00x12 - Behind the Gates: Smoke Signals

[bunniefuu]

There it goes!

MATTY:
The investigation

on Skinwalker Ranch
is hotter than ever.

ALEX:
Burn, baby, burn.

Start corkscrewing in.

Look at this spike right here.

ERIK: There's some unidentified
source at 1.2 gigahertz.

MATTY: And while
the team drills deeper

for new rock-solid
clues in the mesa...

- Did you see that?
- Yeah. I saw that.

Oh, holy crap! What was that?

MATTY: new and
shocking revelations...

ERIK: There it is.

MATTY: have
appeared out of thin air.

TRAVIS: Traveling
faster than a satellite.

What is that?

MATTY: But just how are all

of these incredible
phenomena connected?

That image stays
with me. It-It's chilling.

I'm back behind
the gates to find out.

There's definitely
an active component

to whatever's in the mesa.

It almost seems like it's
teasing you or copying you.

KALEB: It gets even crazier,

- if you can believe it.
- Incredible.

♪ ♪

MATTY: Wow. Another
incredible episode.

Drill, baby, drill.

ERIK: The interesting
thing about this is,

you know, we're drilling
into the mesa in search

of a big void or a big nothing.

But what we seem to be
finding is a very big something.

MATTY: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Look, drilling can be thrilling,
but also very complicated,

especially in the mesa.

In tonight's episode,
you guys are trying

to make that borehole a
little bigger to explore it, right?

Talk to me about that

- and how you guys handled it.
- ERIK: What we're really doing

here is examining that anomaly

in the mesa.

We've got some material in there

that's not like the surrounding
material, a very large mass.

We want these two
roughly parallel drill holes

so that we can put
instruments on either side

of whatever this object is
and broadcast radio waves

or ground-penetrating
radar through that region,

and study it.

And that all makes sense.

But then things start to
not make sense so much.

Yeah, the plan was, we
would make that hole bigger

to allow these guys bigger space

to put bigger
instruments down, right?

And when we got up
to that 200 foot mark,

these guys started
seeing signals

and frequencies that I don't
think you were expecting to see.

No, we weren't.

TRAVIS: Look at that.

Erik, we do have the


ERIK: There's some unidentified

source of 1.2 gigahertz...

That has never been
there before until this year.

Let's remember, this is a
signal that we introduced

with our own transmitters...

- Right.
- You know, at the beginning

of our work this summer, and
now, suddenly, we're starting

to see 1.2 gigahertz
all over the place.

- Right.
- TRAVIS: You could detect

the signal like something...

like it was rebroadcasting
the signal in a different way,

or causing it to
excite the material

in the mesa so that it's
broadcasting... We don't know.

MATTY: And I remember you
guys several weeks ago, telling me

you had come up
with that 1.2 kind of

just off the top of your heads.

Just what could we broadcast
that we haven't heard before?

- Sure.
- Now you're saying every time you try

these drilling operations in
the mesa, you're hearing it.

Almost like it's... I don't
want to personify it too much...

but almost seems like it's
teasing you or-or copying you.

- Responding. -Well, responding.
- Yeah, it is tempting

to read a response into that.

You know, we're constantly
asking, is the ranch trying

to communicate with us, and
if it was, how would it do that?

Well, it's certainly,
at a... at a minimum,

it's some kind of strange echo.

I mean, we are
at least seeing...

- So, we-we rang the bell the first time.
- Ah. Yeah, yeah.

- But the bell never stopped ringing.
- MATTY: Wow.

KALEB: You know,
it gets even crazier.

Is the further we
get into the mesa,

we start seeing the 1.6
gigahertz signal again.

TRAVIS: Look, there.
Look at this spike right here.

There's two of 'em. Look.

They're appearing at


- See it right there?
- Yup. There it is.

TRAVIS: And
that's in the antenna

pointed right at the drill site.

And we still have
that 1.205 one.

So, what is doing that?

- What do you make of that?
- ERIK: It's not that

there's a peak at 1.6
gigahertz that interests us.

What's interesting to us

is the way the-the
amplitude changes,

the way it's being modulated.

TRAVIS: And it always
seems to be correlative.

Uh, we detect this


when we see other phenomena,

like, you know, if we see a UAP.

It seems to always coincide.

So, you see the 1.6, you
start looking in the sky?

- Oh, absolutely.
- Or vice versa.

- Yes.
- MATTY: Incredible.

I want to follow up on this
notion of mimicry and the mesa

interacting with you guys.

You start getting
this mysterious signal

from a beacon that isn't there.

TRAVIS: Yes.

At this particular
point, they did not have

the beacon inside the drill bit.

And for some reason, we
were detecting that signal

that was mimicking the beacon.

Oh.

TRAVIS: That's a strange signal.

This is at... at the
beacon frequency.

ERIK: Okay.

TRAVIS: So, why are we
now getting a beacon frequency

when they are not putting
a beacon into the hill?

Is there a technology we know of

that, if you are
broadcasting a signal,

you might hear
echoes of it later?

- Not over those timescales.
- Yeah. -Meaning what?

TRAVIS: You could
see an echo for,

you know, fractions of a second.

- Right.
- You're not going to see it hours later, right?

ERIK: There should
be no trace of any


be... to be measured there.

TRAVIS: It's like there
had to be another transmitter

- inside there doing that.
- MATTY: So, where is it

coming from, and who's
emitting that signal?

- Or what? -ERIK: Yeah.
- TRAVIS: Yeah.

- And why?
- MATTY: Why?

Man, I'll tell you what.
We feel your frustration

with these drilling operations

and where those
signals are coming from,

and the fact that it seems
like this ranch seems to be...

communicating somehow.

- KALEB: Yeah.
- BRANDON: We are interacting

with something of unknown origin

with an unknown agenda so far.

Is that fair to state?

Yes. And Matty,

you've used the
term "frustrating."

Yes, I can tell
that it's frustrating

to our drillers, especially.

- Yeah.
- However, I would say,

as frustrating as it is,
it's also very exciting.

Because, again, whatever is
gonna come out of that mesa,

and all the activity
and all the invested time

and money isn't just a thing.

It's information,
and we're getting it.

MATTY: Speaking of
exciting, I want to talk

about another experiment
that we saw tonight

that yielded incredible results,
was awesome to watch visually.

But I want to talk about
what we've learned since then

and how it went for all of
you, and we'll do that next.

When the team recently
discovered a massive,

bubble-shaped phenomenon
on Skinwalker Ranch,

they thought it
might reveal the truth

behind the hot spot
known as the triangle.

Little did they know

it might reveal the secrets
behind the entire property.

Guys, this bubble
phenomenon has been incredible

to watch this develop.

And once again, you know,
we're talking about this bubble.

Some kind of a spherical
structure out there centered

on the triangle, you know,

both in the space
above and below ground.

We first discovered this with...

just by doing a
terrestrial laser scan

of the area at the triangle.

But then we've continued
to measure it now,

uh, for many, many weeks,
on many, many instruments.

MATTY: Tom, I want
to come to you because

we talk about all the
technology brought to bear

to discover this
incredible anomaly,

but I think it was
a lot of your work

with this particular
experiment that led to using

good, old-fashioned
smoke and fire.

Well, you know, over the
years, um, as we determined

that there was
something of interest,

we've tried to
identify what it is.

I've heard it called,
"painting the invisible man."

We've launched rockets
with powder inside.

We've used aircraft in the hopes

of spraying smoke
through the area.

Anything that could
help us identify.

And every single time,
something's gone wrong.

And in the past, these
efforts have been fleeting.

- Sure.
- You know, we'll see the contrails from the rockets,

- but they're quick.
- It's brief, yeah.

So this gave us the opportunity

to observe smoke
in that area for hours.

- Right.
- TRAVIS: And so, I think

this experiment idea with

these, uh, firepits,

to put so much smoke up
into this, we were hoping

that on a thermal
or infrared camera,

it was gonna be
very visual and telling.

So, there are really
three virtues to this.

First of all, it's simple, okay,

low-tech, elegant,

and there's energy involved,
'cause interesting things happen

when we throw
that thermal energy

into that zone
over the triangle.

BRANDON: Visually,

I think it helps... it helps
properly characterize

what we're dealing
with, as well...

-Mm. -...in a way

that anyone can relate to.

MATTY: So as the
smoke is billowing up...

Erik, I want to come to
you, because I noticed

- something was catching your eye.
- Admittedly puzzled, yes.

- What was it?
- ERIK: So as we're filling

that zone over the triangle
with all that thermal energy,

all that fire and smoke,

I'm starting to see hints
of something structured

in the smoke.

And-and we didn't just
see it on one instrument.

We saw it on visible cameras,
we saw it on infrared cameras,

night vision. We even saw
it on the differential FLIR

that David Mason brought.

DAVE: All right,
what the hell is that?

A big cold pocket just forming.

Oh, that is weird.

You guys should see
this. This is just weird.

There's a cold
vortex in the heat.

David, that is
really interesting.

Yeah, there's another one.

In the FLIR, we're picking
up these dark zones,

these cold vortexes in the heat.

And then some of them
would just kind of move around.

- JIM: Look at that. Whoa.
- DAVE: So we're looking at...

- JIM: Right there.
- DAVE: And, yeah. See?

Right there. That. Yeah, see?

That doesn't make any sense.

I'll tell you what. I-I just
want to say, as a viewer,

it's haunting imagery.

ERIK: Yeah, but I want to
be clear about something.

- This is a very dynamic situation.
- Yeah.

So as I said, I'm catching
fleeting glimpses of this.

- MATTY: Right.
- You know, it's not like

this is a permanent,
uh, static effect there.

- And we don't even know what that means.
- MATTY: Right.

- That's the thing.
- We don't understand

why it's there, what it is.

Is it an atmospheric anomaly?

Is it a physical object
that's invisible there?

Is it just artifacts
in our cameras?

But it's in all of
them, or on multiples.

So, what is it? We-we
really don't understand that.

MATTY: Yeah, because I'm trying

to visualize what you
guys are uncovering, like,

yes, a bubble, but then,
some sort of thing in the middle.

It's a whole system,
it seems like,

working inside of the bubble.

Is that fair?

Yeah, it could very well be

- a cloaked UFO, for example.
- Wow.

It could very well be something

that has some structure,
but is being cloaked.

- Wow.
- Look there are no free answers here.

One of the things
that we have to keep

asking ourselves is,
are we looking at a thing,

or are we looking at
the effect of a thing?

TRAVIS: Well, or
perhaps we're even looking

at things that aren't
connected to each other.

- Right. Yeah, right.
- TRAVIS: So, we don't know that the dome

is connected to the apple core,

connected to the
anomaly at 5,000 feet,

connected to, you know,
everything else that's happening

at the triangle and elsewhere.

We don't know that
they're connected.

But we do kind of
see them responding

at correlated times,

which suggests they
could be connected.

Right? They might
be many things,

they might be
completely unconnected

with each other, and somehow

interacting because
they're near each other,

or-or not at all.
We just don't know.

I don't want to
speculate too much,

but I'm going
to 'cause it's fun.

Have you thought
of the possibility

that everything you're seeing

up in that bubble is coming from
what's underneath the ground?

Certainly we've talked
about a connection between

what is above and what is below.

You hear us say that often.

You know, you're following
the evolution of our thinking

about what we're
seeing in the data.

You know, originally, we
thought we were looking at a cone.

- Yeah, right.
- And now we've got this terminology of a bubble.

And now we're adding in
yet another thermal feature,

something potentially
dynamic there in the middle.

You know, we're seeing
all this amazing stuff,

especially in the smoke
and on the equipment and...

But what did you think
when we shot off the rocket?

[chuckles] I'm glad
you brought that up,

because I still have goosebumps.

I mean, it's those moments
that only happen here

on Skinwalker Ranch.

So let's talk about that next.

- Yeah.
- Sounds good.

When the team began to fill
the so-called bubble with smoke,

incredible clues
started to emerge.

But when they decided
to launch a rocket,

nobody could believe
what they saw next.

Travis, you've
launched your fair share

of rockets on this ranch,

and you've seen them
do some strange things,

and this was no different.

That image

stays with me. It-It's chilling.

TRAVIS: It was very interesting,
and this is at nighttime,

so we'd have
lights on the rocket.

It goes up, it deploys,

it's coming down,
and it gets to,

I'm gonna say
about 200 feet high,

and it seems to
just stop and hover.

Like there's something
holding the rocket in place.

In three... two... one.

Dude, that one went straight up.

Come on, chute.

- There.
- TRAVIS: There it is!

Good chute.

KALEB: It stopped.

Rocket went straight up,
the chute has deployed.

And it's sitting still
right over the triangle.

- KALEB: What?
- TRAVIS: Look at that!

It's not even moving!

It looks like it's floating
right over the triangle.

It's not coming down.

Look at that!

And then after, um, oh,
I'm gonna say ten seconds,

then it just starts back up.

Like you hit the
play button again,

and it comes back to the ground.

MATTY: I have several
questions on this.

I've seen images on
social media of things

like a plane in the sky
that looks like it's still, right?

And then it's... it's an
illusion of some kind.

- That's a parallax issue.
- A parallax.

That is not what we had here.

ERIK: Yeah, it's not like,
as you just mentioned,

a parallax, where you're
in a vehicle in motion,

and you're changing where
you are viewing something from.

So, this is... this is a
very different situation.

We're stationary on the ground,
seeing it with our natural eyes.

TRAVIS: And it was
actually the second time

that this phenomena
had occurred.

It had happened
the previous year,

just a little west
of Homestead Two.

We launched a
rocket through a point

where we had detected
this 1.6 gigahertz signal,

and as the chute came down,

the rocket just
stopped in midair,

like somebody hit pause
button on a... on a video.

TRAVIS: Oh, that one
went straight up, didn't it?

KALEB: Yup.

Well, that signal
is strong right now.

It's not moving at all!

It's just sitting there!

KALEB: It stopped.

It's suddenly like
something let it go. Look.

KALEB: How the heck
would that happen?

The rocket literally
just stopped in midair.

That's crazy!

With this rocket getting
stuck in the air a second time,

you know, it just goes
back to the repeatable data

that we continue to get.

It's really hard not to
jump to the conclusion

that there is something there.

Now, 'cause it's the second
time it's happened to you...

I mean, I know you
don't get spooked per se,

but did you think to yourself
like, "Wait a second here.

What is going on?"

I'm pretty sure that's a thought

that goes through our mind
every time we're out here.

- What the heck's going on?
- MATTY: What is happening here?

You know, there's two
components to this, though.

Is, that as the rocket
is coming down,

you've got the
difference in elevation,

but you've also got
the rocket underneath

- that's swinging like this.
- Ah.

And so, if it was an updraft,

it may stop its
descent elevation-wise,

but I'd still expect to see
the rocket moving around

below the parachute.

- Absolutely. -It's frozen.
- And this was as if

it was frozen.

MATTY: Okay, now
let's have some fun.

What could have been
stopping that rocket?

I mean, is it hitting some sort
of barrier inside the bubble?

Something like that?

Well, if you cancel out
the plausible explanations,

the only thing left are
the implausible ones.

And that-that's kind of where
we are. I mean, I don't know...

I don't know what
to say about it.

It's not hard to imagine
that rocket being tangled

in some kind of an effect
right over the triangle.

We keep talking
about the bubble.

You know, maybe there's
something very special

- about the region inside of that bubble.
- Wow.

At the same time,
this triggered us

when we saw this
rocket being stuck there.

We're like, "Well, let's...
let's launch another rocket."

And right as we were getting
ready to launch the rocket,

we heard Jim sort of shout.

And then, as the
rocket takes off,

we turn and look, and this
blue orb flies across the ranch

from just south of the
command center here

directly at the
rocket at the triangle,

probably at 100 mile an hour,

and only 50 to 100, 200
feet above the ground.

Three... two... one.

Dude, that went
straight up, too.

- Come on, chute. Oh, did you see that?!
- Yeah, I saw that.

TRAVIS: Oh, holy
crap! What was that?

KALEB: What was that light?

TRAVIS: Yeah, did you see that?

Where did...? I've lost
the rocket completely.

It was, like, right
next to the rocket.

What the crap?

I want to draw
attention to something.

How many sets of human
eyes saw this event?

- There had to be...
- Tens of people.

There had to be


that all pointed and saw this.

ERIK: And the
inventory of cameras

in play all pointed in the
direction that was indicated...

meaning the direction of
the path of this blue light...

not one camera
caught this event.

Whatever it was, it didn't
want you to have film of it.

KALEB: And I think
another point of this is,

in the Pete Kelsey scans,

that was something that
just comes out of nowhere.

That's what I want
to talk about next.

Something you definitely
all saw and captured.

And we'll do that
when we get back.

During the team's
latest experiment,

they began to see startling
anomalies in the smoke,

and then, things
really got interesting.

We watched you
discover something

as you were looking
through the lidar data.

- What are your thoughts?
- ERIK: Well, one statement

that I can make with
confidence is that what we saw

in those scans that night

was unlike the,
uh... the returns

that we saw in any other,

um, experiment
that we did out there.

Of course, the new element
is all the smoke, all the fire.

TRAVIS: Yeah, what you would
typically see on infrared lidar

looking through clouds or
smoke is, it would be hazy.

- You'd lose contrast.
- MATTY: Right.

And we didn't really see that.

So the lidar was working
well through the smoke.

And so, whatever we're seeing
in this spot is giving us a return

as if there is something
there inside this bubble.

I mean, it's almost
overwhelming,

this one experiment,

inside that bubble,

how much it yielded, including

- UAPs themselves.
- Yeah, we were just speaking

of the lidar results.

You know, one feature that
comes to mind is a return,

uh, that shows up in
one of the lidar scans.

And so, perhaps this is evidence

of something like a UAP
passing through our space.

These are questions
that we just have

to keep taking more and more
data and see if it's repeatable.

- Amazing.
- ERIK: Yeah, we-we're in a space, Matty,

where speculation
is not only allowed,

sometimes it is necessary.

-Mm. -And so, as we speculate,

we bookend the
conversation, and we say,

"Look, from this point forward,

we are modeling ideas,
we're speculating."

And I think that's
what we have to do

in the interpretation
these results.

Yeah, so think of it like this.

We don't speculate
in a way that...

that we can't verify or
falsify the speculation, right?

We don't speculate,
"Oh, it's little gray aliens."

Well, the only way we're
gonna figure that out is

if we capture a little
gray alien, right?

That's not what we speculate
on. What we might speculate on is,

"Okay, there's an object
passing through here,

and it's going to create
something that we can detect."

- Got it.
- And then, if we do detect it,

it leads us down a path of,
well, what experiments can we do

to falsify if it's real or not?

And that's what we're
trying to do with this bubble

or whatever it is.

Is the bubble always
there? If it is, what is it?

That's why we put all this
smoke right there underneath it.

That's... what we were
hoping to accomplish.

MATTY: Well, guys, another

incredible night with
you and this team.

What you continue to find is

baffling beyond my
wildest imagination.

So, thank you again for
this deep dive into it all.

I want to do it again next week,

as you go from bubbles to
the mesa, get back to the mesa,

- and start drilling again. Thanks, guys.
- Yeah.

Well, there you have it.

What is truly up and going
down on Skinwalker Ranch?

One thing is for sure:
you can stay tuned,

'cause this team won't
stop until they find out,

even if they have
to hit rock bottom.

We'll do it again next week

right here
from the command center.

Thanks for watching.