Transients - Objects of Unknown Origin and the Nuclear Connection

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Reports of unidentified flying object, unidentified verio phonomenica hoday, different weapons.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Being tested by our own or foreign government instry.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Americans people are becoming most interested and in many instances
very alarmed by the UFO stories. So why do you
suppose that all of this has been kept from the world?

Speaker 3 (00:23):
Exploring our past, our future, and the mysteries of our universe?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Where why can't you explain it? Everybody in uthology is
screaming for disclosure.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
The future is now. This is Micah.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hanks from the high mountains of Appalachia and a bunker
below ground. Welcome one and all. It is the Micah
Hanks Program. Glad is always to be getting behind the
microphone once again and going in pursuit of the anomalous
in our existence, as we do every week, and of
course each dispatch making its way into pockets on podcasting

(00:57):
players everywhere. Glad to have you here a board. We
have some big news this week too, which of course
we're going to be devoting most of this episode two,
and that involves two recently peer reviewed papers that are
an outgrowth of the work of a couple of colleagues
of mine. And so I've had some knowledge of what's
been going on. I also have some perspectives to provide

(01:19):
about this because these papers, with their publication having to
do with not only unusual objects in photographic plates that
actually date back to the nineteen fifties, but also their
possible relationship not only to unidentified anomaloust phenomena, but also
at least a potential connection to nuclear testing during the

(01:39):
Cold War. Yes, this has indeed generated a lot of
attention and naturally some controversy, so we will dive into
some of that here in a moment for this somewhat
shorter news segment, before we jump into a conversation with
Stephen Brule, PhD. Of Vanderbilt University, one of the co
authors of the new papers. First, as far as what's

(01:59):
been happening news, you may have seen that Elon Musk
has now launched a Wikipedia of his very own, a
competitor of sorts. They call it Grockipedia. And this actually
was brought to my attention earlier today by my longtime
colleague Mark Brady, so thank you Mark. He sent along
an email with a link to an article from Business Insider,

(02:20):
which reports that on Monday, Elon Musk appears to have
launched Grockipedia, an alternative to Wikipedia, earlier this week, which
came shortly after the billionaire set on x last month
that his team at Xai was building something that would
be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. In the post at
that time, Musk said frankly, it is a necessary step

(02:43):
toward the Xai goal of understanding the universe. So grockipedia
dot com went live on Monday afternoon, groc by the way,
a reference to X's very own AI agent that operates
there on the social media site. Admittedly, I I haven't
had a whole lot of time to dig into this yet,
but I will note, as Mark did in the email

(03:04):
that he sent to me, it does appear that the
Debrief and even a few other articles by yours truly
do appear as sources for some of the articles on
the site, considering the way that Wikipedia in recent months
has treated the Debrief and more importantly, Ers, truly and again,
I think that it really comes down to a lot
of ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments, as well

(03:26):
as some fairly inaccurate and at least some outdated information.
But really it comes down to the ideological biases of
a short list of anonymous Wikipedia editors. I am, by
no means, of course, the only person who has noticed
this and take an issue with it. In fact, Larry Sanger,
one of the original co founders of Wikipedia, over in

(03:48):
a post recently on x was asking other X users
to help him compile a list of people who have
been unfairly treated or mischaracterized by Wikipedia. So the former
co found of the website is also highly aware of
Wikipedia's ongoing problem, the rotting cancer within what claims to

(04:08):
be the world's largest online encyclopedia. It may be that,
but it certainly isn't an unbiased one, so who knows.
Maybe some good will come out of Grockipedia, although again,
with this being a breaking story, I've barely even directed
any attention to this, so I'll give you a full
report in the weeks ahead, once I've had time to
dive into this with my team. In other news, of course,

(04:30):
as I mentioned, there was a major announcement from Stockholm
University recently. Quoting from a press release about this, Researchers
at Nordeta at Stockholm University have analyzed flashes of light
on astronomical plates from the early nineteen fifties and found
statistical connections between the times of these flashes, nuclear weapons tests,
and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena. Those reports are presented

(04:55):
in a pair of peer reviewed studies that recently appeared
in scientific Reports and publication of the Astronomical Society of
the Pacific. Now, this, of course is an outgrowth of
the ongoing work by Beatrice va Roel, and she's been
on the show with us in the past to discuss
the VASCO project and the search for these again what
she and her colleagues characterize as transience. I also mentioned

(05:18):
that one of her co authors on these papers, doctor
Stephen Brule of Vanderbilt University, who's also a friend and
colleague of mine, will be joining us here shortly to
discuss this, and I want to hear exactly what it
is that they looked at, what their determinations were about
this study, because again, for a pair of studies involving
a subject like this to have gone through the peer
review process is no small achievement in my humble opinion,

(05:42):
And as I mentioned, of course, this has generated some controversy,
particularly due to the studies association with unidentified anomalous phenomena,
and really for me to provide a bit of analysis
here at the outset before we get into our conversation
with doctor Brule about these two papers and the peer
review process and other aspects of the research behind these

(06:03):
two studies. For a bit of analysis here, I don't
think it's so much the lingering specter of stigma prevailing
against anybody who says anything about UAP and the way
that they are treated so much in this case, as
the controversy arises somewhat from the varying interpretations of what
these transients might represent. Again, we have to take into

(06:26):
consideration that although we might say that these are representative
of objects reflecting light outside of Earth's atmosphere, and that
is essentially what the authors of the papers conclude, and
they have also noted statistical correlations that appear to link
these things to nuclear testing, we also have to recognize
that we don't know exactly what UAP are, or moreover,

(06:47):
the varieties of different things that can contribute to UAP reports.
And I think I can say with a fair amount
of authority on my own part that, as someone who
has a website that features a database that we are
built featuring UAP reports, someone who has more than two
decades of serious research into this subject under my own belt,

(07:08):
having come to know most of the former government officials
who have studied this, having read a large amount of
the most relevant, historical and other popular writing on this
subject that's been made available over the last few decades,
having spoken to numerous scientists and participated in scientific research
involving UAP over the years, and virtually in every way

(07:30):
from being a journalist to a citizen scientist involved in
trying to collect data about this and critically assess it
and to provide meaningful insights into the nature of UAP.
Based on all of the aforementioned, I understand how complex
a topic UAP and its study can be, and the
fact that there would be some controversy over what these

(07:52):
findings indicate, having actually again been the subject of two
now pere reviewed papers, is not surprising to me and
not necessarily a bad thing. What we're actually seeing is
the scientific process at working. To me, that's really exciting,
even though for the time being, we have made an
interesting discovery as outlined in these papers, and we are

(08:14):
awaiting further data that may help us to unravel what
exactly this could represent. Now there was a really excellent
article that deserves mentioned, and this was written by Jonathan
O'Callaghan over at Scientific American. They talk about Beatrice and
some of her research, some of the pushback that she's
gotten as well. But they quote Adam Frank in the article.

(08:34):
He's an astronomer who's joined us on the podcast here
in the past. We've used him as a source for
articles we've reported there at the debrief and in a
quote he provided for the Scientific American article, Frank said, quote,
I think there are many in the UFO community who
really want to know what's going on. I think it
is worthwhile for us to have these open, transparent investigations. This,

(08:54):
in other words, the ongoing dialogue about these new papers
by Beatrice and doctor Bruell and others. This, he says,
is a great way to show people how science works.
And again I agree. They go into some of the
research behind these papers, which we'll discuss with doctor Brule
here in just a few minutes, but then later in
the article, they feature opinions from a number of experts

(09:14):
and from a range of different backgrounds with relation to
what is discussed in these papers. One of those experts
is Michael Wisher, a nuclear astrophysicist at the University of
Notre Dame in France, and with regard to the apparent
correlation between the appearance of these transients and nuclear testing,
Weisher says that quote, nuclear tests obviously have an impact
on the atmosphere, and so for his part, he looks

(09:36):
at this as potentially evidence of junk in the outer
atmosphere that could have resulted from nuclear testing. Bits of
metal and radioactive dust, which again they speculate in this
Scientific American article, could appear briefly as starlight bursts of
radiance to a telescope. Maybe not impossible, And I'll admit
I even entertained this idea myself when I was reading

(09:58):
these newly published papers. They also quote the former director
of AERO the Aul Doomin Anomaly Resolution Office, doctor Shankirkpatrick.
Here's what doctor Kirkpatrick told Scientific American with regard to
that possible nuclear connection. He says, taken together, that tells
me that these transients have both a solar and nuclear overlap.
The first thing that comes to mind is solar flare

(10:19):
radiation or ionized particle radiation from nuclear testing. In other words,
split second bursts of light in the upper atmosphere that
would manifest as a point source rather than a streak.
Another possible explanation scientific American reports here is high altitude balloons,
which were used to do nuclear monitoring. According to Shankirkpatrick,
he says, you're going to have a lot of those

(10:39):
around nuclear testing, and so if people see them, a
lot of people are going to report them. So maybe
that's a possibility too. I'll also note that over on
the metabunk website run by Mick West, there is a
thread about this, although it refers to the two papers
prior to their publication and peer review. So when these
were initially released, a lot of people were saying, well,

(11:02):
why release these papers if they hadn't been peer reviewed.
Of course, now we have overcome that issue, so noting
the timeline and the issue that was taken at that
time prior to peer review in publication, there's a lot
of discussion about that on the metabunk forum. Nonetheless, in
a post from August second, twenty twenty five, the user
Jaydog makes a very important observation I think where they

(11:26):
actually look at what could at least be another possible
interpretation for why there may be correlations between the appearances
of these transients in the study by Beatrice and Stephen
in their colleagues and nuclear testing. Essentially, what user Jaydog
argues is that these tests involving nuclear incidents were most

(11:48):
likely to take place on Tuesdays, and indeed the photographs
appearing in the Palomar collection also happened to coincide with
that day of the week. So it could be that
the day of the week that was chosen for some
of the testing and some of the photography that was
being done happened to coincide. And if there is indeed
some apparent correlation between nuclear testing and the appearances of

(12:09):
these transients, it might have to do with that. So
I didn't find that interesting. One more thing I also
had considered, and I remember talking with Beatrice about this
many years ago, the first time she and I ever
did an interview about the Vasco project, and this involved
the fact that right around the same time that these
images were being collected by the Palomar Observatory, we also

(12:30):
had the United States military looking at a lot of
what you might call esoteric possibilities at that time. More specifically,
they were interested in trying to find out if there
were any natural satellites orbiting Earth or what they called
moonlits at the time, and whether at some point in
the future an asteroid orbiting Earth might be used as

(12:51):
the site of a military base in space. It was
a pretty far out idea, but again the military had
been entertaining that possibility, and so what they had done
back in around nineteen fifty nine, two years after these images,
by the way, were collected that were used in the
recent studies. But Clyde Tombo, the guy who discovered Pluto,
was tasked by the US military to try and find

(13:12):
out if there were any artificial satellites, in other words,
asteroids in Earth's orbit encircling our planet at that time.
And there's a really interesting article from twenty thirteen that
appeared at the website of the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium,
and it makes some very important points on this possibility.
According to a portion of this article, they note quote

(13:35):
several faint objects were actually detected by Tombo and his team,
but all were either passing asteroids or even defects on
the photographic plates. Now I'll just point out many in
recent days have pointed out the possibility that some of
the objects in the Palomar Sky Survey imagery could just
be photographic defects. In fact, that's one of the leading

(13:57):
interpretations by the folks on the Metabunk four. Few, however,
have suggested that these could have been asteroids that would
have been barely visible at the time, but which nonetheless
might have been lurking out there. And so, as they
note in the article I'm referencing here, indeed there were
faint objects detected by Clyde Tombo back in nineteen fifty
nine while he was searching for moonlitz around planet Earth.

(14:19):
And so indeed, if Clyde Tombo and his team of
astronomers noticed those back then, it seems likely that any
long exposure photographs taken by the Palomar Observatory probably or
at least potentially could have also photographed some of those objects.
So I wonder if some of the moonlitz Clyde Tombo
had been looking for in nineteen fifty nine, or at
least objects similar to them, if those might not have

(14:42):
also appeared in the Palomar imagery. And then the last
point before we go ahead and jump into our conversation
with doctor Stephen Brule, wondering again how likely it is
that distant asteroids might actually reflect enough sunlight to be
able to be visible in photographs of this sort. I
decided just to check and see if there were any
recent example of asteroids that were photographed by, for instance,

(15:03):
amateur astronomers, and sure enough I have found some really
good examples. Won by Jonathan Ward, an astronomer and author,
really stood out to me because he was able to
use a mid grade nikon camera doing some backyard astronomy
photography one night, and he managed to photograph an asteroid
using his nikon camera in long exposure images that was

(15:26):
millions of miles away from Earth at the time it
was photographed. So maybe we shouldn't rule out asteroids as
one interpretation. But then again, we've heard all kinds of
other ones from people in recent days, photographic defects, possible
radiation after effects observed in the upper atmosphere, and that
idea even proposed by the former director of Aero. But

(15:46):
right now, when we come back here in a moment,
I want to jump into this conversation with one of
the co authors of the paper and hear what doctor
Stephen Brule of Vanderbilt University has to say about all this.
We're going to look at every aspect of this and
also the UAP discussion and how it relates when we
return on right here on the Micah Hanks program.

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Speaker 1 (18:03):
Welcome back, and this week we have some pretty major news.
Unexpected patterns have emerged in historical astronomical observations. A pair
of scientific papers that have recently undergone peer review have
now seen publication, and yes these have to do with UAP.

(18:25):
So I'm very excited to have one of the co
authors of both of these papers joining us this week.
Those two papers, by the way, which we will have
linked for the listeners in the show notes so that
you two can read these, those are titled Transients in
the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey may be associated with nuclear
testing and reports of unidentified anomalist phenomena that was published

(18:47):
in scientific reports. The other aligned multiple transient events in
the first Palomar Sky Survey, was published in the publications
of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Now, the latter
of those two papers has multiple authors. However, the two
authors of the first paper I mentioned there, who are

(19:07):
also contributors to both papers are doctor Beatrice V. Royal,
who has joined us in the past here on the
program and also who joins us right now, doctor Stephen Brule,
a friend and a colleague of mine and also a
professor of anesthesiology at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He
received his PhD in clinical psychology in nineteen ninety four.

(19:28):
He's also a member of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies, and,
as I mentioned, the co author of a series of
recent Pure Reviews studies, not just these two, but another
from earlier this year, all of which address how statistical
analysis of data potentially related to UAP may reveal new
insights into this phenomenon. So welcome to the program, doctor Bruel.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
How are you, sir, Very good, Thank you very much, Bikah.
It's great to be here.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
Always great to talk with you. You and I first met
probably two or three years ago at one of the
SCU events, and for the benefit of my listeners, i'll
let them know you were sitting right next to me,
and we immediately, I think, kind of hit things off,
and we were communicating that entire weekend, throughout the course
of all these lectures. And at that time you'd mentioned
that you had some interesting work you were doing. Fast

(20:14):
forward to earlier this year at the SCU conference there
in Huntsville, Alabama, and you gave an incredible talk about
a paper that you co authored with a couple of
our wonderful contributors there with the organization, Robert Powell and
Sarah Little, So I might say I wasn't surprised, but
I was extremely excited to see an additional edition from

(20:35):
you recently. One of these two papers titled Transients in
the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey maybe associated with nuclear testing
and reports of Unidentified anomalous Phenomena. You and of course
your co author, Beatrice V. Rowell, who's also been a
presenter at SCU, are the two co authors of this
and another paper with other colleagues. This is really quite

(20:57):
a moment, and I just want to commend you first
and say congratulates on the publication. Next, for those who
are eager to hear all about this, let's start with
your background. Can you tell folks a little about who
you are, what you do, and how you got into
studies like this?

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Sure, professionally by training, I am a clinical psychologist, and
one of the things that they emphasize in graduate school
for a clinical psychologist is research methodology, training and training
in statistics. So I did get some background in basic
research skills, but over time in my career I have

(21:33):
ended up really not so much working in psychology, but
working in biomedical research in the context of pain. And
I've been interested in the UAP topic since I was
probably about ten years old. I mean, just the idea
of life elsewhere in the universe and maybe that's what
the UFOs were was fascinating to me. But I had

(21:57):
spent time over the years reading about the topic, and
as I got more professional training, I started thinking, wouldn't
it be cool to do science on this? But I
really felt like the barrier was I had no idea
how to access any data that I could apply my
skills to to try to learn anything about UAP. And

(22:19):
it was actually that SCU meeting in twenty twenty four
when you and I first met that a couple of
talks there that were given, one by Beatrice Vril and
the other by Robert Powell kind of sparked my brain.
And I think I told you this the second most
talks were over. They got me thinking about opportunities to

(22:41):
use data sets that were existing to try to analyze
them statistically and learn something about UAP. Now I didn't
know it was going to lead to three papers in
the past year in peer reviewed scientific journals. Which just
amazes me that we've been able to do that. But
that's kind of how I got into this, trying to

(23:01):
do UAP science. And you know, I think the point
to make is nobody is trained to do UAP science.
There are no schools for this, so everybody who does
this is someone who's trained in another area who is
kind of learning to apply those skills on the UAP topic.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
That's a really important observation. A lot of people talk
about the science of UAP, but really currently we can
apply science and applications from other disciplines towards the study
of UAP, but we're still trying to really understand what
the phenomenon represents. You know, what branch of science is,
maybe an existing one it should go into, or if
it should deserve a whole new area of its own.

(23:41):
And so there are a lot of hurdles that we
have to overcome, I think, before we can really start
applying science of UAP broadly to this topic. To me,
the clearest path forward is the publication of peer reviewed
science papers that credibly and really to an extent I think,
also authoritatively based on the data that we have, present
what is known and how we can study that can

(24:03):
kind of provide a road in that for us. So
you're doing that, my friend, And again it's exciting for
me because from the moment we met, sitting next to
each other at a table there with Greg Bishop at
the event, and we're talking about this, and I'm seeing,
you know, the gears turning in your head, to now
three papers behind you and everybody's talking about all this.
It's so exciting to see the path you're on and

(24:24):
the work that you and some of our colleagues are doing. So,
you know, Steve, let's talk a little about this study,
the one that you and Beatrice have co authored. And
of course Beatrice has been on the program with is.
She is currently right now in Europe presenting at the
Soul Foundation conference, and we hope to have her back
on at some point too. But these two studies focused
primarily on the short lived starlike phenomena referred to as

(24:45):
transience that were captured before the launch of Sputnik or
other artificial satellites into space back in nineteen fifty seven.
So what first drew your attention, you and Beatrice to
this series of pre satellite sky survey anomalies and what
kinds of questions did you want to try and answer
or do you feel could be answered about a data
set that's several decades old like this.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Yeah. So I don't want to take credit for Beatrice's discovery,
but she had the brilliant idea when she was a
new professor. Actually, I think it was when she was
a post doc at the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics
and was realizing that there were years of old photographic

(25:28):
plates from observatories from the late forties and early fifties,
even before satellites. The first satellite was launched in nineteen
fifty seven, and there frequently were a series of photographs
of the same area of space over time, and these
had been scanned digitized, and she figured out how to

(25:51):
access these, and before I met her, what she had
done was started comparing these plates over time. This technique
in astronomy, it's called a blink comparator, where you rapidly
switch between two photographs of the same area, and our
brain is really good at immediately noticing anything different between

(26:14):
the plates and this data set from the Palomar Observatory
in California between I think it's November of nineteen forty
nine through April of nineteen fifty seven is the time
period we're looking at. What she found was that you

(26:35):
would have an area of the sky that had all
the stars you'd expect in the first image. Another image
from thirty minutes later, you would see all of those
stars plus an additional star or several stars, and they
look just like stars. They're point sources, they're not streaks.
But they appear in some cases quite dramatically, and then

(26:57):
images taken days, weeks, months, years later, they're gone in
every image. So it's literally a single image where these appear,
these starlike objects and then they're gone. And she got
intrigued by this and started systematically studying this and working
with some colleagues in Spain, they systematically processed all these

(27:17):
images and identified more than one hundred thousand cases where
these transients that occurred in various parts of the sky
on dates between those two dates I just mentioned.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
Yeah, this is remarkable stuff. And you know, again in
the past, I will refer the listener to an instance
where Beatrice joined us on the program and we discussed
the Vasco project, the Vanishing Stars enigma. In the show notes,
I'll also have linked a couple of articles that Beatrice
has contributed to our website thedbrief dot org, where she
has documented not only this ongoing research project, but also

(27:52):
some of the correlations that Steve, I'd love to get
your perspectives on here, because in the paper, some of
these possi or palamars were sometimes seen in clusters, as
you mentioned, which included on nights adjacent to the nineteen
fifty two Washington DCUFO wave. Now, Beatrice has spoken about
this a good bit, but in terms of, especially within

(28:14):
your purview of playing statistical analysis to these kinds of sightings,
what were some of the significant factors that emerged from
this study with regard to that famous incident.

Speaker 2 (28:26):
Yeah, so this is really why I got into doing
this research, was listening to Beatrice's talk on this, and
that's what you just mentioned, the coincidence of what she
calls a bright triple transient. These are three very bright
starlike objects all in a line in the same image

(28:46):
that fell on the date of one of those well
known Washington DCUFO incidents. And she kind of tentatively said, well,
this is intriguing this correspondence with this date. But I
talked to her. I actually reached out to her via
email and then we ended up having a zoom meeting,

(29:06):
and what I asked her was have you ever systematically
looked at this association between UAPs and the transience? And
she said that she hadn't, and we started discussing it,
and I said that I had found a large database
called ufocat that was originally started as part of the

(29:27):
Condon study back in the nineteen sixties that has been
maintained and added to and has you know, several hundred
thousand UAP sighting reports, including some over this period of
time between nineteen forty nine and nineteen fifty seven. So
I suggested to her that maybe we could look systematically
whether there are associations between the appearance of transience or

(29:50):
the number of transients and UAP sightings from the ground
that are in this ufocat database. So it's basically taking
this one off off correspondence on this particular data in
Washington and say saying, let's see if this generalizes to
other dates as well. And so we embarked on that,

(30:12):
and she is a great collaborator. I have to say,
I really enjoy working with her. She's a great person.
But she was totally on board for doing this. She
gave me access to their large transient data set, and
I pulled the UFOCT database onto my computer and started

(30:32):
the process and trying to clean it and process it
and get it all integrated into a single database. And
in the process of doing that, it started occurring to
me that it would be really interesting from a validation
perspective of the reality of these transients if we could
show that they correspond with other things that were contemporaneous.

(30:54):
And the biggest thing that occurred to me was based
on reading a book called UFOs and Nukes by Robert Hastings,
which describes numerous anecdotal reports of people who were involved
as scientists or military personnel during above ground nuclear tests
in the late forties and fifties who had said that

(31:17):
they saw UAP around the time of the test, sometimes
you know, during the test, sometimes before, sometimes after. Nobody
had ever as far as I'm aware, statistically looked at
whether these were you know, real sightings and statistically verifiable,
and I realized we could look at whether these above

(31:40):
ground nuclear tests were associated with the appearance of transients.
So we had three data sets. We had the transient
data set. We had the UFO CAT data set of sightings,
and then I was able to pull from the Department
of Energy and the Internet all the dates of the
nuclear tests between forty nine and fifty seven, and I

(32:04):
created a database that linked all three of these together.
So essentially what we ended up with was a database
with over two thousand days between those two dates, and
for each day, we coded was there a transient that day,
how many transients were noted that day, how many UAP
sightings were noted that day? And then was there a

(32:27):
nuclear test that day? And not to be long winded
about this, but the original plan was to try to
use AI to clean the data sets in hopes of
increasing the signal to noise ratio, right, because we assumed
that there's errors in the transient identifications, errors in UAP reports,

(32:51):
and it was taking a very long time. So one
day I thought, you know, let's just take a look
and see if there's actually anything in there, any associations
and what I was interested in at that point, since
the anecdotal reports were not consistent in indicating whether the
UAP were cited before the test, during the test, or after.

(33:14):
I created a variable that was like a window for
nuclear testing plus or minus one day of the nuclear test,
and we ran an analysis of that and association with
whether or not a transient occurred that day, and I
have to admit I was shocked because it was highly
statistically significant. I think the number was it would correspond

(33:36):
to eight chances out of a thousand for this to
be a mistake, you know, mistaken correlation. And dug into
it further, and what was even more astounding was that
the strongest association was between UAP sorry transience occurring the

(34:00):
day after a nuclear test, and in that particular case,
it was actually the likelihood of seeing a transient was
sixty eight percent higher than normal on the day after
a nuclear test, which is highly statistically significant, and I

(34:21):
thought it was fascinating how specific the timing was to that,
and you could one other way to look at it
that kind of helps put it in context, is only
eleven percent of the days when a nuclear test didn't
occur was there a transient scene. So eleven percent if

(34:42):
no nuclear test, it was actually nineteen percent of days
after a nuclear test you saw a transient. So that
difference between eleven and nineteen is really the signal we're
interested in.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
I would say so again our guest right now, doctor
Stephen Brule, Professor of Anasthesiology a Vanderbilt University School of Medicine,
and also someone who is applying some incredible insights to
UAP studies right now, and he is one of the
co authors of a recent pair of papers, but that
is by no means his only recent contribution in the

(35:14):
form of pure reviewed research. We've got so much more
to discuss with doctor Steve Brule when we return right
here on the Micah Hanks program.

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Speaker 1 (37:08):
Transients in the data, specifically transience in the Palomar Observatory
sky survey and why our guests, doctor Steve Brule and
his colleagues think these may be associated with nuclear testing
and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena. Yeah, we're having quite

(37:30):
a conversation and we're going to get back into that
here in a moment. First, I want to remind you
if you aren't already an ex subscriber, you're only getting
half the story every week. Of course, we have additional dispatches.
They go out to subscribers and you can find out
all about how to sign up and become a recipient
of those weekly additional additions over at Micah Hanks dot com,

(37:52):
Forward slash x and this week our guest, doctor Steve
Brule of Vanderbilt University is also one of the co
authors of a pair of papers that underwent scientific peer
review before publication. But I also want to emphasize the
fact that there was a very comprehensive peer review process
by people who were by no means in some instances

(38:14):
pro UAP per se. They were not necessarily advocates of
UAP studies or its appearance in scientific peer review papers
and in various publications like those which have recently featured
these two papers. So putting that all out there, I
want to underscore the significance of the papers we're discussing

(38:35):
and the fact that they went through an unbiased critique
by peer reviewers and still made their way into publication.
Those papers are what we're discussing, and one of the
co authors of these two papers joins us. Now, so
getting back into this conversation here, Steve, how can we
determine specifically that the relationship here is more than just coincidence.

(38:55):
Let's talk about those numbers that you were giving us
a second ago. I think, by one estimate, this is
looking at somewhere in the neighborhood and correct me if
I'm wrong, whatever, around forty five percent more likely that
we are going to see these transients appear within one
day of a nuclear test? Am I correct on that?

Speaker 2 (39:12):
Yeah? For that nuclear window, that's correct.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah. So looking at the data, what to the person
maybe who doesn't study statistics or doesn't understand, you know,
what is required for statistical significance with these numbers? What
does this data communicate to us? And why is it
more than just coincidence?

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Well, in terms of statistics, what we're really doing is
testing whether that that number that you just said is
different than zero, right, So if there's no association, it
would be zero increased chance, and you know, what we're
finding is a you know, obviously a much higher chance

(39:52):
of that happening in a nuclear testing window. And in
the statistical test it ended up being probability value of
less than point eight, which means there was only eight
chances out of a thousand that our determination that it
was not zero was correct. Right, So it's basically statistically

(40:15):
proving that the association was different from zero, meaning that
there really was an association. That's the statistical side of it.
The other side of it is there are many plausible
reasons you could throw out for what these things might
actually be. The transience might be that could explain an

(40:36):
association with a nuclear test. And as matter of fact,
I had a person write me after this was published,
who's from Germany, who suggested this, and what he said was,
could it be possible that the bomb itself went it
exploded through material from the bomb into space, and that's

(40:56):
what's causing the transience. Now, that is a perfectly reasonable
thing to think about, and we had to evaluate all
those options in this case. The two critical issues were
is that if that had happened and we threw some
bomb material like chunks of metal that somehow survived, and
threw it into space for them to appear as they

(41:20):
appear in the photographs of the transience, they would have
had to have been thrown to geosynchronous orbit, which is
about twenty two thousand miles out. And it is simply
not plausible that from Earth with a simple nuclear blast,
you're going to eject material into geosynchronous orbit.

Speaker 4 (41:37):
Right.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
I can't say one hundred percent that can happen, but
very unlikely. The other thing that could have happened, though,
is we could have thrown bomb material into the sky
at a lower orbit and it somehow stayed there for
a day to be seen as a transient later. And
that is very unlikely because for that to account for

(41:58):
our results, the material that had been thrown up would
have to somehow be moving constantly for up to twenty
four hours at exactly the same speed that the stars
move around the Earth relative to the Earth. Because the
photographic plates are not streaks, right, Anything that moves over

(42:18):
a fifty minute exposure would be a streak unless it's
moving at exactly the same speed as the stars appear
to move across the sky. And what we see is
point sources. And it is very implausible again that material
thrown up from the bomb blast, which is not powered
by anything, would be able to keep up exactly the
right speed to appear as a point source. So that's

(42:41):
how we ruled out that explanation. And I think you
and I had talked about this briefly about the something
along the lines of Charonkov radiation, right, which is it's
a glow that can occur in water or air that
is related to radiation, and it actually requires material going

(43:07):
the speed of light, So you have to have an
enormous amount of energy to get to that speed. So
the speed of light and water is lower than the
speed of light and air. But to do it in air,
you'd have to have super energetic particles, so like very
high energy cosmic rays, and the nuclear blast is not
plausibly creating something like that. And the other issue is

(43:29):
it would be a more diffuse glow, so what we'd
see is kind of a cloud looking thing that's glowing
rather than a very distinct point source over fifty minutes.
So for that reason, we didn't think that it was
something like some strange form of radiation glow that was
remaining after the test. And the one other thing we

(43:51):
thought about, which the debunkers love to harp on this,
is these are just defects on the photographic plates, right,
you know, it's a radiation contamination on the plate, which
is not the case. It can't be that because that
will create a very distinct, cloudy appearance to the plate,

(44:12):
which is not apparent. The other thing is if it's
a dust spec a smudge something like that, that does
happen sometimes, but if that were the case, there would
be no reason for the transients to appear correlated with
UAP sightings from the ground and with these nuclear tests

(44:35):
so strongly.

Speaker 1 (44:36):
Yeah, that's pretty baffling. So now to kind of break
this down again, an important factor I think to emphasize
here is that the objects, the transients that appear in
some of these images, that are there and then they're gone,
these are essentially consistent with the appearances of stars, the
problem of course being that they are not always in
these images over time, so temporarily they are in concern.

(45:01):
But in terms of their appearance when they show up,
they are more consistent with stars. Whereas, of course a
moving object closer to Earth, much closer to Earth again
when compared with a star at its distance stellar distances,
I mean that object is going to appear as a
line in these because again these exposures will show the
movement of the object in Earth orbit. Now, presumably any
shratnel from a nuclear explosion, if it were metallic or

(45:22):
otherwise and capable of reflecting light, it also is going
to be close enough that movement will be demonstrated. We
didn't see any of that. All we saw were objects
that are most similar to stars, more so than what
you would expect from in a radiation sources. If they
were present in the sky as a result of a
explosion or also from the kind of contaminants that might

(45:43):
cause you know, glitches or impurities in the frames themselves.
Am I correct?

Speaker 2 (45:49):
That is all correct. It's an excellent summary of what
the issues are. I want to add one thing also,
Beatrice and I have another paper that came out simultaneously
an astronomy journal, and there's one critical finding in that
paper that really highlights the reality of these transients, which

(46:10):
is when we were going through peer review, we had
set it out and they had had other astronomers and
scientists review the paper and critique it, and one of
those reviewers had said, well, this is ridiculous, and if
these were real, you'd see fewer of them in the
Earth's shadow, which Beatrice hadn't looked at yet. So she

(46:33):
goes back to the data and calculates all this, and
sure enough, you see all these transients in the sunlight,
but when you get into the Earth's shadow, the number
of transients drops dramatically, exactly like you would expect if
these are reflective objects that are in orbit.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
That's really interesting. Now again, that guess is described in
the adjacent paper you were referencing there, which is titled
aligned multiple Transient Events. The first Palimore Sky survey, which,
of course there were multiple additional authors on that, too
many to name right now, but I'll have that link
so that folks can read that that appeared in the
publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, but again

(47:13):
in Earth's Shadow. The significance there would be that if
these were merely stars or some other kind of celestial
phenomena and there were light emanating from them, Earth's shadow
will have no effect on those. So it seems to
be suggesting, very plainly, based on what you're describing, Steve,
that we're talking about objects near enough to Earth that
they reflect sunlight, and that when they meet Earth's shadow

(47:36):
that sunlight is no longer reflected. And that, I mean again,
sounds very much like objects in orbit, doesn't it.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Absolutely. And the other thing she reports in that paper
is that these objects in many cases aligne on a
nearly perfect line. So you might get three, four or
five transients that appear in a line, and the likelihood
that that line of perfectly like that what happened by chance,

(48:03):
if these were just random things in space, is very
very small.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
That's really interesting. Obviously, there are probably still a lot
of questions that remain about this, and you know, based
on the point at which you entered this study with Beatrice,
and I again, I agree with your assessment of her
as far as being a collaborator, since she's contributed to
articles to the debrief from the past. She's a wonderful
person to work with and also just has a great
mind when it comes to you know, the ingenuity and

(48:31):
how she applies her skill set toward all this. But
I imagine that based on some of these observations, some
new questions probably arose as well. And one thing I
would like to ask you is what kinds of new
research questions maybe have come out already of this current study.
Are there things you're already digging into her that you
plan to look at in the future.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Well, a couple of things we're thinking about. One is
again we know, Well, let me back up. When I
started working with Beatrice, she taught me how to manually
go in and find transience. So I learned the process,
how to access the data sets, how to compare them,
and so I started manually going through some of these transients.

(49:15):
And it's clear that in a few cases these are errors,
like the computerized system that was detecting the transience made
a mistake, and that doesn't take anything away from the
many real transients, but I know there's a portion of
these that are errors, and one of our thoughts was
to use AI to systematically go through and do a

(49:37):
better job of weeding out those errors, so we get
a data set that is more pure, more signal. And
what that does is it makes it easier for us
to detect associations with other things, and so we've talked
with someone about doing that. It hasn't gotten very far
yet because it's fairly complicated. The other issue that we've

(49:59):
talked to Ballot is all of the data so far
from one observatory like Mount Palomar Observatory in California. There
are many other observatories around the world, like the Vatican
Observatory and others that were existent in the forties and
fifties that have plates, similar plates but taken from other locations,

(50:23):
and if we could manage to get those digitized and
get access to those, we could apply the same process
to these independent data sets and try to confirm that,
for example, that nuclear tests were associated with transients noted
in these other locations.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
That is so exciting, and again I hope that happens
in the years ahead. I really do, because it seems
to me like this is such an exciting approach, and
sometimes that's what you need. Sometimes we hear all the
time about how an anthropology or paleontology, there will be
a discovery that's maybe decades or even a couple of
centuries old. It's been sitting in the or someplace, misidentified

(51:02):
or maybe completely unidentified, and eventually a researcher comes along,
looks at it and says, hold on, wait, we thought
this was a turtle shell or something, and it turns
out to be a unique species of ancient plant or
something along those lines. And so a new discovery could
be awaiting us, and it's already in a data set
sitting someplace. We just need to go and look at
the data and properly interpret it. And that's what I'm

(51:23):
seeing here. I'm seeing very much the case where we
have historical data on astronomy that is so very important
because it documents how our skies looked before they were
completely cluttered with artificial objects. These days, I would hazard
to guess it would be very difficult to conduct a
study like this, considering how much junk we've got in
space if possible at all.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
Right, Beaterest has talked about trying to do that, and
I think it's one of these things that in theory
might be possible that even given satellites that nobody acknowledges,
which would be hard to control for, it makes it
very difficult to accomplish that. So, yeah, what we're left
with this data that's seventy years old that people just
haven't looked at yet. I do want to make one

(52:05):
other comment though, if we're talking about trying to do
science in this area, is Beatrice is fortunate because she
had the Swedish government actually fund a study with the
research grant that in part is intended to look at
these transients, So her time is paid for it to
look at this. People like me or any other scientists

(52:27):
that are wanting to work in this area are essentially
donating their time like nights and weekends. And I literally
to write that draft of that paper that just got published,
I spent ten hours a day for seven days straight
and takes a lot of time and effort, which I'm
happy to do because I find this so exciting, But
it would be really helpful to get more scientists involved

(52:50):
if there were funding available to kind of buy a
portion of their professional time to devote to this topic,
and to date that hasn't happened.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
Yes, I hope, And again, this is something you and
I've talked about, you know, when we've been at the
SEU events, and it's something that we so badly need.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
People.

Speaker 1 (53:08):
I can't emphasize what Steve just said enough. That is
so important, the fact that folks like you devote hours
and weeks of your time and that you're able to
do this. Again, I hope this paper ends up being
recognized as a historic advancement in this field. But remember, folks,
people like Steve putting his time, his spare time, what
little you know, professionals like he and I have putting

(53:30):
that time into this and that work behind this is
what this takes. I hope that at some point this
kind of work will pave the way toward their being
funding for serious UAP studies, and again that will advance
us toward there being a real science of this. But
part of this phenomena that we're talking about and the
way that it's being studied right now, it goes a

(53:51):
little deeper into this. But of course our guest doctor
Steve Rule of Vanderbilt University knows a lot about this,
and so when we come back, we're going to go
in that. Where else does this data take us? What
can we learn from it? Right here on the Micah
Hanks program.

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Speaker 1 (55:33):
UAP data science. What are the implications and future research
potentials from what we're hearing about here with our guest
doctor Steve Brule a Vanderbilt University. And ultimately I would
ask what do these findings tell us about the potential
of treating UAP research as a formal empirical science rather
than what many see it as being just a collection

(55:54):
of interesting stories. And so we're having quite a discussion
about these two recently published papers, also another paper that
doctor Brule had co authored earlier this year. So diving
right back into things right there, I want to kind
of move in that direction with things for a moment here,
because earlier this year at the Scientific Coalition for UAP
Studies conference there in Huntsville, you and I've attended a

(56:16):
couple of those together now and had a chance to
catch up and talk a lot about this. But your
lecture this year, and I told you this months ago
when we were there in Huntsville. This really impressed me
because you and Robert Powell, one of our executive directors,
and also Sarah Little, one of our science advisors there
with SCU. You got together and you did a very
unique cluster analysis of historical reports. Now, fundamentally, I want

(56:39):
to start with this. A lot of people would say
UFO reports are just UFO reports. I have a lot
of reasons why I differ on that point. I think
there are more than just stories. I think a lot
of useful data can be extracted from these. But in
your opinion, why can we demonstrate or how can we demonstrate?
I should say that UAP historical data based on eyewitness

(57:00):
reports is valuable to science.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
Yeah, So to preface this, I have to kind of
explain how this all happened. Please, So Robert Powell and
a group of co authors had decided to try to
create a database of highly curated witness reports so we

(57:24):
know for a fact, I mean, I think everybody in
this area agrees that approximately ninety percent of witness reports
are mistaken interpretations of natural phenomenon or prosaic objects. But
there is a remaining, you know, seven to ten percent
that are real anomalous things. And Robert and his colleagues

(57:45):
decided to try to go through several well known databases
like the Guipon database in France, the Blue Book database,
Moufon database and a couple of others, and they decided
to go through and manually inspect all of these reports
and apply strict criteria to maximize the chance that the

(58:07):
report was a real anomalous object and not a mistake
to the extent that you can do that with kind
of existing reports. And they went through I think it
was about one hundred thousand cases manually, which is a
lot of work, and they winted it down to about
three hundred and one witness reports that they had high
confidence were from reliable observers of real anomalous objects. Right.

(58:33):
So Robert presented a talk summarizing the results of this
at the SCU meeting, and it was applying very simple
statistics like just percentages of things and kind of manually
trying to note patterns that they might see, and that
pattern recognition. You know, humans are actually pretty good at that,

(58:56):
that's what our brains do. But we also see patterns
when they're not really there, which kind of confuses things
and sometimes hurts our ability to see what's really going on.
So what occurred to me is I was listening to
this talk, it was just like the talk that Beatrice
gave I started thinking, I wonder if could apply a

(59:16):
statistical procedure that I've used in the past called cluster
analysis to identify patterns in these well cleaned data. And
I talked to Robert afterwards and suggested this, and he said, yeah,
we'd thought about that, but no one knew how to
do cluster analysis. And I said, well, I do, and
I've actually published using it before in the biomedical context.

(59:38):
So we decided to go back to that data set
and clean it a bit more and then apply this
statistical pattern recognition technique. And essentially what it does, I
think I used this analogy at the SEU meeting was like,
if you have apples and pears and oranges and they're

(59:59):
all mixed together, and I tell the cluster analysis, I
want you to classify these by color and shape, and
you run it. If it works properly, what we would
get is one basket that is all apples, one basket
that's oranges, and another one that is pairs, right, And

(01:00:20):
that's what we were applying to the UAP data. And
the advantage of the particular statistical technique we used, which
was called two step cluster analysis, is that it avoids
the problem of our expectations as scientists influencing what the
results are because many forms of cluster analysis, you basically

(01:00:44):
have to tell the computer how many clusters you want
to generate, which immediately puts bias into the solution that
you get. But with two step cluster analysis, what like,
we used the computer itself decides how many clusters are
best and then runs the analysis and assigns each case

(01:01:04):
to the cluster that it most closely resembles. And when
we did that with this data set, it's said that
we had seven different clusters that were all distinct. And
the critical issue is that each cluster the case is
assigned to. Each cluster are very similar amongst themselves and
characteristics of the UAP, but each of those clusters is

(01:01:27):
very distinct from all the other clusters. And you mentioned
at the very beginning of this about the possibility that
all witness reports are just garbage, right, it's just random noise.
And if that had been the case when we ran
this cluster analysis, there's a particular statistic called an average

(01:01:49):
Silhouette value that if it's low, it means it's random,
and the cutoff typically used is point five. If it
has to be point five or higher to be non random.
We were actually point six, which is substantially higher than
that cutoff. And the interpretation of that is that these
witness reports had real information, they weren't garbage, they weren't random,

(01:02:13):
and that the results of the cluster analysis could actually
be interpreted as telling us something about patterns in UAP data. Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. The idea
that a person seeing something and providing a vivid description,
I mean, they may interpret it one way and the
data may yield something else. But the idea that that
data is useless again, that's always baffled me. There seems
like there's a wealth of data. But now using statistical
analysis and the cluster analysis process you're talking about to

(01:02:43):
extract that data and reveal not only that this data
appears to be reliable, but also these consistencies in different
types and other kinds of things that can be derived.
That's just incredible to me. And yet again the statistical
significance I think is also important based on your analysis
of those cases, Correct me if I'm wrong. But Steve,
the data seemed to indicate that these were again maybe

(01:03:06):
a few points higher than the average baseline for statistical significance.
Am I right?

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
They were all the difference between the clusters on the
features we looked at were in many cases highly significant statistically.
And the critical issue though, is that silhouette value. It's
high enough that we can actually say with confidence that
statistically there were in this data set seven different identifiable

(01:03:33):
types of UAP. And by type, I don't just mean shape.
I mean that's typically how we think about it, is
just different shapes of UAP. But in our study we
actually look not only at shape but also size, whether
or not the object was able to hover, whether it
was associated with sound, and whether it had any electro

(01:03:53):
magnetic effects like stopping car engines or radio interference that
kind of.

Speaker 1 (01:03:59):
Thing, right, So, in other words, in addition to their appearance,
which is also a physical characteristic, but also all these
different factors, including effects on the environment, which again I
will note, are a series of trends that we might
say emerge from historical data collected about this, which I
think is really important that we're applying science toward because

(01:04:22):
right now many would say, well, you know, there's UFO
history and mythology and all the books that have been
written about this stuff. And now we've got our All
Domain Anomaly Resolution Office and they have curated very carefully
a few hundred reports, maybe a couple of thousand UAP reports. Meanwhile,
I'm looking at a lot of the old guard we
might say, in ufology, who've been doing this for a

(01:04:43):
long time, doctor Mark Rodiger of the Center for UFO Studies,
Robert Powell, and Rich Hoffman from SCU. They're saying, guys,
we've had data for a very long time that often
reveals characteristics that are significantly prevalent. I'd say, in Arrow's data,
the number of racal UAP reports, the different kinds of
signatures that they are emitting, the effects that they have

(01:05:05):
on the environment. And so the fact that with these
well curated cases, you're describing some of those same qualities
within these seven types that were produced in this analysis,
I mean that to me seems significant.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
One might also imagine that if we applied this even
more broadly toward a larger data set, once it's been curated, cleaned,
and then analyzed in this way. I mean, with all
that historical data, surely there would be additional information we
might be able to glean right.

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
Totally, And I think the dream would be to be
able to access Bigelow's Big database that Jacques Valat created
the data warehouse which compiled stuff from all over the
world and translated the cases into English and kind of
systematized it, which as far as I know, has never

(01:05:57):
been looked at. That's my understanding, But I mean that
kind of data set would be absolutely perfect for clubs
for analysis or other kinds of machine learning techniques to identify,
you know, meaningful patterns in the data.

Speaker 1 (01:06:11):
Oh absolutely. And let me just say here, as we're
closing out your time and the time that you have
put into this and the volunteering that you do both
with regard to this subject for personal reasons and also
as part of seu's efforts and what have you, it
is appreciated. And I think that the culmination of this
in these two recent peer reviewed papers, but also the
one earlier this year that you and Robert and Sarah

(01:06:34):
did that really speaks a lot. It speaks volumes, and
it's more than many have done over the years in
terms of helping to advance this topic. So it's really
important work you're doing. And I'll just kind of end
by asking you given that there is a proof of
concept being demonstrated here and actually a couple and further
that this is also seeing peer review and making its
way into significant science publications. What do you hope to

(01:06:58):
see going forward with this and what do you hope
to encourage or inspire other scientists to do who may
have a similar interest.

Speaker 2 (01:07:06):
I like to think about it this way, and this
occurred to me as I was kind of trying to
do a literature search as background for some of these papers.
I looked, and I may not be exact on this,
but I think there are somewhere around five UAP related
studies in high level peer reviewed journals anywhere period historically

(01:07:31):
right five. So if you think about that, if you
devote your time to doing UAP science and managed to
publish a paper, you have increased UAP knowledge in the
peer reviewed literature by twenty percent right now. Anywhere else
in science you were never going to have that big
an impact. And I do think that the barrier to

(01:07:55):
engaging in this for scientists part of it is fears
about stigma, which I certainly shared. They improved after that
two ty seventeen New York Times article, but there, you know,
they were still there I spoke with the chairman of
my department because I was worried that they would discover
I was doing this and would have a problem with it.

(01:08:17):
And I was quite shocked when I told him I
was doing this, and his only response was, well, you're
applying scientific methods to it. That's a valid thing to study.
And I said, well, I won't use Vanderbilt's name then,
because I don't want to embarrass him, and he goes, no,
go ahead, that's fine. It is a legitimate science. So
it's like, I think people might be surprised that there
isn't as much stigma as you would.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Expect that inspire, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:40):
I was just that's the main point. And I do
think though that this is a labor of love at
this point because you're not going to be reimbursed for it.
And if you have interests in the topic, though, I
would suggest that you reach out to people who are
doing work you're interested in and just talk with them.
You might find, just like I did when I contacted

(01:09:00):
Beatrice out of the blue, that these people are willing
to work with you and there might actually be a
project you can.

Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
Do, absolutely and a meaningful one also. So doctor Stephen
Brule again, thank you so much for the work you're doing,
and that I extend to our friend and colleague Beatrice
as well. And I'm sure that you and I have
much more to discuss in the future, and I look
forward to future publications as well. Thanks Micah, and thank
you to Beatrice Vrol of course, who is right now
currently speaking at the Sole Foundation conference in Europe, hence

(01:09:28):
why she couldn't join us for this conversation. But we
will catch up with Beatrice in the future. She's been
at this for a couple of years now. I'm glad
to see this work is paying off and some of
her findings now going through the peer review process and
appearing in science journals. Rest assured there will be more
exciting things to come. I have no doubts, but for

(01:09:51):
right now, that wraps up this installment of the podcast.
As always, thank you for being here and I will
remain yours truly, Micah Hanks. Until next time, Stay Strange Air.