Skinwalker Ranch - Laser Beam Stops and Starts in Mid Air
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John J.
Senior Member.
Agree with @JMartJr's suggestion that gaps in otherwise visible laser beams is often due to the lower density of mist/ other light-scattering particles along the beam's path.
But I'm puzzled by why the gaps we see in the SWR photo seem approximately aligned, and have roughly straight edges.
Part of the 1st green beam is obscured (or missing) along its right side, as we view it, for a section in line with the beam.
If the missing section of beam is absent because of less mist etc., I'm not sure it would have such a straight edge.
The next green beam to the right, almost adjacent to the first from our POV, is "missing" a section in line with the missing strip of beam 1. (Aware that these 2 beams are probably from one laser battery, but they appear as 2 beams).
(Cropped image, tilted. The original images show the beams rising approx. perpendicular to the ground).
Next beam to the right, blue/indigo, is unaffected. (Only green beams are "interrupted", is this significant? IDK).
If there is something eclipsing the beams the blue beam is in front of it from our POV.
The following green beam to the right, from our POV, is "missing" a section: The start/finish of the missing section roughly lines up with the start/finish of the discontinuities of the first two green beams in the horizontal plane.
If the discontinuities are due to reduced light-scattering along parts of the beam's paths, it must be unlikely that the volumes of reduced light-scattering particles coincide so much in their "floor" and "ceiling" (i.e. their vertical plane extent) between the 3 green beams.
The last green beam appears to partially overlap, lengthwise, the last blue/indigo beam from our POV (i.e. the blue beam is further away from the photographer's viewpoint). The blue beam is visible where the missing section of green beam would otherwise have hidden it, but is of reduced luminosity.
This area of reduced luminosity seems to extend to the right a short distance, from the section which would have been hidden by the green, into the blue beam "proper". Again, the "start" and "finish" of this narrow strip roughly align in the vertical plane with the discontinuities of the green beams; the rightmost edge is straight, and parallel to the edge caused by the missing section of the 1st green beam.
Why are green beams mainly affected- perhaps due to their locations, or their wavelength? (Or coincidence).
I mused about maybe a small strip of something that would filter out green light on the camera lens, something like that, but it seems rather far-fetched.
Also wondered if the rectangular surface elevated by the crane/ cherry-picker might have played a role
...perhaps by selectively warming a layer of air, but I don't think that's credible (not least due to convection, and the inverse-square law).
The leftmost and rightmost stretches of beam that appear absent/ affected from the camera's POV are approx. equidistant from a point vertically above the security camera mount (or whatever it is). No idea if this has any relevance.
But I'm puzzled by why the gaps we see in the SWR photo seem approximately aligned, and have roughly straight edges.
Part of the 1st green beam is obscured (or missing) along its right side, as we view it, for a section in line with the beam.
If the missing section of beam is absent because of less mist etc., I'm not sure it would have such a straight edge.
The next green beam to the right, almost adjacent to the first from our POV, is "missing" a section in line with the missing strip of beam 1. (Aware that these 2 beams are probably from one laser battery, but they appear as 2 beams).
Next beam to the right, blue/indigo, is unaffected. (Only green beams are "interrupted", is this significant? IDK).
If there is something eclipsing the beams the blue beam is in front of it from our POV.
The following green beam to the right, from our POV, is "missing" a section: The start/finish of the missing section roughly lines up with the start/finish of the discontinuities of the first two green beams in the horizontal plane.
If the discontinuities are due to reduced light-scattering along parts of the beam's paths, it must be unlikely that the volumes of reduced light-scattering particles coincide so much in their "floor" and "ceiling" (i.e. their vertical plane extent) between the 3 green beams.
The last green beam appears to partially overlap, lengthwise, the last blue/indigo beam from our POV (i.e. the blue beam is further away from the photographer's viewpoint). The blue beam is visible where the missing section of green beam would otherwise have hidden it, but is of reduced luminosity.
This area of reduced luminosity seems to extend to the right a short distance, from the section which would have been hidden by the green, into the blue beam "proper". Again, the "start" and "finish" of this narrow strip roughly align in the vertical plane with the discontinuities of the green beams; the rightmost edge is straight, and parallel to the edge caused by the missing section of the 1st green beam.
Why are green beams mainly affected- perhaps due to their locations, or their wavelength? (Or coincidence).
I mused about maybe a small strip of something that would filter out green light on the camera lens, something like that, but it seems rather far-fetched.
Also wondered if the rectangular surface elevated by the crane/ cherry-picker might have played a role
...perhaps by selectively warming a layer of air, but I don't think that's credible (not least due to convection, and the inverse-square law).
The leftmost and rightmost stretches of beam that appear absent/ affected from the camera's POV are approx. equidistant from a point vertically above the security camera mount (or whatever it is). No idea if this has any relevance.
They showed both a photo of the monitor and what looked like a crop of the actual image.
Ideally they would release original data for everything. I've been asking Brandon do this for years. But he seems convinced I'm some kind of enemy agent or something.
John J.
Senior Member.
Maybe they don't record or keep data in the conventional sense.
In terms of analysing video footage and instrument readings, the "hypersonic fly" and the "wormhole" on the ground strongly suggest the Skinwalker Ranch people don't check out unusual findings with a common-sense, let alone scientific, approach before making extraordinary claims.
There is no indication that they have any intention of deviating from this modus operandi.
There has been no real cooperation with academia, and no research has been published in peer-reviewed journals.
Skinwalker Ranch folk are in the business of making extraordinary claims, not of understanding the world or educating anyone.
It's their bread and butter. Must be unlikely any of them would get paid as much working as "mainstream" scientists/ researchers.
I hope this doesn't break the politeness guidelines, but I feel the Skinwalker Ranch activities and associated TV series are essentially an entertainment franchise, and it's a shame that the people involved don't seem overly concerned if some kids, and adults, think it has anything to tell us about reality.
Mauro
Senior Member
A recent article on The Skeptic agrees!
https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/05/ufos-the-unidentified-flying-circus-comes-to-town/
jimmyslippin
Member
The hypersonic fly is probably the best example of this.
Brandon Fugal attempted to address this but only ended up revealing how shoddy their process is.
Source: Twitter
- The high speed camera expert actually suggested it may have been a bug or a bird. Travis immediately jumped to hypersonic UAP.
- In the review session the next day Travis was still pushing the hypersonic UAP theory.
- Travis addressed it in the final episode of the season, which was a recap episode that (given the content about whistleblowers and the dates of news articles shown on screen) had been produced months after filming ended and after the hypersonic fly episode had been publicly aired where it was obvious to everyone it was just a fly.
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nmarsollier
Member
This could be the objects distribution ? (But with the camera more far away than this sketch)
Ann K
Senior Member.
"It's their bread and butter".
This, absolutely, means that we cannot look to them for clarification, for raw footage, for information, or for cooperation. It's not in their own interests.
And in that episode he said it was a bird, which was impossible based on the wing speed.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
I'm simply saying that destructive interference is a thing. It happens. It's precisely how a laser interferometer works.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Using mirrors.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Technically not relevant to this particular case, but this just seems like a useful factoid to have in the quiver:
https://www.laserpointersafety.com/aviationfacts/whybeamsseemtoend.htmlWhen you point a laser into the sky at night, the beam seems to end after a few hundred meters, as shown in this photo:
However, this is a dangerous illusion. A person can think their laser beam can’t reach an aircraft, since the beam looks “short”. They are of course mistaken.
...
For a laser beam to be visible, some of the light must reflect off particles such as dust, smoke or water vapor. In a zone near the earth’s surface, the atmosphere is full of these aerosols, helping to make outdoor laser beams visible.
But above the Planetary Boundary Layer (also known as the Atmospheric Boundary Layer), air is much cleaner. After the beam exits the PBL and enters cleaner air (fewer aerosols), much less light is reflected back. The beam seems to disappear.
Mendel
Senior Member.
I contend that for an observer close to the laser (say, an arm's length), a point "a few hundred meters" along the beam is visually indistinguishable from the beam's vanishing point, where it would appear to end due to perspective.
This is because the vanishing point is always the same distance as the distance from the observer to the beam, and, a few hundred meters away, an arm's length appears very short.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
That's indeed an interesting insight. Does the hard cutoff of a boundary layer look different from the foreshortened-attentuated-inverse-square-law of an uninterrupted laser beam? Alas I don't have access to a sufficiently-powerful symbolic maths package any more, and when I managed to torture Pari/GP into creating an ASCII-art plot for me and messed around with the attenuation factor, I got some curves that made no sense (plateauing brightness that then starts getting brighter again). However, the maths matters less than the reality - can someone take some photos of a laser pointer within the boundary layer (over a lake?) and breaking through the boundary (so up), respecting sensible laser precautions, obviously. I have a beautifully particulate atmosphere here, not least because of the sea coast, but alas I have no laser pointer.
Ann K
Senior Member.
@FatPhil, I've been unable to find existing photos that would illustrate your post, but found an interesting article on deflecting a laser with air of different densities.
https://scitechdaily.com/sound-controls-light-deflecting-laser-beams-using-air/
The innovative technique uses sound waves in order to modulate the air in the region where the laser beam is passing. “We’ve generated an optical grating with the help of acoustic density waves,” explains first author Yannick Schrödel, a Ph.D. student at DESY and Helmholtz Institute Jena.
Commonly abbreviated as DESY, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (English German Electron Synchrotron) is a national research center in Germany that operates particle accelerators used to investigate the structure of matter. It is a member of the Helmholtz Association and operates at sites in Hamburg and Zeuthen.
With the help of special loudspeakers, the researchers shape a pattern of dense and less dense areas in the air, forming a striped grating. In a way that is similar to how differential air densities bend the light in the Earth’s atmosphere, the density pattern takes on the role of an optical grating that changes the direction of the laser light beam.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Does this sort of thing help? I would assume there would be a "dust layer" here, but I'm not sure how to distinguish between the beam vanishing as it gets into clear air and a beam vanishing from perspective.
Source: https://youtu.be/hNAOfycknDI?t=39
Ann K
Senior Member.
In a video in which everything seems to be in constant motion, it's hard to see a "reaction", but nevertheless the beam appears to be disappearing as it gets higher. It's still there, however, as it obviously strikes the object. (If the narrator is correct about a reaction, then it's probably a bird.
)But to answer the question from @FatPhil about a vanishing point for the laser, it's complicated by the fact that a laser visible in moist air is also a beam that is scattered by moist air, thus wider (so that its vanishing point should be further away, geometrically) but dimmer (vanishing point should be closer, visually).
Ravi
Senior Member.
Very little chance any boundary layer will make 1 beam disappear, while the others are unaffected. A boundry layer is a layer, not a cell/pocket.
Other than that, I remain with my thought I had earlier in this thread, that we are looking at a screen hoisted up in the air, blocking some but not all beams, as it is in the centre of the circular oriented lasers.
Other than that, I remain with my thought I had earlier in this thread, that we are looking at a screen hoisted up in the air, blocking some but not all beams, as it is in the centre of the circular oriented lasers.
This is correct, and the likely the only reason lasers seem to "end" twhen you are close to them. Also something SWR is confused about (thinking the lasers come together to form a pyramid).
You can see this in the SWR CSS sitch, where I use cyan vertical lines for the lasers. They default to 50km long. If you change them to 200km (200000 m in the "Laser Height" field). it makes zero difference
Here's 5km, 50km, and 200 km
Note also the very small difference between 5km and 50km. If a laser were being "stopped" (made less visible) by atmospheric changes then it would not really be noticeable in this situation.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Even 5km is well beyond "a few hundred meters"
I suspect that laserpointersafety.com is incorrect about at which altitude beams stop becoming visible when near end-on. Moisture and particulates are in the air all the way up above where cirrus clouds form (40,000 feet).
The perpective compression means the bits at the "end" of the beam are much larger than they seem. In my first two examples 5km and 50km, the tiny bit of beam at the top is 45km long!
Not only that, its probably several meters thick, due to beam divergence. That sounds like it makes the beam less powerful, but it actually mean it's hitting more particles, but then it's visually smaller, so essentially it all evens out.
Ravi
Senior Member.
Indeed, and as a laser typically has 1-10 mrad of divergence, the size of the beam will be at least about 20 meter at 10 km.
Interestingly, if you aim a laser at the moon, it will be about 770 meter wide on its surface..
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Yup, foreshortening scales like sec^2 (the derivative of tan). Which is asymptotically tan^2. So the inverse square law balances it out exactly.
I'm unconvinced of the effect of the beam spreading yet - my first stab would be "no nett effect, the decrease is the same as the increase".
Put both together, and the expanding beam should be equivalent to a simple waveguide with its small attenuation factor.
Mendel
Senior Member.
The energy remains the same, it just spreads out more. But if the area it spreads to is still smaller as what we'd perceive through atmospheric diffraction and glare, then it might as well be a point source.
dlandelle
Member
Images from CMOS sensors use a BAYER filter (not like high-end prism video cameras), and what we see is interpolated with generally 4 adjacent pixels :
G U
R G
The interpolation may create very strange side effects (for instance when filming a red/blue texture with a color change near the bandwidth of the camera).
Some other interpolation may be created by enhanced image processing, not talking about HDR cumulating several shots.
I would vote for a side effect.
Many more shots, or a video would be nice !
Eburacum
Senior Member.
The only way I can explain this is by some kind of rolling shutter effect. See the Tom Scott video for more details.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/sk...stops-and-starts-in-mid-air.13479/post-316336
Note that Tom Scot's expert had to turn the camera on its side to get the 'interruption' effect. In the Skinwalker images the camera is the normal way up, scanning from the top to the bottom (or vice versa).
It looks very likely that some of the individual beams consist of several lasers in a cluster, which do not seem to be exactly in phase with each other; that could explain why some of the beams are only partially absent.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/sk...stops-and-starts-in-mid-air.13479/post-316336
Note that Tom Scot's expert had to turn the camera on its side to get the 'interruption' effect. In the Skinwalker images the camera is the normal way up, scanning from the top to the bottom (or vice versa).
It looks very likely that some of the individual beams consist of several lasers in a cluster, which do not seem to be exactly in phase with each other; that could explain why some of the beams are only partially absent.
LeastWeasel
New Member
I watched the show.
They claimed they had a “couple” of “cameras” locked off on the space cannon beams that were set to take a snapshot every “so often” and they found something in that data that is really odd.
The break was in the green beams at 101 feet. Blue beams not affected.
My assumption it was just one still shooting camera that captured the image.
No other cameras captured this image.
They claimed that three different images indicated no errors in the camera.
My assumption it was just one of the couple of cameras. No information on the type of camera, lens, or settings. Just the vague “every so often”. Typical of the show, it seems purposefully vague.
They vowed to repeat.
They claimed they had a “couple” of “cameras” locked off on the space cannon beams that were set to take a snapshot every “so often” and they found something in that data that is really odd.
The break was in the green beams at 101 feet. Blue beams not affected.
My assumption it was just one still shooting camera that captured the image.
No other cameras captured this image.
They claimed that three different images indicated no errors in the camera.
My assumption it was just one of the couple of cameras. No information on the type of camera, lens, or settings. Just the vague “every so often”. Typical of the show, it seems purposefully vague.
They vowed to repeat.
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Eburacum
Senior Member.
Here's an image of lightning over Denver showing the rolling shutter effect. The top half of the image just shows the lightning, while the lower half shows the reflected light from the environment. Although there is only a fraction of a second between the timing of the two halves of this image, it is enough for the light to scatter all around the city in the lower half of the image.
----------
For some reason, a fraction of the green laser beams in the Skinwalker array were not emitting for the split second that the camera scanned them at that height.
A very difficult effect to achieve - perhaps this was a lucky accident, or perhaps it was an effect they were expecting.
----------
For some reason, a fraction of the green laser beams in the Skinwalker array were not emitting for the split second that the camera scanned them at that height.
A very difficult effect to achieve - perhaps this was a lucky accident, or perhaps it was an effect they were expecting.
jarlrmai
Senior Member.
The main issue with the rolling shutter theory is that sensors generally readout along the long axis, the presented photos are portrait which means rolling shutter would be left to right rather than top to bottom.
If you Google image search 'rolling shutter lightning' you'll see examples in both landscape and portrait.
They could be cropped from a landscape image or it could be some different sensor that reads out differently (this last one is fairly unlikely)
Really we would want to see original photos.
If you Google image search 'rolling shutter lightning' you'll see examples in both landscape and portrait.
They could be cropped from a landscape image or it could be some different sensor that reads out differently (this last one is fairly unlikely)
Really we would want to see original photos.
Ann K
Senior Member.
Their white board appears to be hoisted by a cherry-picker, thus could lift an occluding panel to variable heights. But if it were something like that which causes the dark gaps, I'd be surprised if there were not more of a colored glow on the object, even if it were a matte black panel.Here's the setup on the ground. They have a "white" beam shining on a white board to check for variations in color.
If there was something occluding the beam, it would have to be flying. It's several hundred feet up
Interesting. You're above my pay-grade now -- can I ask whether this concept is consistent with what looks like one beam being canceled but the other not? Or are there more beams than I think, maybe, and the gaps represent a point where two beams are canceled?
While I'm here, am I seeing another green laser beam that goes up a few meters then disappears forever? Or is that just a thick part of the structure that then gets thin to support what looks like a security camera, or the like?
I think it's a camera mount
In the last image you see "white" is red, green, and blue lasers mixed together, which suggests all the lasers are selectable color.
[Edit]. Actually looks more like some lights.
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Eburacum
Senior Member.
Quite likely to be cropped from landscape. I'd expect most cameras used in a TV show to be oriented that way.
Apart from this objection, the rolling shutter theory seems the most likely answer.
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JMartJr
Senior Member.
Yeah, looks like you're right. So the middle stubby green thing is not a laser that chopped off short and never resumed, it's just the green-wrapped camera mount.
This image you posted,
is very clear, but raises a question in my mind: Why would a TV/movie production wrap supports and cranes in green?
It LOOKS like preparations for some rig removal later, though that would be a problem as long as green lasers were firing. (Keying out bright green stuff would also key out those lasers, I'd expect. Blue and RED lasers would have avoided that issues, if they were in fact planning to green-screen some effects in post production.) But it strikes me as odd -- why bother wrapping this stuff in green? Why wrap it at all? Were they planning to add some effects later but found something odd that didn't require use of SFX and so changed their plans? Heck if I know.
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Ravi
Senior Member.
I change my position, I think now too it must be of electronic nature, rolling shutter effect and such. But it also does not look as similar as other online examples of lasers being affected by the camera/sensor. I wonder how it would only affect some of the lasers, and also only on 1 spatial position. It is true the signal of the laser is not continuous (CW), and has perhaps a weird shape and/or duty cycle.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Or possibly IT (whatever IT might be) might be low and close to the camera, the part of the beams being occluded being several hundred feet up? As we saw in the recent eclipse, the object doing the occluding need not be close to as far away as the object (or laser!) being occluded, as long as they're along the same line of sight.
I think it's significant that what we see as a single beam is not. It's actually lots of mini-beams.
How does this work? Are there several lasers of each color that are beam-split between the outputs. Or one laser per mini-beam? Do they share a power supply, or are there multiple power supplies.
The significane of mini-beams comes from the observation that there is partial gapping in one main beam (the leftmost green). If this is not simply a fake image (a possibility) then that implies that some of the mini-beams are off, and some are on (in the left beam). Or maybe just a wierd timing thing.
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