.
Why did I start?
I started because I figured the stars aren't actually looking at me,
but something around those stars might be.
And so I started getting drawn to exoplanets.
In fact, part of my book, the populated universe,
has a whole section on stars that might be habitable,
and talks about why they would be habitable.
That's a key point.
There's no guarantee of intelligence.
And right up front, we know that.
intelligence is a circuitous path you follow and by luck you get some intelligence well
every creature has intelligence of some level we as humans will call it rudimentary
for everything below us aliens would probably say we're rudimentary right we
always heard that there were just ants we're not ants okay to aliens in my view
and the reason is because they know we can hurt them all right when you as a human
you're far more intelligent than an elk.
But if you go into a middle of a herd of elk and say,
hey, come here, I've got to put this radio collar around your neck.
Okay?
You're going to get trampled to death.
Okay, so even though the elk is not nearly as smart as you,
he can kill you.
That's true.
Right?
So we have to keep that in mind when we talk about alien life.
What are they going to do?
Are they going to just stop us and put a radio collar around their neck?
So you walk into the house with a big radio collar,
hey, you're going to eat pizza left with a giant collar around your neck, right?
How's that going to work?
You know, we're not going to notice?
Of course we do.
So that, the concept of implants, for instance.
Hang on, hang on.
Before we get to aliens,
there's something about transiting that I want to ask you
that just occurred to me.
So we know that transiting is,
the star luminosity dims a little bit,
a planet goes in front.
Right.
Do we have to be oriented to the orbital plane
and what stars?
Are we missing a ton of transits
because we were just not oriented?
properly? We absolutely are. Really? Yeah, because if you look at my hand,
if we see a solar system like this and there's a planet going around it, nothing.
The only way we would know is if the star does a little wobble. Right. And that's because
the planet might be a Jupiter-sized planet. And as they go around each other, this one moves more.
The small one moves more, but the big one moves a little bit. So if you look just at that motion,
you'll see a little bit of motion. Now that's called astrometry studying the positions of stars.
It's the most error-prone method.
it? Why is that? Because we can't measure those positions right accurately. Why? Because we're looking at stars.
They're just ever points of light to us. And when people understand that, they look at like
Beteljuice in the night sky, the upper left star and Orion. It's a bright red star, right? Well, it used to be bright blue.
It evolved to a super giant. And so when it stopped fusing hydrogen and helium, it went off the
little snaky line we call the main sequence, where stars are that are burning hydrogen,
into healing, we call them normal stars. The sun is one. Okay, Alpha Centauri, those stars are others.
Okay. And of all kinds. So, but once they stop, they leave that main sequence because now they're
going to fuse other elements. And when they do that, they swell. And they become these gigantic,
much cooler red super giants. Betel juice is one such star. But it's still just a point of light
to us. But with something called interferometry, we can actually see the shape of Betel Juice. It's one of the
very, very few stars.
That one in Antares and maybe a couple others that are as massive.
Okay, we can actually see their actual shape.
And that's it.
That's amazing, though.
Yeah, no other stars.
Alva Centauri, 4.3 light years away, okay?
Two stars going around each other with a third one, the red one going around.
That's Proxima, where we have a planet or two going around that one, okay, as well.
Well, those two stars, closest ones to us, we can't see those because they're sun-sized.
If you put Betel juice where the sun is,
it would almost reach Jupiter's orbit and radius.
Right.
And then you've got to make that a huge thing and huge diameter.
Well, Proxima's a rocky planet, yes?
Yeah.
How do we know that?
Well, we don't.
Oh, don't tell me that.
I want the answers.
I want to know that there's oceans.
Yeah, I know.
Proxima is a red dwarf.
It's a tiny little star, but red dwarf stars are the most prominent,
or sorry, most prolific number of stars in the whole universe are red.
dwarfs. Okay, the largest count are these red dwarfs. That said, the red dwarfs also
have the most amount of planets around them, statistically and in all likelihood practically.
So if that's the case, that means that the most likely life forms might be around these stars,
right? And you might say yes. Well, if you look at Jupiter and you look at its moons, the Galilean
satellites, right? You got I.O., Europa, Ganymede, Calisto, right? Well, I.O.
is going like this around Jupiter.
Its same face is facing Jupiter.
It's tidily locked to Jupiter in the same way
that our moon is tightly locked to the Earth.
So, around a red star, any planets going around one of these red stars
are likely going to have to be close to it
for it to be in what we call the habitable zone, right?
And if that's the case, it also means for these little red stars
that those planets are also tidily locked.
So if you're going to develop life on a planet like that,
it's probably going to be kind of on the sunset dark side.
Right.
Where it's, on the front it's going to be scorching hot.
So kind of just on the delimiter.
Yeah, the Terminator.
Determinator.
Yeah.
And at that point, you might see life develop a little further in.
And what would life look like there?
If you've ever looked at cave creatures on our planet,
cave creatures in the dark, they tend to have no pigment, right?
They look kind of white as gray.
Right.
Operative word gray.
Right.
But the ones that have eyes, some of them don't, okay?
But if they have eyes, they're very big, just like the grays we see in literature.
Long before we thought and knew that there might be planets around M stars, people were seeing gray-type aliens.
Now, is it possible?
And I just asked that question as a brain teaser.
Is it possible that gray aliens come from these red stars?
the stars that are the most numerous of any type of star in the universe.
Is it possible?
I can't say no.
I just can't say no.
And so they have zero pigment.
They're kind of grayish looking.
They have big eyes.
Is it possible that they are red star occupants?
Wouldn't red stars be older stars?
Well, here's the thing about those stars.
The red stars, okay, our stars.
Okay, our sun is a 10 billion year lifetime.
We're about four and a half, five billion years in.
Good.
We got that yellow dwarf.
Yeah, it's a yellow dwarf.
Okay.
Actually, it's a white dwarf, okay?
A white-ish star.
Right.
Okay, white star, not a, it's called a dwarf, but it's not like a white dwarf.
That's, again, we're astronomers like to confuse you.
But think about this.
Pluto's a planet.
Hey, it says someone on my shirt.
Atta boy.
Yeah, it says, I need my space, and it shows Pluto's one of the planets.
There you go.
The whole ring.
Team Pluto.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. So we, uh, I knew Clyde Tombaugh. You did? I met him. Yeah, we were at an astronomy conference together and I sat down. Did you get it to a shoving match? No, I agreed with him. I felt that Pluto was definitely a planet. Yeah. Okay, back then there was no doubt. There still was a planet. Anyway, so when we talk about, I, God, I'm forgetting where I was. We were talking about, uh, red stars. Thank you. Okay. So when we look at the red stars as being most numerous in the universe, one of the things that's interesting about them is that they're kind of flary. They're, they're,
They give off a lot of ultraviolet flares, especially when they're young.
And if we look at the sun, for instance, we know it is a yellow star.
It's actually not.
In space, it's white.
Okay, it's yellow because some of the blue light is being taken from it, okay, before it gets to our eye because of our atmosphere.
So it looks yellow in the sky, but in space it's white.
Okay.
And that's the condition that causes that is something called relay scattering.
The problem is that as we get through more air, we see the sun through more air.
What's happening is more the blue light is being removed.
So the sun starts looking redder and redder and redder as it goes to sunset.
Sure.
Or red as it sun rises.
And the reason is just because of all the atmosphere removing the blue light from that red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet spectrum coming to us from the sun.
So with the blue left, out, you only have the red, orange, yellow, and some of the green.
Okay, so it looks predominantly red.
So anyway, and that relates to the green flash, people see as well.
So all that said, when we talk about these red stars, these little guys, they're like little percolators.
The very first star to form in the universe as a red star is still existent and still percolating.
Really?
They live trillions of years.
trillions of years.
Trillions, not billions.
And why?
Because they're a little different animal
than stars like the sun.
The sun, one of the things I had to do
in astronomy was build a star,
computational model of a star,
and make it work at all levels.
And I had to build a core,
had to build this envelope outside.
The core has a,
there's a radiative energy
that comes out from the core
for a certain distance,
and then it turns to convection
near the surface.
Well, the red stars
are convective
throughout their entire diameters.
Ah.
And that means they can dredge
from outside,
back to the inside, hydrogen fuel.
So the very first star in existence that's a red star
is still alive today, so to speak.
So if we only, for what, 13 and change billion years in,
13.8?
Then how do we know it can survive for trillions?
Models predict that stars like this
are utilizing their hydrogen at a certain rate,
and based on their mass, we know how much hydrogen's in their outer envelopes,
and we can calculate what that longevity is.
The number comes out to trillions of years.
So what does that mean for life?
Life has a long time to potentially gestate on a planet like that.
It can come and go.
There could be flares that wipe it out, but it will keep coming, right?
I think the universe provides these templates.
DNA is a template undoubtedly provided by the universe, right?
Edinin, Cinguine, and thiamine, they nucleotides.
These guys make up DNA.
And that DNA is something that has been brought to our planet by asteroids, comets.
and meteor impacts.
I think they just found another one last week.
Yeah, exactly, right.
With the proteins.
That's right.
And see, the Merchison meteorite was famous
because it brought some amino acids to our planet.
Okay?
And when there was a famous experiment
called the Miller-E-R-A experiment in 1951 or 52.
And what they did was they had a flask.
And it was filled with the hypothetical primordial atmosphere
on our planet.
And they bombarded it with lightning.
and there's a spark gap.
A week later, there was a brown sludge in the bottom.
They examined it, amino acids.
Now, what does that mean?
It means that even the Earth, with its thunderstorms,
and its rudimentary atmosphere,
was creating the building blocks of life by itself,
also brought by comets and meteors and asteroids striking the planet.
So you think there's tons of life out there?
I do.
I think that there's tons of life elsewhere.
Is it intelligent?
Well, that's the question.
Now, I had an argument with my director at the observatory when I was getting my degree.
I said to him, I think it's a populated universe out there.
Now, ironically, that became the title of my book later, years, years and years, decades later.
But I said to them, I believe it's a populated universe.
Look at us.
We're carbon-based.
We're bilaterally symmetric.
Same in the left is on the right.
Carbon is the basis of life on planet Earth.
It's probably the basis of life everywhere in the universe.
that's my guess okay
and so I said to him
I believe
I believe that it's not just here
where this has happened I believe it can be
in existence all over
the universe in a variety
of ways in a variety of levels
in capacities
do I think that every life form is intelligent
no I don't
okay intelligence takes a certain
path right
I will say this though
when the dinosaurs were rendered extinct
by the Chicksil of Impact
there was 65 million years ago
there was one dinosaur
whose cranial capacity
was accelerating in size
and it was called the Truadon
that's T-R-O-O-O-D-O-N
I did an episode on it
did you really?
Yes, that's the reptilian race
they come from there
Yeah and so that well you know what
that's funny because I used to say
ha reptilians, what a stupid thing
but then
why not why not
then and then
why files
then I realized
then I realized that I'm really being short-sighted here
because I'm looking at this in terms of Earth development
and I love alternate histories. I do.
So I work through what would happen if dinosaurs
didn't get rendered extinct? Love it.
What would happen? How would life change on the earth?
Well, it would still go on like it's been going on. There would still be evolutionary
mutations, right? Mutation followed by adaptation is evolution.
and that's exactly what we see.
The Trudeon was starting to form a opposable thumb.
Yes, exactly so.
This thing is very important.
Yes, it is.
Okay, and bipedalism is very important.
Well, the Trudon was already kind of bipedal.
Okay, so was it going to reach that status?
We don't know.
We don't know, but it figured out that, hey, caves are kind of safe.
Yes, that's exactly right.
You did do that.
He's a smart guy, that guy over there.
Well, I love alternative history also.
So, without that, let's just.
speculate without chichshulub.
Does the tru-edon become
the apex?
It would become
one of the smartest dinosaurs,
I would think.
Given no other
downfalls, no other
impacts events, no other biological
catastrophes or anything,
the truadon may have actually proceeded.
Now, would the truadon be
conscious of that? I don't know.
Who knows, right? We can speculate.
But I do believe, and this is why
I changed my idea.
And I kept thinking to myself,
don't go down that path. You're going to become
that guy that thinks reptilians are all around
us or something. I'm not.
Okay, I'm not that guy.
But I will say this. I do believe
that you could have races out there
that may
have developed off of a reptilian branch.
Okay, I do believe that.
And here's why.
If you look at how life develops on a planet,
right, you have
an ancient ancestor.
And then what do you have?
You have all this radial branches coming off of it, right?
Radiative adaptation.
Okay, all moving out in all directions.
Every one of those is a different creature, different animal,
different version of the same species.
Yep.
And those do this radiative adaptation.
Many of those branches die off.
In other words, they're not successful.
Now, the question is, where do the mutations occur?
They occur in the DNA to begin with, right?
What's causing that?
What do you think?
I'll ask you a question. What do you think is causing the adaptations and the, say, the mutations in creatures?
Just to survive.
Yeah, right. There's environmental pressures, right? And this one happened to be born with a thicker hide than usual. And guess what? It's going to survive the new glacial age.
Right. It's offspring will probably have thicker hides too. That's right. That's natural selection. Okay.
But the other thing, too, is we have a son, a young son. And that young son, young, young, young, young, young, same.
all wrong. The young sun actually is spewing all this ultraviolet radiation.
And what does that do to our DNA?
It makes it unravel. Exactly. It unravels certain nucleotides and reassembles them another way.
It causes mutations. Yes, you got a shield from that somehow. Yes. And thank you for the
atmosphere. Right. Doing that. Okay, the atmosphere was a little thicker. We had up to 33%
oxygen in our atmosphere one time, which is my goodness isn't so big and hulking. Okay. But today,
Apranosaurus couldn't survive.
Right.
You know, it couldn't have the oxygenation in its tissue required to survive.
So we'd have to give it an oxygen mask.
Or make a little pocketbook one.
Like, who was?
I think it was, I think it was Gino that said it.
Like, Pellup Parris Hilton would have a little pocket dinosaur.
Get back.
That would definitely happen.
A little pocket tie to our Anosaurus.
Pocket, right?
Hey, Rex.
You know?
So give me a read on the Drake's, a course.
regarding life doesn't have to be intelligent.
How many planets do you think?
Well, okay, here's the thing.
When Frank Drake first did that equation,
okay, it only came out to one planet at ours.
Right.
And the reason was because that's all we knew.
There was many parts of the equation
he didn't have answers for, like how many planets out there are habitable.
We didn't have, you'd have to guess.
We only knew one.
One times one is one, right?
And so we had to do that, and that makes sense.
But there's an Italian team, and a,
Another team, they each did their analysis of the new Drake equation using what we now know about exoplanet populations.
The numbers are now staggering.
We have about 150 billion stars at the low end in our galaxy, at the high end 400 billion.
We can't even see the other side of our galaxy.
I mean, it's blocked by the central bulge and all the dark dust.
We're looking through tons of dark dust all the time in our universe and our local universe.
in our local universe.
And we can't see the other side.
We're guessing, based on the architecture here,
we're saying symmetrically, it must look like that.
Okay.
That said, when you look at the number of stars,
let's say 150 billion right now,
the estimate is right now with this Italian team,
I think it was,
that came up with 25 million Earth-like planets in our galaxy.
25 million.
I know, sounds like a lot.
Want more?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's at the low end.
Okay.
And if you go to the high end, it looks like maybe we're talking 40 billion.
40 billion.
B with a B, as in Baker.
40 billion potential habitable worlds in a galaxy.
Now, that doesn't mean intelligent life.
But it sure does give it a fighting chance, doesn't it?
It does.
Yeah.
So that's the possibility that we're looking at right now.
And so it's between 25 million and 40 billion.
Kind of a range, man.
Okay, but, and again, it depends who you talk to.
You know, everybody has their own take on Frank Drake's work.
And I'm kind of in the middle.
I don't go to the 40 billion range.
I actually think it's more of a percentage of the stellar population.
So based on the stellar population,
the fact that M-Stars are the most populous than any galaxy all throughout the universe,
I think we're probably looking at
maybe 10% of the star numbers in a galaxy
might actually be habitable
based on metrics provided by studies and so forth.
So I'm kind of being a little more conservative,
but 10% of 15 billion...
It's plenty.
What technology do we need to definitively
identify that kind of planet?
Transit's not going to do it, right?
Transit gives us an idea of how many,
see, we say, okay, if we're seeing this many,
there have to be statistically this many more that we're missing.
We're still kind of guessing.
That's right.
It's still a guess.
And what about spectrometry?
What about color analysis for atmospheres?
Is that enough?
I've done spectrometry, too.
And creating the bands.
Look at the different absorption bands and stuff.
I've seen it.
I got one going in in our observatory, actually.
We're putting in a new spectrometer, actually,
to make another telescope capability.
they show us what a star is made of.
But if a planet passes in front again, in front of the star,
then that planet's atmosphere is going to pollute the star's spectrum
with its own spectral lines.
Yes.
And that pollution, we call contaminant in the spectrum,
gives away the planet's condition.
So if you see lines come and go periodically, another big one,
you know that there's a planet doing this.
You know, contaminate, contaminate, contaminate, right?
exterminate.
So it's like we see that contamination show up in a spectrum and bam, now we're looking at some
really interesting findings because now we're saying, well, that looks like a planet.
And now based on the spectral lines, we might be able to actually determine what's in the
planet's atmosphere too.
James Webb is doing that.
That's what my next question.
What have we seen anything in the color that makes us go, wait a second?
Well, the thing about the spectra is, yes, we're looking at spectra, and they do tell us what's in there.
But it has its own limitations, too, because we're only as good as the quality of the spectrum coming from the distant planet or whatever.
And one of the things, for instance, to give an example, James Webb made news a couple years ago with a finding in, I think it was Kepler 18B.
It was one of those planetary atmospheres.
Now, the planetary atmosphere was like hydrogen.
It wasn't oxygen, okay?
But it doesn't have to be.
Okay, the hydrogen atmosphere, all right, was,
that was the atmosphere around this planet,
but it looks like that James Webb is also showing
another compound called dimethyl sulfide.
Everybody knows what diethyl sulfide is,
even if they don't know that name.
If you eat corned beef and cabbage, you'd know it.
Good for you.
It's actually, yeah, it's the smell that's only created by life on Earth.
And it's created when the tide goes out, you smell the mud.
Yeah.
You're smelling dimethyl sulfide.
So we've seen that.
We all know that.
Well, okay.
They had a finding showing dimethyl sulfide, and they're saying, well, that was a very aggressive analysis.
A repeat analysis that was more careful didn't seem to show it.
However, it's on the radar now as a,
a target compound to look for.
Because dimethyl sulfide is only created by life.
And if we can find oxygen in a planetary atmosphere of any quantity,
then it's very likely it was created only by life.
Because phytoplankton.
I'm sorry, man, you're breathing bacteria poop, brother.
That's, we are.
That's why we're here.
We're breathing the waste product from phytoplankton.
Yes.
Yeah.
So we're mostly nitrogen.
So think of a distant planet.
How do I phrase this?
Color analysis, can we tell that there is some oxygen in there?
Or does the dimethyl sulfide, is that overwhelm the color?
No, the methyl sulfide is sort of a minor player.
And when you're saying color, we've got to be careful what you mean by that.
Because when we're talking about the spectrum,
there's different locations in the spectrum where these spectral lines will appear.
Right.
And they're at different nanometer wavelength.
And so when we do talk about that, they could be in the red end, they could be in the blue end or whatever, you know, or green or anywhere in between or multiple sites at once, okay?
Hydrogen is usually in the red end of the spectrum, but there's a blue line in there too that you can see too.
So there's a lot of different things, but if we look at a planetary atmosphere, James Webb won't be able to find oxygen directly.
And it was always known that was true.
And the reason is because, and I've seen these lines.
In my spectroscopy that I've done,
I've seen the oxygen lines in our own atmosphere
affecting my stellar shots.
And it's actually down in the red end of the spectrum,
and it's visible.
Okay.
It's in the visible spectrum.
Now, if this is the visible spectrum, okay,
James Webb is like 200 feet that way
where it's looking in the red, if this is red.
It's often that far infrared, okay?
Right.
So now, how can it see oxygen?
If oxygen occurs here in the spectrum, it can't.
So somehow there has to be a way, can it see it?
Well, it can.
Because what happens is oxygen atoms in an atmosphere collide.
And when they collide, they create an infrared signature
that's out there that the James Webb can see.
Oh, I didn't know that.
It's an inferred oxygen.
I love it.
Yeah.
So it's got the eye out for that too.
So, you know, and spectroscopy went from being kind of like a basic science.
in the 1800s to being this mega science now.
In fact, think about this, right?
I mean, this is a truth.
Everything we ever knew about astronomy
is just by looking at the simple light coming from something.
Right?
Radio waves are light, just invisible light.
Microwaves are light, just invisible.
Gamma razor light, just highly energetic blue light.
So obviously everything we ever looked at in the stars,
it's just the light.
And the other thing, which I find interesting too, and this is sort of an aside, but I'm going to take you there because I think this is cool.
The universe is a time machine.
Every time we look out of the universe, we're seeing it as it was, not as it, not as it is.
You see the moon 1.3 seconds ago.
You see the sun eight minutes ago.
Okay?
Right, Beteljuice could be gone already, right?
Exactly, and Beteljuice is like 640 light years away, meaning it took like 640 years to get here.
Well, if Betelchees blew up,
way out there, okay?
Well, the light of it's still being there
is still traveling to us. So it's still coming
to us. If this is us, it's still coming to us.
And when that supernova
finally reaches here, we'll see it.
Yes. But that'll say, ah, when we see the light,
it happened 640 years ago.
And I have a talk I'm doing now.
I'll be doing it on contact.
And it's about the time machine universe.
We're going to talk about what was going on on Earth
when the light we see tonight left that
object. I love that. That's so cool. It is. And it puts it in terms of Earth history and people
say, wow, you mean that object when the light that we see tonight left that object,
Earth wasn't even formed yet? That's right. And now you're seeing light. All that travel time
it took to get here. Earth evolved. Earth became a planet. Earth went through five major
extinction events. And then boom, we're here now, pow, that light comes in and it's gone.
And you're a witness to it. It's kind of a cool thing. I love it. It is. It's neat. Before we break and
come back and talk UFOs.
Where is telescope technology going?
Like, what's the future look like?
What are we going to see?
Yeah, and see, Earth-based telescopes are still progressing, right?
We have the very large telescope.
We have the Vera Rubin telescope.
I actually applied to be their outreach astronomer, actually.
But, alas, they wanted somebody else, which is fine, okay?
But it would have been a Tucson job, right?
But that's okay.
So anyway, I ended up looking at technology.
of telescopes, and for me, for me, the telescope pictures we're taken today with our remote telescopes
are the equivalent of some of the space-borne telescopes of the past. So we're finding that
people with just the ability to put a telescope somewhere, a modern telescope, they have the
ability to see things that just were not ever possible. And I'll be able to take spectra of stars
and maybe see the pollution in a spectrum from a planet.
And so telescopes are progressing to the point now
where even anyone who has no knowledge of science
can do real science.
Okay?
Of course, we guide them, right?
We try to get them successful.
We want them to be successful, right?
And so we're doing these streams, right?
These live streams.
And we have these two.
They're not large.
One's a 10-inch, one's a 12-inch telescope, or 11-inch, okay?
And at different locations, sometimes I'll run them both at the same time.
And people can see a wide field view of the universe and a narrow field view of the same thing.
And then they can see all these things.
But the telescope technology, we have to also couple it with remote technologies.
How do you...
Remember, it used to be an eye piece you looked in.
Right.
And then how many times, when I was teaching astronomy for a science center,
I would put something in the telescope view
and then someone, let me see, and they pull it.
I don't see it.
Yes.
And I'd like, no kidding.
No kidding, you don't see it.
All right?
You just bump it with your elbow, like, oh, okay.
Yeah.
So to get rid of that, I wanted to put a camera.
So I started with a regular film camera,
not a film camera, but a digital camera.
It was a Sony, A7S.
I stick it on my telescope, take pictures,
and pump that out over the internet
to show people alive.
Well, that gave way to dedicated cameras, dedicated instrumentation.
And now you can't look through the telescopes that I may have without looking at a screen.
Now, that's less romantic.
That's less nostalgic.
I agree.
However, it's way more instructive and way more capable.
And that's what I do.
And so the telescopes came a long way.
Their manufacturing processes are probably 100-fold better than they were 30 years ago.
okay and the electronic arm for getting this stuff transmitted digitally has we're probably heading
to a technological singularity with that I mean we're climbing that slope so fast and it's fantastic
what if we unlock the ability to build in space and can construct a giant array not a 20 foot
200 feet that's a plan what's a plan what would we see well could we finally image the exoplanets
with something like that?
Yeah, actually.
And here's the thing, okay,
if we make a large telescope,
there's a limitation of what it can see.
Okay, the DAWS limit, right?
And that limit has to do with aperture.
It's aperture, aperture, aperture, aperture,
the larger aperture, the smaller thing you can image, okay?
Right now, the James Webb is 21 feet in diameter.
Hubble's 8.
Why was it 8? You know?
No.
I'll tell you.
Because 8 feet fit inside a rocket tube.
Okay.
You can't take a circle
and fit it any other way.
Makes sense.
It's going to take eight feet either way.
Either diameter's diameter, you can't, sorry,
diameter's diameter, you can't change that.
But the James Webb was a departure.
They used those hexagonal folded mirrors,
and they unfolded 21 feet out in space.
First time we've ever done that, okay?
And so that 300 plus things had to work right
for that thing to deploy right.
Yeah.
I counted every one of them.
I bet.
I followed that thing.
I wanted that thing to work.
I wanted that thing to work in the worst way.
It was fantastic, you know?
And, you know, I've known pioneers.
I've known a woman that worked at Goddard Space Flight Center.
She was on the team that landed on Eros, okay, and the near-Earth asteroid rod.
And she, believe it or not, was a Catholic nun.
Go figure.
She was a Ph.D. scientist.
Who knew?
She was at my table in my house.
Let's not discount the clergy's contribution to astronomy.
No, no, no.
We certainly can't, but we can discount that we actually make judgments of people when we look at them,
For sure.
Namely Mark De Antonio, who shouldn't have.
And I know it's an aside, but she was sitting at my table and she says,
you know, I really like the Hubble Space Telescope.
I'd love to see some pictures.
Oh, would you like me to print you out some pictures from the Hubble?
Oh, yes, please.
So I went down, got my best photographic paper, printed about four or five of these nice shots,
helix nebula, other things, really nice.
Brought him up, sat down with her.
And I'm telling, yeah, and this, see this, this is hydrogen gas emission,
and it's making it look red.
Okay, now that got T.
heel blue, that's oxygen. And what it's doing is it's ionizing, made the electrons jump off
the atom momentarily, absorbing energy. When they come back in, called recombination, it gives off light.
And she's nodding, oh, oh, okay. Meanwhile, the other nun, who's a relative of mine, is laughing.
I'm going, what are you doing? Sister Florence, you shouldn't be laughing at me, okay,
I'm thinking, and meanwhile, I'm telling her these things, and she's nodding, and I'm a little white-haired old lady.
I judged.
I was wrong because Florence said, she's an astrophysicist.
And I went, oh my God.
And she goes, she works at Goddard.
She landed on an asteroid.
I'm like, that was you?
She goes, yeah.
I was blown away, man.
I was blown away.
I was born away. I'm not worthy.
I love it.
Oh, yeah.
And I was Sister Mary Ellen.
I can't believe it.
She was a wonderful, beautiful person.
You know, she passed, unfortunately.
But brilliant.
She took all that with her.
Now, when Osiris Rex,
went out, okay, to do the asteroid sample, sample return.
I contacted the team.
I said, what are you doing?
Are you doing any kind of photo dots or anything like that?
Oh yeah, we do.
Do you have somebody you want to put on there?
I absolutely do.
What's a photo dot?
They put a little micro dot on the probe, okay?
And it contains all the photos and images
of people that you want to memorialize.
Got it.
I put her in there.
And they accepted it.
So now she is circling the sun for a billion years, you know.
I think that's really cool.
Once again, Mark painted for it.
Let's take a quick break, and we'll come back to talk about UFOs.
Yeah.
All right.
Time to enter the realm of the weird.
Wait, this isn't all weird?
We're just getting warmed up.
This is great, man.
A story you told, I forget where it was, but it was a three-night story.
Oh, that.
Take us to night one with the knocking.
Yeah, that, I will tell you, though, you know, when you're a science guy, you don't expect
the stuff that happened to you.
But what do you do when it does?
You know, I mean, I even did a talk, I even had a lecture called
Where does science go in the face of the unexplained?
Now, the unexplained could eventually be science, okay?
We never thought we'd break the sound barrier.
Right.
Until we did.
Right?
We never thought we'd find planets until we did.
So there's a lot of until we dids out there, okay?
And so where does my thought process go when I know,
there might be alien life here, never experienced it, don't know if it was, not sure if it was,
you know, it's really here or not, but investigating it to try and find if it is.
And then suddenly, you wake up one night and you think, why am I awake?
And you look over at the clock, it's literally 3.15 a.m.
Right? And then you hear this.
What's that? What's that going on? And then you look, and it's coming from like the peak of the window roof.
sets a three just like that.
What is that?
What is that?
It's happening.
Something's going out up there.
I don't even know what it is.
And it's just persistent.
Now, at the time, I rescued greyhounds from the track
because I had my dogs,
and I had these two greyhounds.
All right.
And they sleep underneath a window
to the right side of the bed.
Okay?
My wife is next to me.
Sleep.
And there's a window.
And there's a screen.
It's August,
and you can hear the sounds of the night out there.
And there's one street light you can see through the window,
which is annoying to me.
Whatever, right?
So as I'm sitting there, I'm thinking hearing this thing, I'm like, whatever, and they go back to sleep.
Did that knock wake you, or did you wake?
I'm not sure if the knocking woke me up first, and then I heard follow-ons.
Okay.
So maybe, I don't know.
Next night, okay, same thing, I wake up.
Come on.
Again, I'm hearing this like, and it's like a rhythmic thing like this, you know?
And then I look at the clock, 3.15 a.m. again.
What is this?
You know, what's going on?
Are you frightened?
Are you annoyed?
I'm annoyed.
I think it's like a woodpecker that's like mentally handicapped and he's banging on my vinyl sliding or something.
So I get up and I go over quietly to the dogs sleeping under the window and they're looking up.
They're hearing this thing up there and they're looking up there too with their heads up in the air.
So I lean over them, grab the windowsill and I push my face against the screen to kind of look up.
I didn't want to open the window because I didn't want to open the screens.
I want to scare away what it ever was. I thought it was an animal.
And next thing you know, I see this blanket of white light in my view.
Just a total white flash.
Now, when you have a flash, okay, you see a hot spot and then it fades away, right?
Well, that hotspot that fades away is something that you're used to if you get flash blinded, right?
This was a blanket white.
It was just a pure white flash in my whole vision, the same across, same intensity across the
whole vision. A flash or a sustained? No, it was just like a boom. Okay. And all of a sudden I couldn't
see. My eyes weren't working for a moment. And then I'm just, I'm just holding onto the sill looking
out again. I take away my face from the screen and I'm looking out at nothing. I can't see
anything, just like a haze of white as, you know, after image. And then I start to see the
street light in the distance and it starts to fade back in slowly and stuff coming in around.
I'm like, I was just flashblinded.
Yeah.
What is that?
Why?
I've never seen a flashblind like that.
Does nothing frighten you, Mark?
No, that was actually, this whole...
Good, I need to know you're...
I was terrified by what you're about to be here.
There's terror.
There's terror here.
Good.
Okay, there's terror coming.
Promise.
Okay.
So as I'm sitting there and, you know, waiting for my vision to come back,
I thought, I've been flashblinded.
What the heck?
and now I'm curious.
I got to know what that is.
Well, first of all, I look down because I'm leaning over the dogs.
They're sleeping under me, and they were just perfectly fine down there.
I look down and they're not there anymore.
They're gone.
Like, what the heck, where the dogs go?
And I turned down the light, and I started looking for Tyco, my male greyhound.
Of course, Tyco.
And Tyco is hiding in a laundry pile inside the closet.
Hiding.
Not just sitting elsewhere in a room.
hiding in the laundry pile.
He sunk down behind the laundry pile and curled up,
and he didn't want to come on.
His ears were back.
Something scared him.
And Kepler, the female, okay, was outside the room,
hunched down in that minimal surfaces pose.
I don't want to be seen.
Okay.
And she was scared to come back into the room.
And both dogs, from that point forward,
just as an aside, never slept under that window again.
They'd sleep in other positions,
in that room or in a different room next door.
They would never come back under that window again.
I think every pet owner's seen this.
Your cat or dog, like, what do you see that I don't see?
Yeah, something scared them.
Yep.
You know, and so after I got my vision back, I was like, what is going on?
So later on in that day, I basically forgot about it.
I came home from work.
I was actually working a quote-a-court real job at that point.
When I came home, I went outside, looked up at the window from the outside,
looking to see pecks into the final siding like a woodpecker
and maybe I hit a nerve when I turned my head or something
you know but it was just a flat blindness it was the weirdest thing
so then um that third night now I wake up again
I'm like oh man now tapping again no I'm not hearing any tapping now
now I'm just awake and I'm thinking
is this 3.15 a.m. again and I went to turn my head I couldn't move my
head. Oh, no. So then he went to move just my eyes and my eyes wouldn't move. My eyes wouldn't move.
Sleep paralysis? You know, it's more than a hypmagogic type thing because I've used that for meditation
actually. So you know what that is. I know it is. I get into it on purpose so I can actually
relax and sink, you know, it really feels good when you do it right. So I'm sitting there going,
what the heck's going on? I try to move my eyes. You can move your eyes. I couldn't even move my eyes.
My eyes were fixed and they wouldn't, if I tried to move them, it felt painfully.
like something was restricting it.
And I thought it was like a medical thing that happened.
I'm thinking, oh, no, I'm going to die here.
No one's going to find me or something, you know, a weird thing.
So at that point, I watched from the side,
I saw something that clips that street light.
I couldn't look at it, but I saw it in my peripheral vision.
I can see my hand here on peripheral vision.
While I'm looking at you, I see my hand.
Right.
Well, I saw something pass in front of that,
that rough, you know, dim outline or the window passed in front of it.
And now it's doing this.
It's coming toward me, getting bigger in my vision.
I'm like, what hell is this?
You can't see his shape?
No, it's dark.
Okay.
But then it extended something, and it had like a, look like a wand, like a magician's wand,
but it was like a pen, but it was glowing soft white.
And it's here, right here, and I'm looking at you in the same way that I had to look
because this is where my eyes were stuck fixated on.
I couldn't move and look down, and it wouldn't let me, but I saw, for all the world, gray long fingers.
Oh, come on.
Like a hand.
And then I felt something going up
into this sinus.
And it was like, whoa!
And then it was morning, and boom,
I was lying with my hands at my sides,
face down in my pillow,
and unable to breathe.
Okay?
Why couldn't you breathe?
Because I moved my hands up
and I pushed out the pillow like that.
And I looked down in a pillow
filled with blood,
concave like I was sleeping in a lake of my own blood.
And it came out of here,
out of this sinus.
And it felt like someone
punched me really, really hard.
Now, could that have been just a strange nose blade with a wild dream?
Sure.
Sure.
Over three nights with a knocking.
And frightened dogs.
And the frightened dogs?
There's a lot of concurrent things going on that make this really strange.
What are you feeling when you wake up?
Are you frightened?
Do you, I have to go to the doctor?
You would think that.
You would.
Anyone that goes through such a terrifying encounter is going to say,
I got to get to the doctor and get my face checked.
No, no.
Instead, what does Mark do?
Mark goes and takes a shower, goes to work and forgets about it.
Now, wait a minute.
Okay.
Think about that.
That's not right.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It's not.
It is not.
It is not.
So it took me two full years
of not being able to breathe out of this side of my nose.
That whole time, from that night forward,
this was blocked forever.
So it was like this.
I was like this side only, this is the right side only.
I go to the surgeon, ear, nose and throat doctor in Harvard, Connecticut.
Okay.
It's all public record, which is cool.
I go into his office.
Yeah, hi, doctor.
I can't breathe out of this thing.
When did this happen?
About two years ago.
No.
Oh, okay.
Let's take a look.
He looks up there.
You didn't tell him what...
No, not at that point.
Right.
Okay.
I'll get to that, though.
So then he looks up there and he says,
holy cow he says and i said there's a word you don't want to hear a doctor say
he laughs he goes oh he goes but i will say this you've got something huge up there
and i went really yeah he goes i think we can get it out and i said okay and how can we do that
he says well we can numb it up and i'll i can reach up there we can use a special lasso and then
and get rid of it it's it's uh looks like it's it's something we call a nasal polyp but
it's like the biggest one i've ever seen here
he said, no lie.
Those were his exact words.
I'm like, wow.
And he's been in business like 40 years at that point.
So he goes up there, he snares it, and he pulls it out.
It's this big.
Size of my two thumbs stacked and it comes out through that little hole.
Okay.
I felt like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
That's what I'm thinking of.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's like, get it out, go, pull it out.
You know, get it out.
Right?
That's what it felt like to me.
Did you see it?
Of course I did.
What is it?
It looks like a fleshy mass, okay?
Okay.
It's disgusting looking, okay?
And it wasn't moving, nothing moving.
My first words, can I have that?
I did.
I want that.
Yes.
I want that.
Yes.
Okay.
Oh, no, no.
We have to send this down the pathology to make sure it's not a malignant, you know,
a tumor or something.
He says, but I'm pretty sure it's benign.
He said, but you can absolutely not have it.
and now yet he still doesn't know anything yet
so I said okay well can you at least have them
check the center of it
to see if there's something in there that doesn't belong there
and he said oh you mean like a splinter that a machinist might get
yeah yes exactly that
yeah I can do that why
and you know what's coming next I told him the story
you did a little bit okay yeah not to the detail
I said she even shared with you he laughs he goes
oh he goes I'm sure it's not aliens
Of course not.
Who would think it's aliens?
You know, maybe me?
I don't know.
And he says, all right, call me in a week, and I'll let you know.
Okay, thanks.
I left.
I called on.
Call on a week.
Yeah, hi, it's Mark.
I was going.
Oh, hold on.
Doctor has to talk to you.
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, uh-oh, right?
Yeah, uh-oh.
And my heart's going to do.
What happened?
Maybe it's like my head's going to fall off?
You know, what's going to happen here?
He gets on the phone.
Hey, Mr. De Antonio, just so I'll let you know.
It's probably benign, nothing to worry about, okay?
Oh, so you don't have the results from pathology yet.
And his response was no response.
He paused and he goes, well, I've seen these before.
This looks benign.
He says, but in all honesty, I hate those words.
In all honesty, because that's what happens before you lie.
It is.
In all honesty, I sent it down to pathology and they can't find it.
They lost it?
They lost a sample of someone's tissue.
Is that something that happened in his career often?
He was just losing his response.
I've been doing this for whatever at the time, 35, 40 years.
She said, this is the first time this has ever happened in my office.
I went, of course it was.
Now, he says, but it's not a problem.
It's benign.
Okay.
All right, thank you.
So I left.
And I wasn't happy with that outcome.
but I said, I don't know where it went.
Maybe it really was lost.
Maybe it really was just some kind of stupid polyp, you know?
However, two years later, I went in again for something else.
And you know how you fill in the intake sheet?
Sure.
Well, I always say I'm pregnant and lactating.
And, you know, I always do that.
I make funny cartoons.
Don't do that.
I do.
Because the medical assistants, they, you know, my wife's a medical assistant.
And she has to read those too.
And so I want to, I'm stealing that bit, go on.
You should.
I entertain them, you know, as well.
Because I'm a consummate entertainer that way.
I just want people to have fun, you know.
So these things are meaningless many times.
So, but then for my career, what do you do?
I told him I do special projects for the Navy.
Okay.
Oh, okay.
So, and I just left it at that, you know.
Well, I go in, I sit down.
He walks in with the sheet.
He's reading the intake sheet, and he's laughing.
He goes, my medical assistant.
assistants love you. This is funny stuff. I do cartoons, pictures, you know, all that stuff.
So, you know, you're 45 minutes waiting for a thing that's like 45 minutes late. I'm going to
draw cartoons, darn you. Right. Okay. I'm going to entertain myself. Okay. So anyway, um,
he sits there and he looks at the thing. He says, special projects, huh? You know, yeah. And I told him
some more details. And then he does something I never saw a doctor do in my entire career of going to
doctors entire life.
He hopped up on the exam table next to me.
I don't like that at all.
No, I don't like it. I was like, awkward? I was like this.
And I go, and he goes, you know, he's looking out the window.
Like we're two kids on a cliff looking over a lake or something.
He says, you know.
Wistfully.
Yeah, yeah. Wisfully, remember because I just gave up my top secret clearance this year.
This year! So he was cleared when you know it.
And I looked at him and, huh, that's interesting.
Now, I know from having done work in that arena that you report everything down to your handlers,
the people that you work for at all times because otherwise you're liable.
You actually can be criminally charged if you knowingly don't report something that you should have.
So he probably called and they probably said, okay, where is this thing you took out?
and he told him
in the pathology department here at Hartford Hospital.
And so,
they probably then said,
okay, thank you,
okay, bye.
Under oath,
under polygraph,
he doesn't actually know who took it.
Under oath,
under polygraph,
he can't say who took it and where it went.
No,
it's all compartmentalized by design.
You got it.
So what do you think it was?
Could you feel metallic?
Could you taste metallic?
plastic. No, but what I found out, what happened after was what made me realize there was something
more to this. Now, yes, I suspected there was more to it because of a terrifying encounter.
Of course. However, I second-guessed myself. Did it really happen? Did it happen that way?
And as I reproduced and recreated the results in my head, watched it events over and over and over,
I came to the conclusion, this was real, man.
No other way to say this wasn't real other than say it happened.
It's as real as me talking to you right now.
Is this real or is this Memorex?
You know, is this a brain dream?
No.
We objectively can decide what reality is.
Sure.
And I decided that that was actually reality.
That actually did happen.
So sometimes when it was taken out at first,
I would be driving down the road
and I'd feel a burning pain right where it used to be
and I hear a high-pitched whine in my head
Really? Really loud, yeah.
I'd have to pull over
And it persisted for like two years afterwards
It would do that every now and then
No pattern to it, okay?
And then it went away for like a decade.
No more tapping, no more light, no more...
Nope, and then, recently it started happening again.
I started getting that, I mean, within the line,
last eight months to nine months, I started feeling this pain.
From now?
From nine months ago, from today.
I would feel this pain again and hear that high-pitched wine.
I'm like, what the heck?
You know? Mother ship's trying to find you.
Yeah, well, know what it is.
And if you have an electrical circuit, you know all about this.
You design a circuit.
You try to put charge through a circuit, and the component is substandard.
It's going to go pop and it's going to burn, right?
Or if something's going to happen, you're going to have a short circuit.
All right.
It felt very much like and sounded very much.
much like a short circuit going on up in there.
Was it?
I don't know.
Have you had it looked at since?
I have had multiple MRIs.
Okay?
And the MRIs show clear.
It's clear.
You know?
So what's going on up there?
Why is it doing that?
No one knows.
You know?
This is weird stuff.
And like I said, where does science go in the face of the unexplained?
I can't explain this, man.
AJ, I'm at a loss for words.
So you're doing some special work for the Navy.
and you end up somehow on a submarine.
Yeah, that was decades ago, actually.
I always felt like UFOs, UIP, I still call me UFOs,
I always felt like there's more of them in the ocean.
And your experience on that sub was very interesting to me.
Can you tell us?
Yeah, you know, I'll tell you right now,
everybody's always looking up for UFOs, okay?
But there's a growing number of people looking under the water for U.S.os, unknown suburbs object.
I've always said to people, they go where we are not.
Okay.
Because if you're a science team going to study elk in the Yukon, what are you going to do?
You're going to go right out in the middle of the elk herd and say, hey, come here, let me study you.
Nope, you set up a blind.
It will kill you.
You set up a blind, yep, and you watch them from a distance.
You tranquilize one.
Abduct it.
Yep.
Put something in its nose.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tag in the ear.
Okay, well, the elk don't notice that, but humans would.
Hey, Frank, where'd you get that tag?
I don't know.
Got some pizza?
I mean, right?
We're not going to do that.
Right.
We're going to notice that stuff.
So the bottom line is that they're basically going to say,
we need a surreptitious way to do it.
So they use sinus, potentially sinus implants, right?
That's one of the things Roger Lier was into, okay, all that.
And maybe that's happening.
Maybe that's real.
You know, my experience seemed to indicate it was, right?
I can't say.
But when I was on the submarine, okay.
And why were you on a submarine?
Okay, well, first of all, I did some project work for the Navy.
And I literally was asked, would you like to go out on a submarine?
a submarine US sub.
Yeah.
Who wouldn't want to go out on a sewer pipe with end caps
in the middle of the ocean?
You know?
This guy.
Yeah.
But go on.
Well, at that point, I was making submarine models
that actually functioned.
I actually made working subs that.
He had real ballast tanks,
and there were models,
but they would go in lakes,
World War II German U boats,
modern submarines.
I had research subs like the Alvin.
Yep.
Okay, I did engineering talks
for the Woods Hole Oceanographic.
institution using the Alvinite created, which could dive deep and come back to the surface.
Oh, it's so cool.
Super cool.
Yeah, really cool stuff.
You know, there's engineering there, real engineering.
So that was kind of neat to actually go through all that.
Well, anyway, as a thank you for some project work, they said, you want to go for a trip on a sub?
Yeah.
I didn't know what I was getting into.
I've only been at subs at the dock up to that point, and I had been in the Virginia class,
at the Sea Wolf class.
But I was able to go all over the boats.
I mean, to be honest, I could go anywhere.
I've been in dry dock with some of the boats
and places that people normally don't get a chance to see.
And so I said, I want to go.
So I showed up at the sub-base.
I think it was like 5 in the morning.
The boat left by 7.30 a.m.
But I never even realized we left the dock
until I started to feel the whole boat swimming around under my feet.
And I thought, oh,
getting like dizzy what's going on well that's the river and the water causing the boat to move
and do this compound motion in the water and man i got seasick i'm not i'm not proud man i was
sick as a dog right so i thought oh man i have to have dinner with the captain later in the wardroom
oh no i don't want to be sick no okay no and i was scared so um once we got out to sea
okay
and they dive the boat
it feels like everybody
listening and watching
feels right now
you can't tell you're moving
okay there's no motion
except when you go through water
of a different temperature
you get a little bit of vibration
and that's how you know that you're moving
because you're getting that vibration of
you know okay warmer water up front
colder water at the back
translates through the hull
okay and that stuff is
that's how you know you're moving
that's the only way you know
If you're moving at high-speeded you turn, they bank,
so you kind of feel a little weird and heavy,
but you never feel like you're being whipped to the sides.
You either get heavier or you just feel that vibration.
So it's very, very little force.
So anyway, all of the motion while we're on the surface,
the boat doesn't dive until it's way out into the Atlantic.
And as I said, it's a sewer pipe with end caps.
It rocks and rolls, brother.
And that thing, it just knocked me for a loop.
And I was like, oh, my gosh, why did it come on this boat?
the hallway's doing this and I'm trying.
I was like, mm-hmm, okay?
Yep.
So I talked to the kid that passes the doctor on the boat
and they gave me this weird thing called the patch.
I never saw that before.
I thought it was like, you know, which doctor signs?
He just stuck it on my neck right there.
So you should be okay in a little while, sir.
I know, okay.
Well, was that, what was scopolamine, whatever it was?
Well, they tried it on the Navy before they tried it on us.
Now you can get one.
Sure.
All of me.
Go to CVS.
You can grab one.
Get me in the airport.
That's right, exactly.
But the Navy had him first, okay?
And I tried one of these new things, and it worked, but it took hours, a couple hours to work.
So while it was trying to work, I sat down, I asked permission to sit next to the active sonar and just watch the kid do the sonar.
And once under the water, okay, the boat felt like we feel now.
And I was like, okay, I can handle this as long as my stomach comes back.
I dreaded eating in front of the captain and having me.
You keep checking your watch.
I'm like, oh, man, you know, this is bad.
So anyway, as I'm sitting there, I'm actually sitting up straight.
Now, in a submarine, it's not quiet.
It doesn't sound like it does in this beautiful studio in the basement of the cool window.
Okay?
It doesn't.
It sounds, there's a cacophony of sound.
There's stuff going on all the time.
You hear high pressure air.
You hear people talking.
You hear people talking.
it's really, really loud in a boat.
So it's hard to hear yourself talk,
and then when you make announcements over the intercom,
everybody has to stop and listen.
No matter what your conversation is,
you've got to stop and listen because that dominates
and you let it pass, just like at the airport.
You know, when they start making these announcements,
you know, you know, when you're on top, please come back.
Yeah, when you hear the whistle, you stop moving.
Yeah, you do.
And you just stop moving and listen and let it pass.
So anyway, several of those things happen too.
But while I'm sitting there, I'm drifting off, sitting up vertically, you know, and I even
I made the mistake of trying to move the chair closer to the sonar station.
They're locked down, man.
Okay.
And they look to me and go, ha, a newbie, you know.
You're a noob, man.
You know, and so I go, sorry.
And so I'm trying to get my stomach back.
I close my eyes.
I lean back, cross my arms, and I start to drift off to sleep.
All right, thinking, okay, I'll get my stomach back.
Dinner will be great.
It'll be fine.
I'm not going to have a problem.
all right right this is all good and while I'm thinking that I'm hearing
con sonar con sonar fast mover fast mover what what I'm like now my heart's going
I'm thinking is that a torpedo are we going to die out here what the heck happened
oh my gosh I should never have come on this cruise of course I should never come on this
boat I'm thinking I'm no this is bad I can't believe this
the executive officer XO comes around the corner just saunter
ring around, really calm, what do you got?
I'm like, huh, I'm thinking, faster, dude.
They've been to be a torpedo.
We've managed to maneuver, you know, get away, you know,
drop decoys, do whatever you're going to do, you know?
And this is what I'm thinking.
I didn't say, I'm just sitting there like this,
you know, like a little worried.
And the kid at the sonar turned it aside,
and he's away from me,
and the XO is up there talking down to the kid
who's facing away from me.
Remember I told you, it's noisy in a boat.
Yep.
He gives the bearing in the range, which I did not hear.
Okay, but then the X-O said, how fast is that moving?
And the kid did a calculation, and he turned and he put his arms out like this and said,
several hundred knots, sir.
Several hundred knots.
Hundred.
Several hundred knots.
And he's like this, like, oh, okay, what's going on?
You know, he doesn't understand what it is.
Now, sonar guys are supposed to know everything they hear.
Yes, that's their specialty.
That's why they go to school.
That's why sub-school is so important.
They have to learn all the stuff.
sounds. They can tell if there's barnacles
on a frigate's
propeller. Okay, and
which one it is and how many
RPM's turning and all that stuff,
all that stuff from the sound. Did you see
his waterfall display? Yeah,
it's just water. It looks like the matrix to me. I don't
know what it is. So you couldn't see a shape?
There's no shapes. Okay. It's
lines. Okay.
And this apparently was a transient,
which I didn't even see because my eyes were
closed. Okay. And
so he says to the
XO several hundred knots
In the XO
Without missing the beat
It's okay son log it and dog it
Yes sir
I said well sir yes sir
Now log it and dog it
No hey come on
No no no no no now
Sea sickness whatever it's gone
Of course my adrenaline went
Boof out you go
And I got up like a big shot
Because I'm a big shot right
I'm a VIP man I've been invited
I'm special dinner with the captain
You see where this goes where it's going
I get up
I go up to the next door. Sir, excuse me, I know what these fast movers may be. Is there anything
I can help you with sir? And he looks at me and he goes, the Antonio, correct? Yes, sir. He says,
you having a good trip so far? Sir, yes, sir. Let's keep it that way. And he turns out
walks away. So I was like, okay, I'll go back. I sat back next to that sonar, I'm squirming like a little
kid thinking, wow, this is crazy. I got to get off this boat. I can't wait to get off. I got
to research this. What are these things? But his, his calmness in that moment told you something,
didn't it, that this is something that they see all the time.
That's what struck me.
It's like, why was he?
It wasn't even phased.
It was the term fast mover.
Now, the kid had never seen a fast mover before.
Like 80 knots, maybe it's a concern.
350 knots.
No, it's several hundred.
Several hundred.
So what's the fastest sub on Earth?
40?
Yeah, maybe.
Okay, and see, the thing is about the torpedo.
Let's talk about torpedoes.
Yeah.
Because I thought it was a torpedo.
The fastest torpedo on the planet is owned by the Russians.
it's a rocket torpedo.
It spews steam out of its nose
and coats that torpedo body
with a laminar flow of steam.
So effectively the torpedo is
racing into its own vacuum.
It's gorgeous. I love it.
But still how fast?
But that's 200 knots.
However, it's the loudest thing in the ocean.
You can hear that thing anywhere in the ocean.
It's what's called a desperation weapon.
You fire it, they know where you are, you're dead.
It's the last thing you ever do.
It's the last act of defiance.
You know, it's like a mouse giving an eagle the finger, right?
Right, right.
Yeah, it's how much for you.
So the bottom line is, okay, it wasn't the squall torpedo.
It was something else that was really quiet and moving several hundred knots.
And I wish I heard the bearing in the range, you know, the angle off the boat in the distance.
I didn't have that information.
I couldn't hear that.
Yeah.
So when I got off the boat, finally, I raced home and I started trying to figure out what these U.S.os were
because this sounded like a USO to me.
And now I'd heard about them.
I studied them.
Never expected to see or hear of one.
And as I'm going through the USO stuff,
I'm learning way more about them than I thought I actually knew.
What are you seeing when are you learning?
More Navy see them than ever before.
The Russians I knew saw them.
They're not the only ones.
Of course.
Other people in our own Navy did.
And I started talking to other submariners.
And they said, oh, on our boat, we call those jellyfish, which is kind of the joke.
Because jellyfish don't move.
Right.
The water column, right?
They don't move.
But if it's moving several hundred knots, they don't know what to call, they call it jellyfish.
Just to be funny.
Right.
Because that's it.
They have to officially call it something.
You know, so there's other boats that call them by that name.
Have these been photographed?
No.
They haven't.
This is sonar stuff.
You know, it's all sound, sound coming to the boat through the past.
of arrays, all right? So they just don't have any idea what it actually is. Now in the 50s,
there was a five sub task force with another task force of surface ships off Puerto Rico.
I don't know, 60, I think it was 1960. And one of the subs heard something, and it started
giving chase. It didn't know, the people in the boat did not know whether this was part of the
exercise or not. So they're doing what they think they've got to do. Give chase.
Right.
They chased it for two or three days. It was going to,
going full ocean depth and then going all the way to the surface within seconds.
It was letting them approach and then rocketing off at high speed.
Within seconds?
Yes.
So there's no people doing that?
Correct.
We don't know.
Not people.
Right.
Not people nor even if it's aliens, there's no aliens that can race and do like a 90 degree turn in the sky either, as we may get to.
Okay.
They don't have to.
They don't have to.
Right.
All right.
So the point is something was out there and they,
They showed that this, in fact, was not a machine issue,
a fake problem in enigma with the machine.
The machines were all working right.
Sonar system were all on top of their game doing their thing.
So what was it?
To this day, we don't know.
Now, there was another, there was a Japanese freighter traveling to Japan,
another incident.
And this was like the Kusigawa, Maru, or something like that.
And it was traveling when all the people that, all six crew members on this boat,
watch these silver discs flying out of the water.
Okay.
And they actually had the presence of mind to mark the latitude and longitude of where this was.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Okay.
Of course, I researched that.
You know where that latitude and longitude put them?
Right at the southern end of the Marianas Trench, exactly at the southernmost point.
the deepest place on earth.
Yeah.
That where we can't go.
The challenge are deep.
Well, Jim Cameron can go there.
Well, he can.
And Trieste did.
Trees did.
True.
But a different part of it, right?
So isn't that interesting?
Why there?
You know, is that, the point being, because they could.
I've said this before, and you heard me say it.
They go where we are not.
So if they go where we're not, well, we're never there.
So they're safe there.
But wait, Mark, the pressure is incredible.
Of course it is.
So how do they mitigate the pressure?
No, no, that's something else.
which we'll get to.
We will.
I do want to finish up
on that fast mover thing.
Let's do it.
It took me,
it was like two years
after that trip.
I had to do a job
for the joint chiefs.
I was actually building a model
for the office of the president.
It was an advanced model
showing the concept.
And that's what I can say.
So I bring it down
and I delivered to one of the chiefs
and I sat with them.
And I know I shouldn't have said it.
Oh, no.
Come on, alright?
Mark.
You know.
Yeah.
I shouldn't have said it.
My brain was saying, don't say it, don't say it,
but my words were already coming out because see my mouth says things before my brain gets engaged sometimes.
So what came out of my mouth was, sir, what can you tell me about the fast mover program?
Exactly.
And I'm sitting there and I immediately, literally physically went, oh, literally cover my mouth.
Like, oh, I shouldn't have said that.
I shouldn't have said that.
And he just looked at me and he smiled and he goes, I can't talk about that.
I'm sorry.
Oh.
It's okay, sir.
Never mind.
Never mind.
Never mind.
And he said,
thank you so much.
He says,
great work.
We'll do follow on stuff with you.
And they did.
So that didn't hurt me, luckily.
But again,
that gave you information.
Oh, yeah.
By saying nothing,
he said everything.
I mean,
and so when I drove home
from Washington,
D.C.
back to Connecticut,
that's like a six-hour ride.
I don't remember the drive.
Of course.
Right?
Because I was only thinking,
I just drove on autopilot
and got back.
And it wasn't like missing time.
No.
Okay,
because for six hours,
I was ruminating
about,
everything I was learning and all the past trip and all the stuff and all the knowledge I was
thinking. It's like, wow, they're here. Holy cow. They're really here. And they're living in the
oceans. Do you think organizations like Arrow A-Tip are connected to the U.S.Os or is there
another organization tracking that? I think that the thing is, there might be. I know what Navy does.
Okay, we know that for sure. Because we see them go from air to water and back. Yeah, yeah.
Well, remember, the XO said log it and dogged. Right. By the way, that was decades ago,
We're not talking about last week or two months ago.
We're talking decades ago when that actually occurred.
So they were tracking them way back then in our U.S. Navy.
Okay?
Okay.
I understand that.
So now you come forward now and you look at Arrow and ATIP and all these other project activities.
And you have to say, now, these aerial objects that people are seeing,
are they also the same as the underwater objects?
And I believe they are.
because based on going transmedium,
and Darcy Ware has done a great movie on this called Transmedium.
I'm not plugging, but hey, it's a great movie.
Watch it, right?
But Transmedium capabilities will be automatic,
depending on the technology used to move that ship around.
Okay?
So that said, they could be the same object.
The Kichikawa Maroub folks saw these silver discs coming out of the ocean and flying.
Well, they're transmedium right in front of you.
water to air, water to air, water to air, over and over as they see these disks come out, right?
So clearly they can do both, all right?
And there's reasons why they may be able to do that, right?
So hearing from literally one of the people that works for the president of the United States say to me that this is something I can't talk about,
to me it's an admission that it exists, but kind of all knew that, you know, at that point.
but hearing it from that level, it's just like blows your mind.
Actually, say, wow, I can't believe I heard this.
So what's your take on the current disclosure narrative?
Do you think we're being prepared for Disclosure Day?
Or is it a sci-up?
Well, you know, I do a lecture about, in part,
why the government's actually assisting in disclosure.
And one of those things is they work through Hollywood, too.
Okay.
Think about the show, the movie The Day of the Earth stood still.
Of course, Clatoo.
Clatoo.
Nick Tu-Bratu, right?
Okay, great.
Well, that was a message.
That message was,
we warn you about using powers and nuclear power.
You've got to be very careful, blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
Then remember movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Well, in there, the aliens are benevolent,
but they don't have a concept of time.
They returned people they stole decades earlier,
but to them, it's nothing,
but to the people coming back,
it's like, where am I?
Right.
So that actually was a cool disconnect.
And of course, you know, I work with Douglas Trumbull, who did the effects for that movie.
Okay, I didn't work with him then.
I worked him for 10 years, but he was just like a grandfather to me.
Well, just as an aside,
yeah.
Douglas Trumbull was built the most famous UFOs in movie history.
Was he a UFO believer?
As a matter of fact, he was.
He was?
That's how we met.
I did an NPR show about X-Files of Connecticut.
And during the NPR interview, they said, well, you know, this, this, especially
effects guy, Douglas Trumbull, my idol. I mean, I've watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001, like
dozens of times. I loved that movie. I loved how Trumbull created all the...
Everybody on the planet has seen his work. Of course. Everybody. Yeah. And so he said,
next time I'm going to get you on with Doug Trumble. I went, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know,
that's always like, wow. So I didn't wait. I got home from that interview on NPR,
and I wrote an email I found for Douglas H. Trumbull.
and I wrote him telling him everything.
Half hour later, I got a one-page email back from the man himself.
Wow.
Whoa.
And he says, been to your website, fxmodels.com.
Wow.
Excellent.
In every respect, we could use you now.
Can you come up in me?
I'm like, hyperventilating at that point.
I'm going to meet the, oh, my gosh.
Blade Runner?
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I meet the guy.
I go up there to his studio.
His studio?
Oh, yeah.
It's a studio out in the middle of the woods in Massachusetts.
Okay.
And I meet in his office.
I look around this office.
Well, there's Blade Runner paraphernalia.
There's the helmet from Brainstorm.
You know?
I mean, all these things, all around everywhere.
Okay.
I thought to myself, gee, wouldn't it be cool if I did some cool props
and he had him on display in his office someday, you know?
And that happened eventually.
What did you get in his office?
What did you build?
Oh, we worked on, there was an Apple iPad Pro commercial for the Super Bowl.
Okay.
We did that commercial on site.
And I was in charge of doing just one effect for one small shot.
And as time moved on, Doug put me into many other shots and I ended up doing 13 different pieces of that commercial.
And I even brought my son in to do a particular.
a particular comet crash into the Earth's atmosphere sequence.
Wow.
Okay, and I had him build the comet and everything.
And he now worked for the biggest TV station in Connecticut,
and so he's stuck with his journalism and stuff, you know, and so forth.
So as a point of fact, Doug called me his chief scientist, which was hilarious.
And so I would always talk, he'd always ask me, this is, he doesn't need my opinion.
This guy has every right to be arrogant.
He has every right to just say, look, go away, you bother me.
And I'd accept it because he earned that right in my view,
with all the work, his body of work.
But instead he'd say, Mark, what do you think of this?
And I've said to him several times, and he always yelled at me,
well, you want my opinion?
He goes, I wouldn't ask you if I didn't, you know, and he'd smile.
And so I gave him my opinion.
And so we had a relationship where he valued what I said,
and he was actually very corroborative.
He would actually...
Well, it's super handy to have a scientist around.
And collaborative.
Yeah.
Especially with space stuff and other types of things.
Didn't metamaterials land on your desk when you were working with Doug?
Oh, they did.
You got to tell us about that.
Yeah, yeah.
I held better materials.
Supposed the meta materials, yeah.
From retrieval?
They came from, yeah, they came from some type of retrieval.
And I'll be seeing one of the guys that actually had them.
when you get contact.
I got to remember his name.
But he came from MIT, a materials lab,
and he came in with the receipts, with the results.
And he said, okay, this piece here, and they had a container.
He brought the pieces.
I held them in my hands.
I got photos of me holding these in my hands.
So are they lighter, they heavy?
Well, you know, to me, they look like normal pieces of industrial cutoffs.
You know, I was like, well, what is that?
You know, I mean, but he goes, let's study the isotopes of these.
Oh.
This honeycomb piece of material, and I'll recognize that because in my shop I have a laser cutter,
and I have a honeycomb as the base underneath.
So it looks like my laser cutter honeycomb.
He goes, that's where the similarity ends.
Look at the isotopes, and we went through the spectral analysis, and he read me all these settings and stuff,
and it's like, well, that isotope doesn't exist.
Doesn't exist.
No, that one doesn't exist on Earth in a stable form.
It was, yeah, it's in there now.
That isotope is in this piece.
What metals were those?
in there.
Don't know.
Don't know.
That's the thing.
The metals had a combination of multiple different types of metals.
I mean, it's weird to say this, but you know how alloys are right there at the conglomerations.
Well, this is one of those.
But I don't remember the specifics.
He said we could detect certain known metals, but then there's some we don't know.
And this one, here, there's an isotope in here that we can't produce on Earth.
So we don't know why this one is in this.
this piece that you're metal that's sitting in the palm of your hand right now. I'm like,
wow. Isn't it true that different isotopes could be a signature of coming from a different world?
Well, yeah, if they're stable on Earth, then maybe not. But if they're not stable on Earth,
and you find them built into a mechanism that is produced on another world, well, then they could be
stable in that thing, and even on Earth they'll be stable because they're locked in. But you can't make
them on Earth.
Yeah, I've heard someone comment on those meta materials that, yeah, we can do that in a thousand years with a billion dollars.
Exactly, exactly so.
And that's the whole point.
It still smacks of advanced technology, doesn't it?
Why did MIT choose you guys to look into that?
Because of Doug Trumbull.
Doug, he's done presentations for them in the past, and so let's bring this to Doug Trumbull.
Because they knew he hunted UFOs.
He definitely worked.
He definitely worked SAPs.
He just didn't tell.
He had clearance for sure.
No, he didn't.
As a matter of fact, when we were working on the U-Fotog system,
which was a UFO detection system,
we were making some strides,
and he got a call from some DOD guys.
And they said, we'd like to come see what you're doing.
He said, absolutely F and not.
Wow.
Yeah, no.
You're not welcome.
Wow, my hero.
Go F yourself.
He did not want to be,
didn't want them in the room.
You know, he wouldn't accept them in there.
Are you able to explain how that UF photog works?
Yeah, UFatog was interesting.
Because the system that Doug had developed
even before I came along, okay,
was that it would track objects in the sky.
Now, Doug coming from a camera background,
a physical practical background,
he focused on having a system
that could spin around really fast
and he had telescopes and cameras
and detectors all aimed at one spot in the sky,
and he could track a jet,
you're going through the sky,
and then gather information about it.
You know, okay, what's it spewing?
What's it doing?
A spectral analysis.
So, okay, what are we got?
You know, what's this made of?
That kind of thing.
So it had that kind of capability,
but we wanted to expand it more.
And I said to Doug,
because he had this all in a Humvee
on a hydraulic lift.
Remember, he's a showman.
He was a movie maker,
so he wanted something to look cool and flashy.
Yeah.
I said, Doug,
how about if we do something a little different?
what if we make platters, which each have cameras,
and make these platters have a solar panel to power them,
and then just put the platters out in the desert,
have them communicate with each other, set them up in a triad.
So all three are linked to each other, okay?
And I got that idea from War of the Worlds,
where the Martian land would land in triads,
and then they would, in triangles, like cover the entire United States.
I thought, you can do the same thing as more of the worlds.
We'll put one here, one here, one here, separate them by like two miles each.
That way, if this one detect something and then this one down here detects the same thing,
we can triangulate directly, right?
Because it means it's far enough away that this one can see it too.
But if this one sees it, this doesn't, this doesn't, this is a local event.
Right.
And we're just going to get the data for the one.
Okay, let's do that.
So we started working on centralized servers,
trying to figure out a way to get that data to go there in one place.
And, you know, Doug ended up getting sick, you know, and passed away, obviously, a few years ago, which broke all of our hearts, you know, and his wife, Julia, a beautiful lady, you know, very, very understanding and amazingly supportive, of that, of that man.
And, man, he could be, he could be a bear sometimes when we weren't doing, we were doing a commercial for ESPN.
It wasn't working out right.
And it was two in the morning, and he was just getting downright tired, and he was just sinking deeper in his chair.
And he says, I don't know how we're going to get this thing to work.
and we finally did, of course, because that was Doug.
We always make it work.
So he ended up, we ended up working to try and figure out how we're going to get the telemetry to work.
I was working on little XP transmitters trying to figure if that will work too.
And then we actually had an idea for getting the communication to go, have it making a round robin at all times.
You got anything, got anything, got anything, polling, and then extracting the data, making it available on a centralized database.
Did you get it working?
No, no.
We didn't, unfortunately.
And that's okay.
That's okay, because we put the feelers out to get other people involved, too.
We wanted to make sure that people could do it.
Now there's other projects out there doing similar kind of things.
But as I started to get further into this, I thought these platters would be really cool.
They'll be self-sufficient.
And, you know, all the cameras will be looking, you know, it's better to have single high-pixel cameras
pointing at a different plot of space with overlapping fields than to have one big giant,
all sky because the all sky is going to have limited resolution it's going to have
warpage and distortion a singular camera wouldn't so we have enough cameras we can
cover the whole sky all right and be able to have a high resolution digital
zoom capability on every field we want us that we see something in then we could
stitch those together and we want to work on having a methodology for auto
stitching views and stuff and to recreate same motion and then tie them to other
units to be able to talk to each other.
Well, this sounds like you still
have ambition to build this. I sure do.
I sure do. I hope you do.
Well, there's another guy I talked to
a guy named Dave Mason.
He's been on television a lot
doing some stuff, but he's also an inventor.
Okay, and David and I,
whenever we get on the phone,
three hours passes, and we don't even realize
because we're talking about things to do.
So I would definitely
team up with Dave, and he would team
up with me, I'm sure, and we would actually make this
happened because I know we can solve a lot of these problems. There's ranches out west that
people say this is all happening. There's TV shows about it. You know. Okay. I think we can solve those.
Okay. Because in the networks view, they don't ever want them solved. Because if you solve them,
the show's over. That's right. And the profits go right down the tube. So we don't want that
solved. Make sure you always have questions so you can have a next season. So there's a vested interest in
not figuring it out. But we're something.
science guys. We'll figure it out
and blow it white open. Now, yeah, we'll get
a lot of people mad at us.
Can't launch rockets anymore. Oh, well.
Oh, well. Yeah. So what?
Too bad. So to set up
our next break, I've heard
a lot of different theories on UFO propulsion.
Yours is my favorite
because it's not propulsion at all.
It isn't. All right, so we'll talk about that
in just a minute. Oh, wow.
What percentage of photos
of UFOs that come across your desk
can be explained?
About 99.5 or 6%.
What is it usually?
Well, a lot of people photograph airplanes, birds, dust moats that are captured in a flash.
They call them orbs, right?
I mean, but not all of any of those things are planes, dust motes, you know, or whatever.
They could be actual things.
So we have to carefully examine these to see if we can determine what the conditions were
that may have led to them mistaking something ordinary as extraordinary.
Because I always say many times people capture ordinary things in an extraordinary way.
Right.
And that's because of the way cameras operate, right?
They do this for us.
Cell phones don't just take a picture.
That's not how they work.
They're actually stacking all the time.
They're actually taking multiple pictures and stacking.
them together to get the final result.
Okay? And so that can introduce its own set of artifacts into images.
So it's a pretty extensive science, you know, and it's hard to know what people actually
took a picture of, what they thought they saw, because you ask 10 people what they saw in the
sky, looking at the same event, you get 10 different ideas, right?
I proved that when we were training people out in the Sonoran desert
at a boot camp that was like a three-day boot camp out there
and I affixed a very, very bright light to one of my drones
and I flew it up in the air, turned on the light
and started flying it toward people away, left and right
until they noticed.
And I was on the other side of the building from where they were
and I heard them all saying, look at that, what is that?
I don't know.
I think that's a Navy jet.
No, no, no, it's something bigger.
Okay?
Maybe it's a triangle.
I'm not sure.
It's moving fast.
It's got to be moving hundreds of miles an hour.
I listen to all this stuff.
Yep.
I'm chuckling because I'm thinking they're demonstrating everything that happens with people.
They all see a singular event a different way.
And that's okay.
But they have to really try to isolate what it is they're seeing in the sky.
right? So when I look at an object in the sky, there's only so many things it can be, right?
Well, that's either a star or it's a satellite. If it's moving, it might be a satellite.
It could be a high altitude aircraft where you don't actually see the FAA lights, you know,
from that altitude. It could be a black project. I mean, it could be something like that, true.
We've seen some of those probably. Sure. Okay, and not even known it. Okay.
Stealth Fighter was a black project for a while. B-2 was a stealth farmer was a,
black project for a while.
We see weird stuff here over Vegas all the time.
You know, and that's just not the Elvis in-person.
No.
Yeah, exactly.
Have you ever had a siting yourself, like an in-person setting?
Well, the in-person event I had was strange.
I had, okay, first of all, with our remote telescopes,
with our SkyTurfed, live-streamed telescope out in the Sonoran,
I have an All-Sky camera.
Very high end, they built it.
it, you know, myself, make sure it captures everything really nicely.
And I caught something flying through the sky on that all-sky over the course of the night,
and it did a time lapse.
And every single line of it corresponded to like 15 seconds.
So over 15 seconds it was going here, then 15 more seconds was going there,
then it was going here and here.
It literally went, but it was a faint light.
Do you have that footage that we can show when we cut this together?
I indeed will.
Okay, great.
I will send it to you.
you'll see the actual photograph of this thing moving through the sky.
Yeah, so if you're just listening, Mark, is indicating what?
It goes across the sky and then upwards?
It varied off on like a 40-degree angle,
and I've never seen anything do that before.
That was weird.
I've seen airplanes turn, that's fine,
but they have FAA-mandated lighting on them, don't they?
You can register and recognize what you're looking at.
Okay.
But wait, Mark, what about a black project?
Could have been a black project.
Could have been one of ours.
but to fly in a configuration where you don't have lights
that is only used in wartime in battle zones
it's not used over the continental United States
because ATC needs to know what's up there
right you know so it is kind of
interesting that this happened
the second thing that I saw again another all-sky image
was this little tight circle way up in the sky
right very very tiny circle
sort of faint.
But it was a perfect circle.
It was across two frames
that were each 12 seconds long.
Okay, so over 24 seconds,
this thing made a complete circle in the sky.
How high up do you think?
Hard to tell.
It's a single point, vantage point, right?
But it was high enough
so that if it was any kind of light
that was on a vessel or a craft or a plane,
you would recognize the relative brightness.
You know when something has a brightness
of a certain amount. It's kind of certain altitude. You can kind of guess.
Sure. But in this case, this object was a sort of a dim brightness, and it was, it curled around
in one image, it curled half the circle, and the second image it went the rest of the circle.
Same brightness. So I thought, well, is that maybe a fighter from Luke Air Force base?
Because it was nearby. But if it was a fighter, you might say, well, maybe it's a F-18 Hornet,
or maybe it's, say, an F-16 or something.
Okay?
And they have a jet nozzle, a singular jet nozzle.
An F-18, they might blend the one this scene from the ground, okay, if it's high enough.
And you'd see it as it was going away from you.
But what about the other half, where it's coming toward you?
There's no nozzle there.
Right.
So that one perplexed me.
So those two things I saw were very, very perplexing.
Now we've seen a re-entry of a Chinese rocket.
We've seen that.
we've seen Starlink launches and Falcon 9s.
That's all cool.
I've seen them live.
I've seen them.
They're cool, but you know what they are now.
We know what they are now.
Have you ever seen a good hoax?
I mean, it's so hard to hoax a VFX artist who's an astronomer who's been doing this since he's nine.
That's a tough call to try and hoax our photo analysis team, right?
Right.
For sure.
I tend to see a lot of things.
But they try, don't they?
They always do.
Right.
I'll give you an example.
There was a hoax known as the,
Dome of the Rock, folks.
It's one of my favorites.
This is a few different angles.
Yeah, go ahead.
I love it.
Yeah, that few different angles was really important to me.
Okay, but that's what undid it.
Was it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, tell the story, because everybody knows that exciting.
Yeah, I figured that's why I brought up, because it's pretty popular.
The Jerusalem Old City Dome of the Rock footage, when I got it,
it was like, wow, you're hearing people talk about it, right?
But you're hearing people milling about, and you're not really hearing a specific comment about that thing
other than maybe just an exclamation.
And then it looks like it's rotating and it, boom, it takes off really fast.
Okay, that's the thing.
But when it takes off, it flashes the whole city.
Yes.
Okay, momentarily.
Okay.
However, there's other images of that.
And in the other images, the other videos of this, you see a close-up, say, of this UFO.
and it looks like it's spinning and it has lights on it and stuff.
You do a comparison between that and the other video, they're totally different.
So what we saw in this close-up is not what was in this distant shot, okay?
Because you can tell when something's flashing, the bottom light should be going like,
brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer, at that frequency.
It wasn't.
So that was wrong.
So then, am I disappointed you?
Yeah, you are.
I mean, I knew it was fake, but I love it so.
It is really interesting.
It's fun.
Now, in that part of the city, the city never sleeps.
There's always people out.
Yep.
Why wasn't it reported by anybody else?
Why was there only like three people reporting it?
And it just happened to be the people that filmed it.
Right.
It just showed up.
Okay?
And they were at this vantage point, and then somebody was down filming it from below.
They saw it.
Okay, supposedly.
What do you think the chances are that all three of those people knew each other?
chances are pretty high.
Yeah.
In fact, they did.
They were all in a film class.
Oh, no.
Yes, they were.
And the guy that was the teacher
is the one that basically
accepted them doing this little project
to fake this.
Hey, you know what?
It's kind of cool because one of the first things you do
when you're doing compositions
in compositing is you'll use something
simple like a flashing light.
Because that way you don't have ships to worry about
and shading and shadows.
That's a problem.
You know, having been in the three,
3D world. I was a 3D, I've done 3D animation for television and for myself for decades.
So I'm familiar with how people fake stuff. And when I watched this footage, I thought,
there's something wrong here and I'm going to figure out what it is. And when I watched the three
different versions of this thing, every one of them was different in ways that made it a fatality
in terms of being an actual event. And then we found out that there was an Israeli reporter, I believe,
that actually made the breaking news
that these were a film class project that was done.
And that was like, wow, that's, now I get it, you know.
Can you break my heart one more time?
Yeah, which one?
It's a sighting that's happened many times over Turkey
where in some of the frames, it looks like there's two pilots in the craft.
You know that one?
I've seen that.
I analyzed that one too.
and one of the issues I had with that one
was that the reflection we're looking at
is something that's
it's a curved reflection
that's what I'm looking at a curve shape right
so you're saying oh well the ship is like a you know it's got a little like a delta
wing maybe it's like out of Stargate or something right with that little curve to it
yeah and you see those two things sticking up
well that one
people said look if you zoom in fatal words
if you zoom in, you can see aliens.
No, if you zoom into anything, you see pixelation,
and then your brain makes it into something that you want it to be.
Like bunnies in the clouds.
Oh, it's a bunny.
No, it's not.
It's Satan, you know, whatever.
Right.
You know, you can make whatever you want because your brain manufactures it.
The peridolia takes over at that level.
They hate the P word.
They do.
They do.
It's the P word.
That's right.
Sorry.
But that one.
That one.
Let's talk about that one.
Now, that one,
it looks like right now,
and I haven't gotten any more data on this, to be honest,
so we'll let it rest as a potential unknown, okay?
So, and we'll break your heart entirely.
Okay.
Okay.
It looks like a potential lens reflection at the edge, okay, that we're looking at there.
I know exactly what you mean.
You do, don't you?
I do.
Yeah, I mean, you kind of got cameras all around.
You kind of know.
Right?
You get some kind of weird reflections,
especially when you have bright lights on the water.
And in this particular case, there were bright lights on the water.
There was a distance ship, and that distance ship at sea could have caused an edge reflection in the barrel of the camera.
And I leave it at that, because it could have been that.
Was it that?
I can't say for sure.
And that's the mystery, isn't it?
Are there any that you haven't solved that you're like, this is the real deal?
That 0.5%.
You know, the two I caught in the All-Sky Cam, yes, they're mine, but still.
Those are points of light.
They're points of light.
craft, shapes.
Yeah, I haven't seen any that I could be, say, are convincing.
Right, to my heart.
I know, I'm sorry about it.
I'll tell you this.
Remember the Belgian triangle?
Sure.
Okay.
The photograph of the Belgian triangle?
Well, that found out to be a model.
Okay.
And it was a styrofoam model with lights on it.
And that's why it was so blurry because they couldn't, you know.
Right.
But they used that as a potential for being the Belgian triangle.
And they ended up becoming the standard image.
of the Belgian triangle. A hoax image was created as a, and said it was a standard triangle.
I'll tell you this. My sister, who doesn't believe in this stuff, her name is Beth,
called me at 2 in the morning one day and said, Mark, there's something outside my window.
Well, is it a person? No, it's a craft over my house. I don't know what to do.
She doesn't believe in UFOs. Never has. Very practical person. Okay.
I said, describe this thing to me. I didn't say, is it a triangle?
I said, describe it to me.
Well, it looks like a triangular shape.
It's really dark, but at the ends where at the ends of the endpoints,
there's like these red lights.
Really?
How big are the lights?
Well, they're about, she tried to say that they're like balls sticking up in the four,
in the three corners, okay?
I said, is there anything in the middle at all?
No, I don't see anything in the middle, but it's moving slowly across the yard.
It's pretty high in the air, and I heard this humming sound.
I don't know where it's coming from.
And I open the window and I hear it.
It's coming from up above my house.
Now, my sister is not a hoaxer.
My sister is practical.
And this was, I'm listening to a shaking voice and she was panicking.
He's all right, calm down.
It's not going to hurt you.
All right.
Is it moving away?
It's moving toward the trees at the end of the yard and it's going to go over and it's going to end up in the rest of Plainville, Connecticut.
She said, but I can't really tell.
I go, why?
Because all the power's out.
Oh.
Yeah, plane ball's out.
All the lights are out.
All we see, all I'm seeing is this thing in the sky.
Wow.
So is the power outage related to this thing in the sky?
Maybe.
But a power outage isn't going to wake someone up out of a sound sleep.
No, either.
You know?
So what was that?
So she witnessed something that I wished I could have seen.
Okay.
And, you know, I thought that was a really, really interesting observation.
I'm glad that you said that.
I thought you're going to tell me it was a drone, but we don't know.
It's something we don't know.
And again, she can observe, obviously.
She's very good at it, but she's not someone that can say exactly what she's looking at, right, either.
So she left it to me.
But by describing it, she literally was describing a triangular craft that had lights at the three vertices,
you know, and they were red, a dull red.
But she said they were weird looking.
the lights were kind of weird
hard to look at but not
too bright yeah
and I've heard that before
I have too
and she's not
she hasn't into that any of that
I've heard sometimes the light
seem to be moving within the shape
but yeah
and they're hard to look at because they're weird
it's a weird type of light that the eye can't
figure out
and that might be perhaps
part of the propulsion
or whatever we're looking at who knows
So last one, Phoenix Lights.
Oh, yeah.
Flares or why is it seen across the whole southwest all night?
What happened?
Yeah, and see you said the last part you said is very important.
Okay.
Seen across the southwest, all across the southwest.
The Phoenix lights were not the flare drop exercise that is so often shown.
That was an actual flare drop over the Australia's.
I've been there. I've been in the Australia's looking at that site.
Okay.
those were flares, parachute flares.
But they're not the Phoenix lights.
There's no actual imagery or video of the actual Phoenix lights.
So what we see are those are the flares?
Those are the flares.
That thing that's popular from 1994 or whatever it was.
That's the actual flare drop that occurred.
But that's not the phenomenon that occurred all across Arizona.
Nobody captured it?
No.
It was like as far as I know.
If there's stuff out there, I haven't seen it.
You know, none of us have, you know, as far as I know.
but that was not the flare exercise.
I mean, that was not the object.
That was actually the flare exercise.
You know, and the thing about parachute flares
is the first one that comes out is the first one to go out.
Right? So they drop, and the lowest one is the one that has dropped the furthest,
meaning it was first out. So it goes out first, then this one, then this one.
Well, those are parachute flares.
Right.
Because their lifetime is, you know, based on, you know, how long they burn.
The first one out is going to burn, you know, for, say, 12 minutes or eight minutes,
and then it goes out.
but it's going to fall the furthest as well.
And then the second one will be a little higher.
And that's what we saw.
It was sort of in a weird line.
But the news grabbed onto that flare drop and said,
this is the Phoenix Lights.
But everybody was saying, that's a flare drop.
And they were right.
And it was not, unfortunately,
it doesn't discount that the Phoenix Lights actually occurred.
What it says is you accurately said that this is a flare drop,
and it was.
What you didn't say, though,
was that people all across,
Arizona saw this boomerang of lights moving through the sky silently and I'm sorry
but when when you look at something like that and you get cases like that
people who don't even know each other reporting the same thing across a path
that you can then extrapolate that means something I you just said early in
the break that's how your analysts work you you separate them I do I do I
separate the analysts and I have them do all the work separately and then we combine our research
at the end to come to a common consensus only after we've done all of our own diligence.
I think that's the way to do it.
I agree.
So when you have all these separate people around Arizona reporting a certain thing,
kind of all the same way, all right?
That means something.
I agree.
My gut tells me it's something, but my gut isn't good enough.
I like data.
Me too.
I'm a data guy and sometimes the data doesn't tell us everything we need to know
or everything doesn't tell us exactly what's happening.
We don't know.
So Phoenix Lights is a bit of a mystery.
We don't know what it is.
But could we figure it out someday?
If it occurs again, we can do it.
Why are most UFOs round?
You know the answer.
But you're leading me on.
I know you.
Okay.
So this is your propulsion, your theory, which I love.
It's not my theory.
It's actually a theory of a good friend of mine, Robert Schroeder,
who wrote a book called Solving the Eiffoneigma.
I think it's out of print.
Okay.
But he covers in there that if we consider advanced physics and string theory,
that we'll be able to take advantage of multiple dimensions.
You know, Avi Lobby even mentioned that he thinks maybe they travel interdimensionally as well.
I don't know if you mentioned it when he was with you.
He did.
Okay.
So the actual definition I'm sure he couldn't talk about because we don't really have a full definition of how that would work.
But we do have a concept.
And the concept is absolutely thrilling.
Okay.
Because this is something that, well, this is something that got me a real cowboy hat.
Now, wait, what?
Okay.
I was presenting in Texas at a big conference.
and I told people this process
and I said this is probably the only way it can actually work
and I explained how this interdimensional travel possibility can work
and we're going to get to that
and there's a guy in the front row cowboy hat and boots
after the lecture he walked up to me and he said
I got to tell you that everything you said
that just that closed all the loops man
that's exactly how they work.
It's got to be because everything you said is reflective of everything people have seen.
He says, you know, I want you to have this.
And he took his hat off his head and put it on mine.
I'm like, that's your cowboy hat, man.
You don't give up your boots, your horse, or your hat.
That's right.
He goes, well, this hat belongs to you, my friend.
I shook his hand and took that in my office at home.
That's a big deal.
So why was it so impressive?
Why does it resonate?
The reason it resonates is because,
because it answers the big old question.
If the universe is so big and so vast,
how can they possibly be here?
That's my hang up is the distance traveling.
Not me. Not anymore.
Ready?
I'm ready.
Okay. So consider this.
Everything we've ever done is in four dimensions.
X, Y, Z moving through time, times a dimension.
Here's my hand over here on the left
at a certain X, Y, Z coordinate at a particular point in time.
One second later, is at a new X, Y, Z coordinate at a different time.
Yes.
To get here, I move through every point between that first point and this last point.
Okay?
So motion takes us through specific XYZ points all throughout time, right?
Voyager, 30 years to get out of our solar system, traveling linearly from Earth all the way out.
And every point between here and Voyager was crossed by Voyager.
Okay?
Yep.
So wormholes, Einstein rolls and bridges.
Yep.
all in the four dimensions. They are not something outside of our time. And when we get into this,
people say, well, what about time travel? It's all about time travel. No, it's not. No, it doesn't have
to have time travel involved, because I believe time is linear. I don't believe we can go back in time
and get rid of Hitler. Okay, I don't believe we can do that. Okay. Block universe theory? You don't
subscribe to that? Not really. I mean, I think that one of my issues,
is that if we look at the way the universe is constructed,
we're looking at it from the point of view of understanding four dimensions.
No other dimensions, no other realities, no other possible, nothing else possible.
I had an occurrence in my shop that bordered on interdimensional possibly.
What?
Yeah, this is something where I was working on a prop for a movie, Doug.
Trumbull and I were doing. And I was working in this prop really excited. It was 3.30 in the afternoon.
Okay. In fact, I was trying to finish this thing up to show duck because I was really excited about
this thing. I plumbed it for liquid nitrogen. We're going to have liquid nitrogen spewing out of this
thing. It was an EMP's device. And so as I'm working on it, I see this semi-transparent creature
walk into my special effect shop. And I'm going, what is that? You know, it looks sort of like water
without to shine, kind of a glowy, not glowing, but sort of like undulating mass of something.
And I'm taking off my glasses, I'm looking at it going, is that real? And I'm looking at it and
thinking, that looks real. So I walk over to it. And as it starts moving, it's making rhythmic
motions like a dog looking itself. What? Yeah, no kidding. It's weird. Okay. Now,
you have to understand, this is on the heels of seeing people that were
there in my house and also hearing voices of people talking that weren't there.
Didn't you leave that house?
This is my new house.
Okay.
So now the other problem I have is that about 35 years ago I had brain surgery.
You know, I'm not an easy case, man.
What can I tell you?
And they had to put one in.
Drampa.
No, but, so what happened was they operated and I thought maybe this was part of the latent injury
manifesting 35 years later, 30 years later, whatever.
Did you say, hey, Doug, do you see this?
No, he wasn't in the shop.
Oh, okay. I was in my own shop.
Building it to bring up to Doug.
Right.
Okay.
Or I was, what is this?
I absolutely said it, you know?
So I had been previously seeing people that weren't there thinking it was just
my brain is replaying images it saw in the past.
I saw a lady in a dress which scared me because I turned around brushing my teeth.
And there she was.
I was like, oh.
and I dropped my toothbrush on the tile
and that loud clack made her,
who she was gone.
I was like, what is that?
Now, other people would say,
you're seeing ghosts.
Okay, maybe.
Okay, but then I saw a guy walk by my door
in a sport jacket.
Now, I couldn't really see him.
I saw the cut
because it was sort of like a grayish,
semi-transparent thing walking by.
But it walked like a person
and it had squared off shoulders
that looked like a guy with a sport coat on.
And I'm like, man, I don't remember seeing that.
You know, I literally was saying, well, I don't remember seeing that in the past, but I must have.
Same house with the woman.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
And so then I would hear people talking.
And they're not saying, you know, go kill your family.
Nothing stupid like that.
What I was saying was you're going to go, yeah, I'll be there.
I'm going to go there.
I'm going to go.
Who are you going to go with?
Yeah, I'm going to be there.
I'll see it in nine and a class.
I mean, just like random talk like you hear in a crowded room.
Right.
You know, so much so that I went to the doctor.
and I had to start taking a drug to focus
because I couldn't get focused
because I kept hearing people talking everywhere around me.
It got so bad that one time I was watching or working on my computer
and my kids were banging around on the floor above.
Like, oh, what are they doing up there?
Bang, bang, you know, I hear them yelling,
and I'm thinking, their mother's asleep.
I run upstairs, empty, dark.
I run upstairs the second floor,
sound asleep in their beds.
as a scientist you know this sounds like schizophrenia it does as a matter of fact however
it wasn't i wasn't becoming somebody different right i was just hearing things that weren't there
and so i actually wore a brain monitor i went to a neurologist i had them at the air neurological
institute put a brain monitor on me i had a thing the press whenever i saw and heard these things
i did okay now this thing that happened
right, is something that, you know, I'd see an object, I'd press the button.
Okay, I see something, press a button, see something, press a button.
They looked at the data.
Yeah, nothing there.
Your brain looks perfectly fine.
Okay.
Now, cue the dog.
The dog walks in, curls up.
It looks like a piccanese.
One of those little yappyap dogs, right?
If you have a yap dog, I'm sorry.
But it comes in and it's curled up, and it looks like it's licking itself, right?
Now, I'm a stable guy.
I don't have weird crap going on like this, okay?
So what do you do?
You know, where does science go in the pace of the unexplain?
I keep saying that.
It's like a mantra, but that's what I say.
So this thing curls up on the floor, and I walk over to it.
What happened next changed everything
because I stepped on it with my left foot,
and it felt me step on it,
and it got up and ran out of my shop,
but took my foot with it.
What?
Yeah.
How does that work?
I don't know.
But you know what it felt like?
I can tell you what it felt like.
If you wrap a bungee cord around the base of your ankle or base of your foot, okay,
and you start the tension and you have someone run away with it,
there's only so much ability for your leg to keep putting pressure to keep you on the ground.
Then it's going to fly out from you and go flying and you're going to fly up.
That happened to me.
My left leg flew out.
I saw my left foot briefly in the sky.
I felt this tremendous pain in my left knees and hyper-extended.
then I saw my right knee coming up with my right foot
and the next thing you know I'm falling
and I hit my right shoulder on my workbench
my left shoulder on the concrete floor
and my head on the concrete floor.
When was this Mark?
This was, oh gosh, in my visual effects shop
this was, I'm trying to remember when we did that movie.
Maybe...
I was trying to get a sense of what was going on.
I know, I'm thinking like maybe it was around 2000
and
2011,
2012,
maybe?
You know,
I had to think about that.
You know,
I don't remember directly.
And then,
so now I'm on the floor
hurting and I get up,
I'm in serious pain,
my legs killing me,
my head is bleeding over here,
my shoulder,
I can't even move my arm.
But aren't you going,
what the hell was that?
I'm getting up going,
wow,
what the hell was,
I'm like,
this is crazy.
And I actually say the words,
did you see that?
And I'm like, what an idiot?
There's nobody here.
What am I saying?
And I was like blown away.
Because now I'm thinking, well, this is one of two things.
We hear of ghosts interacting with people and hurting them and whatever.
But I don't believe they can actually hurt you.
I think they can make you hurt yourself.
Okay.
But you're not going to make me hyper-extend my knee, okay?
Or, and I coined the turn for this, maybe it's a parallel universe intersection.
Ah.
And this is a parallel universe creature that just is pushing into our universe because of the concurrent
or sorry to say coincident spheres of universe poking and prodding.
They're always moving maybe in these certain different ideas about parallel universes.
Maybe it's poking and prodding it where you see a little piece come through.
Philip K. Dick believe this.
Yeah.
And if you're there, you see it.
Yeah.
He believe this.
And then it goes away and it's gone.
Right?
And if your house is at a potential location where that kind of thing can happen, maybe you see.
more of those things than other people do. I don't know.
So time travel, no, multiverse. Yes, that's where you are?
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. And I think that's very possible. I mean, and I call it a parallel universe intersection,
a P-U-I, you know, and I find a lot of other people using the term now, which is cool,
because I do think we need to research this. Yes. I'm not saying it's actual. I'm not saying
it's real. I'm not saying that what happened to me isn't some strange confluence of crazy,
I don't even see, I don't even know what the word to put for that.
Until we know why the wave function collapses, I think everything's on the table.
It's all there.
And you're absolutely right.
So until we know what's really going on in the quantum world, we're not going to find out what this stuff all means.
So this also gave me another revelation, and that was maybe people that see ghosts and people that think there's parallel universes, maybe they work together.
Maybe they can, you know, two things can be right at once.
And maybe there are ghosts.
And maybe there are multidimensional being seen across universes.
And maybe they just appear in our four-dimensional universe in the same way.
So maybe they both exist.
So I can see Aunt Mabel, okay, and it's really Aunt Mabel.
It's really her.
Yeah, it could potentially be.
But maybe I'm seeing a lady in a long dresser.
I don't even know who she is, and she's a parallel universe.
interloper who's just as surprised to see me as I am to see her.
Right, that's what's interesting as these worlds collide,
but they're aware of each other.
It's not like you're just observing.
Yeah, yeah.
Think about that.
Stepping on this thing and having a yanked by leg off from under me,
that constitutes rudimentary communication across some golf.
Yes.
And that's, what is that golf?
Parallel universe?
I don't know.
The ghostly realm?
Maybe.
See, our terms are not,
our terms are not sufficient to describe what's actually happening here.
So, and I've said this before, today's paranormal could be tomorrow's science.
We don't know.
We don't know.
We don't know.
But today's paranormal could be tomorrow's science.
And maybe this is an example of that happening.
I don't know.
Think about that.
Isn't that crazy?
It is.
I didn't expect this story.
Yeah, well, I'm not crazy.
Oh, I know that.
I'm very firmly grounded, okay?
But when things happen, I'm open-minded enough to say, we should explore this.
and I think this is one of the things we should explore.
So let's see if we can explain how that fifth dimension would work.
Okay, let's talk about in terms of propulsion.
And when I say this, it's going to sound crazy until I explain.
UFOs don't need engines, in my view.
They don't need them.
They just need the ability to translate from one dimension to another.
How do they do that?
Well, we have to go down to the fundamental forces to see that.
we have a strong force, a weak force,
electromagnetism, and gravity, right?
Right.
And gravity's the weirdo.
Yep.
Right.
Physicists hate that one.
That's right.
They do.
And the reason is because the other forces
we can define as a weight function,
as a weight function,
we can describe it as an equation,
or as a particle.
Their duality, right?
Light is a photon, it's a wave.
Okay, an electron is a wave, okay?
And it's a particle, right?
We can define it as a probability equation, right?
Or as a particle.
that happens with all the quantum
particles
except gravity
which is 10 to the what
30 second power weaker than
electromagnetism
and nobody knows why
the hierarchy problem
that's right
and so exactly
and why is it
why is that hierarchy problem
even there
we don't know
but we have a clue
right
we have a clue
and that clue is because
you're not seeing all of it
okay
why is it we're not seeing all of it
Because we're in four dimensions.
What if there's more?
What if there's another dimension?
What if there's a fifth dimension?
Well, how do we even...
What's that mean?
What does a fifth dimension mean?
Okay?
Well, we have to change our physics to understand that.
Because as I said before,
everything we ever done is in four dimensions.
We've gone in four dimensions to go everywhere we've ever done.
Everything is four dimensions.
As such, we only know 4% of the universe.
The rest is dark matter, dark energy.
Whatever that means.
Whatever that means, dark means we don't know.
Doesn't mean black.
So dark matter, dark energy, who knows?
But I'll tell you this.
If we talk about the four dimensions, okay, and the fifth dimension,
we want to talk about it in terms that give us some kind of grab hold into the other dimensions.
So we have a new construct, and that construct partly is string theory.
String theory is not proven.
We don't know that it's real.
Right.
Okay?
We have no idea.
But if we can employ, let's hypothesize for a bit, if we can have a fourth dimensional space with a fifth dimensional space too,
that actually corresponds to one particular variant of string theory called Randall Sundrum 1, RS1.
Well, Randall Sundrum 1 states that there's four dimensions and a fifth dimension.
If we can access that fifth dimension, there's something that's a quality of that fifth dimension that I use my thumb for,
which is very really really strange.
The farther in you go into that fifth dimension, it's exponential.
It's exponential.
Farther you go in, the smaller the universe gets around you.
So imagine this.
You travel 12 inches out here.
You go 12 measured inches on the ruler.
Go into the fifth dimension, some distance.
You travel that same 12 inches from your personal measurement on your ship.
You're actually traveling a much bigger distance,
because when you come out, that expands to the size.
size that you actually went.
Right.
Okay.
So that means you could be at the moon.
But wait.
Don't you travel all the distance from here to the moon?
It took us like two and a half days to get there.
All right?
Well, no, because you're utilizing this other dimension.
So what happens is you translate to the fifth dimension.
All right, from this exit point in your four-dimensional space, let's say Earth orbit.
You go into the fifth dimension and you translate to a new four-dimensional point over at the moon.
And you can do that because the space is, I think, the client called it compactified exponentially.
So you're really just hopping out and back in.
You're punching out and punching in.
Right.
That's right.
Now, think about that.
Okay.
It makes no sense.
Before you go on with that.
Yeah.
If RS1, and for people listening, this is a published paper from, I think, the late 90s,
if gravity originates deep within the bulk and it's compensated.
factified exponentially, then that would unify the theory because gravity would just be leaking
back to our dimension and it's exhausted by the time it reaches and hierarchy is solved.
You don't need me. You got it.
Well, so that's how that works. Now, how do we travel in that?
Okay. Well, that's the thing. Because that happens at subatomic level. How do you blow that up?
Well, see, that's the problem. We don't actually know how to access it that way. Mark!
We don't. We don't know. No one does. Okay. But we actually
have okay here is the nature of this this process back in the 20s
Kaloosa incline right theorized that there were kloosacline particles okay and they
theorized that these particles could potentially have uses and characteristics
that might be advantageous to us right but back then they didn't know anything right
well go to CERN now and there's a detector on that large Hadron Collider that
that was built some years back called Atlas, ATLAS, very different from 3-I Atlas.
Okay, that's a different detector.
What's it do?
Well, in part, it was built to do what?
Detect Kaluza-Kline particles.
Why?
They're only theoretical.
Because if we can detect them, these are particles that are very, very interesting.
Why is that?
Because they allow us to take gravity and actually quantify it in a way that will allow us to
actually utilize it.
Is this the elusive gravitan?
Yes.
Ooh.
This takes us, you knew that.
I know you knew that.
And Einstein read this paper, I think the first paper from Kaluza,
held it for two years.
He couldn't break it.
He couldn't break the math.
Yeah, because it actually made sense.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's difficult when you're looking at things that don't make sense when you think they,
or that do make sense when you think they shouldn't, right?
And then you're going to sit on it like he did.
He sat on it for a long time.
Right? But the point being, let's draw a picture.
Okay, you have a UFO.
You ask me why they're circular.
I never answered that question,
purposely because I wanted to get to this to answer that.
Okay.
When you talk about how we generate those particles,
we're trying to generate them by speeding protons
into a circular channel and curving them with magnetic fields.
Right.
Okay, well, when you take a charged particle like a proton,
a plus one charge, okay,
made of the three quarks.
When we do that, we put them into a ring like that.
To make them go in a circle, we have to use the magnetic field and contain it.
Every time we do that, protons want to go in a straight direction.
So when you curve them, they generate another form of radiation,
which you probably know it's called synchrotron radiation.
Yes.
That's very dangerous, so we don't want that.
Okay, that's why the CERNs, Enchantron Colliders, hundreds of feet underground, blah, blah, blah,
okay, the ground protects.
So the problem is that that is the way that we're generating particles to look at.
And we're doing it crude.
It's rudimentary.
We don't have an efficient way to generate particles.
We just look at how they splash together at the end of the channel.
Right.
And we look at the basis on the basis of that beautiful collision.
We can follow the trails and build digital paths that they take and say, oh, look, that's a cork.
You know, this one has charm.
Okay, I mean and figure stuff out that way. But we're also doing that to try and find
Kaluzocline particles. Notice I didn't see gravitons yet, okay? Because the elusive
graviton would basically theoretically come from the fact that all the quantum
particles are dual, they're dual. We have a wave and we have a particle nature. So we now know
that gravity has waves. Where's the particle? Right. It's got a
exist. We just can't see it. Can't see it. And the reason we can't, it's not in our four dimensions.
It's originating outside in the fifth dimension. Ah. So this means that when we, when we are subject
to gravity, we can measure it, we can calculate its effects, we can send, we can send probes outside
our solar system on exacting paths using gravity and propulsion. But we aren't actually controlling gravity.
we're subject to it.
Because RS1 has three provable
experiments that should prove
that those gravitons are there and we can't find
none of them work. It's null. It's three.
We're over three.
Our technology is not to the point where we can possibly do it.
I would like to get more information
and like to see that we can prove.
We have to prove string theory. We have to actually be able to live
within RS1 for some period of time.
We'll be able to do this. I don't think we're there yet.
but I do think that this is the way they operate.
And let me paint another picture.
When we talk about the large Hadron Collider, it's a big ring, right?
And we're primitive.
We have a 22-mile ring that we're trying to make these particles collide.
It takes us that much time, you know, in size to actually speed these things up to near light speed, to collide, etc., etc.
Alien creatures, probably being, say, 1,000 years ahead of us,
would have figured out how to shrink their accelerators, the generators, the generate.
particles that they could then use for their purposes.
So when you talk about UFOs being round, I think they're round, especially the 30-foot sport
model, as Lazar calls it.
Right, the coop.
Whatever that is.
Okay.
The 30-foot diameter size, I think that they're round like that because the outer ring
is an accelerator.
These are particle accelerators, and they're generating particles that surround the craft and close
the loop with gravity.
they generate these fifth dimensional particles from their accelerators
and because they have generated these particles
they're pulled into the fifth dimension because that's where they're going
I'll call this way going home to okay and they pull every craft in
they pull anything within them into this fifth dimension now that's very
dangerous especially in the compressed universe if anything goes wrong in there
they're toast right figuratively and accurately okay however if they can pull it off
if they can get in there and they can go in a certain distance, all right?
And what they do is they now can punch in at a new point from within there,
but based on how far in they go,
that point they go to will be expanded to a much bigger distance.
So theoretically, you can go from here to Alpha Centauria,
and a Stanford physicist figured this out last I checked.
He calculated that using Kaluza Klein gravitons, if they exist,
they're about 10 to 16 times stronger than the gravitons holding us to our chairs today.
Right.
Okay.
He said, if we can do that and use these particles like that,
we could actually get to Alpha Centauri in about 20 minutes using this technology.
Which is what, four light years, four in change?
4.3.
Wow.
And 20 minutes?
Yeah, and we're not traveling four light years.
We're not violating the speed of light because we're not using it.
You just hop into the fifth dimension.
And pop in.
Right.
It's probably going to be like this zigging through space between here and Alva
Why would you bounce in and out?
Because we can't probably go the whole way.
We probably can't generate the energy to us so far in that we can make the massive jump.
We can't.
And maybe when we get the technology, we're going to take a bottle-sized spacecraft and send it to the moon in two and a half seconds.
Oh, look what we did.
And then bring it back.
But the fact is if we can't, if we do that, we're going to probably oscillate in and out.
okay and this is key because if you oscillating it out from the fifth dimension to our four dimensions
if you do it fast enough well now it's like a frequency right and if you can do it fast enough
you're not here you're not there you're sort of in between kind of in that little in between path
at all times so guess what you can be in the deep ocean for as long as you want and not feel any force
of pressure no problem you can live down there you can hide from us you can actually have your
UFO sitting on the bottom you can have your ship on the bottom
and just sit there.
How does that accelerator protect the occupants?
Ah, well, see, that's the thing.
The accelerator, okay, the central core, all right,
is going to be subject to synchrotron radiation as well.
Probably very intense.
But not as much as the outside, no?
Well, it could.
It's radial in all directions.
But the fact being, in the interior, you can shield that.
We can shield the craft to prevent that.
But that's a torus.
How do you protect above and below the plane of the accelerator?
You don't.
You don't.
You don't have to?
You don't have to.
Because the occupants are inside, in the middle.
And they're protected, okay?
They have shielding.
So that stuff is going to surround the whole ship.
Metamaterial would be useful there.
No kidding.
Right?
Maybe.
Maybe.
Now, keep in mind that there's another wrinkle I haven't talked about.
That's micro black holes.
There's a few wrinkles here.
There's a few.
But I love it.
There's so many wrinkles that it's like, is it even worth talking about.
But yes, it is.
Yes, it is.
Because I believe that this is the way that it may actually work.
I think you're right.
I think so.
And I think Bob Schroeder was right, too, when he wrote that book.
So micro black holes.
Yeah, the micro black holes, okay, here's what they do.
Okay, with a tiny particle, all right,
that's 10 to 16 times more powerful than the graviton's holding us down,
it's going to generate a certain percentage of micro black holes,
theoretical construct.
We don't see them all the time, right, obviously.
So if you do that, what are they going to do?
They only live a few nanoseconds, a few billions of a second.
But if you keep a flow around your ship at all times, you have a certain net number.
If you're seeing a ship using them, what are you going to see?
You're going to see the ship shimmer.
Right.
You see it change color.
Wobble.
You might see it wobble.
You might see it vanish.
And what's it going to eat?
It's going to eat some atmosphere.
It's going to eat some light.
And it's going to eat the gravitons coming from the earth.
That's right.
And it's going to prevent the Earth's gravity from reaching it.
It's not anti-gravity.
It's preventative.
It's preventing the Earth gravitons from getting to it.
it. Right. It's a shield. Okay? So that's not anti-gravity per se. That's actually just
gravity avoidance. It's avoiding gravity very cleverly. Do those singularities affect
gravitons out of the bulk, out of the extra dimension? Oh, well, would you, okay,
that's a very good point. Okay. When you talk about those little micro black holes,
outside the bulk, they're affecting our Earth gravitons because they're actually consuming them,
right in the way that we don't even understand right because gravitan and that emanates from mass
that's right okay so all right right go to the higgs boson to talk about you know why we have mass
for particles that's another show okay but think about this okay if we have for instance if we have a
a bunch of these particles surrounding our ship and we have a net number of micro black holes
it's going to eat like I said air light all that and give you visual effects that we see in the
literature, okay? Of all the UFOs, we see this stuff happening. Is it possible it's Kaluza Klein
Gravitans in play? Maybe. Is it possible that it's just a distant star shimmering on the horizon?
We know it has been. Yes, that's all true. So differentiating between all of this is the tough
part within our physics. So if we now see that we eat some of the Earth Gravitons,
that explains why these things look like falling leaves sometimes to people. Sure. And just drifting.
because the occupants don't have an up or down.
In fact, when they disappear from one spot,
sometimes they'll vanish outright in front of you
and reappear over there.
I'm an astronomer.
We can say that's the autoconetic effect.
Your eyes unable to track things.
Right.
So you look where you think you were looking isn't.
So your eyes always dancing around.
It's an evolutionary trait of our eyes.
So you're never going to be able to see a point light in the sky
and try and follow it around.
It's not going to work, unless it's constant.
If it disappears, you'll,
lose it and it might look like it's appearing somewhere else, not very far away.
I've done that before and showed people that they're actually looking at a tumbling satellite,
making it perfectly straight line, dash of light, no light.
Dash of light, no light.
They say, it's here.
Now it's there.
Now it's there.
Wow, it's a UFO blinking at us.
I was taking a picture, guys.
It's a tumbling satellite and there's the proof.
So it points out the foibles of the human eye.
Sure.
So now take that, okay, and let's go a step further.
So now, if your Kaluza Klan gravitons are eating a little light, a little air, whatever,
then they're going to disappear and they're going to get replaced with more.
Microblack holes.
They eat a little bit of our gravity, right, the gravitational particles that we haven't found yet.
And now the ship is not subject to Earth gravity, right?
If they choose to go from one XYZ coordinate at that point in time to another,
well then to your eye and right in front of you, if it was this mug, it would literally,
literally disappear right out of my hands and it'd physically not be there.
Oh, it's gone.
And then something could appear like here.
And it would really have done that.
Because when it goes to the fifth dimension, it's really not here anymore.
It's really not.
Yeah.
So as long as they can keep those particles flowing,
then they can actually do this process and continue to do it.
So the question is, but Mark, what about the energy requirements?
Oh, yeah.
And the hawking radiation as well.
Yeah, hawking radiation is very important, right?
What do they do about it?
Why don't we see that?
Well, Doug and I were actually, we were using this technique to try to decide if we were actually seeing UFOs or now.
We wanted to create hawking radiation detectors.
Very expensive, okay, and very, very out of reach right now.
Well, yeah.
Yeah, okay.
This is when a black hole evaporates.
That's when we get the...
Yeah, right.
And we would not be able to capture that.
No.
No, not with our conventional systems.
So we opted for gamma rays.
Okay, interesting.
And if we see a thing vanish in the sky and we get a burst of gamma rays,
well, that might actually indicate that,
because that's going to be another incidental,
that might indicate that we're looking at Kaluza Klan Gravitons in play, right?
And we have a gamma ray detector on the system.
We had one.
It was about that big.
It was a little horn.
And we thought that's cool, but I want to micriminuturize it.
That's what I told Doug.
I want to miniaturize this and put them each on this.
single platter, each platter has one, you know?
And he's like, you know, you're going to have like a million dollar platters out there.
You know, I don't know if we want to put that kind of stuff out in the middle of desert, you know.
I said, well, if we can get funding for doing this, we probably could.
And we could gate it off.
We could, you know, make sure that they're camouflaged, right?
The cameras need to be able to see, but it could look like it's a boulder.
And when I could look for visual effects, guys, we can make that happen.
Right.
We can make a camera that can see and smell and taste and that.
It's only the most important invention ever.
Only ever.
Right.
Yeah.
So the point being, okay, if you look at the fact that UFOs then are accelerators,
they figured out how to miniaturize, they figured out how to make circular pathways and waveguides that are really small.
However, they don't shield the outside, as you've said.
And what do we have in history?
People touch UFOs.
What do they get?
Radiation burn.
And burned.
What do you think those burns are from?
Synchotron radiation.
Yeah.
See, now you're picking up.
up and you're putting it together too yeah this is where we're going so it's like it seems to all
match it does that's why i got a cowboy hat that you deserve that cowboy hat you know um you know
well i i should have given it to bob schroeder you know but but that was his initial thought
process and i i'm really very comfortable with this thought process because i think that
looking at the universe as vast as it is how do we shortcut i mean if we travel at light speed it takes us
over four years to get the nearest star,
although in their own.
Okay?
It takes months to get to our own.
You know?
Right.
So how do we do that?
You know, we have to do it by literally avoiding the speed limit of the universe,
which is light speed.
And to do that, we need to actually get out of the four dimensions.
Fortunately, people are experimenting right now to try to solve that,
not for UFOs, although they should keep that in mind,
but just to solve the hierarchy problem.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, the disparity in the forces, I mean, it's just incredible.
And everything falls right in the place.
But again, once we realize where gravity really comes from,
we're probably going to find that the hierarchy problem isn't as bad as we thought.
Right.
Because gravity is only partially visible here.
We're not seeing the whole thing.
Right.
So if we see the whole thing, well, that might fall right into line.
And guess what?
Unification.
Yep.
Right?
We can do that, but it's going to take some time.
It's going to take some time.
speculate on how navigation would work in the bulk
it's just speculation but I mean what would we do
I mean see in the bulk now you're in a compressed universe
right so whatever distance you travel in the bulk
it's literally going to be a translation to another coordinate from within the bulk too
speculating not actuating I don't know
okay but if you travel a certain distance
you don't have to go far right to extend that to a massive
amount when you come out.
You know, literally, depending how far you can go in,
okay, let's talk about UFOs acting in the atmosphere.
People say, it's going across the sky at unbelievable speeds.
Right.
It's making 90 degree turns in the sky.
You know, how can it possibly do that?
No creatures could survive that.
And they're right.
Not even them.
They're not making 90 degree turns at high speed.
This is a punch in coordinate.
All that's changing for them,
it feels like we feel right in here now.
in this incredible studio.
Okay, nothing's moving.
All that's changing is the scene outside the window.
They could just be navigating like,
hey, Bruce, make a right.
We're a little bit off.
Yeah, go to these coordinates.
I think they're the greatest cartographers
in the universe, to be honest with you.
Well, they have to be.
Exactly so.
They got to know, oops, sorry, Torg.
You got us in a star.
Get us over here.
I said, I'll just lose it can, you know?
So, I mean, it's really crazy.
So they have to be good cartographers, too.
But yeah, and so the bottom line is if they're going to be able to go point to point like that,
all the changes, like I said, is their view out the window.
They go from this point to that point without traveling the distance.
But what do our linear devices capture?
Something going from here to here.
And even if it went, think, think, think, think, think, think, think, in a very high speed to our cameras, to our sensors,
it looks like it's going, boom.
Right.
So we translate it to a high speed.
It's not high speed. It's zero speed.
Zero speed.
How about that?
I love it.
And that's why UFOs don't need engines.
They're just translating from one X, Y, Z coordinate to another by doing this transfer into the bulk.
All they need is the power generation.
And by the way, we keep mentioning power generation.
Where does that come from?
Hmm.
What could do it?
What could possibly create the power needed to do that?
Hmm.
I bet you have an idea.
I'll tell you.
I'll tell you, huh?
I might.
Go ahead.
I bet you do.
Okay, here's what I think.
right now we deal with fission
nuclear science
right
we've discovered that
if you have exposed fuel rods
next to other exposed fuel rods
they generate
these errant particles that come off
and heat up the fluid they're in
and basically a nuclear reactor
just makes steam that's all it's for
yeah but that's dangerous
and if the water goes away
those fuel rods begin to melt
there's nothing cooling them right
witnessed Chernobyl
with that graphite reactor
blew the stack, poisoned
all of Europe
essentially. It was fall out through
all of Europe detected.
And I'll tell you a story
about how that was stopped too
if you want after.
So then with fission power
I liken it to being
in a deep valley like a V like this.
Fission is at the bottom.
To make it stop, you've got to push the reaction
out of that deep valley to get it back to the
top. The pushing out is the control rods going down to shut down the reactor, right? That takes energy
and you have to be able to do it. Now, the Russians have a submarine that had a kind of a runaway
and they couldn't put the control rods down in. And it ran away, sailors died, submarine sunk,
some sailors were rescued, some died, okay, because of fission reaction gone awry. So they couldn't
climb the wall of that that canyon to get out to the safety okay that's fission now all they have to do
is bring my fingers together and go the other way now you have a point that's where fusion lives
a fusion reaction is very temperamental and with unlike fission if fishing goes out of whack you melt down
you blow up you do a Fukushima you got a hydrogen explosion in your in your building because you're
your spent fuel rod pulls dry.
Okay, you get that.
However, in case of fission, here's where you are.
You're at the top of that little peak, and you balance that reaction.
If it goes out of balance just a little bit, it shuts off.
No nuclear bombardment of anything.
No, no ionizing radiation, no chernicov radiation, no dangerous results.
In fact, one of the fuels for a fusion reactor is tritium.
And tritium is harmless to us in the sense.
You could rub it on your skin.
It's like talcum powder rub it on your skin.
It doesn't penetrate your skin.
Worse, it's not, or better, it's not even cumulative.
So you'll get rid of it.
You'll screed it out.
But Mark, they say there's no sustained fusion reaction.
Well, they say that, except that,
Lawrence Livermore Lab in San Francisco is making great strides, aren't they?
They certainly are. They have. That's right. And I knew one of the Lawrence Livermore lab scientists,
a good friend of mine. In fact, one of our observatories is on his land in Arizona, okay,
top nuclear scientists for Lawrence Livermore. And so that
that particular conundrum saying that we don't have fusion,
well we don't however and they always say it's just 10 years away right 10 more years 10 more years
get your stuff together right well anyway it's say they always say 10 more years but fusion has come a long
way one of the problems of fusion is sustaining it right because we look at the sun we say well
the sun has a temperature of over 15 million Celsius in the middle and that's fusing hydrogen
into helium okay and it's a process to call a proton proton reaction
and there's deuterium in there and all that stuff.
Okay, but eventually you get this helium isotope.
Okay, fine, great.
Energy is released.
Yep.
That's what we want.
Okay, but we want more energy coming out than we're putting in.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, and that's the problem.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
So that said, the idea now is, well, we can fuse a fuel pellet and have fusion occur for a split second.
Yay, that's a huge, actually, that's big.
Yep.
We did that several years ago.
Now, they've achieved something else.
they actually achieved a sustained reaction.
They were able to do more of a fusion reaction than before.
And because they're using magnetic containment and so forth,
they're actually able to isolate the particles, isolate the heat.
And now there's another fusion process that's making its way onto the stage.
And that is a fusion process that uses laser bombardment.
Okay, that doesn't require the containment like the other.
Now, I don't know enough about that yet,
but it's very exciting.
It's not the cold fusion thing
that people were talking about,
which of course was debunked fairly.
Yep.
Okay.
No, I know what you mean.
It's been used in sci-fi
is using lasers.
Yeah, and so this multiple laser bombardment technique
is something that I'm very fascinated by,
so I'm going to be following up on that.
So next time we'll talk about that, right?
Kind of a thing.
I look forward to it.
Right?
So think about it.
I mean, if you think about it,
that means that fusion reactors are coming,
all right well guess what
CERN is looking for
these KK particles
Lawrence Livermore is working on a fusion reactor
how do you generate KK particles sufficiently
with a fusion reactor
marry the two together
and now you might generate
maybe a little bottle-sized probe
to go interstellar
you know and then we'll have
you know the first aliens coming here
saying hey hey no more warp drive
you guys cut that crap out now
We're not ready for you, and you're not ready for us.
I don't know.
It's a joke, obviously.
But we're entering that whole, that whole, was it, Zepham Cochran.
That's right.
The first warp drive.
Yeah, yeah.
We're entering that first thing.
But it's interesting how science fiction leads to science fact.
It really does.
It always does.
And in fact, that's kind of weird.
And it comes from, I think, a biological evolution.
We can't think of anything.
with our brains
that is actually
patently impossible
to actually do
our brains
don't allow us to do that
our brains are made
from the material of the universe
we have the knowledge of the universe
kind of within us
right
I mean
based on our arc
the archetypal brain
okay we know how it's made
essentially
we know the organics
okay yeah yeah there's microtubules
yeah there's a whole zero
you know I know about zero point energy
no no
I don't even have to go there.
I'm talking about just the fact that when you start to think of something fantastical,
is it really impossible to make?
Well, we can think of impossible things.
I'm going to invent something to make my elbow touch my nose.
Well, we know that's an anatomical limitation, right?
Right.
But we know it's not possible, but we'll say I want to make something like that,
but you can't.
And we know that.
So we know it's not possible.
But still we can muse about it.
But we can't actually think of a development that is patently impossible to actually do
within the laws of physics, right?
Because physics, everything we're seeing now, and I'm sure people are thinking, oh, I got a few,
okay?
And maybe they do, okay?
But the fact is, it's all in your perspective of looking at the laws of physics,
the laws at the quantum levels, the laws of the universe, okay?
people have to keep in mind
the periodic table is the same here
as it is a billion light years away
that's right
the elements are the same a billion light years away
as they are here right
hydrogen is the most populous
helium's next
oxygen is the third most populous element
in the whole universe
and then there's carbon
so carbon and oxygen
have a love affair
yes they've had it for a long time
and so we're going to get carbon-based life
it's going to make discoveries it's going to probably
have intelligence as we've talked about earlier today.
Well, let's bring it home by reconnecting to,
we're talking about sci-fi movies preparing us for disclosure.
Oh, yeah.
Let's end with that.
What's going on?
Well, you remember the movie Prometheus.
Yes, I do.
The engineers.
We're going to wipe you guys out because you were a failed experiment, right?
And we took issue with that.
We did.
Yeah, we rose up.
They had a couple of good points, but I get your meaning.
Yeah, but the message there is,
humans are a bad invention and you've got to keep your heads down just in case life was seated here.
We want to be careful not to get our way out there and start announcing ourselves before our time.
Yeah, that's dark. I'm more of a dark forest guy.
You know, I'm going to keep your head down, kind of like Stephen Hawking.
Maybe, let me keep quiet.
Too late. Too late. Too late.
You know why?
I do. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Two and a half billion years ago.
Yeah.
Okay, oxygen built up in our atmosphere.
I knew you were going to say that.
The blue freaking marble.
Yeah, it's better than that,
it's the blazing blue beacon in the universe.
And you know what?
We're how far along in human race?
A few hundred thousand maybe years overall.
Okay.
And 4.2 million years away from Lucy,
you know, Australopithecus, aphrensis, right?
Well, the bottom line is that in that time,
we're looking for life elsewhere.
And what are we doing?
We're looking for oxygen in a planet's atmosphere.
So it stands to reason that,
another civilization is going to do the same.
I believe that fully.
Okay?
And I believe it just takes about 500 years, 300 years, 500 years ahead of us
to do it more efficiently than we're doing it by far.
So for two billion years, roughly,
we've been announcing there's oxygen in the atmosphere,
this little blue beacon.
And tests looks for a swath of planets with transits,
and there's no reason to expect it.
A test-type telescope created by an alien race
that's going to look for an oxygen.
signature. So we could have been visited for thousands of years, millions of years. By many different
types of aliens, if that's true, and I do believe that's possible. And if they wanted us gone,
that's, they could do that. Correct. But here's the thing. If you're a civilization that creates
technology to travel and ply the gulf between the stars, are you actually going to go to
destroy them and conquer them and do an independence day? I don't think so. No, you're not coming
to do an alien thing like eat the brains either you're not going to do that okay you're gonna stick
your finger in and say stop messing with the nuclear weapons you might do that you might do that you know
if they had an interest in us right or they might just an interest in the resources or hey tord let's see
what they do with the nukes right okay okay well you sure we want to let them yeah why not what could go
wrong you know i hope they're paying attention right now right right right but think about that
Isn't that crazy?
So the bottom line is then that, you know, whereas Hollywood influences what people think,
I have a feeling when actual disclosure occurs, people are going to go, that's it?
Yep.
That's it?
Where is the fireballs?
Where is the explosion?
Where's Will Smith?
Where's this?
Come on.
Where is they welcome the earth?
But where's all that?
You know, it's probably not going to happen.
When do you think Disclosure Day is?
Government knows.
I don't think that's.
Yeah, well, we know that the Navy sees these things,
and here's what the rule is.
I found this out.
It's actually from, you know, the guys we talked to in the Navy.
Their operative mission is to observe and report, do not engage.
That's what they do.
But we want more than, hey, there's stuff out there that we don't know what it is.
We want to know there's 15 races here.
Here's what they look like.
The Nordics, the Artigili, the Ray.
We want to know that.
Yeah, like people of Earth.
Yes.
Right?
We had Jeff.
That's right.
I forgot.
Jeff the Gray.
Hey, you know, and he's always getting messed up, right?
Are they going to tell us that?
Are they going to bring out the chart?
See, I don't think that there is anyone that knows what the chart looks like.
Oh, no.
No Majestic 12.
No, counsel of nine.
I don't know that that was real or false.
I can't say, but I'm not going to, you know, throw a water on it and put shade on it because I don't know.
Okay.
Is it possible?
Maybe.
You know, maybe.
You know, I read all the books.
You know, I love Corso's book, you know, the day after Roswell.
That was fantastic, you know, talking about seeding technology to societies, little by little, or companies.
It's great, I debunked most of it, but it's a great book.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
You know, the nut file he had in this, you know, file cabinet and all that stuff.
Yeah, is that possible?
Well, it's possible, but do I fully believe it?
Well, you know, come on.
You know, I think we're fully capable of creating Kevlar.
Yes.
And the transistor didn't just, you know, didn't just appear overnight.
actually it was a combination of a lot of work in the past with looking at, you know, and or Nandgates, you know,
and putting together computer, you know, decision-making.
Right, so you're going after the reverse engineering argument, fiber optics, lasers, all of that.
Yeah, I mean, that stuff, I mean, there's no reason we couldn't have created that.
Right.
You know, because we thought of it, and we're trying to put it into practice.
We are a very, very, I don't know what the word is,
creative people, right? We are. You know?
You know, a shadow would say, we are creative.
I'll keep rooting for the, for the gravitants. That's what I'm hoping for.
Yeah, I think that's pretty cool. I think that that's probably one of the only, the only ways they can actually travel long distances.
And it really ties it up in a knot. It makes it so elegant.
And it makes it, it removes the biggest impediment, the visitation that exists in the universe right now.
And when I came to that realization, it was like half my head went,
I was like, wow.
I did the same when I read your theory.
I said, by George, I think he's done it.
Yeah, and again, I stood on the shoulders of giants, so I'm, you know, I can't take all
the credit, but I can tell you I can be the mouthpiece.
Mark D'Antonio, where can we find you online?
What can we do to support you?
Oh, man, well, we got a beautiful Patreon.
I only have a few Patreon subscribers for our observatories, but would love more.
I'm, you know, go to Skytour Live.org.
We are a nonprofit organization.
I take no money.
You know, I do this out of passion and love for astronomy, and I teach people astronomy.
I've taught classes in Bangkok from my house in Terryville, Connecticut, okay, on astronomy, showing them the live night sky.
So we pride ourselves on showing the universe live in real time, you know, AJ, and it's one of those things where, once you get going, they have this nickname for me.
It's Mark just one more, Dan Antonio, because I will find, I'll look at this last object, you say, okay.
Right, you're doing an encore right now.
It's two in the morning and I got to go to bed.
Okay, but wait, just one more.
We're so close.
Let's do this.
And I show them one more.
And, of course, people like that.
But then all the photos we take are available for free.
They can download and see these beautiful, spectacular objects in a way that they've just never seen.
Because people live in light pollution all time.
You know, they can't see what's above their heads because they're not allowed to.
The lights ruin their night view.
Well, I'd love to have you back to go through those images,
Also to go through some UFO photos and do some of that.
Oh, I like that stuff.
This has been a joy and a pleasure and a treat. Thank you.
Thank you so much, AJ. I've had a great time.
Hi, everybody.
So that's Mark D'Antonio, and I went down the rabbit hole after we talked,
so we can walk through some of this.
Mark's credentials check out.
He's Mufon's chief photo and video analyst.
His astronomy degree is real.
His company, VFX models, does work for Hollywood and the defense sector.
He runs to remote observatories in Arizona
and live streams the night sky
through a nonprofit called Sky Tour Live.
That's all on the record.
And you should definitely check out his live stream.
The Gentry Lee story?
Confirmed.
Gentry Lee is the chief engineer
for the Solar System Exploration Directorate at JPL.
He directed science analysis for Viking missions to Mars.
He co-created Cosmos with Carl Sagan.
Mark says this guy wrote him back as a 9-year-old.
Lee is documented as exactly the kind of guy who would do that.
that. Now, Douglas Trumbull was very real, obviously. He passed away in February 2022 at 79.
That was a great loss. It did the effects for 2001, Close Encounters, Blade Runner, Star Trek,
I mean, everything. Mark says that they worked together for a decade building a UFO detection
system. That collaboration is documented in multiple interviews. Now, the physics stuff,
which is my favorite. Mark brought up the Randall Sundrum model, RS1. Now that's a real paper from
in 1999, published by Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum in physical review letters.
It proposes a fifth dimension that could explain the hierarchy problem, why gravity is so
much weaker than the other fundamental forces.
The idea is that gravity originates in an extra dimension and only leaks into ours.
That's why it feels weak.
CERN's Atlas detector is actually searching for the signs of these extra dimensions right now,
including Kaluza-Klein Graviton signatures.
But so far, they haven't found anything.
But the search is still ongoing.
The bookmark referenced is Robert Schroeder's solving the UFO enigma.
And Schroeder proposes that UFOs are miniaturized particle accelerators generating Kaluzikline
gravitons to punch in and out of a fifth dimension.
Now, it's speculative, but the underlying physics is RS1 Kaluza Klein theory.
It's all peer-reviewed and taken seriously.
And it would explain why UFOs are round, why they shimmer and why witnesses get radiation burns,
and why they see.
to appear and vanish rather than fly.
The fusion stuff tracks too.
Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility
achieved fusion ignition on December 5th, 2022.
They put in about 2 megajoules and got 3 megajoules back.
The first time in history, more energy came out than would end.
And by July 2023, they repeated it and got almost 4 megajoules out.
Fusion is no longer always 10 years away.
It happened.
But here's what we have to keep in mind.
Mark isn't asking anyone to believe.
even aliens, little green men, grays, or any of that.
All he's saying is that the physics exists
that could explain how interstellar travel works.
The Randall Sundram model, clues of client particles, extra dimensions.
These aren't fringe ideas.
They're on the whiteboard at CERN.
And in a week or two, we're going to have a physicist from CERN in here,
and we talk about this stuff.
As for, we're in the Wi-Files catalog this fits.
Probably the Gravity is a Lie category.
Maybe the Project Anchor episode.
Because what Mark's describing really isn't anti-gravity.
It's gravity avoidance.
And the math, at least on paper, doesn't break any no laws of physics.
It just requires technology we haven't built yet, allegedly.
Mark's book is called The Populated Universe.
You can find it on Amazon.
And if you want to watch you live stream the night sky for free,
go to skytore.org.
We'll have some links down below.
Until next time, be safe. Be kind.
I know that you are appreciating.
That was almost one take.
Almost.
the smiling man I'm told name was cold the secret city under stations planets are
bolted and where the dark watchers find
