Probing the Mysterious Anomaly (S7) | The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch

How fast is the wind blowing right now?
That right there feels like 50.
It’s perfect to use the wind to our advantage.
-Yeah. -[Travis] Later that day, [Erik] These are the right conditions to run a test with a smoke machine to see how the smoke interacts with the boundary of the bubble. We can exploit the fact that we’ve got the wind.
You know, we have a, uh…
you know, w-we know what to expect.
It-it should just blow right through.
Well, so, what-what I’m thinking is, uh, the wind’s blowing west to east.
So I say we get on the west side of the bubble and blow smoke at it while we drive back and forth through the boundary and watch it with cameras.
-Yeah. -[Thomas] So, what are you looking for, to see if the currents are changing at all -when they get to the boundary? -See if the boundary does something unusual to the smoke flow.
[Erik] Yeah, that’s right.
If we see a change in direction, that would tell us we may have -something else going on. -[Travis] Yeah.
[Travis] When we’ve detected the bubble during our experiments, it’s always been centered at the triangle with a 2,000-foot radius. But what we don’t know is if it’s always there or if it’s maybe something that gets activated to act like a giant spherical force field when we start using our equipment. We’re gonna start just outside the bubble boundary. Then we’ll reverse the truck with the smoke machine pointed towards it in the direction of the wind. The smoke should just shoot straight out if nothing is there to stop it. This camera’s ready to go, y’all.
If the smoke did anything unusual today, we’d be ready to capture it.
Well, all right, Erik, we’ve got everything in place

to do the first test here on the western boundary of the bubble.
We’re gonna get going, so, uh, we’re-we’re gonna start this thing right now. Copy that, Travis.
-Okay. -[Travis] All right, let’s do it.
I am recording.
Our, uh, gusts are at, uh, 40 and a half miles per hour, current wind speeds are 31.1.
[Travis] That’s crazy. It’s almost like we’re having a hurricane out here or something. All right, let’s back up. Hang on, Thomas.
All right, Jim, we’re approaching the bubble boundary.
We’re gonna stop just short of it.
Okay, stop there.
Wow!
[Royston] Travis, it’s being pushed back at us.
It looks like it’s coming our way.
[Travis] Yeah, it came backwards on us. -Right at the wall. -Yeah! I know! [Travis] Let’s keep backing up through the boundary and see what happens.
Copy that.
[Travis] We got through the boundary of the bubble.
That’s good, Jim.
Now that we’re inside the bubble, it looks like it’s blowing normal.
-[Thomas] It is! -[Travis] Isn’t that weird?
[Travis] Okay, Jim, now just drive forward slowly. Copy that, here we go.
[Travis] Now that the smoke is blowing in the direction of the wind inside the bubble, we’re gonna drive back outside of it to see if the smoke changes again at the bubble boundary. Now, look right here in the bubble. Look!
-Look! -[Thomas] What the hell?
[Travis] We couldn’t believe it. Even while moving and shooting smoke with the direction of 30-mile-an-hour winds, our smoke was being deflected and redirected by the bubble boundary. So either the smoke triggered the bubble to turn on its boundary in response to a stimulus or we got more data telling us that it’s always there.
For this next test, we were gonna take a little different approach.
Since the wind’s direction was blowing towards the eastern bubble boundary, we were going to approach it with our smoke machine from the inside going out. We wanted to see if the smoke flow would change again when it hits the inside of that boundary. [Travis] Yeah.
-[Thomas] I’m not seeing it plume now. -No, it’s not. No.
[Travis] Just like before, the smoke started shooting straight with the direction of the wind the second it got past where we’ve marked the bubble boundary.
Now look, it’s starting to spread and go up.
[Travis] Yeah.
But no matter if we were inside or outside of the bubble, the smoke reacted any time it was blowing against the boundary.
Hey, Erik, do you copy?
We’re about to start the smoke over here at the triangle.
Are you ready?
I’m ready to take data.
All right, let’s crank it up.
All right, Erik, we’re about to go.
[device whirring] [Thomas] It’s pretty convincing that there’s something here.
[Travis] What’s going on, fellas? [Erik] Uh, I’ve got the results of our experiment with the, uh, smoke gun.
-[Travis] All right, cool. -Great. -[Erik] I want to start with a video I recorded from a camera on the mesa processed through the Meta-Frame software.
[Erik] Now watch what happens here.
This is when you guys were parked outside the bubble boundary.
You can see the bright colors here, which is our smoke.
And you’ll notice we can see upward movement of the smoke.
[Travis] Oh, yeah, look at that.
[Erik] All in this direction and in this direction.
So it’s doing this, it’s fanning like this.
Now, which direction was the wind predominantly moving, though?
-It was doing this. -Right down that road, yeah.
[Erik] And yet you’re seeing, you know, the spreading of the bright area to the left and right.
-Which is interesting, right? -Right.
[Erik] Okay, so I’ll just continue letting that play at its natural rate.
-[Travis] Look how high the smoke’s going up. -Mm-hmm.
-Can you back that up a little bit? -Sure.
All right, uh, go ahead and let it play.
-Okay. -So, if you start looking, and you’ll start to see in here, and it starts moving up, which…
[Travis] Oh, yeah, look at that. I can see it now.
I didn’t even notice– look how high.
That’s got to be hundreds of feet in the air.
[Thomas] Correct.
[Erik] Why? Why is it going up?
Does the “bubble,” does the structure we’re talking about, actually introduce its own effects on the smoke?
[Travis] And that’s what we were looking for, to see if there’s something invisible that’s gonna change that normal flow.
It was one thing to see the smoke pushed around in real time at ground level, but Erik’s Meta-Frame showed that the smoke appeared to get pulled up and around the bubble boundary, more than 100 feet in the air. Normally, it should have dissipated in all that wind. So, could the bubble boundary have displaced the smoke that much? How?
Now, this is video of our last smoke test, 31 feet above the triangle, processed through Meta-Frame.
And we’re punched way in.
You can see two towers out there.
The tower on the right is just below where we’ve seen that blob feature before.
-[Travis] Right. -[Erik] Once again, I’ve got that change-detection filter on, so changes will show up lighter than what you see here.
-Yeah. -Yeah. -[Travis] Yeah. -All right. Okay.
[Erik] So, at this point, already the smoke is flowing at the center of the triangle.
It’s flowing the way we would expect it to until it reaches the area where we’ve seen the blob.
[Thomas] Wow, right there, see where it’s coming down?
-[Erik] Mm-hmm. -We did see the smoke dive down, come about five feet off the ground.
Let’s see right there. Stop.
-I-I’m gonna draw on the screen. -[Erik] Yeah. Go for it.
Look at the boundary it makes.
That right there is almost a perfect circle.
Mm.
-[Travis] So, is this the blob? -Mm-hmm.
[Travis] Once again, we’re seeing the smoke being manipulated right where we’ve previously seen evidence of the blob.
The smoke even looked like it was moving around a blob-like shape. Are we looking at more evidence that there is definitely something there at that spot, 31 feet above the triangle? [Erik] So, now that we’ve seen these flow patterns in the smoke, does this help explain anything we’ve seen?
Well, it doesn’t explain it, but I think it showed more evidence that the bubble and the blob are real and maybe always present.
-[Erik] Now we need to figure out what they are. -Yeah.
You know, I think this informs future experiments we do in both places.
[Travis] Right, back to poking harder at the nest for some answers.
Well, I say we, uh, we get to it.
-Yeah. -[Thomas] Let’s do it. -Great.
[Royston] I’ll see you guys.