Hello, and welcome. I am your host. Well this is I will
tell you what the show is first. I guess this is Open Mind UFO
Radio. And I am your host, Alejandro t Rojas. And I am
here with and I've used this name before, but I'm just gonna use it
again because it explained the new ways you here. I am here with Martin
highwayman Willis. Yes, I'm sorry, I'm sitting right not too far from
the highway. I'm not on the highway. Good go. So did you
like when I called you highwayman last time? You kind of took that to
heart. You thought that would be fun to kind of wait by the highway
and and jump on people and rob them like the old highwaymen used to do
in the olden days. That's not why you're doing yeh, not this time,
but no, it's funny. After you did that segment. I don't
know if you've got email. I think I passed it along to YOUE yeah.
It's an English saying yeah or something. Yeah, someone who costs people
on the highway. So or are you like you have a cardboard sign up
trying to collect money for your show? Is that what you're doing? Yeah?
Well, these are desperate time, my friend. No, no,
I'm just getting my car repair. That's oh okay, yeah, okay,
okay, yeah, well those are those are some other exciting scenarios that might
have been fun. So thank you so much for joining me, even though
you are busy out and about running your errands, getting your car fixed and
everything. The guest that I've got today is Mark D'Antonio, and you know
what's funny, and we talk about this on the show. It's hard to
really encapsulate what he is when it comes to UFOs. He is the move
fun photo analyst. However, he does so much more building models, working
on commercials and movies and blah blah blah. And he has a degree in
astronomy. And that's in particular what we're going to talk about. Because you
all may have been following the news, hopefully you follow Open Minds on the
Facebook group for our weekly headlines, or even you know the stories that I
post on my Facebook page, and there's been a lot going on when it
comes to astrobiology and the potential of extraterrestrial life out there. So that's what
Mark and I are going to discuss. Great Mark, I love Mark.
He's awesome, Thank you very much. I'm laughing because of the kind of
the lake comment. You got the queue that that was your space to add
something. Yeah, m hmm, well I got it. Yeah, but
before we what was that? No, we have a bad connection. I
can hear you. Can you hear me? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
okay, good good, no problem, damn it. Doing the show from
the Highway for God's sakes. So but before we get into talking to Mark,
of course, we're going to talk about UFOs. Are you seeing any
UFOs now, Martin? Not right now? Okay, we'll keep an eye
out. The day is young, yes, yeah, and you're outdoors.
So if you see something you know while we're talking about the news, feel
free to interrupt and say UFO UFO and then describe what you're seeing. All
right, okay, I'll keep my eye on that in the sky. Good
good, So UFO news. You got a story you want to talk about?
I do this one. Well. I don't want to say silly,
but it's interesting anyway. In Washington, DC, back on October second,
just a couple of days ago, this guy was walking I think he sat
home from work, and he noticed a strange object hovering in the sky.
It was about thirty or forty feet up and about somewhere around sixty or seventy
feet away from him. And if you look at the pictures, it looks
to me like a balloon, he said. At first he thought it was
the helium balloons that you are, the balloons that you make those animals out
of, you know, those long thin ones. Oh yeah, But then
he said it they if that was filled with helium, then why was it
just sitting sitting in one spot or appeared to be anyway for about three minutes,
and while he was taking a bunch of pictures of it, it is
a really another strange just like last week, of a strange looking object.
To me, it looks like balloons. But then he ran across the street
and tried to get himself right underneath it, and it was gone. It
was nowhere to be found. So I thought it was kind of an interesting,
you know picture. Anyway, he did look for any sign of any
wire or ribbon or string holding it down. He didn't see any sign of
that as well. So it's just one of those, you know, it's
an oddball, strange object. Yeah, I kind of Someone commented that it
looks like the symbol for you know, formally known as like you know,
when Prince was going under a symbol instead of a name, that it looks
like that, which is kind of funny, but it does. It looks
like a balloon animal gone wrong, or like if I were attempt to do
a balloon animal, that's probably what it would look like. But uh,
and it just floated off or something. That's what it looks like. So
it is kind of weird. Although it looks kind of larger than that.
I guess it's hard to tell. But yeah, that's an interesting one we
just posted today. Weird. Maybe that's at a genetically modified balloon animal maybe
you never know, would be you know, black project type of thing.
That's right, So another weird one. Lots of weirdness going on. I
guess that's what the field of UFOs is. But this is a Colorado witness
who says he photographs metallic objects. So another photo story. He said he
saw five objects he felt we're moving at about thirty thousand feet he could not
identify. It was four pm on September twenty fifth, and he says his
wife saw at first. She calls him out and they look at these weird
things floating around. He said they seem to fluctuate in brightness, potentially from
changing its position with respect to the sun, which I kind of agree.
It does look like these things are reflective because they're just really weird shaped and
it's hard to even describe the shape. One of them is sort of an
S kind of shape, and parts of them are reflecting and just kind of
weird, like these sky omibas that are reflecting there. They were in Superior,
which is out is in Boulder County near Boulder, colorad And yeah,
just kind of really strange. Did you see those pictures. I did not
get a chance to look at them today. No, Well here's what you'll
have to check it. Do that. Another weird one is in West Virginia.
And this is kind of funny because what happens is Roger will post the
videos and then he'll write the story. Well, he posted the video this
is Roger Marsha moufon another mouf On case, and people thought the video looked
stupid and they were all upset. This is retarded, this is a star
and the video is bad. You can't tell much, but this witness what
these people didn't know who were watching the video. This witness also took some
pictures and in the pictures you can tell that the object is just not one
point of light, but several points of light, which makes the case much
more interesting. So, I mean they videotaped it with their phone. They
said their phone sucks at videotapes, which is true, and then they took
some pictures and the pictures are weird. And it all started when in West
Virginia outside of a place called the Stone Wall Resort, where this guy was
going to do getting to his work, and this was at six eighteen am,
so he worked early. This was on September fifth. They went to
the top of this heel where they get their machinery out where it was still
dark, and he saw this really bright light. So him and his buddy's
side, they felt it wasn't an airplane. It didn't move like that.
So that's when he videotaped it and got some pictures. And it wasn't until
he got home and zoomed on it that he saw it was kind of strange.
So you can see that in the picture that it is very strange.
How about that? Now, I wonder if the new iPhone seven has any
better video quality. I know that they really did improve the camera options and
quality, So I'm wondering if the video is going to be better because you
always say, you know, yeah, I mean when you try to video
something, especially at night, it does not come out well at all.
So maybe we'll get some real good footage if that, if it has improved,
yeah, yeah, so pretty cool. There's another video I'm going to
write about today. I did. You can find it on our news.
I don't know if you saw this one from Bolton. It turns out it's
a moufine case. But a patre this person got something weird on their security
camera. They were afraid of robbers, so they set up a security camera.
Something made the security camera go off. They think maybe it was their
cat. But in this security video, which is only four or so seconds
long, towards the end of the video, you see this weird light above
the houses in the distance, and it goes behind one house and then you
see, you know, once it goes past the crest of the top of
the house. It goes by again, but it makes like a left hand
turn and then comes flying in front of the house and then the video cuts
out. Of course, people are really upset, why did you stop up
the video? But they didn't stop. But you know how the security cameras
just do it themselves and it's just trying to record something close, not something
in the sky, so you know it turned off. But that's another really
weird video. I was able to look into the mouf On case. Roger
sent me some more information about the case that what they discovered there the researchers
in the UK. So I'm gonna write about this one. But that's another
one to look forward to. Strange video. Yeah, there's some. There's
some pretty interesting security camera videos in the past that are kind of unexplained,
really interesting ones. So yeah, it makes you wonder, especially in England.
You know they say there's not a lot of sightings in England because of
the weather, but they have that I forget what it's called, like the
cat TV or whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, where they have cameras
all over the place. Yeah right, yeah, so they're bound to catch
something one of these days. Yeah. Well, and you know they the
English papers write about UFOs so much. Of course, there's a tabloid who
write mostly junk and really poor stuff. A lot of secure team or these
fake hoaxters. But the the legitimate papers, the local papers and the legitimate
ones, they also write a lot about UFOs, but they're like this,
they're sightings that are submitted to them or more credible stories, and and they've
been writing a lot about this stuff, and this is another one of those
interesting ones. Now it appears they talk to the witnesses themselves, So I'll
use the quotes that this Bolton, this local paper got. But then these
people also luckily went to move on. So we have both sets of statements
from the witnesses who seem very credible, just kind of curious. And when
you see this, the video is really weird. I can't wait to see
it. I haven't seen that yet, ma'am. You're gonna have to get
to a computer, I know, when your car is fixed. That's right,
Yeah, drive straight to the closest computer. Don't try to look while
you're driving though. Yeah. Well, my neck hurts because I've been looking
up in the sky and the other thing I've seen so far is buzzards.
That's it. But I think they're flying. Yeah, I think they're flying
over me, but I'm not sure. Oh my goodness. Well, that's
kind of scary, right yeah, all right, Well, no UFOs,
no UFOs at all, No, not yet. Any weird looking people who
could be aliens. I'm in the state of Maine, that's all I'm gonna
say. Yeah, a lot of weird looking people. Well yeah, well
I don't know. I really shouldn't say anything, Okay. I just stay
out of Walmart, that's all. Okay, Yeah, things can get scary.
That's where things go down. And we're coming up on the holiday season,
so these Black Friday sales and stuff, that's when people lose their lives
in the Walmart. So that's right, yeah, coming up here. So
all right, Well, thank you so much, mister mister Martin for joining
us for the UFO News. Once again, my pleasure is always. Okay,
be safe out there, buddy, and let's go ahead and talk to
mister D'Antonio. I am excited as usual. Well I'm always excited when I
introduce a guest. I think there's only once or twice where I haven't said
I'm excited to have this person on and I purposely left it out but to
to give you some inside but this guy I'm really excited about because this is
my homeboy. My homeboy, Mark d' antonio. Hey, how you doing,
Alejandro. Thanks for having on. That's show yours, which is just
going like gangbusters out there, is fantastic. Well, thank you so much,
my friend. Thank you very much. It's great to have you back.
And there's actually a lot to talk about. I've had you on,
I guess quite a few times, probably, but you know, I want
to talk about a lot of what we talked about in our panel that you
hosted at the Moufon Symposium. I remember that. Yeah, some kind of
astrobiological type of stuff. And there is lots of news out there, and
you know a lot of people read the science news. They kind of get
it and then pretend, like when they're talking to other people that they get
it more than they do. And I'm describing myself, but I know some
other listeners are like this. But you actually know a little bit more,
although you're probably pretending a little bit too. I don't know a thing.
I actually been pretending this whole time. I have no clue. But you
have a degree in astronomy. I don't even know your real name. Yes,
thatd it? How do you say it? By the way, I
don't know do you pronounce it? Well, what's that? My name?
Say? My name Alejandro Ross. Oh yeah, that's very good. Some
people I've had friends that I have known for years the call yeah, I
call me ale Chandro or and someone called you Ali Jondro. I heard that
one too. Yeah, that's happenning. So I guess we'll start off.
We'll start off with the big Star. And here's why I post to the
stories today and people got really bummed, and I was like, hey,
hold up. You know, I'm going to talk to Mark about this today.
And I suspect that it isn't as you know, doom and gloom as
it says, but some people may know about this star out there now.
It's called Tabby Star where Kepler, you know, is out there looking for
planets. It looks for stars to dim and can kind of calculate the planets.
You can give us some more technical details on that. And there's a
star out there that's dimming weird. Uh. The scientists looking at it,
I have suggested maybe there's an alien megastructure there. So this is real excited.
We've been talking about this. You and I have talked about this on
the show before, but a new story this. This is a headline came
out Kepler data glitch not aliens could be to blame for wacky star behavior,
says leading astrophysicists. What does leading me and what does leading mean? What
does astrophysicists mean? Oh yeah, I could. So what were your initial
thoughts when you when you hear this? Well, initially there were there were
several theories as to why this star would be dimming for such a long period
of years, and that that actual dimming process is something that has been continuing.
The star hasn't been getting really brightened and getting dimmed and really bright I
mean, it's actually been gradually dimming over time from what I've seen in the
data. And that said, they said, well, you know, the
latest theory is that maybe it was a collision of a planet with another planet
in that Solar system, causing say an asteroid belt to be forming, and
so we were watching this dimming as this belt material started to coalesce into a
ring around the star or whatever. That was one theory. Another theory put
forth by someone that I know, suggested that maybe these dimming sequences were actually
part of a swarm of comic that we're getting between us and that star Tavy
Star and causing it to dim over time. That was discounted. The asteroid
belt theory hasn't been fully discounted at this point, but the comets have,
and now there is the possibility that the Kepler telescope itself is responsible for this
dimming. Now I haven't read the full data on how technically the dimming could
be occurring, because to me on the outside anyway, looking in, to
say that this is a dimming caused by the instrument itself, I have to
respond with, wait a minute, the instrument's supposed to be looking for dimming.
That's what it's doing. That's what it does. So this would imply
a fundamental flaw in the entire Kepler program. Maybe I'm over exaggerating, Maybe
I'm dramatizing a little, being over dramatic, but I think that this would
be on the outside, I think it's probably a theory that would fit multiple
stars, not just the one Tabby star. We should have seen this occurring
with other stars, and maybe it is. Maybe we have to readdress all
of our findings, except that when you see a dimming with Kepler, that's
not what determines whether a planet is in existence, it actually has to be
corroborated by a secondary technique independent of Kepler and light curve analysis. Now,
light curve is when the star is out there and you have the planet that
crosses in front of the star and it dims the light ever so slightly from
the star, and I mean ever so slightly with emphasis on all three words,
and that minuscule minute amount of difference is something that the Kepler telescope is
good at picking up. So that's one way to actually see that there's dimming
that produces a you know, a Kepler opject of interest in a candidate planet,
and then several years will pass before that planet is identified as existing or
not existing, and that existence will be based on corroboration through radio velocity or
another astrometry type approach to the star another way, another another technique used to
measure whether there is something going on at that star other than just a light
dimming. Now, is Kepler the only device they've used to measure or observe
this dimming with I think so. I think that the Kepler is the only
you know, satellite, space based telescope that actually looked at this star.
I think that's what discovered that this dimming was occurring currently with Tabby Star.
But I think the Star has been observed before. And I'm I'm frantically as
we're speaking, looking for corroboration of that, because I want to make sure
that I'm not speaking out of turn here. Well, and a couple other
things I can add. How do you say her name anyway, doctor Tabitha
Boy? Well done? I mean, I'm an astronomer, I'm not a
pronunciation specialist, So I'll go with you on that one. I think that's
what it is. But the point is the Star is now called Tabby Stark.
We used to refer to it as k I see blah blah blah,
all these numbers, and that's saying star, Yeah, exactly. And so
she says that she also thought maybe it was a data issue with the kepler,
and he talks about, you know, having to do with pixels or
something like that, but she says she worked looked at that very closely,
and now many many people have confirmed that they all feel confident it's not this
data issue. So he wasn't the first one. The guy who who they're
writing this story about, doctor Brad Tucker. You know, he's not the
first one I come up with this idea, and he admits that. He
says here, I don't discount the literally hundreds of other people that have thought
about this, but for at least my own understanding, I want to make
sure I'm confident that this really is an awesome star. So he's just doing
his own due diligence. It sounds, and this newspaper just decided to make
a story about it. But before you fear that this whole thing's been poopooed
and figured out, that has not. It really hasn't. No, no,
And he's just the latest guy, as you said, in the chain
of astronomers and researchers that have just you know, have already looked at this
data. And as you say, they probably decided to make a story out
of this. But I don't see his story yet. And that's because the
very thing he is saying is the problem is the actual mechanism by which the
kepler works. And I would have thought, as anyone would familiar with space
based telescopes, that such a problem would have been figured out long ago,
like when the Hubble had a bad mirror grinding, they actually produced bifocals for
it. And installed it up in orbit. Now that's an example of something
getting away from us and then actually getting to orbit with a flaw. And
there's numerous satellites that have had flaws in orbit later on found to be unfixable
and lost, you know, for the reasons like the Hittomy satellite was went
up there and it was lost, you know, a short time after it
was launched, and that was again all because of something that may be related
to ground technique or capability whatever. So we have no share. We have
our share of failures that were caused by us, and Kepler could be in
that category. But I tend to think that we're seeing something that is hard
to explain as a natural phenomenon. That's just my feeling. And I'm not
trying to say aliens. Okay, i'd need bigger hair for that, but
I'm bum But I would say that the jury is still out in a big
way, and I think we just need to keep looking at the star.
You know, another couple of years of study of the star will be very
telling. Now, I guess, are you familiar with the crowd sourcing thing
that they did around Tabby's Star? No, I'm not actually familiar with that.
Yeah, it was just a group I remember, and I was going
to find out if you knew there were They are are raising money so they
can observe tabby star constantly so they can record the effects. And I just
was wondering whether they were going to use solely Kepler's data or they were going
to look with something else. Are there other telescopes capable of measuring this dimming
that we have? Yeah, I mean we have, we have a number
of fact. I just talked to the guy who was running the test mission,
which is the next basically the the next generation space telescope that's going to
be launched soon. He's the guy in charge of it, and he's a
real nice guy, and he thinks that you know, that telescope will be
able to show us some fantastic views of the sky and do the same types
of things that Kepler did with additional clarity and ability. So I think tasking
tests, to say it that way, tasking tests to look at that star
for a period of time, might be a very good thing to do,
especially if it stands to be a historic observation. And that's an example of
one is to be launched. I mean, there's other programs earth based programs
that are looking for other planets around stars. You know, the Gemini telescope
on Manikeia is fantastic. I talked to those guys and got imagery to use
and the talks that I do here and there, and they're finding things by
actually looking at infrared residue infrared hangout, you know, left over from the
formation of a planet. The planet's still warm, it's radiating. Although it's
not very visible in the you know the other part of the spectrum, it's
visible in the infrared. Same thing around you know, a star called fomalhol
Okay, it's actually got a tiny planet orbiting it that was found in the
infrared again, and they call it direct observation because infrared is actually pretty close
to the visible and of the spectrum at that point, so they basically say
it's a direct observation. So we do have a ground based and some space
based capability coming that are going to allow us to put this matter. The
rest. Oh interesting, And I found that kickstarter. People can look it
up and I won't go through it, but I had looked through it before.
What's really cool about this kickstarter is that and that's what's exciting about this
whole thing is that there are several astronomers that have made comments about that they
got quotes from or interviews with to talk about the importance of an observing Tabby
star, and for the most part that they're very conventional talking about we don't
know what is causing this. It could be this, and it could be
that. But several of them, several the majority of them ended their talk
with essentially saying that, you know, and of course, the most incredible
possibility is that it's due to the actions of some extraterrestrial civilization, and of
course that would be an amazing discovery. So that's what's great about this is
that, you know, scientists are the ones who came forward with this idea
first, not some weird fringe YouTuber UFO person or something. It was an
actual scientist and many of us. Tabitha herself is the one that started that
kickstarter. So it's really exciting that, right that the scientists are just,
you know, so strongly open minded about this possibility. Yeah, and it's
interesting because you know, I'm just just got to the page now and I
see that, you know, observatories are donating to this kickstarter A lot of
folks in the business are donating to this to look it's just to get the
answer. You know, you're not paying for aliens to be there. You're
paying to get an answer as to whether it's possible they are. And every
one of these people that contributed may not ever get the answer in their lifetime,
which is, you know, kind of sad. But it's where we
are right now and our technological development. We can't send a any kind of
faster than light FTL type craft to the starts fifteen hundred light years away,
isn't it. I mean that's pretty distant. So it would take fifteen hundred
years at light speed to get there, and we can't travel at but we
can, you know, do this warping of space game that we've talked about
a number of times, you and I and NASA's actually got a lab now
to investigate the feasibility of such a drive because the concept has been reworked.
So the potential quote unquote warp drive may actually be just around the cosmic corner
for us. It's a lifetime away, but it's just around the cosmic corner
perhaps for the Earth. So this could lead to the ability to just say
well, I think we saw something there. Okay, we'll send the probe
there and let me know what it says next week, you know, I
mean that kind of thing. And we laugh now because it's so far science
fiction, but that's coming and it's going to reach us, and we are
getting there. And if we're doing it, I always have to say,
if we're doing it, some other civilization out there that's ahead of us by
a thousand years, four thousand years, five hundred years has already done it,
and it's probably thinking of it. We're not the first, but I
think we're probably right there in the middle. We're not the youngest, but
we're not the oldest, and there's a lot of them out there, you
know, to my belief anyway, and that's yours. I know that is
well. And another interesting thing is, you know, i'd like to hear
your thoughts on this, is we're kind of on the outskirts of the galaxy,
right, yeah, a little bit. I mean, our position in
the galaxy is in this particular arm of the galaxy and we're actually, you
know, about two thirds of the way out maybe, so we're kind of
in the middle of this arm. So it's really you know, it's it's
sort of a position where a lot of stars are formed. I mean every
star you see in the Big Dipper we came from the cluster of stars that
were formed all at the same time, which included all the stars you see
in the Big Dipper, which is why it's so prominent in our sky.
Now they've all migrated apart as they're moving and circling the galaxy over time.
But you know, we have actually we have actually become a I don't know,
it's sort of a landmark local because where we are in the galaxy,
all right, is is a location that we haven't even been able to fully
explore. We barely know where we are, you know, in the galaxy.
We know we're in the Orion Spur, but we don't know exactly where.
Okay, Now the stars of Orion are nearby, and that's that's why
they're also so bright. Okay, And you know, you ask what is
nearby? You know what is nearby? Were the galaxy that you didn't ask
that I was going to though, you're right, Okay, Well, if
you do ask that, you say, you know what is nearby? I
mean, well, nearby is like you know, five hundred light years a
thousand light years. Now we we think of you know, proximate centaury,
where they you know, where a planet has been found circling the nearest star
to us, and we think that's nearby, all right. We think that's
a hop skip and a jump that's actually very close, and five hundred light
years is still close, considering that the galaxy is you know, one hundred
thousand light years across or more. So. Now I want to make a
point too at that, because I don't know that we've really discussed this,
and I think it's important to talk about just what a fascinating person you are,
kind of a modern renaissance man that you you know, you're not only
the photo analysts and stuff remove on when it comes to astronomy, and you
build models and all of this other stuff, but when it comes to astronomy,
this is something that you actually utilize in your professional life as well.
I know, for instance, you build, and you have large contracts for
building like the planets of the solar systems at scale, for for events and
for places. Yeah, yeah, that's that's true. And we have a
we did a whole scale solar system for a science museum in Turkey. Oh
wow. Yeah, and Jupiter was massive, and of course the Earth was
small, you know. But we have ongoing projects where we're doing these big
solar system models for all this new construction across the country. We've got over
two hundred buildings to fill with new solar systems that will keep us busy for
many years to come. And you know, we've we've done most recently,
we actually did some some NASA work. We did some Martian globe for NASA
that was really nice and that the ended up on a sixteen foot tall tower
on display a little bit different inside, you know, so you know,
yeah, I mean the planets. You can't you can't argue with an astronomer
who knows, you know, what the planets look like, right, I
mean, and there should be no no equivocation. You off, if you
don't know, if that details there, you're not going to put it on
there, whereas someone else who doesn't know the planet would say and they'll never
notice, and this just put it on, you know. But we're not
like that. You know. We were doing three models of these planets I
say three D meaning the craters were in relief, and we would we did
Mars that was my favorite planet to do because we would do all the valleys,
rift valleys and all the craters and volcanoes on Mars as relief items and
then indented items into the planet. So Vallas marineris this gigantic valley on Mars.
The Mariner Valley on Mars was a deep gouge in our model, going
around in the center of the planet. I say deep at that scale of
a it was a forty inch planet at that scale that you know, we
had it. It was a quarter inch deep, but that was huge on
a model. We did it that way because it caught the light and it
looked nice. So yeah, and every crater was where it's supposed to be,
and when you put a light on it from the outside, you think
you're looking at Mars, you know, because it looked like Mars. The
polar cap was was exactly as it should be. It's a really interesting shape.
And we reproduced that. I laser cut stencils. We have a laser
cutter here and we leisure cut stencils to get that just right. And Doug
Trumble was working with me. He wanted to He wanted me to kick it
up at even a bigger nots and said, Monney, just build a system
to actually paint them automatically and just rotate them and have them paint like like
a automatic process. And I said, Doug, I'd love to do that,
you know, I mean I could use you know, any number of
hardware processors that we know how to program here to do it, but I
just never had the time to do it. You had a great idea though,
you know. I mentioned him because he's your favorite you know, yeah,
he's your favorite guy. Yeah, I'm a huge, huge fan.
And it gives me a chance to plug the interview we had you were there,
but we we posted an interview we had with Doug. I watched some
great imagery that Michael Klein put together and I love that interview. So you
can watch that for free on YouTube. And it was very good, by
the way. That was world done, Thank you very much. And Doug
Trumble's a a movie you know, special effects guru now. And that brings
me to another question. You worked with Doug on the iPad pro commercial where
it goes into space and it's just an amazing commercial. Apple used it to
you know, even at their launch of the Apple iPad Pro, and you
know, it's when you all worked on that. Did you also use you
know, your astronomy knowledge to recreate the galaxies and things like that? Absolutely?
I mean, for instance, to create Jupiter's red spot. We created
this. We had this giant spherical tank and we spun it on a computer
controlled turntable and then these guys dropped in die as specific places and the swirling
motion, the friction of the water on the acrylic wall would draw these things
out into a perfect red spot. So we actually recreated Jupiter's red spot just
beautifully, and it even had three D depth to it, which is the
coolest thing. And then we created a comet which didn't actually get into the
commercial, but it was principal footage that was shot. It might be making
an appearance later co And the comet was I plumbed it for liquid nitrogen so
that we could actually shoot liquid nitrogen out of it, and then a burst
of air as well, so that it was made up in pieces. It
all interlocked. It was like an interlocking puzzle, like a physical Tetris thing,
all chunky rock look and stuff. And when the computer would bring the
camera down underneath the comet, and this all happened in about two and a
half seconds, but it was shot at very high speed, so it was
a slow motion, beautiful slow motion comet. It would break apart and shower
down onto the camera with pieces of its and it looked like you were traveling
into the tail of comet. You just have to see the perspective to understand
how because you're seeing it from the camera's point of view. And this was
beautiful. And the whole time, liquid nitrogen was raining down because we're,
you know, just just just blasting liquid nitrogen into this thing, and it
was dropping out of the holes and sprang out behind it. It looked like
a comet tail. And of course you light it dramatically and it's beautiful.
So it's all about special effects. But we had to create the comet to
look real. So when Doug says, okay, I want you to make
the comment, I said, okay, I'll make the comment, and I
know what to make it. I showed it in the first time and he
says, what the heck is that. I said, that's a comment and
he says it's black. I go, yeah, comets are black. You
didn't know that. And he says that's not gonna work. And I said,
don't worry. When we put the liquid nitrogen in there, it's going
to produce a frost. It's actually gonna look white on the camera. In
fact, you're gonna have to you're gonna have to cut down the f stole
to make it look right. And so he saw that it was correct and
we did it. Then we did another sequence of a meteor hit going into
the atmosphere where it was leaving use trails smoke behind it. And for that
we actually had a long, tall, rather vertical tank that was only about
twelve inches wide. It was about six feet tall and it was about let's
see, about the four feet or five feet across, so it was like
a very thin, almost window profile water tank. Okay, just a little
thicker. So, and what we did was we created pieces of the meteor
and we soaked them in white paint. We just injected using a syringe,
we injected white paint into the little holes and the grooves that we had put
in it. And then we started shooting at sixteen hundred frames per second,
and all we did dropped them into the water, and as they dropped into
the water, they sailed down, leaving a trail of all this white,
cloudy smoke behind them, but no one thought, no one knew that there
was desrind water because when they were compositive against an atmosphere and moving under you
horizontally into the atmosphere, it would actually look like and it did look like
smoke trailing behind a comet, I'm sorry, behind a meteorite. So in
that. So so we got to use the astronomy and to do that there,
and you know, that was his He jokingly calls me his chief scientist,
you know, and we we when we do these things. He wants
it all right because he's he's he's not like George Lucas in suspending this belief.
He actually suspends this belief only to the point where we might be able
to see that belief in reality in one hundred years or so. So he
actually is more of a realistic science fiction guy. Amazing, that's so cool,
and you know what, you know, I love to hear these and
how fun it would be. I mean when I wanted to be a rocket
scientist at first, when I went to school, it was for aerospace engineering
at CU Boulder. Well that was my intent. I was in engineering,
but in physics, you know, in high school when I got into the
advanced physics and everything, it changed the way I kind of viewed the world
really because like clouds. You know, that's why I love the liquid methods
that you use often, because you know, when the atmosphere, and I
think it's a good way to think of it is like that layering of it
so is, and so the clouds are kind of scooting across one layer of
the atmosphere, and I think that that helps me to understand that's why you
have all these different layers, and it makes you understand that you know,
just because the wind speed is in one direction at one location or at one
height, that at another elevation it could be totally different, which is important
for this field because it so is. You're right, you have to be
aware of that. As you know, Yeah, ground speed, ground winds
are not the same as winds aloft and many times, you know, people
say it was very calm, yet this thing was racing across the sky.
That's because on the ground the speed was near zero. But once you reach
that stratified layer in the air, say two hundred and fifty feet up,
then that thing, which might be a balloon for instance, was scooting along
in that wind column. And you know, people don't recognize that, nor
do they recognize the three dimensionality of the world. You know, like contrails
seen coming at you will look like vertical lines in the sky. They're often
mistaken for rocket launches. And you know this. I know this, and
so the first thing I do is try and figure out, Okay, I
believe that's probably an airplane. It's moving too slo to be a rocket.
So which airplane is it? And that's readily available from ADSB data and other
information. You can actually figure out what aircraft it was, for instance.
So you know, having a knowledge of the atmosphere as a medium that leaves
tracks and traces, the clouds are an artifact in an atmosphere. There are
an area in the atmosphere where the density is different. They're an area in
the atmosphere where the components are slightly more concentrated or different. And then translating
that to creating a visual effects, say, is sort of a piece of
cake. You just find, you know, if we're trying to create clouds
that we have to create dies for instance, that won't dissipate and stay pretty
much together while you release them, and thus you have the appearance of a
thick cloud. Okay, creating nebulas. We create a lot of nebulas.
This way. Everything you saw and if you saw the iPad pro commercial great
big universe, everything you saw in there except at the end was all done
practically, meaning it was all done with an actual physical effect. There weren't
any CGI components before that. When they pulled out and showed the iPad on
the screen and the person fingering you know, the screen and moving around,
that was all you know, the CGI stuff. But everything up to that
point was real, you know, actually done this. Yeah, so cool.
We saw it. We saw it just like you saw it, which
is really cool. Yeah, and that reminds me of another effect that you
worked on. But uh, and I mean to lead into that it has
to do with a big NASA announcement. And this is what's funny now.
NASA keeps doing this and it's always kind of a I think especially for the
general public. It's kind of a cry wolf type situation where NASA says,
we're going to have a press conference because we figured something out really cool.
And I think scientists get a little more excited about some of this stuff than
the than than the layman. But of course you and I get excited about
it. But the uh, there's also this kind of allusion to astrobiology and
the discovery of alien life, and and the media especially is always like,
are they going to tell us they found, you know, an alien microbe
or something like this, and that typically doesn't turn out the case be the
case. Even in this one, NASA said it's not alien life. They
even came out and said, we're not going to be talking about that,
but they did talk about, Uh, it's somewhat related in that they feel
that it and you can explain how. But you know what I'm talking about,
right, I think you're gonna tell me about the icy geysers of Enceladus
exactly. Enceladus, Yeah. Celadus is a little three hundred mile diameter moon
of Saturn and it's covered in ice, thick ice has a mantle of ice
on it, and I mean mantle meaning covering, not the mantle of the
planet. But and this this covering of ice has cracks in it. Now
it's not The orbit is not perfectly circular, so at one point in its
orbit, Saturn's gravity actually compresses the moon a little bit. Actually tidal forces
squeeze the moon and cause those cracks to open up, and that's when it
spews as we've seen icy water from its southern hemisphere geysers. Then after it
passes that point in the orbit, that ceases because the gravitational forces are no
longer tugging in the same way. The fissures close up and the geysers stop
billowing this ice water. However, what's interesting is, okay, that's the
mechan that causes it. Now, fascinating topic about Enceladus is that this has
been happening forever since the moon form, So we're seeing that there's a lot
of material inside of Enceladus to spew out. Now, that led to other
studies to indicate maybe Enceladus has a slushy ocean underneath, kind of like Jupiter's
moon Europa, and you don't want to confuse the two. Europa's much bigger,
has a similar icy sheath, but has up to one hundred mile deep
ocean beneath its icy crust. Enceladus, on the other hand, is tiny.
It might have a slushy water ice component, but we see along that
southern hemisphere we don't see just water. We also see some complex molecules that
are being deposited out there. This indicates that we see the building blocks of
life, because they're building blocks of life being formed in a lot of place
places that seemingly are inhospitable throughout our Solar system. And this is very important
for when we're looking for life. It's also the premise of the book I
wrote called The Populated Universe, which talks about these building blocks of life that
are found almost everywhere we look. They're even found in hot jupiters that are
so close to their star that they're not even able to change the direction that
I can't orbit. They're actually locked facing the star. That's called tidal locking.
And even in the atmospheres of those planets, we've been able to detect
some strange compounds and things that are forming. And this is the kind of
science that we're heading for, and we're going to use the science of Enceladus
the science of Europa. We're going to find I predict, I think we're
going to find that Europa around Jupiter now bigger moon, okay, more ocean.
I think we're going to find that the water underneath that crust is highly
oxygen. Now that means two things. It means yay oxygen, that means
life could exist, yes, but it also means highly acidic too, because
whenever you have highly oxygenated water, you also have some acidic content of water
can be highly acidic. Now, that doesn't mean life can't exist. Just
look in the Yellowstone Hot Springs for instance, or look at some of these
very inhospitable acidic lakes that are on the planet Earth. There's bacteria that are
thriving in these environments. So this brings up the concept of extremophiles, extreme
forms of life that can live anywhere and why and you know this, I
think you did a story in this. There's even the microbes on the outside
of the International Space Station that were discovered, right, So these are all
very important aspects of the search for life. And we're not just searching for
life like us. We're searching for life not like us, because that's probably
more readily present now. These geysers on Enceladus. Uh. The way the
story was framed is that NASA wasn't one hundred percent sure there were geysers,
but that that that's what was kind of even more of a letdown from the
press release, but that they were saying they're pretty sure, they're a little
more sure than they were before that these geysers exist. Yeah. I mean,
there's there's a number of photos that people can look up online. They
show up these wonderful backlit images of Enceladus and you could see stuff spewing out
a very focused focal points on the moon. This this is water ice along
with some complex molecules that are being spewed out of there. And it's not
it's not that these don't ex exist. The question you want to ask is
how long will they exist? All right? Because it's showing, you know,
some of the some of the latest research is actually showing that these guysers
are beginning to i won't say shut down, but they're starting to reduce their
output. So it's possible that really yeah, and it's possible that the narrowing
is occurring as stuff maybe is accumulating inside the walls of the guys or who
knows. But if it's been doing it now, it's probably been doing it
in some form for a long long time, and so maybe it's changing to
a different mechanism. Maybe it's going to seal up. Maybe it periodically opens
and then closes after a period of time we don't know, but you know,
it's interesting that the moon, actually the moon actually has the potential to
have an awful lot of water inside. And it also in another backlit image
you can actually see. In fact, I use this image for one of
our displays actually at the move On conference. There is a taurus that is
a ring if you will, of water ice residue around Saturn. Enceladus is
orbit, so over time it's spread out and made its way around the whole
planet, you know, the whole and formed a very faint ring which is
visible in back light. And this is you know, part and parcel to
the whole thing going on with Enceladus. Now you might say, well,
wouldn't that stuff have just all evaporated already and just gone away, And the
answer is yes, it might have, but there's nothing to stop it from
just staying there in orbit around Saturn, and as Enceladus, with no atmosphere,
collides with it as it moves around its orbit, its self replenishing and
this water falls to the surface of Enceladus, and you know, forms new
ices and new particles on the surface of Enceladus. And one of the things
that happens is that that stuff instead of building a thicker and thicker ice sheath,
it has to be getting recycled in some way back into the interior.
This could be through Saturns inexorable tugging on Enceladus causing it to blocks, to
raise and lower and to basically flip over, say maybe like an iceberg in
the water, and it's recycling some of this material back to the interior,
you know. So as it increases this weight, okay, it's pressing down,
and so that that ice sheath on the surface will start to go dive
deeper into the planet. Its own weight will carry it deeper into the planet.
On the bottom of that ice sheath inside the planet, the stuff that
is there gets melted off and ends up going back up to the surface.
Because another thing that's happening is that tugging from that moon is causing or the
tugging from satur and on that moon is causing friction, and that heats things
up, and that's why we have water at all most likely, or it's
the leftover radiation from initial formation. But the bottom line is that that inextrible
squeezing causes enough friction and enough heating to melt those subsurface layers of ice into
that ocean that's underneath Enceladus. I say ocean, but it's you know,
we don't know, right, But either way, it's creating there this ring
of water that it that the planet goes through, traverses through and causing this
this space rain. Essentially, that's correct. I mean, if you're on
Enceladus, you might actually find a fine misty you know, ice covering on
your spacesuit over a period of time. I can't say how much because I
don't know the density of this this material that's falling on them, but yes,
and over time, if you had an instrument that you placed on Enceladus,
you would probably find if you came back five years later, that it
was encrusted with this ice. That's crazy. That's a transport mechanism. Something
is transporting it, and it's it's the orbit of Enceladus itself spewing this up,
you know, And then it's that's stuff that's spewed out is going to
stay in orbit. There's no reason for it to go anywhere else. And
as the particles collide with other particles in Enceladus's orbit, they reach an equilibrium
velocity and angular velocity in which they end up going around the planet the same
way as Enceladus. Now time, when it comes to this space rain idea,
you're probably aware of this, and and I can't say the name of
the guy who is the main scientist where can share and be or something like
this. It's not because it's it's anonymous, it's just because I can't pronounce
it. But I think it's the University of Edinburgh in conjunction with the University
of Alabama. Well, we had Richard Hoover who's part of this group of
astrobiologists, and Hoover worked for NASA on their astrobiology team early on, and
he since retired, but there's still this group of astrobiologists who, for instance,
defend the Mars rock that you know, Clinton famously talked about possibly having
evidence of extraterrestrial life, but it's still under debate. He talks about the
possibility that Earth experiences space rain, and some of this rain accounts for the
red rain that has been you know, anecdotally talked about people seeing red rain
and that that rain he feels could hold you know, extraterrestrial microbes that could
have, you know, kind of brought life to this planet. Do you
know much about that topic? But I do know that the red rain has
been reported. It's not just red. I mean it's been different colors,
has been yellow, green and other colors, and it would stain your clothes.
I remember this. And one of the things that I remember was that
it was actually algae that was actually sent airborne through some mechanism like like,
well, certainly a water spot would do it. Indeed, Yeah, and
this has happened in places like India and other countries where this rain, this
red rain has occurred. And you know, it's called the blood rain,
and of course because it's associated with blood, it becomes a very spiritual thing
to a number of people. And a water so people know it's when a
tornado essentially goes over a body of water. That's right, giant straw that
pulls that water up and spews it for miles many times. And yeah,
so it's possible that the red rain has been I don't know. I mean,
I know there's a panspermia that's obviously the life from out there getting here
hypothesis, and we thought that maybe the red rain. I know that the
pants spermia hypothesis talks about red rain is coming from comets at some point in
the past or meteoric material that stuff. Is it possible then that we moved
through and I think we have. We moved through let's say the tail of
a comet, and then that ice rains back down on our planet. Well,
I can say yeah, I mean, of course it's possible. In
fact, it's not only possible, it's guaranteed because we actually every time we
go through a cometary til we see a meteor shower. And that's what meteor
showers are. It's going through the dust tail of a previously past comet that
came by. So when a comet, you know, the funny thing about
comets is they leave a trail behind them the whole way. Okay, And
this is especially interesting and light of the fact that the Rosetta mission just terminated
the past week, and that cometary tale that they leave behind them is actually
a dust dust tail. But there's also a chemical reaction, an electromagnetic reaction
that occurs, and there's an ion tail that's also created. The ion tail
always points, okay, in a direction that is away from the Sun,
and the dust tail just goes to wherever the orbit of the comet was,
So a comet can have two tails in the sky, and that dust tail
is the thing that creates the meteor showers. And what you're talking about the
pot stability of that cometary rain of debris coming down on our planet. And
there's no doubt that this has happened in the past, and in fact,
there's no doubt that comets have actually struck us, delivering a huge amount of
water to our planet. And when you look at our oceans and the size
of our oceans, you say, it couldn't possibly have had that many cometary
strikes to make up that kind of water, and that's probably true. But
we have had billions of comets strike this planet over time, and that is
during the early era of bombardment. In the first billion years or so of
our formation, there was an era where we were constantly bombarded by all manner
of comets and meteors and asteroids, and in one planetary sized body, which
is the thought process behind which the Moon was formed, when it hit the
Earth and split the Earth off into a small chunk came out and that was
the Moon. So there's that possibility. So the pan spermia approach from commets
is not so far fetched actually, because we certainly oh a great deal of
our water to commentary impact from a long, long time ago mm so.
And if there was some sort of impact and a piece of the Earth detached,
it could take with it earthly extremophiles, which then could rain down on
some other planet populating that planet. That's an interesting point that no one's ever
made, and I like it. Thank you, you're welcome. I mean,
the thought is I give a huge credit where credit is due, and
that was a good thought. I actually never thought of that, the thought
that maybe these impacts hitting Earth took away I'll call them pan spermatic particles like
I don't know what else to call them. That led to some other planet
having microbes, maybe Mars. Okay, maybe it was both directions. Maybe
we've been struck by Martian asteroids and meteorites in the past, but maybe Mars
has been struck by Earth based asteroids, and maybe any microbes found on Mars
might look very much like microbes here, but you know where they came from
here, And this object, should it have dislodged, would have a tail
as it went to go see another planet. So it's kind of like Earth
sperm. It's an Earth sperm. At that point, we're running out of
time. I'm sure the look on your face is priceles right now. How
would you can see the look on yours in the wide eyes and the eyebrows.
Oh, I can't believe you said. But speaking of Enceladus and models,
you've created a model of Inceladus for NASA's Unexplained Files. Is that true?
Yeah? Yeah, I I've worked on all four seasons of NASA's Unexplained
Files, and you know, I go in front of the camera. I
do special effects behind the camera as well. And on one occasion, I
think it was season one, they talked about Enceladus and I actually created two
models. I created one model that we could compress under gravitational influence to show
the cracks opening, and then when that compression was released, you'd see the
cracks closing. So I created one model of that, and then I created
an acrylic sphere model of Enceladus where I actually created the white surface that looked
like ice at at that scale, and then I had these tiny holes in
it and I only put I put one psi of fog inside Enceladus. Enceladus
model just one pound persureance just slightly higher than normal, and out of those
tiny, tiny pinprick holes came spewing these gigantic geysers of fog. Now at
at slow motion and film properly, it looked just like the back of the
image of Enceladus, you see, but in motion. So it was really
cool. That's super cool. It was cool. Well, that's because you're
just a cool dude, you know what, anything to make the ends meet,
right, So it sounds like a lot of really fun cool stuff.
Like I said, we're pretty much out of time now. People of course
can find you. You do stuff with mouf on. You do the NASA
Unexplained Files, which is on which channel? That's on Discovery? And I
also I also do one on Earth, which is a new series, and
that's I don't I can't say which one. I don't remember with the channel.
It might be Discovery, might be Science or History channel. I don't
know. I forgot what channel I am. I can't remember. I never
get to watch them. I always get to do them. I always have
to do them. Yeah, you know, what on Earth is coming out
in a couple of weeks, and and nasa'sn't Explain falls just left the remains
of season four, and I just never know where I'm going with these things.
I just I just get the story list, I start working through it,
you know, and and and we go. I hope they put you
in that cool What was it like? A red turtleneck? Yeah, that
was pretty cool. I mean, so Jim Obird can say that I look
like the red shirt on Star Trek. Yeah, you did look like red
shirt at the Star Trek. Jim and I had a nice talk about that.
We laughed. You know, he's a very nice guy when it comes
to this. He was pretty good. Well, yeah, so that's where
they could find you. Where else can people look for you? Well,
my website, which is outdated because I simply don't have the time to update
it, is www dot fxmodels dot com. That's the my special effects website
FX Models. You can also go to Doug Trumbell dot com and see the
kind of work that we've done and that we do up at the studio with
Doug putting your UFO work that you guys do together. That's correct. You
can see the UFO work. You can see the euphatog originating project that created
the project we're working on now called Euphatog two, which you know all about,
and then some of your viewers may know about the You know, it's
bringing eupology into the twenty first century, albeit slower than we want. But
you know, we are self funding at this point. We're not looking for
any anyone yet to provide vast sums of money. We're trying to get this
out the door ourselves, and everyone working on the project is working for free,
so uh, you know, but we are expending a lot of money
to try and get this thing to work because we know it will work.
It's just you know, if someone's out there using advanced technology to apply the
stars, then they're going to leave what we've termed skid marks in our four
dimensional space when they cross back into it and leave our dimensional space. And
that's what we're looking for marks. Yeah, and every nine year old kid
will laugh as butt off exactly. The nine year old kid in each of
us was seeing making a joke. But I think the nine year old kid
that's in me is the one that came up with that phrase. When I
call him skid mark. I have no idea what I just started, but
I probably shouldn't have. But it's okay, I believe it wholeheartedly. Nine
year olds have skid marks. Okay. Oh and a joke came out.
All right. Well, thank you so much for being on the show again.
Great as always. You have a good one. Yeah. Great to
talk to you too, Okayn, thank you very much. All right,
thanks man. Thank you so much to marky Antonio for being on the show
again. What an interesting, interesting, interesting fella. So he's a lot
of fun to talk to and really interesting. It's great to have someone so
knowledgeable in these things to be able to discuss, you know, some of
the news because the media doesn't always you know, get things totally right.
I mean they're not scientists, they're not astronomers, so sometimes it's hard to
interpret this stuff and then you don't get the full story times as well.
Plus there's a lot of implications, so there's a lot of questions and possibility.
So it's a lot of fun to have Mark there to be able to
talk to, and it's just fascinating. I hope you all find it very
fascinating as well. Because I'm mainstream science. It's twofold. First of all,
they seem to be on the cusp. They're on the verge of finding
some sort of life, even if it's in a microbe. But the second
of all it, you know, this whole Tabby Star thing just demonstrates how
open many scientists are to the idea of extraterrestrial life and even intelligent extraterrestrial life.
So I think that's really really important. Otherwise, thank you so much
to Martin for joining us for the news even though he was out in a
boot today. And thank you to you all for listening. Thank you to
Caleb Hanks for the opening and closed music. A couple notes when it comes
to the UFO Congress, Last Friday was the last day for the Super Early
Bird. Oh you missed it? Oh no, but you know I love
you. So we have created these social media codes, social Fool and Social
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I'm posting a speaker this week that's going to be super awesome. You'll hear
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I tell you guys everything. But anyways, it's going to be really cool,
So that's where you'll be able to get. Remember, it's Social full
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which is usually when we put them out every other week, if something
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you know, YouTube videos. Oh my gosh, we're hooking you guys
up. And the reason that especially it's good to let you know about our
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you know, I'm only a day late on this one. I've just
had a hard time scheduling guests recently for some reason, just bad luck connecting
with people and getting able to work with schedules and stuff, which reminds me.
You know, if you have someone that you would love to hear on
the show, either have them, have them and again, or you know,
for the first time, let me know. Email us a contact at
openminds dot tv. Remember that is contact at openminds dot tv, and send
us a suggestion or send it something over Facebook or or wherever. That's cool
too. But you all heard I was very enthusiastic, you know, whce
I came back from vacation. I'm gonna do shows and stuff like that,
and I've been trying people, but we're gonna have a lot of great shows
coming up, so so no worries there Otherwise, I guess that's all I
got to say for now. Visit open Minds dot tv for more and of
course the last people I like to think are you all the listeners. Thank
you all so much for listening, and until next week, Audios mood chattos at