I looked after a child once in an emergency department. He presented with what appeared to be an incision made with a sharp knife from just below his knee, wrapping around in a slight spiral to just below where his calf muscle ended. It was open, gaping but so neat and perfect. Immediately my brain assumed the child had been attacked by somebody with a weapon; a sharp one at that. Before the mother had a chance to open her mouth and relate the facts to me, I was almost wondering would this attack be on the news? A knife wielding madman out of control attacks a child, who though severely wounded, was alive. A miracle!
The reality of what happened was far more prosaic, though obviously terrifying and serious in its own right. The child's mother explained that a lost/stray dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier, had wandered into their garden. The child began to play with it. In the course of playing, the dog took offence to the child for reasons best known to the dog and latched onto the child's leg below the knee. The child screamed, the mother turned - instinctively grabbed her child and pulled him away violently and hard from the dog. This had the effect of opening up the child's leg via one of the embedded canine teeth, effectively running it down the leg while inserted firmly at the same time. The dog let go and they whisked the child to hospital.
Curiously there was little active bleeding when we saw the child. Turns out, the major blood vessels had somehow avoided injury so the bleeding, though there definitely had been a fair bit at the scene by all accounts, was largely stopped. It was not the bloodbath one might have anticipated for such a large deep wound. So the cut had happened, there had been initial blood loss but the natural haemostatic mechanisms had curtailed it. When I unwrapped the leg(there were homemade emergency wrappings on - best attempt they could manage given the adrenaline filled nature of everything), it just lay there, wound wide open and gaping but not bleeding.
My point here is that weird and wonderful things happen. Sometimes it is only through knowing the actual facts of the matter that such things avoid being cast into the realms of the fantastically unexplained. If I had encountered this wound on a deceased person, with no background story to inform, I would have no doubt stuck with my Nightly News special explanation and the mystery of the Maniacal Leg Slasher would have been born, at least in my head.
Sometimes these events and occurrences are a little like magic tricks. That is to say, they are terribly impressive and mind-blowing while the illusions' method remains a secret. As is often the case with illusion, the reveal of what is really going on is often an exercise in taking one's amazement from a solid 10/10 down to a 2 or 3/10. Perhaps that may be the case in these occurrences on Skinwalker Ranch, perhaps not. I feel unqualified to judge as I find myself as the audience at a Vegas Magical extravaganza. I am watching reality suspended without benefit of the method, the end product without knowing what led to it. As you have stated, in this case we are indeed left with " well it was probably this but really, I don't know".
And so, the magic continues and we, the audience, keep reading.
My neighbor's dog had his neck slashed open by the razor-sharp rear claws of a rabbit he was trying to catch. It appeared to be a perfect incision created by a scalpel.
Your consideration of a piezoelectric effect reminded me of the phenomenon of earthquake lights. Historically, scientists have been a bit sceptical about it (no doubt due to many of the things you outlined) but they're now starting to take it more seriously. This is an analysis of claims that earthquake lights were seen during an earthquake in Canterbury, NZ in 2010. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1794-61902015000200004
Well, if a fella's going to throw his hat in here, might just as well.
So far, the consensus seems to favor a lack of empirical evidence; even though the folks who were hired (and paid) to collect measurable evidence did their job by providing measurable evidence. They refrained from reporting phenomena outside quantified results.
The narrative suggests phenomena outside of measurable/quantifiable results; together they suggest a conclusion that is unknown.
Now that we're all on the same page: a simple Feynman chart suggests that travel in all directions of the space/timelines is not only possible, but probable, (to the extent that everything in quantum physics is probable) and is an aspect of nature. Then, of course there is Schrödinger.
My point is determinism is a thing, and self-determinism happens. The clues are everywhere hidden in plain sight e.g., "a madman sees what he sees" Game of Thrones.
I do love this stuff, it's my world. So thanks, ISA, for having me, and glad to meet y'all.
You seem to have an uncanny ability to tell the truth. That, and you’re an excellent writer.
The Skinwalker Ranch mystery hasn’t been helped by the television series done on it with very dramatic scientists who make these astoundingly emotional statements of surprise and amazement. Having worked at Boeing Aerospace Company for 6 years, the program scientists I talked and worked with were anything but dramatic: not one of them was animated enough to tell a good joke.
The pronouncements made by these television scientists — particularly the one with the horrible blonde dye job — are nonsense: “vast underground structures found by ground-penetrating radar” and their detection of vast rays of concentrated energy… there’s not a single device on Earth that is capable of measuring directed fields of energy in three dimensions. Not one. We can detect EM fields, but we can’t synthesize images of rays of energy in three dimensions, certainly not by shooting an electronic payload into the air by a small rocket. Having worked on Project DUMAND briefly in 1975, I became well-versed on how poor we are at detecting streams of energy… let alone projecting them in 3-D, but these television actors (or whatever they are) talk about these directed energy fields with smug certainty. Trained as a scientist in university studies, perhaps the only thing I really comprehend with any certainty is that certainty is a very BIG word.
The conclusions reached by these scientists are laughable and seemingly unsupported. Their conduct is questionable: shooting at “very large wolves” in darkness, for example, on a ranch populated by cattle and horses seems rather reckless. That word seems to characterize their methods, studies, observations, and conclusions.
You’ve done an excellent job describing our perceptual problems and biases. There are an adequate number of sporadic anomalies at Skinwalker Ranch that merit serious investigation. I suspect that our mastery of physics is still at a very basic stage, and until we take the next big step scientifically, we might be swamped in bad data and even worse conclusions about it.
Thank you for sharing this. Your background at Boeing and work on DUMAND gives your observations a weight that is desperately missing from most discussions about Skinwalker Ranch.
You captured the core issue so well: reality television demands dramatic, immediate conclusions, which is the exact opposite of how genuine scientific investigation works. The moment a research project prioritizes narrative resolution and sensational declarations over patient, cautious methodology, it stops being research and becomes performance.
I really appreciate your kind words about the article and your reminder that true scientific progress starts with admitting how much we still fail to measure.
I took a celestial navigation course at U of W (and, later, a course in real estate law): one of the people I met was bongo-playing Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, who was very easy to talk with. I expressed my dismay, one day, about the scope of my ignorance one day, and he encouraged me by saying that’s exactly what college should do: convince us of our ignorance. It was a watershed moment for me, as—since then—I read voraciously… like a crab feeding on the running tide, I want to sample everything I find of any interest, later weighing their merit, if any. I have few conclusions to offer, but I do have a lot of questions. Reading what you write causes me to suspect you’re of the same ilk.
Meeting Richard Feynman and receiving that specific piece of wisdom directly from him is an absolute treasure.
His point about education being the process of discovering the vastness of our own ignorance is so liberating. The moment you realize that not knowing isn't a deficiency, but the very engine of curiosity, the world opens up entirely. That imagery of a crab feeding on the running tide is fantastic and beautifully captures what it means to be an endless learner.
Being grouped into that same category of restless question-askers is one of the highest compliments I could receive.
One final observation about the television scientists: they’ve allowed “consensus” as a substitute for proof, elevating their collective beliefs above the level of scientifically-reproducible truth.
Hi Isa, thanks for this. They've never let a true independent scientific team onto the ranch for an unbiased project, so I am really skeptical of their claims. I do like your theory of geological anomalies being a factor here.
One night I was driving along an expressway in Silicon Valley. As I went around a curve I suddenly saw an opposum trying to cross the road. There was no time to avoid it, and I ran over it. My memory of it seemed to last longer than the actual reality, and I remember thinking it was as large as a racoon.
A few days later I drove the same road in the daylight at a time of little traffic. I looked for evidence of what happened; I found it. The flattened remains looked about the size of a large rat.
When I ran over the unfortunate creature I was driving the speed limit, about 50 mph. So my memory is clearly at odds with what happened, and that is what adrenalin does.
If people see large wolves and aren't able to shoot them, it might be coyotes and the adrenalin affected the shooter's aim. I once worked with a guy who had been a sniper in the marines, and he described how a sniper takes a shot; adrenalin is clearly not involved.
Your story about the opossum is a perfect case study in how fight-or-flight hormones manipulate our visual processing and temporal perception making seconds feel like minutes and turning small creatures into looming threats.
When you apply that exact mechanism to the pitch-black, high-strangeness environment of Skinwalker Ranch, it explains so much. A sudden movement in the dark triggers an immediate adrenaline spike, and the mind fills in the missing visual data with exaggerated proportions before logic can catch up.
- the tv show is just tv. it is 14-week slice of the work that goes on year-round. the scientists who appear do recount things that take place that do not make it onto the screen because the producers say it isn’t great tv. you have to view with that in mind. if search for videos about the ranch on youtube, you can find interviews with some of the people on the show and those interviews are measured and mater-of-fact. they’re experts who are stumped about what goes on. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhpb3l6gyW4)
- recent articles on consciousness and quantum physics make it clear that our understanding of “reality” is simplistic, at best. we are not the advanced creatures we assume ourselves to be.
the more deeply you read about these occurrences, the weirder they seem. which is the fun part!
There are many things and places on Earth that are beyond our comprehension. Skinwalker ranch is one of them. The Earth is over 4 billion years old. Many civilizations have come, gone, disappeared without a trace. What seems strange as you said it is all these phenomena occurring in one place. I think there are portals that lead to other dimensions where people, places, and things are quite different then as we see them here. All these vertices coming together in one place for whatever reason we can't really explain in any terms that are imaginable. Many old Indian tribes have witnessed many strange things, alien to what we reason as possible. One thing is certain and that is the uncertain.
Reading the book authored by George Knapp is required before you start the tv show. What happened to the original owners is well documented and scary. Explains do much more than the tv show
I looked after a child once in an emergency department. He presented with what appeared to be an incision made with a sharp knife from just below his knee, wrapping around in a slight spiral to just below where his calf muscle ended. It was open, gaping but so neat and perfect. Immediately my brain assumed the child had been attacked by somebody with a weapon; a sharp one at that. Before the mother had a chance to open her mouth and relate the facts to me, I was almost wondering would this attack be on the news? A knife wielding madman out of control attacks a child, who though severely wounded, was alive. A miracle!
The reality of what happened was far more prosaic, though obviously terrifying and serious in its own right. The child's mother explained that a lost/stray dog, a Staffordshire bull terrier, had wandered into their garden. The child began to play with it. In the course of playing, the dog took offence to the child for reasons best known to the dog and latched onto the child's leg below the knee. The child screamed, the mother turned - instinctively grabbed her child and pulled him away violently and hard from the dog. This had the effect of opening up the child's leg via one of the embedded canine teeth, effectively running it down the leg while inserted firmly at the same time. The dog let go and they whisked the child to hospital.
Curiously there was little active bleeding when we saw the child. Turns out, the major blood vessels had somehow avoided injury so the bleeding, though there definitely had been a fair bit at the scene by all accounts, was largely stopped. It was not the bloodbath one might have anticipated for such a large deep wound. So the cut had happened, there had been initial blood loss but the natural haemostatic mechanisms had curtailed it. When I unwrapped the leg(there were homemade emergency wrappings on - best attempt they could manage given the adrenaline filled nature of everything), it just lay there, wound wide open and gaping but not bleeding.
My point here is that weird and wonderful things happen. Sometimes it is only through knowing the actual facts of the matter that such things avoid being cast into the realms of the fantastically unexplained. If I had encountered this wound on a deceased person, with no background story to inform, I would have no doubt stuck with my Nightly News special explanation and the mystery of the Maniacal Leg Slasher would have been born, at least in my head.
Sometimes these events and occurrences are a little like magic tricks. That is to say, they are terribly impressive and mind-blowing while the illusions' method remains a secret. As is often the case with illusion, the reveal of what is really going on is often an exercise in taking one's amazement from a solid 10/10 down to a 2 or 3/10. Perhaps that may be the case in these occurrences on Skinwalker Ranch, perhaps not. I feel unqualified to judge as I find myself as the audience at a Vegas Magical extravaganza. I am watching reality suspended without benefit of the method, the end product without knowing what led to it. As you have stated, in this case we are indeed left with " well it was probably this but really, I don't know".
And so, the magic continues and we, the audience, keep reading.
My neighbor's dog had his neck slashed open by the razor-sharp rear claws of a rabbit he was trying to catch. It appeared to be a perfect incision created by a scalpel.
(He survived.)
Your consideration of a piezoelectric effect reminded me of the phenomenon of earthquake lights. Historically, scientists have been a bit sceptical about it (no doubt due to many of the things you outlined) but they're now starting to take it more seriously. This is an analysis of claims that earthquake lights were seen during an earthquake in Canterbury, NZ in 2010. http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1794-61902015000200004
Well, if a fella's going to throw his hat in here, might just as well.
So far, the consensus seems to favor a lack of empirical evidence; even though the folks who were hired (and paid) to collect measurable evidence did their job by providing measurable evidence. They refrained from reporting phenomena outside quantified results.
The narrative suggests phenomena outside of measurable/quantifiable results; together they suggest a conclusion that is unknown.
Now that we're all on the same page: a simple Feynman chart suggests that travel in all directions of the space/timelines is not only possible, but probable, (to the extent that everything in quantum physics is probable) and is an aspect of nature. Then, of course there is Schrödinger.
My point is determinism is a thing, and self-determinism happens. The clues are everywhere hidden in plain sight e.g., "a madman sees what he sees" Game of Thrones.
I do love this stuff, it's my world. So thanks, ISA, for having me, and glad to meet y'all.
Just a hillbilly who can read and write.
You seem to have an uncanny ability to tell the truth. That, and you’re an excellent writer.
The Skinwalker Ranch mystery hasn’t been helped by the television series done on it with very dramatic scientists who make these astoundingly emotional statements of surprise and amazement. Having worked at Boeing Aerospace Company for 6 years, the program scientists I talked and worked with were anything but dramatic: not one of them was animated enough to tell a good joke.
The pronouncements made by these television scientists — particularly the one with the horrible blonde dye job — are nonsense: “vast underground structures found by ground-penetrating radar” and their detection of vast rays of concentrated energy… there’s not a single device on Earth that is capable of measuring directed fields of energy in three dimensions. Not one. We can detect EM fields, but we can’t synthesize images of rays of energy in three dimensions, certainly not by shooting an electronic payload into the air by a small rocket. Having worked on Project DUMAND briefly in 1975, I became well-versed on how poor we are at detecting streams of energy… let alone projecting them in 3-D, but these television actors (or whatever they are) talk about these directed energy fields with smug certainty. Trained as a scientist in university studies, perhaps the only thing I really comprehend with any certainty is that certainty is a very BIG word.
The conclusions reached by these scientists are laughable and seemingly unsupported. Their conduct is questionable: shooting at “very large wolves” in darkness, for example, on a ranch populated by cattle and horses seems rather reckless. That word seems to characterize their methods, studies, observations, and conclusions.
You’ve done an excellent job describing our perceptual problems and biases. There are an adequate number of sporadic anomalies at Skinwalker Ranch that merit serious investigation. I suspect that our mastery of physics is still at a very basic stage, and until we take the next big step scientifically, we might be swamped in bad data and even worse conclusions about it.
Thank you for sharing this. Your background at Boeing and work on DUMAND gives your observations a weight that is desperately missing from most discussions about Skinwalker Ranch.
You captured the core issue so well: reality television demands dramatic, immediate conclusions, which is the exact opposite of how genuine scientific investigation works. The moment a research project prioritizes narrative resolution and sensational declarations over patient, cautious methodology, it stops being research and becomes performance.
I really appreciate your kind words about the article and your reminder that true scientific progress starts with admitting how much we still fail to measure.
I took a celestial navigation course at U of W (and, later, a course in real estate law): one of the people I met was bongo-playing Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, who was very easy to talk with. I expressed my dismay, one day, about the scope of my ignorance one day, and he encouraged me by saying that’s exactly what college should do: convince us of our ignorance. It was a watershed moment for me, as—since then—I read voraciously… like a crab feeding on the running tide, I want to sample everything I find of any interest, later weighing their merit, if any. I have few conclusions to offer, but I do have a lot of questions. Reading what you write causes me to suspect you’re of the same ilk.
Meeting Richard Feynman and receiving that specific piece of wisdom directly from him is an absolute treasure.
His point about education being the process of discovering the vastness of our own ignorance is so liberating. The moment you realize that not knowing isn't a deficiency, but the very engine of curiosity, the world opens up entirely. That imagery of a crab feeding on the running tide is fantastic and beautifully captures what it means to be an endless learner.
Being grouped into that same category of restless question-askers is one of the highest compliments I could receive.
One final observation about the television scientists: they’ve allowed “consensus” as a substitute for proof, elevating their collective beliefs above the level of scientifically-reproducible truth.
"Consensus"
That certainly sounds familiar.
Hi Isa, thanks for this. They've never let a true independent scientific team onto the ranch for an unbiased project, so I am really skeptical of their claims. I do like your theory of geological anomalies being a factor here.
Adrenalin affects what we see.
One night I was driving along an expressway in Silicon Valley. As I went around a curve I suddenly saw an opposum trying to cross the road. There was no time to avoid it, and I ran over it. My memory of it seemed to last longer than the actual reality, and I remember thinking it was as large as a racoon.
A few days later I drove the same road in the daylight at a time of little traffic. I looked for evidence of what happened; I found it. The flattened remains looked about the size of a large rat.
When I ran over the unfortunate creature I was driving the speed limit, about 50 mph. So my memory is clearly at odds with what happened, and that is what adrenalin does.
If people see large wolves and aren't able to shoot them, it might be coyotes and the adrenalin affected the shooter's aim. I once worked with a guy who had been a sniper in the marines, and he described how a sniper takes a shot; adrenalin is clearly not involved.
Your story about the opossum is a perfect case study in how fight-or-flight hormones manipulate our visual processing and temporal perception making seconds feel like minutes and turning small creatures into looming threats.
When you apply that exact mechanism to the pitch-black, high-strangeness environment of Skinwalker Ranch, it explains so much. A sudden movement in the dark triggers an immediate adrenaline spike, and the mind fills in the missing visual data with exaggerated proportions before logic can catch up.
two things:
- the tv show is just tv. it is 14-week slice of the work that goes on year-round. the scientists who appear do recount things that take place that do not make it onto the screen because the producers say it isn’t great tv. you have to view with that in mind. if search for videos about the ranch on youtube, you can find interviews with some of the people on the show and those interviews are measured and mater-of-fact. they’re experts who are stumped about what goes on. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhpb3l6gyW4)
- recent articles on consciousness and quantum physics make it clear that our understanding of “reality” is simplistic, at best. we are not the advanced creatures we assume ourselves to be.
the more deeply you read about these occurrences, the weirder they seem. which is the fun part!
There are many things and places on Earth that are beyond our comprehension. Skinwalker ranch is one of them. The Earth is over 4 billion years old. Many civilizations have come, gone, disappeared without a trace. What seems strange as you said it is all these phenomena occurring in one place. I think there are portals that lead to other dimensions where people, places, and things are quite different then as we see them here. All these vertices coming together in one place for whatever reason we can't really explain in any terms that are imaginable. Many old Indian tribes have witnessed many strange things, alien to what we reason as possible. One thing is certain and that is the uncertain.
There are a lot of people who live in this area, including myself. You'd think we have some really freaky stories to tell.
We don't.
Reading the book authored by George Knapp is required before you start the tv show. What happened to the original owners is well documented and scary. Explains do much more than the tv show
People believe because it's fun to believe. Acquiring proof is just a job.