Hello, and welcome to the show. I'm Martin Willis your host. We
have Chris Cogswell on the show tonight. He was on a couple of years
ago. He's really a very nice guy, real fun to be on the
show. I'm glad he chose to come back when I asked him. And
he is the chair of the Science Advisory Board of sky Hub. This is
something fairly new which he has gotten into. And sky Hub is a worldwide
basically a worldwide search for UFOs using a glow network of machine learning, smart
cameras and sensors, sensor arrays built by you, yes you, with their
open source software. And this is actually the largest They're trying to create the
largest observational science project in history. Wow, that's amazing. So I have
to tell you one of the benefits of doing a show like this is sometimes
I get to see things ahead of most people. And I'm not trying to
sound like I'm bragging or anything like that. I'm just I'm excited to tell
you that I did get to watch the screener for the Phenomenon and it totally
lives up to the great work that you would expect from James Fox. If
you watched Out of the Blue or I know what, I saw films like
that that he's done in the past, And I'll tell you at the ending
of the movie it's very, very moving. And if you're newish to the
UFO field, you're not gonna want to miss this because there's a lot you
can learn by watching this. And I'll tell you if you were, if
you were a skeptic, you'd be thinking twice, if you know, I
know how a skeptic is probably not going to watch a show about UFOs just
because, but if some do, they're gonna maybe think twice a little bit
on some things that are just really undeniable. So you can pre order this
now on Apple, tv, UM, Amazon Prime, Vimo, and Voodoo.
And I gotta tell you, I got contact today from someone from Canada
and he says there's he can't because he's Canadian. He can't order it through
Amazon, CEA or anything like that. He's tried all the other programs and
you just can't get through being from Canada. And I'm sorry about that.
And that message I sent over to get to James Fox and he's going to
be looking into that. See if you can solve that problem. I want
to thank everyone that listens to the show, and I also want to thank
everyone behind the scenes that helps out tonight. We do not have a phone
screener. We do not have a phone. There's something wrong with the phone
system. Hopefully that will be fixed by next week. And so if you
are going to ask questions and chat, please do all caps so I don't
miss them, and please be kind to each other and chat. So Also,
we have a very active Facebook page and this show is actually playing simulcast
on Facebook as well, and that's at basically Facebook slash podcast ufo dot com.
There's about twenty some thousand people over there. It's pretty active. A
lot of times there's new news put up there. I want to thank everyone
also that helps support the show. I really couldn't do it without you.
And anyone can support the show for two dollars or more a month and you
can find that on our Patreon link over there at podcast ufo dot com.
And while you're there, check out the latest blog by Charles Lear. It's
titled Michigan UFOs on Radar and it's about a night back in March. I
guess it was March eighth, nineteen ninety four, meteorologist Jack busch On was
manning the National Weather Service office and he saw after he was contacted about some
UFOs, he actually saw them on radar. It's a very interesting story.
And as I mentioned here in the last number of shows, Charles Lear,
the author of the blog, is creating an audio blog. It's going to
be posted here on YouTube. Also wherever you get your podcasts, it's going
to be in that feed as well. And let's see, um, I
think that is gonna just about do it for us. And let me do
a little bit of an adjustment here. And actually you can see on YouTube
you can see my green screen. I had a better green screen background,
but it kind of like went berserk just as I was starting the show,
so I changed it to this looks like I'm in the garden here. I'm
gonna be working on that making it better and net for now we're bringing there,
I guess. Chris Cogswell, welcome to the show. Hey Martin,
thanks so much for having me. Thank you. I guess it's been two
years. At times flying a lot has happened. Yeah, I guess,
so it's been. It's been a while more and more than I expected it
had been. Actually it time flies when you're having fun. I guess.
Yeah, A lot has happened in this in the UFO field, it seems
like, you know, there's something going on almost on a weekly basis.
That is that is true? Yeah, stuff happens. M oh, my
goodness on stuff just goes crazy, you know, stuff. Stuff happens all
the time here. So it's pretty intense. But we are we're excited to
be helping out as much as we can. So right, and we're gonna
be talking about that. Now. You went to the same school my son
did at first unh and uh and yeah wildcats and go Wildcats. There we
go. I'd like to hear and uh, you got your PhD? I
forget where did you get that? I got my PhD from Northeastern University.
Oh nice school, great school, and and uh and what did what did
you get? The PhD in my PhD is in chemical engineering, So my
my thesis focused on the creation of nano materials. So we worked on things
called metal organic frameworks and layered zeolites. So I think, um, layers
of stuff one to two nanimeters thick, staffed on top of each other and
engineered for specific purposes. So yeah, well and anyone could do that.
Yeah, it's you know what, it's actually funny. I always joke with
people if you read my it sounds so complicated, or some of the papers
that I've published, it sounds very complicated. But ultimately, if you can
bake a cake, you can bake an animateial. That's good to know.
We might all have to do that at some point. There we go.
We never know. So basically, can you tell us your background for the
I've mentioned this almost every show. I have a lot of new listeners and
some most people are a lot of people that listen to the show have never
heard you before. It really don't know how you got into the UFO topic
or other topics. So you talk about quite a few things on your show,
The Mad Scientist. Is that what that's called Mad Scientist podcast? The
Mad Scientist Podcast. Yeah, so I kind of got involved, I guess,
you know, because of my family, because of my grandmother specifically,
So my family is originally my mom's side of the family, at least the
side that I kind of grew up with and around, is originally from Italy,
and so my mom has in her family, they have a lot of
like anyone whose family is from you know, they're immigrants from other countries.
I think there's a lot of a lot of kind of different cultures and things
than kind of is standard, to say, the normal Middle America view of
things. And part of that is is a very heavy emphasis on spirituality,
and on not even just spirituality, but I would almost say superstition that there
is. You know, my grandma had a lot of ideas about stuff that
worked that probably didn't work, but she swears swore they did. So you
know, things like um, she would make every day for herself kind of
a concoction of like lemons and yogurt and onion and like you know, herbs
and stuff and whatever, and she would eat that every morning despite it tasting
terrible, because she was like, this is what's keeping me alive. Is
she's still alive, like in a hundred something she's My grandma passed away actually
a couple of years ago now, but she was like ninety five. All
right, Seeing everyone works, so maybe it works. I don't know,
you know what I mean, I really I should get out of the podcast
game and get into the curdled yogurt game. Clearly, you know, doctor
Koswell's magic Lemon formula, you know. But but so from through her and
then through my mom, who my mom has always kind of been open to
you know, spirituality and New Age ideas and things like that, and also
was always really into sci fi and horror movies and all that when I was
a kid, you know, she was really open to me reading about like
new religions and new ideas and stuff like that. And and as a little
kid who was really interested in science fiction and science, the UFO topic was
kind of a no brainer because it was, you know, of those subjects
we can think of as being sort of forty and mysterious whatever. The UFO
subject is the closest in my mind, has always been the closest to being
real, do you know what I mean. There's the best evidence for it
in my mind. And so I always loved the topic and just sort of
got you know, once I ordered, Once I had that first book and
heard the first story, there was no going back. Yeah, yeah,
there are there are so many there's so many compelling stories this really, you
know, it can't be denied that. I was just kind of reminded of
that after I watched James Fox's you know latest movie that there's just so many
in that movie, there's just and it's quite a compilation of of you know,
sightings and witnesses, and there wasn't one witness in that entire movie that
I thought, well, you know, maybe I don't believe him. I'm
I mean, they're all so believable. There's really something happening and undeniable.
Sure, yeah, it's hard. You know. That's the one thing to
me that has always been so interesting is and it's part of why I got
involved in you know, so your listeners mean, I know this, so
I got I originally got involved in this subject actually at UNH doing philosophy research
on science and technology and why certain scientific ideas are accepted and others aren't.
And then I went to grad school, obviously, and in grad school I
missed talking about this sort of subject. So I decided to start my podcast,
which is the Mad Scientist podcast, And on that show, we talk
about kind of the scientific ideas and philosophy and everything else behind these subjects.
And one thing we always talk about on the show is the fact that you
know, if you have a single weird event case or even just a cluster
of cases, that it's interesting but still explainable. But when you have something
like the UFO subject, which appears to span decades upon decades of information,
thousands of people every year reports something, you know, families have consistent experiences
over time, it is very interesting and I think very compelling UM and part
of the reason why I became involved in groups like say sky Hub, or
even the SEU before it, or even the little bit that I was at
moff on UM. The goal has always been to try and use big data
methodologies and data analytics to cut through the noise. You know, you can
you can you can ignore or even disbelieve a single case, even if the
witness is stellar, even if there's evidence for the case right. But what
you can't ignore is a continued pattern of cases that to me is really the
goal with these subjects like this. Yeah, I mean you're right, I
mean just for seventy years, you know, and long before that, but
I mean like a steady seventy years more or lastly, now with your your
your background and you just talked about your thesis, the let's just say,
like a nanomta materials. I don't even know if that's quite the right term,
but would you think that if we had crash material like that? It's
been talked about, you know, quite a bit lately in the news and
you know, the New York Times and all that. If we actually had
a crashed vehicle, is that what we look for? Something very strange that
would have to be manufactured? And or could it you know, I mean
they could be using the same material we would use also. Yeah, So
that's a really it's a really good question, and it's a very complicated.
It has a lot of parts, It has a lot of moving parts.
I think that there are you know, the example I give is just imagine,
you know, if we think that's a civilization or a species that is
able to travel here from far away, they would have to be thousands of
years advanced from us, even given the curve of the the technology progresses here,
we would think that it would it would have to be at least a
couple thousand years potentially. If we just think about, let's do something relatively
simple a CD ROM. Right, If we were to give a CD ROM
to someone a hundred years ago, right, so, just a LaserDisc cd
ROM, they would have no idea what it was for, Right, They
would have no, there'd be no concept even about this is for storing information
or this is for you know, as far as they're aware, it maybe
is a kind of mirror. Maybe it's like a flying gets a toy.
Like right, there's it's hard to grasp even the point of the material.
But what they would be able to tell is that the material has clearly been
engineered in some way. So what I mean by that is, for example,
the layers, the layer itself and the material, the materials micro structure
is very specifically built right in a way that we don't anticipate what happen in
nature. There may be properties of the material, for example, on a
laser, or on a disc rather or on a CD rum um the surface
has been polished to such an extent and it's been made defect free, as
defect free as we can. That is something that we don't expect to occur
in nature. So I would argue that if we're looking at a crashed material,
or if we're looking at a crashed vehicle, we probably would be looking
for materials. And so although we may not know what they're we might not
know what they're being used for, what their application is, we should be
able to tell at least these have been engineered, these have been made in
a way that we don't expect to happen on Earth. Yeah, but you
know, and I hear a lot of times when people are speculating that,
you know, there's almost like we know about all the elements. So these
elements could be used anywhere, you know, from anywhere in the universe,
or they could be from right here. So there's no way of knowing.
But uh, you know, I would imagine that it's possible that there are
some elements that we have discovered yet, I mean, or elements in parts
of the universe. It may not be here. So besides, just so
okay, the elements there are, we anticipate that there would be elements above
say element I think it's like one eighteen, which are stable. It's called
the island of stability, which is this idea in atomic chemistry and kind of
nuclear physics nuclear chemistry, that these elements would be more stable than say the
radioactive elements we know today. Right, there is a limit though on how
stable something could be. But there are some theories out there that maybe there
is chemistry of these super heavy elements, right for example, that's one potential
thing. But we don't even have to get that complicated. We don't.
You know, when a meteorite crashes on Earth today, or when a piece
of space debriate crashes on the Earth today, researchers on Earth actually get that
material and then they'll study it for crystal structures, alloys, material phases,
things like that which don't normally occur on the surface of the Earth. Right,
So that's actually have a lot of research into things like say metal or
rather magnets today occur, or other kind of high performance materials or alloys or
not really alloys there. Crystal structures or some of my crystal instructures we look
to see are their combinations that occur someplace else that don't normally occur on Earth.
Right. And what I mean by what I mean by um, what
I mean by say a combination is something like, actually, this might be
a good a good chance to show my screen. Yeah sure, so just
remember you can choose the window or tap perfect. Yeah. Actually, let
me let me share my screen here, and I'm going to do the whole
screen and nothing but share this, the whole screen and nothing but the screen.
Right, Okay, are you ready? Great? Yep? I'm ready
all right, Okay, let me just switch these two. Hang on,
that's not letting me do it. I wonder why. So miniaturize yourself,
Um, if you can, you'll see a place where you can pop yourself
out down at the bottom. Um, I don't want to remove you.
Yeah, let me see if I can. Here we go. Okay,
are we good? Yep, we're good? Perfect? Okay great. So
Um, this is, for example, the crystal structure of sodium chloride,
which is just table salt. Right. And you'll notice that these sodium and
chloride ions, they actually exist in a repetitive structure, right, because it's
a crystal. It's a crystalline structure. But you can imagine that if instead
of it being sodium chlorine sodium chlorine, it would say sodium nothing, chlorine
nothing sodium. Right. So you can have different permutations of the same of
the same molecule or of the same crystal that form in different ways. So
and that would give us different um what's the word? That would give us
different ultimate properties of the final material. So even though we might know all
the elements, we can't possibly know all of the different ways that they'll be
put together. And so and even in solid materials that are simple. Right,
So sodium chloride, we know that it has this phase let's say,
right, So we can do here like phase diagram. Let's say steel.
Right, So we know, for example, steel is a certain structure,
right, but it all of these different phases here, right, gamma or
austinite steel here we have alpha plus iron carbon steel or fair right steel.
Right. Depending on the conditions, steel ends up becoming different solid structures.
And so this is, for example, an area where we might expect there
to be new materials that we would get from say a crashed saucer or something
would be Okay, maybe we have a good idea that this is how iron
behaves in these regions of temperature and pressure, or temperature and composition in this
case. But maybe there's a region someplace here for example. You know,
we've never studied all of these areas on this graph, right, So there
might be places that are come up with what are called new thermodynamic phases of
these crystals or these solid structures that we don't anticipate occurring on Earth. You
know, So I see there might be imagining the temperature if we're at very
very high temperatures there might be completely different phases of steel that we've never discovered,
we've never worked on before, just because we've never tried it. So,
you know, we anyone who tells you we know everything about the earth
right now, we know everything about science, we know whatever. You know,
people have been claiming that we know everything about the physical world since ancient
Greece, and they've never been right, and they will never be right.
You know, there's always something new to learn. So it's a it's a
good it's a great question though. Yeah, well I think it is.
It is interesting when you you really think about, um, you know,
you just mentioned the different temperatures and things like that that can cause uh,
but also that you're saying that things can be put together in different ways that
we're just not familiar with. It is that kind of where I'm absolutely,
yeah, yes, absolutely, you know. The another good example from baking
again, because I'm I'm a simple man. I love cake and pies and
everything else, right, I love baking. So another good example of baking
is you can imagine you can have flour, eggs, milk, and butter,
but you can put them together in different ways and bake them at different
temperatures and times and and and everything else, and you can get completely different
results, right, you can get um, you can get you know,
sponge cake and let in regular cake and uh whatever, right, um,
creams and all this other kind of stuff. So really, when it comes
to making materials, it is a lot more complicated than just the elements put
together. Right. It's the elements, it's the time that you gave them
to build. It's the temperature, it's the pressure, it's the mixture ratios,
it's it's all of those other things, right. Um, so yeah,
no, there are there are loads of other phases of material that we
haven't discovered yet. All right, Well, it looks like someone in the
chat rooms getting right into your sky Hub. I want to talk about that.
He has a question for you about the cameras. But let's why don't
we jump into that. We've got plenty plenty of time to talk about all
kinds of things. But let's talk about sky hub and and how that all
began the founder contacted you or how did that happen? Yeah, so sky
Hub. Actually, it's funny, there have been for a long time,
there have been a couple of well for a long time, Um, there
have been efforts in the past to do something similar to what Skyhub is doing
now, right. Yeah, So actually the first one of the first systems
that was built to do this was called a Baker nun camera system and that
was built in like the nineteen sixties nineteen fifties by NASSA. And what they
were trying to do was actually to study the motion of satellites, right because
this was the first time that this had happened. We suddenly have things flying
in the sky above us all the time in near earth atmosphere, so they
would develop these systems to try to try to track how those objects are moving
in the sky. Over time, obviously, the technology that's needed for this
has gotten better and better and better. So the system that we use today
at sky Hub is a you know, the computer itself is very small.
It is maybe about three inches by four inches large, so it's a very
small system. It's a very small unit. Um. I actually have one
running right now, just right on my window sill currently. That's why I'm
looking at it to be like how big is that thing? About three and
you know, so this effort essentially though really kind of started as the brainchild
of a couple of folks on our team currently. So the people that kind
of really put this together right now are Steve McDaniel, Corey Gasbard, and
then Adam Allen, who actually were working in another group previous to this but
decided to kind of break off and do their own thing. And so Steve
and Corey are really the kind of Steve, Corey and all and Adam,
I should say, are the co founders of this group. Steve is the
lead software developer, Corey is the lead web developer or web developer, and
then Adam it does legal affairs and data licensing for us. And then as
we were, as they were building their team, they actually approached me a
couple of times and asked, would you want to be, you know,
on the team, would you want to be chair of the science advisor?
Would you want to do these other things? And actually the first couple of
times I turned them down because I was like, well, you're you're making
a lot of promises, but I want to see some results, right,
I want to does this thing work? Doesn't work? And they have they
have proved it to me since then that in fact, it does work.
And not only not only does it work, but someone who is as bad
with computers as I am, can put one together and have it running.
So UM, we're we're pretty excited. So anyways, they asked me to
take part in this and I accepted, and since then now we have been
kind of moving forward. We've added onto the team a couple of other people
as we go forward here. Richard Hoff has been helping us with machining and
design of the actual enclosures themselves. So the system, the kind of computer
UM, the cameras, the GPS, the sensor modules, all of those
things are we wanted to use as basically as cheap options as we could while
they're still formidable enough to do what we want them to do. They still
have the computing power we need, and they're still able to kind of exist
out there in the elements. So these can be an and and out the
any any elements, like in Alaska someplace like that. UM. So we
haven't tested them in Alaska yet, but the goal would be here that they
would be able to withstand um kind of average ranges of temperature and pressure and
you know, humidity and rain and weather and vents and things like that.
So currently we have them running UM in so we have a couple in Texas.
We have one here in Massachusetts where I am, we have one in
Delaware, UM, and then we have one in Austria, and I want
to say we have one in France as well. So far M the team.
We haven't officially launched yet. These are all tests. These are all
tests devices right now, I seem to do this however, as someone in
the chat actually smartly has pointed out already, we are essentially utilizing UM the
goal. So let me start from the beginning here a little bit more uh
successfully. I'll say. One of the main problems with the UFO subject for
a long time has been when there have been serious efforts to collect data,
that data ends up going into a black box. So for example, if
we think about you know, UM large organizations that actually study you know,
UFO cases, that data never makes its way out there to the public and
it's really hard to get access tom. On the other hand, when there
have been scientific efforts to do this work, say through through the government or
through you know, organizations or universities or whatever, again that data has never
really been made available to the average person. So the goal here is the
goal here is to create an open source data science platform where people can build
these themselves. They can then capture the video themselves if they want, they
can upload them onto our system so that we can analyze them and have them
kind of come together into one larger system, and then that data as we
go through it will be made available to the public. Right. So the
goal here eventually is that if we have one of these things running and it's
out there in the field, you'll be able to get that data. Right
you watching right now on this video, you in the chat will be able
to log onto that system and see that data that's coming in. That's really
the ultimate goal here is to make an open source, relatively inexpensive, freely
available database of software that people can install onto their Linux machines. So we
use the jets and nano currently, but they can follow along on the wiki.
They can get the information on how to build these things, and then
it'll run based on the software that we've built and are going to deploy to
the public. Now I'm on your checking out your site. Now, are
you going to have like a system where someone can log in eventually or is
that it's just going to be playing open to you know, I'm just thinking
about how people can submit, you know, like if they become part of
the part of the program or whatever. Someone wants to have a camera.
I mean, I live in this great area up in Maine on the coast
where I can see the Milky Way. It's so clear, you know clear.
Sky is not saying that just because I can see the Milky Way,
I'm going to see UFOs. But no. So the goal would be basically,
it's okay. The way that it works is let me show you mine.
Let me show my screen again. Act sure you got so people can
kind of see what I'm going to be showing. So you're ready, can
yeah, I'm ready? Okay, Okay. So if people go to skyhub
dot org, which is our website, they can see here join the chat,
and then they can also download the source code. So if they want
to be part of the chat, they just click on and join the chat
here and it'll it'll bring them to what it's called rocket Chat, which is
up here. And this is the tool that we currently are using right to
do our chat, our chat stuff, and all the work that we've actually
been doing as we move forward. If you want to learn how to build
one of these things, you would go here to resources and go here to
the wiki page. So on the sky Hub wiki, here we have a
thing that says, okay, how you can get involved, of course,
but we also have here guides. So if you go to guides, we
have how to set up your tracker, how to download and use the main
interface for sky Hub, how to build your enclosure, and then how to
do final checks and tests before the tracker becomes deployed, so to speak.
Right, so tracker set up here, You can see here what we needs.
You need these internet gables, you need the barrel jacks, these screws,
etc. Etc. But we talk about how to build this right.
So here we have the jets and nano platform. You apply the fan,
then you can set up your PSU or you can just use the power connected
to your wall, set up your SD card right and run the actual nano
system itself to begin with, and then set up your GPS. Right.
So, what would just for just of the listener out there right now?
What would this problem? What would be the approximate cost to set this up
for someone that is really interested in helping out. Yeah, great question.
So the goal is to make the system cost about three hundred dollars. Now
what we are That three hundred dollars, though, doesn't go to us,
right, That three hundred dollars goes to getting the fan, getting the PS,
getting the actual system itself, getting all the coreds you need, getting
the camera right, all those other things. The goal, really, or
really the challenge, I guess, is building a system like this that is
accessible enough to average people. You know, none of us on the team
are millionaires, right where we don't have unlimited funds to build these things and
everything else. You know, the sky Hub, the sky Hub system right
now that I have. You know that money came out of my beer fund,
you know what I mean. That's you know, it's you know,
it's for the love of science though, so it's fine, but you know
it's we want it to be accessible to people, so you can build it,
you can run it, will help you troubleshoot, will help you set
it up, all those other things. But the bare minimum system that we
suggest would be about three hundred dollars. Now, like I said, though,
if you have extra money lying around, if you're you know, I
don't know, a wealthy retiree or a you know, a young startup millionaire
or whatever. You can buy a better system equipment, right, Like you
can buy a better camera, you can buy a better GPS, you can
buy a better computer to run this thing on. All of that is also
possible, but we want to have a minimum standard whereby the vast majority of
people can buy the stuff, they can put it together themselves, and then
they can run this. Right at the end of the day, all of
this stuff is kind of out of the box, right, It's supposed to
be plug in play. What we are actually giving though, is the software
itself. Right, So if you go to our git lab repository, you
can see all of the software, all the code that we our team is
built essentially, right. It's it's quite a bit of code that the team
has been working really hard, and there's a lot there. But once you've
run it essentially, you can then access your Skyhub system and then you can
basically you can basically run the camera itself. Have you heard of eagle Board?
No? I have not. Okay, someone was asking it's some type
of system. Someone was asking why you wouldn't use that, So it's nothing
I'm familiar with. So yeah, So most of the reason why we're using
kind of what we're using actually is because it will connect nice and easily to
the sensor platforms that we're hoping to utilize. So right now the current system,
so let me go here and here, so sensor array, right,
let me just mention this too. I'd say about eighty percent of the listens
to the show is probably through the audio podcast. So I'm going to have
a link in the show notes to the skyhub dot org so you can check
out everything that Chris is talking about right now. Yeah, really really good
call there. So the reason we're using the stuff that we're using currently is
because we are we are in development currently with building further sensor systems. Right.
So example here this wit motion does kind of the motion or the movement
of the box itself. Right. Some of these here are temperature sensors are
eventually we're hoping to have things like infrared or other radio signals or electromagnetic spectrum
signals that we can do. We have GPS, we have these other expansions
and things like that, so there's a lot of sensors that we can play
with here. We're thinking about like stuff like geophones and you know, Geiger
counters and all the kind of sensors you can think of. But really for
the first system here, it's it's simple, right, it's a camera,
it is a GPS dongle essentially, and it's the computer itself. That's the
base level system you need. Now the ultimate goal of the system here,
so let me show you a little bit about So this is what we envision
the ultimate enclosure will look like. There actually is one of these already in
existence living out in Austria, which is really cool. But so if you
look at the system here, so this is a phish eye camera and then
this is a past camera. What the software actually does is as an object
comes into the field of view of the fish eye camera, it treats that
as a point source and then it will tell the past camera to point over
to that point source and then track it as it moves across the sky.
Currently, what works right now, or what is in the first release of
the system at this point in time, is the fish eye camera. So
in other words, if you build one of these, your fish eye camera
will be able to capture objects as they come into the field of view,
track them, and then we're actually able to pull the data out of that
and do some image analysis essentially to get things like say a velocity and acceleration,
etc. All of that is kind of in development past the V one
release, But the simple V one release is the camera system can track objects.
It'll be able to tell this is something out of the ordinary or this
is something of interest, and then it can actually upload it to the cloud
automatically for us. Ah, I'm gonna just pop up quickly this right here.
Let's see here. Let me stop sharing my So this is what this
person in chat said. It's called beagle Bone. I never heard of it.
It's a learning AI. It's also crowdsource. You know. I don't
know if it's something you can you know, make work through this. But
anyway, it's just a suggestion. Okay, yeah, yeah, really good,
really good question, A really good suggestion there. So, Actually,
the other reason that we're using the jets and Nano is that it's an a
video platform, so it already has a lot of out of the box software
for things like say, tracking of objects as they move across the screen and
things like that. So because of the videos, because Navidia has such a
robust developer community already, there is a lot of software and a lot of
already people kind of working on that outside of sky Hub, of course,
but we're able to pull from that large repository of development on the navidio platform.
But it's a really great I mean, that person who made that suggestion
please join our chat and help us code. Yeah, yeah, there you
go, answers. We'd love to have you anyone in the chat. Seriously,
we would love to have you please, that's Stephen. Yeah, well,
uh, it's really it's fascinating. What is your I guess what is
the mission statement? What is the goal? Uh, you know, get
people all over the world you know, doing this ice in the sky.
So the ultimate yeah, the ultimate goal really is so we kind of have
a couple of different things, Um, what's the word. We have a
couple of fear frank, a couple of different goals going on simultaneously. But
the ultimate goal is to create a open source data collection platform for people who
are interested in this subject to be able to actually do something about studying it,
right, That's the ultimate goal here. So our best case scenario would
be we have a sky Hub tracker. You know, we have a bunch
of these trackers across the United States. Let's say and then we are able
to say, or we are able to see, for example, an object
as it moves through the sky in different locations. So you can imagine,
Martin, if you have one of these up in Maine. We put one
in New Hampshire someplace. I've got one here in Massachusetts on the coast.
If we're able to see that objects it moves across the sky from all three
of our cameras, that is much more compelling than a single person with a
cell phone camera. Right, that's the goal. Get Yeah, and actually
I can show you already a video that we've actually already captured. Is this
one in Texas in May? It is the Texas one in May. Yeah.
You know what's so funny is we actually had we had that unit deployed
for like a weekend, and it already captured something like are you kidding me?
We've already got something cool on here. Now I'm not saying it's UFO,
but it certainly doesn't look like it's behaving like a like an airplane.
Right, It's like, I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens.
Right, I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's aliens, Right, Um,
it's very it's very exciting stuff. I mean, you know, we're
we're able to do all of this in different ways and kind of you know,
ultimately, again the goal is to let is to have this community kind
of come together and do something here, which is which is very interesting.
A question is what language are they coding the sin and I don't know,
is there such a thing as Yeah, yeah, no, that's a really
good question. So, um, we're currently I want to say that we
are. That is a question for someone who is better at computers than I
am. Let me say that. So why my role on the Science Board
really is essentially to come up with So that's definitely a question for Steve or
Corey, right, the actual developers, the people that are writing the code
itself. Right, Um, it's a really good question. Though I want
to I don't want to give you an answer and then they'd be wrong,
right, That's that's kind of the the baseline here. That's why I'm kind
of not really good an answer right now. But yeah I will. I
will absolutely if after the show DM me or even go into the Rocket chat
itself and ask that question. It's a very very good question, and yeah,
they'd they'd love to be able to help you there um more on that
stuff. So my role as part of the science team is to actually do
the data analysis or figure out how to do the data analytics. So what
we're actually doing with this stuff is we are there's a couple of different things
going on simultaneously. So there are there are sensors, right, that are
collecting data, there are the video streams that are collecting the videos, and
then there is the analytics on top of those videos. For example, right,
you can't just tell a computer that, oh, there's this video and
figure out where the object is and whatever. You actually have to code all
of that, and that's partly why we're using the video platform. Part of
the goal here, for example, would be imagine you have an object on
these videos and it's a point sorce, right, So actually I can this
will probably be better to show here. Let me share my screen quickly.
Are you showing the video now or something? Yeah, I'm going to share
the video, so let me do that quickly and show you this, so
one second here, let me and again, well for people listening to this,
there's also skyhob actually has a YouTube channel you can check out. They
have on I don't know, maybe only about four videos up there so far,
but this video is on that. So yeah, yeah, so are
ready to share that? I'm ready to share it. Okay, okay,
and hang on just a second. We'll pop it here. Okay, here
we go, all right, So here I'm going to play this Now,
why is it circular? Is that the camera it's a fish eye camera yep.
So it's it's a circular screen essentially, right. It almost looks like
a globe when you look at it, like the earth. Yeah. So,
as you can imagine, right, so this object is coming into frame,
it's kind of slowly coming in. Then it stops, and then as
we allow it to kind of move forward in time, and so you can
see the time here ticking across. So then it stops and then it starts
to shoot off. Okay, I talk about that small right in the center
right here, yep, with a tail behind it yep. So then it's
it kind of trails off there. So now what you can imagine is,
for example, if we do say a simple image analysis, So for example
we say that, okay, everything back here is just dark, it's black,
it's background noise. Right, So as this object comes into view.
We track its motion over time by tracking the pixels as they change. Right.
The data that we then have that's kind of pulling in or the ability
that we're going to try to do or try to build into this is going
to be once that image actually shows, getting things like say a velocity,
a potential acceleration, right, and things like that from this object. Because
you could imagine, for example, right, if you look at say my
mouse, my mouse point are here. If this is an airline or something
simple like that, you would imagine that as it moves across the screen,
it's gonna go basically in a flatline path. Right, Because airplanes, as
they move, they don't judge it's in around, They don't kind of jump
in everything else. Right, they have simple motion. Right, But you
can imagine that if it's a UAP or something of interest, it might move
around much more erratically, or it might jump around the screen, and as
it makes those movements, it's going to be doing so much more quickly.
We would hypothesize then, say an airplane or a drone could or a bug
or a bird or whatever. So ultimately the goal of the science team is
to come up with and think about how can we turn the answered data that
skyhub is pulling in into interesting, actionable testing parameters that then we can use
to test hypotheses. Right. So, for example, one of the first
things that actually we're actually doing here is as the system pulls in an object,
as it says that, oh, there's something on screen here that's of
interest, it is then going to check, basically with a registry of all
of the airplanes that are flying over the vicinity and exactly yep. So it
can then tell is this an airplane or for example, we can say is
this a medior, is this a known atmospheric phenomena, things of that nature.
Right. Ultimately, the system is going to be using some machine learning
techniques to do things like say, okay, we have a thousand videos of
airplanes, we have a thousand videos of birds, we have a thousand videos
of say, insects, we have a thousand videos of drones. Teach the
system then, based on some of those parameters, we pick this is what
a bird looks like, this is what an airplane looks like, this is
what a drone looks like. Normally, and then eventually the system will be
able to pick out of the you know, thousands of events maybe attracts over
the course of a month. It can say, okay, well, these
ones are probably birds, these are probably airplanes, these are probably whatever.
These events though, this event maybe if you collect one, this event is
interesting. This is one that we need to do further analysis on. Right,
So kind of taking the human element out of this process and allowing you
know, systems to do this kind of work for us, that's that's one
of the goals here on our team, of the science team, at least
to be able to have happen. Yeah. Yeah, I'd like that.
The fact that it's kind of a learning situation, you know, like like
training AI basically absolutely, yeah, that's the kind of goal, right,
And I mean we know we can do this too. We know that we
can use this too for exam ample with other technologies, right or with other
methods. So for example, there's actually been a lot of research work on
image analysis like this for say cancer cells, right, So being able to
track whether or not a cancer cell has become metastatic. That actually essentially what
can happen is in a normal cancer cell that is not metastasized yet, the
cell as it bounds as it hits another cancer cell, it'll just bounce back
right, so it'll it'll hit another cell and it'll just move backwards. But
in a metastatic cancer cell, what'll happen is the cells will actually hit and
then the metastatic cell will move over and then continue its path forward. So
if you look at us, if you look at a population of cells and
you treat each of them like a point source, so just a single object
on your screen, what you'll notice is in normal cancer cells that have not
metastasized yet, they kind of sit in like a circular pattern if you measure
their movement over time, right, But metastatic cancer sales will actually continue in
a straight line path. So a lot of research work actually has been going
on to do image analysis for cancer sales, for example, and other image
analysis techniques work work in the past as well. So we're really we're really
trying hard to learn from the past, learn from efforts that have been done
to do this before, and also work with other groups that have done this
kind of work, you know what I mean. So we are reaching out
to the people that did the Baker Nun systems back in the day. We're
reaching out to you SETI and researchers and other organizations they're doing this kind of
work. Set Let me just ask you this, because you know, I
know just one person that study I've actually communicate with, Jill Charter, but
Seth Shaw, Seth Shostak, even though he and I kind of bumped heads
when he was on this show, we still communicate with each other. Who'd
you reach out to there? So we reached out to Seth was also a
friend of also a friend of the Medicidist podcast and was interested in what we
were doing. Um Steady actually has had seti IF back in the back in
the late two thousand or early two thousands, I guess had a project called
SETI at Home, which wasn't officially through Steady, it was through like the
University of Ohio. I want to say, but um efforts, That's what
I'm saying. There is a lot of research work that has happened over time
to build these kinds of systems before, right, and we are just trying
to learn as much as we can from those other efforts that have happened before.
So we're reaching out to and we've talked to you folks at SETI.
Set and a couple of other researchers there already. We've talked to people at
say, we've talked to some physicists who would do things like say, you
know, radio astronomy and things like that of that nature to do these kinds
of work. You know, we're really trying hard to learn as much as
we possibly can. And yes, cl you are completely right. The heart
of it is the crowdsourcing component, right because that's the other part of this
too. And I have a huge, huge question up here. It kind
of involves that it's going to block you right out. This is from over
on Facebook from Abigail and basically, have you thought of involving or recruiting groups
through social media that do regularly SkyWatch, et cetera and working directly with them,
not just but for an example the UK, you know, I know
there's a lot there's not taken seriously in the group, would be able to
fund the equipment there, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Have you thought about
using social media or do you already do that? So we use social media.
We have a Twitter account, we have a Facebook page, we do
have the rocket chat um right now, a lot of our efforts have been
focused on getting the first version of the software out right, once at first
softwarevent, once the first system. So once this system officially launches UM,
then it's kind of gangbusters, right then. We're happy to talk to anybody
about any collaboration, collaborative effort that can happen. If there are groups that
would be interested in purchasing or rather getting the components and building them themselves and
having us help, please please do reach out to us. We would love
to work with you for sure. I mean, you know again, anyone
who wants to build one of these with our help, we are more than
happy to have work alongside us. Awesome. Well, you know, speaking
of that, someone has a good question up here. Chris has been on
the show Christopher O'Brien that is a number of times over the years, even
visited me here up in Maine. How similar is this setup to the project?
Are you familiar with what Christopher O'Brien is doing? And also there's others.
There's there's the you photogue. I don't think it's called something else now,
but I think I can actually tell Leslie. The difference myself, I
believe is this is more of a like a crowdsource thing than and Christopher's O'Brien
as these little, you know, camera setups in different places. But it's
not about people getting involved as far as I know. Maybe I'm wrong about
that. I actually owe him a call, so I'll find out more about
that. But as far as I know, he's just having these things set
up in certain places, and I don't think it's open to it's open source
like this, I'm not I'm not positive though. The major difference between our
effort and efforts that have been done in the past, although we respect them
and would love to work with them, of course, the main difference is
that our effort is completely crowdsourced. It's completely open, so no one on
the Skyhub team is getting paid to do this work. We don't make any
money if you buy a unit, right because the units aren't ours. You're
buying the software, you're buying the the information, or rather, let me
restate that you're buying the hardware from hardware manufacturers, not from us, and
the software is being given away for free. So um, you know it
is we want this to be as open and transparent as possible. We don't,
you know, because we all hate them. We hate the problem of
you know, I always joke that, you know, for a subject that
hates that says it hates secrets and hates the government hiding information about this subject
from us, the UFO subject loves secret keepers, right. They love people
who are like I can't tell you that's an inside source of mind. You
know, they love that stuff, right, And it's it's so frustrating because
it's like, no, if if if you want the information to get out
there, then it shad to get out there, right. If you want
disclosure to happen, then start disclosing things. Right. So the goal of
this is if you collect a video, um, you'll have it sammed on
your own hard drive as it uploads to the cloud. Right. Um.
The idea here is going to be again, the software is really available.
The units are easy to purchase. It's cheap stuff that you put together yourself.
You can build off of it if you'd like to. You can make
a more complicated sensor system. You can make a more complicated camera system,
you can do all these other things. The goal here is though, that
as the data comes in that we will work together. Basically, Yeah,
that's great. Let's say, look, we got just two minutes until we
go into our break. So let me just pull up there was I saw
another question in there. This question seems to come up. I've seen Rodrigo
ask this question before. Do you want the UFO mystery solved? Or do
you enjoy the search? That is a question. I guess we really have
to ask ourselves deep inside. I don't know if it could ever be solved,
even if it was solved. Good, Yeah, No, it's a
it's a it's a great question. Right. Let me let me the You
know, we talk about this in our podcast all the time. If if
the President went out onto the lawn of the White House holding the hand of
an alien and was like, look, they're real, We've been working with
them for decades, right, They've been here this whole time, there would
be a good percentage of the UFO subject fan base that would say I don't
believe it right because it doesn't fit with their own kind of preconceived notion about
what disclosure or what the UFO presence has to conform to. Right. So
I would say, I would like to know. I would like to know
if people are having legitimate experiences, and I would like to be able to
verify that using data from our systems, right. And I don't mean to
say like I want to know if people are having legitimate experiences. I don't
mean that to sound like I don't believe people who are having experiences. But
what I mean by that is it's not enough to believe that a person had
an experience for science, for the scientific community, right, Um, what's
important is getting enough data, getting enough information that you can actually prove it
to the skeptics, to the scient to try to do whatever. I agree.
Yeah, yeah, so that's the that's the important part. So I
do want an answer. I don't know if we can ever have an answer,
though, that's true. I agree with you one hundred percent on that.
All right, we're heading into break. Hang on everyone, Uh,
let's see. I just want to say I'm gonna I'm gonna go into break
for KGr Radio right now. We'll be right back right after these messages.
All right, So for everyone in YouTube, I watched some raw footage of
right after the nineteen fifty two UFO flap over Washington, DC. And I've
always liked this clip, so I'm going to run it here during the break,
And here we go. I am here to discuss the so called flying
saucers. The Air Force interest in this problem has been due to our feeling
of an obligation to identify and analyze, to the best of our ability,
anything in the air that may have the possibility of threat or menace to the
United States. In pursuit of this obligation, since nineteen forty seven, we
have received and analyzed between one and two thousand reports that have come to us
from all kinds of sources. Of this great massive reports, we have been
able adequately to explain the great bulk of them, explain them to our own
satisfaction. We've been able to explain them as a hoaxes, as erroneously identify
and friendly aircraft, as meteorological or electronic phenomena, or as light aberrations.
However, there have been a certain percentage of this volume of reports that have
been made by credible observers of relatively incredible things. It is this group of
observations that we now are attempting to resolve. Our basic difficulty in dealing with
these is that there is no measurement of them that makes it possible for us
to put them in any pattern that would be profitable for a deliberate custom sort
of analysis to take the next step. We have as a date come to
only one firm conclusion with respect to this remaining percentage, and that is that
it does not contain any pattern of purpose, all of consistency that we can
relate with any to any conceivable threat to the United States. We can say
that the recent sightings are in no way connected with any secret development by any
agency of the United States. Well, I'm going to bring us back in.
So I always thought that i'd like to kind of get your opinion of
what. You know, he just said, I don't know if you were
actually paying attention, you went off to break or whatever. But he's saying,
you know, basically, you know this, these sightings happened, and
he's not like discounting them. You know, he's saying, a lot of
them can be explained. But it's a pretty pretty interesting take. Um.
You know that that they were you know, they had to kind of explain
what was going on, so many reports coming in, um, and it
was all over the papers and a world actually worldwide press and actually a misleading
picture of light reflections in the sky over the Capitol which kind of makes everyone
think that's the UFOs. But that's not that's not that was light reflection.
So you're so your so what was your question there? Your question was do
I yeah, so how do you think the Air Force was handling that situation?
How do I think that they have in that particular right there right there
and that that club gentlemen, you may want to answer that, ask them
that one back, So stand by that one that was planned. Well,
okay, all right, stand by sure and three two one go, all
right, welcome back my guest again as Chris Cogswell. And we were just
having a laugh because during the break we watched General Major General Stamford nineteen fifty
two talking about, you know, the UFO flap trying to calm everyone down.
Isn't that kind of what that's kind of what you can take out of
it. You know, it's not a threat, it's not us. And
you know, most of these things can be explained, but some of them
can't. Some are incredible and some cannot be explained. It was it's a
very memorable and that's why I wanted to play it. It's it's such a
great clip. Hmm. It's it's it's funny how when watching those old kind
of when watching those old videos or even reading some of the old analysis that
happened. It's funny how little has changed, right in the seventy years,
and this subject has really been kind of at the top of mind for the
American for the American public, I guess, and top of mind. Maybe
it's the wrong the wrong word because or the wrong saying because it's never it's
not always been top of mind. But you know, it's interesting that even
given the big increases in the percentage of people who believe in this or who
think that something is really happening, but ultimately the government's response is kind of
continue to be the same, right of well, we don't know, we
we can't tell everything, but you know, some of these might be unexplained
still, but it's doesn't mean that it's something interesting or whatever. I mean,
it feels like there's only so much time, that there's only so much
time that you can keep saying we don't know before you say, well,
why aren't you looking right like you don't know? Okay, shouldn't you be
trying to find out? Then? Like people keep asking you, it's you
know, you're you're the government, right, You're the you're the military.
You're the air force here. Whoever, at some point you will need to
know what's up there when that day comes, you know. I think that's
ultimately been That's been one of the big conundrums I guess with like the modern
days, say disclosure movement or even disclosure movements in the past, has been
there's this break between you know, there's a break between the public who want
to think that the government has the answers and so this must be some big
conspiracy to keep it secret. But then there's also a person of the public
you kind of think, you know, the military or the government might be
just as you know, flabbergasted by all this as we are, I think.
So I say that on the show all the time. Yeah, and
that's and that I think. The kind of camp that I fall into as
well is you know it, it seems um, I don't know it.
Just again, it seems to be the most it seems to be the most
likely scenario, the most sensible scenario, I guess, I would say,
right, is that the government doesn't know they want to find out. I
mean, why else would they have programs like a tip right unless they wanted
to find out? So and and also you know, it comes up a
number of times. Um. You know that there's really good film out there
there. You know that there's been some you know, really incredible things kind
of swept away somewhere who knows where, maybe in a private program where it
can't get congressional oversight or something like that. But speaking of that, UM,
you know we have UM, there's some uh, there's going to be
a bit of oversight, you know coming in. There's going to be UM
Marco Rubio is heading this. I think it's him heading it. M the
looking into the UFO UAP subject, but not you know, they're they're trying
to base it more of you know, what's a threat or international threat.
They're not really you know, going I mean it is mentioned now and then,
but it's not really saying, you know, what might be off planet
that might be or unknown to us, might be hitting us. The I
think the answer to this in many ways has always been to treat this as
you know, it's one of the It's one of the kind of funny things
about science, I guess, and modern science especially is how tied up it
is with industry or with you know, money, right with funding, So
you know, the we like to think that science just kind of gets funded
because the government is good enough to give its money away to people who study
all kinds of wacky things. But that's not really in the case. Right.
A lot of government research is funded, or a lot of research and
the sciences gets funded because it has some applicability to a problem that we're looking
at. Right, And so in my mind, the ultimate goal of say
a you know, the UAP Task Force or the government's new work looking into
these things or whatever, the ultimate goal of that, you know, would
never or probably would never be about, you know, we're looking for alien
intelligences, right, because that's not the way that funding happens. They are
trying to solve a very specific problem the right, and that problem is we
have incursions over our airspace that we don't have an answer for it. Currently.
We don't know what they are, we have no way of tracking them,
We have no way of knowing um, you know, we don't know
how many there are that are occurring because we have no way of tracking them.
So what do we do? Right? That is a more interesting problem,
I think for the government, and it's also frankly easier to sell when
you're trying to get government funding. That again, government funding is it's not
an unlimited resource, right, there's parts of the pie. You're Any money
you get isn't going to say, you know whatever, Right, get us
to Mars, get us to you know, these other things that we want
to try to do well. Um, you know, I've heard it said
that the reason that science hasn't taken the UFO you know topic seriously is because
of a number of things. It's something that it can't have an end date.
There's no end date to it. Um, so there's nothing solved.
And you know along those lines, you know, what do you think about
that that aspect of it? So I think the problem is a little bit
more nuanced than that, although I agree with that general sentiment. I think
the problem is that when we talk about solving one of the things that at
sky Hub, the reason why we started with something relatively simple, right,
which is just capturing these things as point sources, you know what I mean.
Ultimately, what we're doing is we are comparing if you had to think
about what Skyhub is doing in terms of its kind of hypothesis, its ultimate
goal for the testing that we're doing right now, the main hypothesis is that
there are you can categorize objects in the sky based on their mean square displacement,
are based on their vector of transport. Right. So, in other
words, if you look at an object in the sky and you just measure
how it moves over time, certain objects are going to be moving in one
way. Other objects will move in other ways, and then similar objects,
similar objects will will have similar flight paths or similar patterns. Right, that's
the ultimate hypothesis that we're testing. That has nothing to do with UFOs,
It has nothing to do with UAP, it has nothing to do with any
of these other things. It's very simple, right, It is something solvable
that to me, has been the ultimate problem with the UFO study has been
that when we talk about these things, we want to talk about this like
it is this that's all encompassing, all or nothing answer. Right, We're
gonna get the answer, and then that's how we're going to know about UFOs
and aliens and UAP and whatever. And it's going to be the you know,
we're filing going to get the document that proves it all. But that's
not the way science, that's not the way information gathering happens. Right.
We gather small bits of information over time slowly, so that finally we can
say, aha, we've discovered something. You know what I mean, if
I had to give it an analogy. The UFO subject people, people that
are involved in this, they want to find the answer, like they are
digging through, you know, like a like a needle in the haystack.
Right, they stick their hand into the bucket of sand, they pull it
out and they have this beautiful, shiny, you know, ruby of truth.
Right. But the way that truth actually happens is you chisel away at
it, right, You break stuff off, you break falsities away, and
so it takes decades before you finally come to like a very tiny little slither
of truth. Right. And that isn't compelling television. That isn't compelling storytelling.
It's it's boring, right. A lot of that work is boring.
And that's I think the problem is that no one wants to do the boring
work. And I am here to say that Skyhub is willing to do the
board. So let me just ask you this. So let's just say that
you have one of these sky Hub cameras, you know, in the network,
catches something going say twenty five thousand miles an hour and then it makes
a right hand hand a right angle turn, which uf always have. I
mean, that's not an uncommon thing when it comes to what people have described,
and not necessarily twenty five thousand miles an hour. But you know very
fast where let's say that happened, and you have it, you have it
right there in front of you. Where do you go from there? Is
it? You just make it available like we have this and are you hoping
to like catch the eye an ear of someone that will take this more seriously
in the science world. Yeah, ultimate goal. So that's the thing,
right in the science world. A single video is never going to be it's
never going to be the thing, right. What we need to do is
gather data that is statistically relevant. Right. So for example, if we
capture, let's say, out of one hundred thousand videos that this thing captures,
right, that a thousand of them show behavior like you're describing that they
come to sudden stops and then they make quick right turns, and they appear
to be accelerating and stopping in ways that we don't expect and that they don't
have. You know, if we're able to show something like that, that
based on the vector analysis, this is truly happening in these cases. It
seems to be maybe one percent of cases or point one percent of cases.
And here's the data to prove it. Here are the video feeds. Here's
the vector analysis we did. Here's the sensor data that we collected. Here
the GPS coordinates of the trackers. To show that these haven't been messed with
or anything else that is compelling. That's the goal here, right, So
if we capture a single video that's interesting, we'll make it available on YouTube,
you know what I mean. People will be able to see it.
It'll get out there, I'm sure. But at the end of the day,
what our what our results will be, or what our kind of product
that sky Hub hopes to do, will be data that can convince the scientific
world. And so we have data scientists on the team who are helping us
develop like this is the way that we would have to do this, This
is how we would have tom what's the word. This is the way that
we would have to kind of move this forward. Actually, there's a really
good question in the chat that isn't in uppercase. I will let me just
tell me where who's saying it not cl cl at seven twelve has got a
really good question. There is it? This one right here just below that
one? Oh sorry, oh yeah, a j I agree, that is
how that is how scientist collect data. So let's read it. Yeah,
Chris up once. So see how Once is saying, Chris, how does
that example change if you capture the same event from five trackers at all different
angles distances. So that is a wonderful question. So, um, if
we have more than one tracker that captures it, if we have three,
three trackers let's say at a minimum, that capture the same event, then
we can do triangulation. Then we can start looking at more specific things.
Right. So, right now we've kind of like brushed it aside. We've
kind of walked over this this point. But when I'm talking about image analysis,
what I'm talking about is we treat that. So you know, we
all saw now the circle of the object. Right, So if you're listening
at home, think about a think about what a video of a sky would
look like. Right, we have no way of telling how close or far
away the object is. Right, we will not be able to tell based
on the fish eye camera, just because that's the way that fish eye cameras
are designed. Now we might eventually be through testing, be able to get
a calibration curve that would tell us something that's this bright, is this far
away, or whatever. But all of that is based on assumptions, right,
when we're trying to do this in a way that is has the least
amount of assumptions implicit in it. So you have this kind of two D
image of a three D object moving through the sky. We treat it as
a two D object, so it's just a point of light on a black
two D space, and then we measure how that light pixel, that pixel
of lighter that object moves from point to point over time in the video.
That is a very simple analysis that is done on a single camera. If
we had multiple angles, though, of the same object, then suddenly we
can do things like three D me happing right, so we can tell,
for example, oh, the object not only was moving left and right,
but it also dipped down right. Or we can get an approximate idea of
say the size of the object, the diameter of the point source or whatever.
Right. So as we get more trackers out there, and as the
data gets more, as the data gets better and better, we can start
doing much more complicated analysis. Right, that's the kind of goal there would
be if we have you know, right now, again, we're trying to
do this lean. We're trying to do this as agile as we possibly can.
So it's single cameras kind of out there in these you know, interesting
places whatever, Right, But the ultimate goal will be too if we can
have say, an array of sensors on a single location, that's going to
give us much better data. It's going to give us a much more compelling
story. So let me just ask you, So, let me just ask
you this. So, for approximately say nine dollars, if someone wanted to,
if someone wanted to really help, they could set up a triangulation on
their property basically at different you know, say, you know, one hundred
yards this way, one hundred yards that way, one hundred yards that way,
type of thing they could. So the problem, or I guess one
of the challenges is and we haven't it's it's this is like an idea that
we have kicking around in our heads that we're like, this would be amazing,
right, we haven't thought it all the way through yet though, because
so far, what we're trying to do let's get one hundred trackers out there,
you know what I mean, Like, let's get a hundred of these
things deployed before we start thinking about triangulation. Yeah, but we would have
to think about things like, let's say, how far away does each tracker
have to be from each other to give useful data? It might be that
they have to be miles apart, do you know what I mean? I
see, compending on how high the object is. Yeah, because you can
think like if the object is up in them, if it's flying, and
say the same airspace is like an airplane, then having them a thousand yards
apart probably isn't going to tell us very much. But if we're able to
have him then say miles apart, that might be more interesting, right you
see? And that's why actually and that and that's in that UM. In
that scenario, what actually might be better is you build one UM and you
help someone else build one. You know what I mean, We ask you
when it comes to them, let me ask you when it comes to the
building. I mean, when I was a little kid, I had one
of those kids and built at Crystal Radio. So I kind of like,
you know, that type of tankering things like that. But how difficult is
this from saying, like the average person if he wants to put one of
these units together, some type of background would you have to have? It
is actually really simple. So I have never built I've never built a PC
in my life, you know what I mean? I break computers like that's
that's just why I do. You know, Um, the fact that I've
been able to figure out how to do the podcast with just like three chords,
it's a mystery, you know, It's it's amazing, right, So
the back and I was able to build this thing, I'm not even kidding.
Like the fact that I was able to build this thing is a modern
miracle. It's really simple, right, It's literally all of this is plug
in play, right. So what I mean by that is you are you're
basically getting a jets and nano. You're taking it out of the box.
You're plugging in a power chord, and you are plugging it in through it
already created USB port on it to a computer screen and a keyboard and a
mouse. Your nano is ready to run already, right, it runs out
of the box. What you need to do to modify it to become a
sky hub Basically a skyhub system is you take a GPS unit, you plug
it into another USB port, You take the fan and you just the fan
is probably the most complicated part, the fan. You kind of plug the
pins in, but it's very easy to do. Still. It's a great
how to online and you just screw it into the heat sync on the thing
itself, which again is very simple, and you're systems running. Right.
This is literally like you're plugging in USB dongles. It's very simple to do.
So it's actually it's funny. You might be disappointed with how simple it
is based on the radio example. Right. Look, it's that's what I
thought was gonna happen too. I got all excited. I was like,
oh, this is gonna be great. I'm gonna solder some stuff and I'm
gonna get to like I'm gonna get to be all electronics guy and whatever.
I needed a Phillips head screwdriver, you know what I mean. Like,
I was so upset and how easy it was. I was like, come
on, it is a challenge, no challenge. The most challenging part has
been, to be honest, the most challenging part has been because right now,
these are still in development right, So right now, what we're doing
to like run the system and everything else is we are using UM. We're
basically using Linux to UM you know, control them, right because it is
a Linux system there. So what we're actually to actually like get it's downloaded
everything else. It's not an installer right now, it's just through the kind
of the terminal window. Essentially. That part is a little challenging, but
we are actually currently developing an easier installer for folks. So you know,
um, you have a question that just came up here, so pop that
up from Hobbs. Other than watching the recordings twenty four seven. Is there
a mechanism in the system to alert your that an object has been captured?
Absolutely? Yeah, So that's the goal, right. The goal here with
this system is that you can just leave this thing running and if you so,
Basically what happens is once you've installed the software and everything else, you
would go to the sky Hub. You basically would go to your system.
So your your nano has an IP address, right, you would just go
to that IP address in your in your search bar, just like you do
for your router or anything else, and it will bring up the sky Hub
camera UI, and it'll tell you, oh, these are captured events we
have, right, so it'll store them automatically for so you don't have to
do anything if I had to give that, if I had to make this
kind of analogous to anything else. It's very similar to say a dash cam
in a car, right where you can leave it running and if it captures
something, it'll tell you samething. Well yeah, trail cam right, it's
it's it's it's designed so that you don't have to watch it twenty four hours
a day because despite how much work we've put into Skyhub, we all have
day jobs, right, yeah, we all have other things we have to
do. So yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah, I mean the
motion sensor type of situation. Um, you know, I think that's kind
of what's in those you're talking about, the trail cams or whatever they are
for like wildlife. Yeah, similar. Looks like someone has a couple of
questions here. Again, there's if you could put your questions in caps so
I don't miss them and on no phones tonight, I'm sorry. So if
you have a question for our guest, just put it here. Let's see
two questions wouldn't it be easier to create data if all cameras are the same
size? And the second question is in the photo unit in the desert has
a tracker camera that isn't version one? Do you understand that question? Yes?
I do so yeah, so um, okay, so the first question,
wouldn't it be easier to create data if all the cameras are the same
size, Yes, it would be easier. But we realize and recognize that
that is not going to be possible for everybody, right, Um, some
people can buy better cameras, and so they'll be get they'll get more high
resolution photos, right, They'll they'll get better tracking, well not better tracking,
but they'll get better better video of the tracked event. Right. So
that's why we need to build this system in such a way that all of
that, all that sensored data essentially can be um can be kind of you
know, cohabitated together, right, it can make it It has to be
made to play nice with each other. Right. Yeah. So another analogous
example to this would be things like, say, I don't know if anyone
in the chat or anyone watching this right now is interested in say like at
home meteorology, but things like tracking the weather from your own home. Those
don't use the same devices either, right, Those are often different systems,
different sensors, different whatever. Same thing with say astronomy hobbyists, those are
often completely different systems and everything else. The goal essentially is too so that
as that censor data comes in to habituate it to each other so that it
all plays nice. Right. So that's why our system has a minimum spec
and not a maximum spec, if that makes sense to you. So it's
a great question. And in a perfect world, all of the units would
have you know, in a perfect world, we would be making these systems
ourselves, right, But we don't live in a perfect world. There's not
a lot of money in searching for UFOs on the weekends, and so we
can't ensure that all the cameras are the same size. But it's why we
suggest cameras. It's a suggest systems. YEA. For the second question,
the photo of the union the desert has a tracker or a camera that is
an inversion one. Yep, that's correct right now. So currently the V
one version uses only the fish eye camera. Development work is underway for the
PCT camera, which would be that second camera that's there. Ultimately, Again,
the goal here is if you buy or if you get the stuff to
build a version one unit, as we develop and as we make version two,
as we build the software for the secondary sensor platforms and for the PCT
camera and everything else, you'll be able to buy that stuff as it happens.
Right. So the goal here is we want to start, we want
to hit the ground running, but we also want to be sure or we
also want to be cognizant of the fact that most people, if they spend
three hundred dollars on this thing, that's that's a big investment for most people.
You know what I mean. I don't. I don't spend three hundred
dollars and stuff for myself all that often. So what do you think of
this question? Yeah, that it's funny. Uh, that's from CLO.
UFO seekers aren't rich. Let me say this there, there isn't money to
be made necessarily in UFO science. Let's say that there's plenty of money for
like TV shows and stuff, but you know, yeah, we're investigating anything
that's really funny. UM My brother in law, UM has a PhD in
chemistry and UM he retired a few years ago from Los Alamos laps. He's
actually busier now as a consultant, goes all over the world. Um,
but anyway, UM, I asked them the question. Um, oh,
I don't know. It was a few years ago. I said, you
know, he said, you do a show on UFOs said yeah, he's
never watched it or anything. But I said, so funny, let me
ask you, I said, let me ask you as a scientist, what
do you think. Um, you know, I'm not saying one hundred percent
sure because no one really knows, but it's possible that we're being visited.
What do you think about that? And he kind of looked them because I
think it's very possible. I was shocked because his usual science is like,
you know, I need to see data, you know, in all this,
But I was shocked that he actually said, I think it's possible,
you know, kind of like, yeah, I think it's possible. How
do you feel in general? Do you feel like you're like a lone wolf
or do you think there's other people? I know you mentioned the SCU which
I think is great, and there's a you know, a lot of PhDs
in that that are interested in this topic. But for the most part.
Do you think it's a tough subject to breach. You know what's actually funny
is I have yet to meet someone in the sciences whom who makes who tells
me like, no, there's no way, that's stupid. Why are you
wasting your time? I've yet to need one. I've yet to meet one.
Right, And I talk about this putful all the time. I talk
about this stuff, right, Um, yeah, you know. The the
most I guess pushback I've gotten actually has been from people in philosophy and the
humanity is more so than science part of your education too, right, Yes,
yeah, so it's philosophy chemical engineering double major in undergrad But so the
it's interesting in that way, I think, I think for a lot of
people, I think the part where it gets to be so it's it's interesting.
A lot of the scientific community, I would say today is willing to
think that there is a very real likelihood that there are organisms out there someplace
in space. Yeah, some of them, even I think a good portion
would even go as far to say that there if there are organisms out there,
there's no reason to think that there are not. There's not the possibility
of intelligent life existing out there. In space. I think the part or
the issue for the scientific community comes in with when you start getting into very
complicated, very mythological sounding arguments or stories about how this system of alien intelligence
works. Right. So for example, you know shows like like say Ancient
Aliens, Right, those shows do no service to the UVO community. They
just hurt it in my opinion, because what ends up happening is you have
systems like say what we're doing, or what Christopher O'Brien is doing, or
even the work that say, you know Bigelow did back in back in the
late nineties and two thousands, getting people to agree that well, there's stuff
in the sky, we don't know what it is, shouldn't we study it?
That's not a hard ask for science, right, That's not a hard
thing to ask them. What is hard, though, is when you then
take the next step and say, there are intelligent beings piloting these craft and
they're from the Pleiades and they can heal you, and you just gotta you
know that it gets you know. What I always say is we have people
arguing about, you know, the politics and culture of alien civilizations, and
we still don't have a good photo of one. You know what I mean,
like it's put in the cart way before the horse. We gotta start
small. Yeah, yeah, that's uh, that is ah really something when
you when you think about well, just now they're looking at you know,
there's signs. I forget what the particle is, but it's a in the
upper atmosphere of Venus, which is yeah, but that's it. Phosphene nine
hundred degrees fahrenheit on the surface of Venus. But you know, you and
the atmosphere as you go up, of course it cools down. It's very
possible there's some type of life floating in the atmosphere the Venusians, like the
contact these talking about. Yeah, you never know, man, you know,
it's it's so funny. We're gonna find out that phosphine has beautiful long
blonde hair and yeah they sweet sweet bodysuits and everything else. And it's gonna
be it's gonna be trippy, man, chemistry is gonna get weird. That's
right, that's right. And you know it's still you know, not not
talking about intelligent life, but it's still not out of the realm of possibility
that there was life at one time on Mars. You know, I think
that's a very good possibility with the water that was on there at one time
for many millions of years. You know, it's it is so funny to
me that it we know that we know, you know, one of the
problems I think with one of the problems I think with science too, or
one of the issues that we kind of come to today, is science has
really focused hard on sort of D D magicing itself, I guess, is
what I and say. Right, So we have this idea that before the
before the Enlightenment, right, you know, the world was full of magic,
and it was full of these magical thinking styles and everything else. But
as we started to become more scientific and more materialist, the places for those
kinds of ideas of you know, non local causality or other intelligences existing or
ghosts or whatever, all of that kind of started to go away. And
I think we're in an era now and this happens a lot with these kinds
of things that they pull in as they pull and push that we're in a
time now where a lot of that metaphysical stuff is coming back and so M
and I don't, you know, I don't really have I guess the issue
with that is that that that metaphysical stuff can't be proven, it can't be
scientific, right, And so a lot of philosophers, very smart people throughout
history have kind of chosen pragmatically to say, well, that isn't scientific,
so we don't do science with it, we can't use science to study that.
And that's actually the argument that I would make too, right with sky
Hub. It's the argument we make as a group that you know, with
what's the word that with the metaphysical stuff, with consciousness or CE five or
any of the other stuff that's not scientific. So I don't have an opinion.
I can't have an opinion on that, right because I mean, I
guess I can't have an opinion, but it's not going to be worth anything
else anymore than anyone else's, right. Whereas with what we're doing at sky
Hub, it is designed so that it's scientific. It is designed to be
based on material kind of conceptions of the universe. So it'll play with science
today, it'll play with, you know, the way the world of science
exists. So I guess that's kind of a long winded philosophical explanation for why
we're two of the way we're doing them. Yeah, Yeah, I think
it's really great that, you know, I mean, there has been you
know, a lot of different people trying to think up I mean even Peter
Davenport of all people, you know, Um, the at the UFO Reporting
Center there is has an idea of a radar you know type system. This
has been in you know, these type of ideas have been in the works
for a long time, but rarely does it come to the point where someone's
actually putting in gear and really going with it. You know. For instance,
I'm not even really sure if Chris O'Brien have to ask him if his
units are going anywhere. We mentioned ufotag, which is UFO tag too now
started out in a hummer, which was really awesome with Doug Trumbull, with
all um talk about not having an unlimited expense account. He was making something
really great him and Mark D'Antonio and I have I'm not sure where that's uh,
where that's going. So yours is yours is ready to launch at some
point, right, um, do you know exactly what is your goal as
far as actually launching this thing and getting it operational? So right now,
if you join the chat, you can build one and you can start loading
in the code already. Right, we haven't officially launched, which means we
don't have a we don't have a code that is not still being updated.
Right, But you can come in and play with the beta version all you
want, right, Like, you can come help us make it better by
telling us the bugs you're seeing and everything else. Actually, recently a big
bug that we just overcame was the GPS units. There was something like going
on with those or wherever. We figured out how to fix them. So
right now we're still kind of in beta. Right, we're late beta,
but we're still in beta. The goal for this to launch is within the
next month or so is kind of the ideal situation. But again, this
is really at the end of the day, it's a team of it's a
team of people who are interested in this, building it together, you know
what I mean. And I think that's the other thing too that kind of
helps these projects. One of the other challenges that's always been with these jets,
it's kind of a group. It's a very small group of people who
are going to do this, and then if one of them have an issue
that come up, or if it's a challenge or whatever, it can't go
anywhere else. This is really a group of it's a group of us building
this, you know what I mean. And anyone in the chat, anyone
watching this, if they want to get involved, they can join the chat,
they can help us, and they can get started, you know.
But so when we officially launch, when we have that bug free code that
goes out to the public just with an easy installer and everything else, Martin,
you will be one of the first people I tell and you can vote
it to the chat and everyone else. But please do join our chat and
look on the wiki and see what we can do. Already all right,
now, did you ever I don't know if you followed this, but at
one time there was the and I actually had one of the people on my
show here the cube sat thing that are you familiar with that as a UFO
detection through a cube sat thing. I'm having a distortion on my background.
I have to change that. Um, had you ever heard of that?
So, yeah, we've heard of that. So actually it's funny, that's
it was it. It was the indie go go project, right, Um,
they were trying to fund it through indie go go. Um. Yeah,
it's a really interesting idea, it's we're doing. We're so that was
a satellite, right if unless I'm mistake and it was up in orbit for
a short time, not very long time. So that's one of the goals,
or that's one of the reasons why we're doing what we are doing,
is that it is a lot easier for people to put one of these things
out on their patio than it is to get something into orbit. Right.
It's kind of the good thing about being on a team of engineers is you
know, um, like the first couple of the first couple of these units
that have been deployed that are just testing units. They're in like you know,
rain proof plastic boxes. You know what I mean. It's because you
gotta work smart. You can't work hard, right, work smarter, not
harder. That's kind of what we're trying to do here. So it's a
really great idea. But I think, um, you know, it's going
to be another one of those things that we kind of try to learn from
right as we as we kind of look through this stuff. We are starting
the literature search very early, right, We're starting, like I said,
in the fifties and sixties, So there is a lot of paper. There's
a lot of research work, there's a lot of just stuff to kind of
slog through and learn from, and that's the process we're still doing. So
will I, if anyone from that team wants to reach out, please do.
Now. You mentioned earlier that you were looking over at your window sill,
So is this something that's actually or can you mount it inside of your
house looking out a window or does it have to be outside? So mine
currently is sitting on my window sill because we're still testing stuff. Yeah,
so the ultimate goal here is okay, the unit. So that's actually one
of the things that we're trying to play with internally, is this idea of
maybe having it be wireless or something like that. Although that's gonna be a
big challenge, right, that's a that's an engineering hurdle that we haven't even
considered at this point yet, like a Bluetooth type of thing something yeah,
right, something like that. But the way it currently works basically, or
the way that we designed it right now, is it is something where it
is something where you can basically have it running to a power outlet in your
home. So maybe it's on the roof, maybe it's out on the patio
or on a porch, maybe it's in your backyard right on you know,
right near your house or whatever. But if you put it inside, the
challenge that we're going to probably face is the window itself will have glare.
You're not gonna be able to get a very good photo, right and windows
are facing normally are facing you know, uh, vertically exactly right. Yeah,
if we're talking like a skylight, like maybe that'll bit different. But
you know, yeah, in my house right now, I think I think
my camera and its testing mode has probably captured more um images of my cats
right now in the sky. But the one fighter are working great. Yeah.
Listener over Facebook, Hobbs has this question. Could you envision schools setting
up a unit I'm thinking of a high school science clubs, et cetera.
Absolutely, yeah, we would love to see that happen, so un science
project exactly. It's so it's it is a It is absolutely something we would
love to see people do if they would like to. Um. It's a
great, great idea, and it is something that we've started kind of playing
around with again. UM, and that's something that we're going to kind of
think about more as we Uh, what's the word as we get that first,
you know, perfect version out there for people to download. Um,
if you are if you are a science teacher at a school or a university
or whatever, or you just have I don't know, boy, scout troope,
girl, scout troope, whatever that do this kind of stuff, it
might be interested in doing this. Let us know. We would love to
We would love to help. I think it's a great idea. Actually,
we do have a science teacher in Canada that was just emailed me that listens
to the show. Hopefully he's listening. Yeah, that'd be wonderful. We
wouldn't really love it. Uh yeah great. Well, um, so as
far as let's get let's get back, let's switch gears just a little bit.
Um, and let's talk about your podcast, because I know you do
mostly one podcast, a Mad Scientist podcast, but you're you have another one
as well. Yeah, we have another. We have a show that so
the Mad Scientists podcast I do with my co host Marie, and Marie has
a show called um whatever remains that it would be great if people went and
checked out. It is a it is a lot of fun. So she's
actually doing now a series on the Circleville Letters which is kind of an interesting
true I'm sort of story that's been going on. So The Mad Scientist is
the show that I do with her. That show is much more kind of
conversational. We talked about different topics. Um, you know, we talked
recently. We're doing an episode now on the discovery of King Tut's tomb,
which is really interesting and kind of some of the story there that's in the
background of this figure who founded and everything else. It's I love that,
that whole story. It's always fascinated me. And the things they found when
they finally found that tomb or just sitting like they were sealed up yesterday.
Yeah, amazing it is, you know with chairs, I mean it's just
you know, three thousand year old would just sitting there like it was brand
new at the art whatever it is. Yeah, that was one of the
one of the quotes that actually I really liked from the last episode we did
on It was as soon as they opened up the chamber, air started flowing
out. Hot air started coming out of the chamber. And then there's a
quote in there from a chemist who actually helped there's a there's actually a chemist
who is um responsible for basically making sure all of the objects that came out
of the tomb were able to be transported and safe from the atmosphere, because
as soon as you opened it up, it started degrading, Yes, exactly.
And so there's yeah, there's a quote from I want to say it's
from the chemist, but it might have been from one of the archaeologists.
But essentially the quote is, as soon as they opened the door, they
started hearing wood crack, they started hearing like papers degree. They were like,
you could hear the degree the degradation happened. It's just it's it's amazing.
It's oh, it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, but you look at
the pictures, the vintage pictures that they took, and it's he's just it's
just amazing, just amazing. It's a great it's a very very interesting story
and it's one that they never thought they were going to find it for a
long time. No, it's so crazy, it's it's really cool. So
if you if you like that kind of stuff. So we did that.
We recently did a series, well recently we finished a series finally on um
kind of the history of Robert Bigelow's forays into the UFO world, which was
so much research work. It took so long to do. Um, I
have like hundreds of documents and pages and everything else that are just like you
know, oh my, we couldn't have done it without, frankly, the
work of so many other great researchers before us. But that was a really
great series. We tad that was a lot of fun. Now you can
find that easily on the Matt Scientists podcast. So I'm going to listen to
that. Yeah, look, look for it on Spotify. Um, they're
on YouTube actually too, although our YouTube channel is just the podcast re uploaded.
Look for us on spreaker. On every podcast platform you're on, you
can you can find our episode. So just search for the Matt Scientist podcast
and we should be there. Yeah. Yeah, I will definitely check that
for I mean that those two you just mentioned, I hope you'll like,
Yeah, there were a lot of fun. We actually this season, we
started off this season with a series on we did it. We basically wanted
to start this series off with archaeology, you know what I mean, because
that's something we both love and we hadn't touched on before last season. That
we did a lot of Um, a lot of the last season, we
did a lot of stuff on like UFOs and a lot of alien stuff and
whatever. This season we were like, let's do let's do archaeology, Let's
do some cool stuff there. And so the first series we did it was
actually on Troy and the Discovery of Troy. And then this one I was
on is on King Tut and we have some others coming up to that I
hope will be I hope it'll be interesting. It's it's gonna be a lot
of fun. So, you know, I think a really interesting topic,
um, you know, and maybe you've already talked about it on your on
your show, but is when they would have to change the history book when
they find something that goes against oh sure, like for instance, when they
settled North America, when humans supposedly first settled North America, that type of
thing, and they find something that kind of goes against that, you know,
those type of fines. I think it's very we That's it's funny.
Actually, that's kind of right. Where are our show sits? A lot
of our episodes sit at those points where we look at stories where science and
pseudoscience um or um, you know, where history and pseudohistory or history and
not yet discovered history where those things merge and they kind of clash. Right,
that's the interesting part. That's the areas where cool stuff happens. And
so yeah, no, we we will we. My co host has been
dying to do an episode on like ancient American history stuff like you know about
um yeah, like vikings and all that other stuff and or whatever, and
we just haven't done it yet. But it's all it's on the docket.
It's in the docket. Don't worry. Yeah, it'll be good. Yeah,
I know, you know, Columbus gets all the glory. There's Yeah,
well that's what's so interesting, right with with Troy. Um. The
guy that supposedly just rediscovered the lost city of Troy is this guy whose name
is Schlieman. And if you actually like read uh, if you read kind
of the history and everything else, he didn't really rediscover Troy. He you
know, he just he went to where Troy was said to be and he
just went there and the people were like, yeah, this was Troy.
And he's like, I did it. I did it. You didn't do
anything, you know what I mean, Like you slam dunk, Yeah,
slam dunk. This is perfect. Right. It's like it's like me rediscovering
Montana, you know what I mean, Like no one here in Massachusetts talks
about man Montana. I'm gonna find the lost city of Montana. It's crazy,
you know. Um And and one day I will I will discover that
lost city of Montana. Lost awesome. Well, all right, so we'll
skate back to the UFO world and uh and you know what you're doing I
think is wonderful and I really hope you know, it's something that I actually
would like to actually build myself and be a part of it. I'd like
to do that, you know. But I got to tell you, when
you talk about coding and stuff like that, you're talking to the wrong guy.
I don't know any of that stuff. I mean, I I do
my own websites and things like that, but I mean it sounds complicated.
Oh I am believe me if I'm if I'm talking, you're talking to the
wrong guy. I don't know that stuff either, you know. We um,
that's the that's why we are. It is very simple, you know.
The methodology right now is relatively simple. So the goal ultimately is to
build the system that anyone can do, right we want this to be something
that, um, you know the joke I always well, this is a
joke. I was gonna say the joke I always say, this is a
joke. Actually that my advisor when I was a PhD told me, and
I've taken it with me forever since then. He would always say, what
I was about to do a presentation or teach a class or anything, he
would say, if your mom can understand it, then you did a good
job. Right. That's the sky Hub test too, Right, if our
moms can build one of these systems that we've done it, right, that's
kind of the goal here, right, you know, So it's got to
be easy enough that anybody can build one of these things, but it also
we wanted to be robust enough then it can do what we needed to,
right, you can actually do the tracking we want to do. Yeah.
The only thing I think about, and I've thought about this not just your
you know, what you're looking to build, but also I've asked this of
you know, Chris O'Brien and Mark d Antonio and what they're decided to do
to do the weather. You know, you can get such in some erage,
you can get such harsh weather, you know, high winds and ice
and all that. How would you you know, I can't really foresee exactly
the unit you're talking about, but how do you compensate to make sure,
you know, it doesn't get affected by the weather. I know, you
get the fan and also you know you could be out in the desert with
really high heat that you know a fan may not be enough. Yep.
So it's a really great question. So the enclosure has been designed by our
kind of you know, enclosure designer or lead enclosure designer Richard Hopps to withstand
those, uh, those situations. But again, a lot of this is
going to be about testing. Right. As we do this, as we
test these things more and more, we're going to learn more, right,
Um. So it could be that you know, um, it could be
we put one of these things out there and it turns out, hey,
it isn't you know, it isn't built to withstand the cold of New England,
right, something like that. Say, um, that'll be something we'll
learn and we'll find out and then we will we will design to fix it.
Right. The beauty of this system is that, um, you know,
we are working with the public to make this work, right, and
so there are a lot of smart people out there listening, and a lot
of smart people on the team, and a lot of smart people who aren't
on the team yet but hopefully will be, who will be able to help
us to solve those problems. Right. And actually that was a question that
I actually saw. It's funny enough to someone asked in the chat earlier,
who decides where those first hundred units go? You do? The public does,
right? Who builds those first hundred units? The units go up where
people build them. You know, we have no control over that, right
If if one hundred people in Texas decided to build those units, we're going
to have a hell of a sky hub sensor array in Texas. Yeah,
but you know it depends on who builds them, right, So whoever whoever
puts them up there, that's how they're going to go up. You know,
a lot of you mentioned crowdsourcing earlier for thus tubes at you really at
three hundred dollars, you're not really going to have to worry about that,
you know, I mean I realized, you know, with this COVID there's
actually economic issues with a lot of people that may not have the ability they
have all the time. Now they wish they could, but they may not
have the time to afford something like that. But someone could do their own
little personal go fund me or I don't know how those things work, but
you know, possibly if especially if they want to higher end. No,
what'll be cool too, honestly, is you know, if if a group,
you know, if let's say, like a local UFO research group wants
to get together and build one of these things together, they can, right.
It doesn't have to be you know, I mean it would have to
be at someone's house to have it do stuff, right, But the goal
here is that, you know, we want it to be cheap enough that
people could do it. Even if they have to save a little bit,
they could still do it. And really, if you just want to be
involved, you in our chat, right, we have a Patreon if you
want to send us a dollar a month to help these things happen. Right,
Like, It's it's really easy. I mean, our costs ultimately come
down to server costs to store the video and to analyze it everything else.
But you know, at the end of the day, we're a pretty cheap
organization. You know, we've been built to be um you know, We're
built to be a cheap date, right, so it should be relatively easy
to do. Yeah, you know, I can't believe we only have a
couple of minutes left. But I did want to ask you this question at
some point, and that is, there are a number of places in the
country that are very interesting. Someone posted on the chat earlier Skinwalker Ranch,
for instance. But there's hot spots. Um, when you want to encourage
someone that's in supposed a supposed hot spot to go ahead and get one of
these things rolling, we absolutely would. Um. One of the kind of
long term goals for myself at least, would be to understand are there hot
spots? Right? If we look at say the if we look at say
the data from moof on. Right, if you look get where mufon gets
reports, even where mufon says good reports come from. Right, So when
they're investigators have analyzed, they'll say this is a good report, verse this
is a bad report. If you look at that data, their only correlation
that there exists between that data is you get more sightings of UFOs where there
are more people. Yes, so the upon data doesn't support the idea that
they're hotspots. Now, of course, I think that there could be a
hotspot, there could be an idea of places of high strangeness or whatever.
We would love to get units out there on those places. We absolutely would.
You know that is that is definitely something that we would love to see
happen. Excellent. Well I have to cut the short now. Thank you
so much, Chris. It's been a real pleasure as always, has a
lot of fun. Thank you Martin A love it guess audience. Thank you
so much for in the chat there. Thank you for your attention, to
your support and everything else. Please join us toob dot org. Yeah,
all right, you take care bye, don know. All right, so
everyone, thank you so much for listening. We will be back next week
with Tim Brigham. It'll be a great show, so make sure you check
that out. Thanks everyone that helps out and behind the scenes and all.
And thank you again the listeners, and remember to keep your eyes to the sky.