-[Travis] How’s it going, fellas? -[David] Oh, lovely.
How are you?
-Good to have you back. -[Travis] It was gonna be [Erik] You know, there’s an ongoing discussion about why we love to launch so many rockets out here at the triangle, and I would say it’s because rockets are one of the simplest and best tools -to investigate this airspace. -Yep.
[Travis] We did an experiment with drones, and the data suggests that there’s some kind of weird magnetic anomaly at about 750 to at least 1,000 feet high, -directly above the launch tower. -Mm-hmm.
So, since the triangle is at the dead center of the bubble, tonight we want to gather more data on whatever is lingering there in both of those areas. We’ll also be able to gather more data in the zone where Pete’s lidar scanner showed all those GPS errors at the triangle. So that’s why today our hopes are to launch as many rockets as we can get up through our areas of interest with all the high-speed assets recording it.
Yeah, we’ve got you covered.
We’ve got a couple motors ready.
We can push it up above the 3,200 mark.
Ah, that’s gonna be fantastic.
The plan is to launch different-sized rockets right through our two target zones: the 31-foot mark of the blob and the 750-to-1,000-foot zone where we’ve detected that electromagnetic anomaly. Some of these rockets will be able to go even higher, up to a max altitude of about 3,500 feet, which we believe is above the top of the bubble. They’ll be outfitted with instruments to measure things like their airspeed, GPS position, and even if they encounter electromagnetic charges.
This will help us record data that we can compare both inside and outside of the bubble.
All right, well, uh, we still got a lot of setup to do.
-Let’s just go do it. -Let’s get after it.
-Here we go. -[Kaleb] Going hot.
Going in five, four, three, two, one.
[Travis] Oh, my god.
-That one went, dude. -Holy smokes.
-[laughter] -[Thomas] How high? -[Allen] 22…
[computer] Last altitude: 2,284 feet. [Thomas] Chute. We got a chute.
So that’s about 200 feet above the bubble.
Look, it’s stalled right there. It’s stalled.
It’s like it’s stuck at the top of the bubble.
[computer] The rocket is now northwest at 39 degrees. [Travis] Holy crap, look at that.
It’s falling away from the triangle.
That’s a heavy rocket.
It should be coming straight down.
[computer] Distance: 2,000 feet. Just, it land– it landed 2,000 feet away.
-[Royston] No way. -It landed 2,000 feet.
-It’s right at the edge of the bubble. -It landed on the edge– north edge of the bubble.
[Travis] That rocket launched from the dead center of the bubble, but when it came back down, it fell like it was sliding down something until it landed on the ground 2,000 feet away. That’s the exact distance from the center of the triangle to the edge of the bubble. That’s too crazy to be a coincidence.
Hey, guys, uh, we’re burning daylight pretty quick, so let’s reset everything for night launches.
-[Allen] Okay. -Let’s do it.
All right, next up is the rocket with the coil.
[Allen] The coil rocket. Let’s go.
[Erik] One of the customized rockets for this experiment has been equipped with a coil of copper wire to assist in the measurement of any unusual magnetic conditions.
So, as the rocket passes through that magnetic anomaly between 750 and 1,000 feet, we’ll see if any voltages are being generated that we can record and try to better understand what could be causing them. [Travis] Wow.
[Allen] 3,400 feet.
[Thomas] It’s dropping fast.
[Travis] It’s dropping fast. The chute is not deploying.
[Allen] Guys, she’s coming in hot.
[Travis] That’s crazy.
[Kaleb] Oh, my gosh.
Thing’s, like, three feet in the ground.
Look, that’s– they didn’t– the chute didn’t…
[Kaleb] It didn’t even unfurl.
[Travis] All right, let’s see.
[grunts] Goddang, it’s in there, dude.
-[strains] -You got it.
God, look at the dirt in that, too, though.
-[Travis] Dang. -That’s nuts.
[Travis] At least the cone is in one piece.
Hopefully, that means we should be able to get good data out of it.
Thomas, why don’t you guys get the final rocket ready with the LED lights? That’ll be our last launch for the evening.
four, three, two, one.
-[Kaleb] Wow. -[Travis] Now, that’s a rocket. -[Allen] Wow.
That was freakin’ awesome.
Holy crap, look at that.
That thing’s still going.
-Chute. We got a chute. -[Allen] Chute. Yeah.
[Travis] It’s straight overhead right now.
[Thomas] What elevation’s it at?
2,200.
-22? -Yeah.
[Thomas] So it’s just about to hit the bubble boundary.
-[David] Look at that, hey. -[Travis] Look at that.
[David] What’s going on here?
[Travis] Look at that.
It looks like it’s suddenly veered off in a different direction.
-Yeah. -Yep.
Dude, that thing’s way over there.
[Erik] Yeah, Travis, at the current rate of travel, looks like it might end up over here close to my location -at the command center. -[Kaleb] Wow.
[Travis] Once again, we had a rocket fly straight up through our zones of interest just fine.
But then, on descent, it started falling away from the triangle like it was sliding down along the bubble boundary. [Erik] You guys ready to look at some rocket data? [Erik] This is the camera mounted to the rocket.
We’re looking back down at the ground.
-[Travis] Oh, awesome. -Oh, nice.
[Erik] Now, as you recall, this is the one where the chute didn’t deploy correctly.
-[Kaleb] Yeah. -[Royston] Right.
[Erik] So I’m gonna play it through at normal speed.
-[Travis] Man, look at that. -[Royston] Oh, that’s cool.
-[Travis] It’s up there, too. Look at that. -Wow.
[Travis] Okay, so we should hit the chute charge– -there it is. -[Erik] Mm-hmm.
And then we get the 3D pendulum motion -until it hits the ground. -Yeah, so…
so I-I would, I would say that’s as close to our textbook version of how things should go.
Nothing obvious to explain why a chute wouldn’t deploy.
-[Thomas] Yeah. -[Travis] Yeah. -[Erik] Well, let’s watch this thing as it goes up frame by frame.
Okay, so we’ve got an ignition.
[Travis] Yeah, that’s amazing.
[Erik] Okay, and now I’m just moving one frame at a time here.
[Travis] Now, see how– we’re still only about ten or 15 feet up right here, maybe getting close to the 30-foot mark.
[Erik] Mm-hmm, yeah, things are changing.
[Travis] Wait, what is that?
Back it up and let’s see Okay, so let’s keep going, frame at a time.
-[Travis] Look at that. -And it separates.
[Travis] It sure does. In one frame.
Whatever it is, it’s fast, too.
-Look, there’s nothing else doing this. -[Thomas] Wow.
That’s an odd event right there.
The slow-motion video clearly shows something moving rapidly through the rocket’s exhaust flames shortly after it launched. And could this also be connected to whatever prevented the parachute from deploying? [Erik] Now I have, uh, another launch here that I want to share with us.
-[Travis] Great. -This is gonna be Meta-Frame.
So this is one of our night launches, of course.
This is the rocket we had with the coils to detect magnetic anomalies.
We had the camera mounted on the inside of the rocket…
…looking at that sensor to record changes in the magnetic field.
So, you typically just expect to see zero?
No, you’d-you’d expect to see some small changes, like the two digits, probably.
If it starts getting really big numbers, then…
then it means it went through a really strong magnetic field.
So we are in flight.
[Travis] Did you see it jump right there? Look at that.
There were some big, big spikes.
[Kaleb] There was a spike.
-Ooh, look at that. 270-something. -I saw it. 273.
[Travis] The rocket with the copper coil that we launched above the triangle detected an electric field that was several times higher than what you would normally see in the natural environment. So, even though the bubble stopped us from collecting as much data as we wanted, we did get enough to confirm that there is some kind of electromagnetic anomaly high above the triangle.
[Erik] We can see at what height we got the voltage spike.
And I already calculated it, and the spike in the voltage started at this dot which is at 750 feet, right where the drones went wonky a couple of weeks ago.
-Interesting. -Okay. -Wow.
-For sure. -[Erik] Well, before we wrap up our review, there’s something I want to show you from the last launch we did.
This is some video that was taken with the night vision camera.
Yeah, so there’s our launch.
And then we have the chute deploy right here.
-Whoa. -Yeah, I saw something– -Right there. -Yep. -[Travis] Back that up.
What, what was that?
-[Erik] Okay. -[key clicks] -[Travis] There it is. -Yes.
-[Royston] That’s weird. -That’s not a bug.
I don’t know what to make of that.
I don’t know what to make of that.
We may have caught something here, and I-I can’t tell you what I think that is.
I don’t know what that is.
I don’t know if that light was some sort of UAP or what it was. But the fact that it showed up just after the rocket chute was deployed is interesting.
Because that’s when we saw the rocket suddenly veer off in a different direction. We thought it might be from making contact with the bubble’s top boundary. But could it have been from a collision with this thing?
If so, what was it?
And where in the heck did it come from?
