A camera goes down 240 ft into a hole in the Utah desert.
Its lights burning and the screen shows nothing at all.
[music] Not darkness, not shadow, nothing.
As though the lens has been wrapped in cloth.
The technicians check the cable.
[music] They check the lamps.
Everything is drawing power.
Everything is intact.
[music] And still no light comes back up the hole.
And then from somewhere inside that black [music] small points of light begin to appear and disappear one after another like something down there is transmitting.
The man watching that feed is Brandon Fugal who owns Skinwalker Ranch 512 acres of northeastern Utah that he bought in 2016 with money he made in commercial real estate and which he has since spent a great deal more of trying to explain.
Beside him [music] is Dr.
Travis Taylor, an astrophysicist and aerospace engineer who has become the public face of this investigation and who has now spent six seasons being asked to put a number on things that refuse to be [music] numbered.
What came back up out of that hole, metal fragments, elemental readouts, a core sample, and three aerial photographs that do not agree with each other is now sitting in university laboratories.
[music] Some of it has been through a mass spectrometer.
Some of it has been lowered into liquid nitrogen.
So, here is the question this video exists to answer.
And I want you to hold it because the answer is quieter and stranger than the title promises.
When the team finally broke into the mesa, [music] did they open a tunnel or did they open something that had been sealed deliberately from the outside in?
Because there is a detail buried in the middle of this episode that almost nobody talks [music] about.
It is not the object.
It is not the readings.
It is a single sentence spoken by the owner of the ranch on a video call [music] in which he gives the team permission to go deeper and then attaches one condition to it.
That condition is the reason this story ends the way it does.
To understand why a drill rig was standing on that messa at all, you have to start with a piece of metal smaller than a thumbnail.
Archaeologist Chris Roberts had been sweeping the spoil pile.
The pile of cutings and slurry that comes back up out of a bore hole [music] with a magnet.
And in that pile, he found a coin, a nickel, dated 1964.
On its own, that sounds like nothing.
A piece of pocket change in the dirt.
But in archaeology, a coin is not trivia.
A coin is a date stamp.
When an object is deliberately placed in a site, it marks a moment in time.
And it tells you that human hands were there and roughly when.
So the question the team immediately asked was not what a nickel was doing in the Utah desert.
The question was what a 1964 nickel was doing coming up out of material pulled from deep inside a messa that has no recorded excavation history.
Either it fell there recently or it was left there on purpose by someone who wanted to know if anyone came back.
That was strange enough.
Then Eric Bard, the principal investigator, went looking through the archive and pulled [music] three aerial photographs of the mesa.
One from 1961, [music] one from 1963, one from 1969.
The first two agree with each [music] other.
The terrain matches, the shadow lines match, the texture of the ground matches.
[music] The third one does not.
In the 1969 image, there is a patch where the surface of the mesa appears blurred, [music] smudged, softened, as though something has been painted over it or retouched out of the [music] frame.
Now, let me be fair here because this is exactly the kind of detail that gets overplayed.
Aerial survey photography from the 1960s was not perfect.
Film could be damaged.
Negatives could be scratched.
A print could be doctorred for reasons that had nothing to do with aliens, cloud removal, crop markings, survey annotations.
A single soft patch in a 60-year-old photograph is not proof of a cover up, but it is a question, and it is a question that arrived in the same episode as the coin, which means the team now had two separate threads pointing at the same idea that somebody at some point [music] had an interest in this specific piece of ground, which fed directly into Dr.
Taylor’s working hypothesis that what is buried inside this mea is a craft, not a [music] metaphor, not a folk story, a manufactured object, possibly from the early space age [music] that came down in the Uenta basin and was recovered in a way that left no public record.
And here is why that hypothesis has survived six seasons of ridicule.
Because if something came down and was quietly taken away, the recovery would leave paperwork.
It would leave a chain of custody, a shipping manifest, a property transfer, a photograph that somebody wished they had not taken.
A coverup is not magic.
A coverup is administration, and administration leaves marks.
If the record had been altered, somebody decided this ground was worth lying about.
And that is a different kind of mystery than lights in the sky.
It is a mystery with a filing cabinet.
So they went back to the mesa and this [music] time they sent a camera down.
The rig was set up over bore hole 2 and the camera was mounted to the drill head and lowered 240 ft into the ground.
The feed came back up to the monitors in the command trailer and the feed was empty, not dim, [music] not grainy, empty.
The lights on the camera were functioning.
[music] They were drawing current.
And yet the walls of the bore hole did not appear.
The crew went through it the way you would.
[music] They checked the lighting.
They checked the lens.
They checked the cable for a break.
Everything came back nominal.
The instrument was working.
The light simply was not returning.
[music] And then the specks appeared.
Small bright transient points flickering across the frame, appearing and vanishing at irregular intervals as though the sensor were being struck by something.
Dr.
Taylor’s interpretation was specific, and it is worth stating precisely [music] because it is a hypothesis rather than a conclusion.
Gamma radiation, he suggested, striking the camera’s focal plane.
High energy photons interacting with the imaging sensor produce exactly this signature.
Isolated bright pixels that flare and disappear with no light source in the scene to explain them.
If that reading is correct, then the camera was not failing.
The camera was being irradiated.
Then they moved to bore hole one and the resistance became physical.
At 450 ft, the drill snagged.
The team pulled the bit [music] and the side teeth came back chewed down.
Not worn, not blunted by ordinary sandstone, but eaten away in a pattern that suggested something harder than the bit had been in contact with it.
They tried to recover the pulling eye, [music] the component that lets the rig haul the string back out.
It would not move, not down, not up, not in either direction.
They ended up chaining a semitr to the rig to generate enough pull to break it free.
And this is where the episode stops being about instruments and starts being about force.
Not a shape in the dark, not a shadow on a thermal camera.
[music] Force measurable in metal that has been eaten, in cable that will not move.
[music] In a machine built to destroy rock being asked to do something it was never designed for and failing at it.
Whatever was down there was not passive.
It was answering.
Then came the payload.
A PVC casing was finally run to depth and for the first time the team had a stable pipe into the mesa that they could lower instruments through.
Two of them went down.
The first was Dr.
Jan Franka’s [music] ground penetrating radar, a system that sends electromagnetic pulses into the ground and reads the reflections [music] the way sonar reads water.
The second was Sam Disso’s sled carrying a magnetometer and a radiation sensor [music] logging the ambient magnetic field in the radiation environment as it descended.
Two instruments, [music] two completely different physical principles.
Radar measures dialectric contrast, [music] the boundary between one material and another.
A magnetometer measures distortion in the Earth’s magnetic field.
[music] If one of them returns an anomaly, you have an interesting reading.
If both of them return an anomaly at the same depth [music] in the same place, you have a feature.
And that is what came back.
The magnetometer logged a disturbance in the local magnetic field.
The radar returned a signature consistent with a roughly 6- ft thick object near the 270 ft mark, and both of them pointed at the same coordinates.
Meanwhile, Dr.
Taylor was running a handheld spectrum analyzer across the site, and it spiked 1.6 6 GHz.
A frequency that has followed this property across multiple seasons of investigation, appearing in different locations on different equipment at different times, [music] and appearing again here at the Mesa.
The team’s own verdict, stated plainly on camera, was that none of this reads as natural geology.
[music] And that matters because natural geology has a signature, too.
Voids in sedimentary rock do not produce localized magnetic anomalies.
Sandstone does not return a flat dense radar reflection the way a manufactured boundary does.
Fractures are irregular.
This was not irregular.
For the first time in the episode, [music] the thing under the mesa had a shape, 6 ft of it.
And a shape is worse than a feeling because you can point at a shape.
Which brings us to the video call.
And to the sentence that reframes the entire operation, Dr.
Taylor raised an option, not to abandon the bore holes, but to drill between them, to come down vertically or at an angle into the space between bore hole one and bore hole two, straight toward the object the radar had mapped, not to sample it, to reach [music] it.
Brandon Fugal approved it, and then he attached a condition.
It had [music] to be done with the utmost care because whatever was in there might be intact and it might be the only one.
I want you to sit with how strange that instruction is.
This is a man who owns the land.
He is legally entitled to put a tracko through that messa and sift the rubble.
Nobody is going to stop him.
[music] The state is not going to stop him.
The university is not going to stop him.
And the audience is certainly not going to stop him.
The audience wants the reveal.
A television production wants the reveal.
Every incentive in this situation points toward going faster.
He chose to go slower.
And he chose it for a reason that has nothing to do with ratings.
If that object is what the radar says it is, then destroying it to prove it exists would be the single dumbest thing anyone has done on this property in a 100red years of strange history.
That condition is the moral pivot of the episode.
Curiosity became custodianship in a single sentence.
And it is also the reason the episode ends the way it does.
Not because the drill failed, but because the man paying for it decided that the answer was worth less than the thing that would give it.
The drill, meanwhile, went back to work at the shallow end of the mesa.
There is a separate anomaly at 33 feet, [music] not the object at 270.
A second feature much closer to the surface, and when the rig came down toward it at 32 1/2 ft, the bit struck something, not slowly, not gradually.
The bit hit a surface that rang, a hard, resonant contact, the kind of sound a driller learns to hear through his feet.
The crew [music] stopped.
They conferred.
And then they made a decision that tells you everything about what they thought they had hit.
They swapped the bit for an augur.
Specifically, to avoid shattering whatever was underneath.
An augur cuts differently.
It bores rather than hammers.
It is slower [music] and gentler, and it is what you use when you are worried about breaking something.
[music] Even with the change, the grinding continued.
The rig kept complaining and they pushed through past the mark [music] down to 38 ft.
Then they pulled the core sample and the sample was a slab of sandstone denser than concrete.
Listen to the rig in that sequence because the audio is doing more work than any graphic on screen.
A drill rig has a rhythm.
It bites, it loads, [music] it clears, it bites again.
When it hits a void, the tone drops and the feed rate surges.
When it hits a void, it screams.
What the rig did at 32 1/2 ft was none of those things.
It did not sound like it was drilling.
It sounded like it was arguing.
5 1/2 ft below the surface of the ground, something stopped a bit, and it did not feel like rock.
[music] Then Chris Roberts went back to the spoil pile with the magnet.
He had done this before in an earlier season, [music] and he had found flakes.
Then, this time he found more, a cluster of small metal fragments clinging to the magnet as he lifted it out of the pile.
And when the team compared them to the material recovered previously from a different bore hole, the read was that the chemistry matched.
Now, I want to be precise here because this is exactly where these shows tend to lose the plot.
The claim is not that these flakes are from a spacecraft.
The claim the production makes is narrower and more defensible than that.
That the elemental composition returned by analysis does not match what you would expect from background material at that site.
And that it closely resembles fragments recovered from a separate bore hole [music] drilled at a different time into a different part of the same formation.
Matching fragments in two different holes.
That is a distribution problem.
Not a single lucky sample and it stacks.
Add [music] it up.
A coin from 1964 in the cutings.
A photograph from 1969 with a soft patch where the ground should be.
[music] Metal flakes in the spoil.
An augur that kept grinding.
[music] A core of sandstone that outweighs concrete.
Suspicion is a mood.
A flake of metal in a sample bag is a thing you can put in somebody’s hand.
That is the difference between a story and an investigation.
Then they took it to the sky.
Sky Elements brought a swarm 100 drones arranged 10 by 10 programmed to fly a zigzag grid pattern up to a,000 ft above the ranch mapping what the team has come to call the bubble.
The bubble is not a metaphor in this production.
It is a defined volume of air above the property where [music] instruments misbehave.
And this flight was designed to give it a boundary.
The four corner drones went up first as a check.
All four came back down and landed.
And every single one of them was 40 ft off its mark, [music] not 40 ft in different directions.
40 ft in the same direction in [music] the same way.
All four identically.
Preston, the drone operator, told the team that this could only be caused by a magnetic anomaly.
Then the full swarm launched, and the behavior got worse with altitude.
Drones wobbled, drones spun, drones dropped out of formation.
Then, [music] as the fleet descended below roughly 800 ft, the behavior normalized, as though they had crossed back out of something.
Drone number seven logged the data that made the whole flight worth running.
A strong magnetic anomaly across a band between 750 and 1,000 ft.
Here is why that is the most important paragraph in the episode and it has nothing to do with anything exotic.
Global positioning is a timing problem.
[music] A GPS receiver works out where it is by comparing the arrival times of signals from satellites and it is corrected in most flight controllers by a magnetometer that tells the aircraft which way it is facing.
If your magnetic reference is wrong, your heading is wrong.
And if your heading is wrong, your position solution drifts smoothly, consistently, and in the same direction for every aircraft sharing the same reference.
One drone drifting is a fault.
100 drones drifting the same distance in the same direction is a field.
So, the anomaly was no longer just underground.
It had a ceiling.
It had an altitude band.
It had a boundary at roughly 800 ft that you could fly in and out of and watch the behavior change, [music] which meant the team was no longer looking at a buried object.
They were looking at a buried object sitting underneath a column of disturbed space.
Then the shards went to the lab.
At Utah Valley University, chemist Dr.
Tammy Clark ran fragments through gas chromatography [music] and atomic emission spectrometry techniques that identify what a material is made of by burning it and reading the light it gives off.
And Dr.
Brian Patchet did something stranger.
He lowered a fragment into liquid nitrogen down to -320° F to test whether it behaved like a superconductor.
What happened next is the moment this episode stops being a field investigation [music] and becomes something else.
The sample did not stop bubbling when it should have.
A material at minus 320° should be quiet.
It should be inert.
[music] There should be no thermal energy left in it to drive anything.
And yet the fragment kept producing gas, kept reacting, kept doing whatever it was doing.
[music] long past the point where the physics said it should have settled down.
And this is where the episode earns its dread, [music] not in a dark tunnel, not in a night shoot with flashlights, but under fluorescent lights, in a room full of calibrated instruments, with a person in safety glasses writing down numbers.
Because a laboratory is where mystery is supposed to die.
You bring a strange object into a lab and the lab tells you what it is.
And then it is not strange anymore.
It is just a mineral with an unusual history.
That is the normal ark.
That is what is supposed to happen.
[music] This time it did not happen.
The lab made it worse.
The spectrometry in the end returned a list.
[music] Titanium, calcium, iron, aluminum, and venadium.
Dr.
Taylor’s point about the venadium is specific and it is worth giving him credit for making a narrow argument rather than a broad one.
Venadium is not exotic.
It is in the dirt under your feet right now in trace amounts.
But venadium is also a workhorse element in metallurgy.
[music] It is used to toughen steel and it appears in titanium alloys used in airframes, engine components and high performance structural parts.
It is the kind of element that shows up when somebody was trying to make something strong and light.
Finding it in a random sedimentary fill is not impossible.
Finding it in that sequence, in that concentration alongside fragments that match material from a different hole is the kind of thing that makes a geologist stop writing and look [music] up.
Now, here is where I have to be honest with you because the episode is not going to be.
The most serious objection to all of this is contamination.
[music] A drill bit is made of metal.
A casing is made of metal.
Drilling fluid carries material down and carries material back up.
The act of boring a hole through rock puts steel against stone at temperature and pressure and it produces exactly the kind of fine metallic debris that a magnet will pick up out of a spoil pile.
That is not a debunk.
[music] That is basic drilling.
And any laboratory analysis of material recovered this way has to answer that objection before it can claim anything.
Second objection.
The word engineered is a word chosen by a television production, not by a peer-reviewed paper.
[music] There is no published methodology here.
There is no independent replication.
There is no chain of custody that an outside scientist can inspect.
The show controls the sampling, the shipping, the lab selection, and the edit.
Third objection, and this is the uncomfortable one.
This is season six of a show whose business model depends on the mesa remaining mysterious.
A definitive answer in either direction [music] would end the story.
That does not make the team liars.
It does mean that the structural incentive of the production points one way and you should hold that in your mind while you watch.
So what survives all three objections?
Three things.
Material that is magnetic from a formation where the surrounding rock is not.
[music] Material that appears in the show’s own description to self-heal fragments that seem to close over damage, which is the kind of property that gets a material scientist’s attention for reasons that have nothing to do with UFOs and a composition that is out of place in a sequence where it should not be.
I am not going to tell you this is a spacecraft.
I am going to tell you that a lab returned a list of elements a geologist would not expect in that order and that nobody outside this production has been allowed to check it.
Both of those statements are true.
Only one of them is comfortable.
Which brings us back to the question we started with.
[music] Did they open a tunnel or did they open something that was sealed on purpose?
Here is what the record actually documents.
A hole, a camera that went down 240 ft and came back with black.
[music] A magnetic disturbance and a radar return that agree with each other at 270 ft.
A 6-t thick shape.
Metal flakes in the cutings.
[music] A coin from 1964.
A photograph from 1969 that does not match the two before it.
100 drones that drifted 40 ft in the same direction and then settled below 800 ft as though they had crossed a line.
And a decision, [music] the decision to keep drilling carefully because the object might be intact.
Dr.
Taylor’s plan to come down between the bore holes was approved and remained unfinished.
Fugal’s condition was never lifted.
The object [music] is still exactly where it was when this episode began.
6 ft of it at 270 ft under a mesa in Utah that has now been mapped, measured, [music] and politely declined.
So, the honest answer is [music] no.
They did not open a tunnel.
The footage does not give us a tunnel.
It gives us an obstruction, a signature, a refusal.
But here is what makes that a better ending than a reveal.
The team did not fail.
They succeeded.
[music] And the success was the problem.
Six seasons of experiments [music] and the mesa finally answered.
Not with a revelation, but with a boundary.
A depth the bit cannot pass without grinding.
A frequency that keeps appearing whether or not anyone is looking for it.
A band of disturbed air that starts at 800 ft and gets worse as you climb.
A shape with an edge you can measure.
[music] They have stopped guessing what is down there.
They have started surveying it.
That is a different kind of investigation and it is a much more dangerous one [music] because surveying implies a plan and a plan implies going in.
The next time a rig goes up on that messa [music] and there will be a next time it will be drilling between two holes toward an object that has already eaten through one bit under an owner’s single condition.
Do it carefully [music] because it might be intact because it might be the only one which leaves one question [music] and it is not the question the thumbnail asks.
Not what is in the mesa.
[music] What is the mesa for?
A hole 240 ft deep that swallows light.
A mass 6 ft thick that returns two different readings at the same coordinates.
Metal that should not be there in a formation that should not contain it.
An anomaly that extends from underground to a,000 ft in the air with a floor and a ceiling like something with dimensions.
Natural geology does not have a ceiling at 800 ft.
[music] The door has not been opened.
But for the first time, the team knows exactly how thick it is.
And that is the problem with a door that thick.
You can measure it.
You can [music] map it.
You can prove it is there.
None of that tells you what it is for.
[music] And the thing about a door you have only learned how to knock on is that eventually somebody knocks hard enough to get an
