Travis Taylor: “Shall we Make it Official this Season?” P2

But Skinwalker Ranch is different, not just in degree, but in kind. The concentration of activity there is unlike anything documented elsewhere. At most anomalous locations, you encounter one dominant class of phenomenon.
Strange lights or electromagnetic disturbances or unusual geological effects. At Skinwalker Ranch, all of it converges. UAPs, radiation spikes, electromagnetic surges, GPS displacement, equipment failure, physiological effects on humans and animals, often occurring in the same place at the same time during the same experiment. And most unsettling of all, it is repeatable. The team can now design experiments and with disturbing reliability anticipate the type of anomaly that will occur, where it will occur, and under what conditions. That is no longer random. That is no longer coincidence. That is a system responding in patterned ways. It is as if the ranch is not merely a site where strange things happen, but a focal point where multiple layers of anomalous activity intersect, a nexus. If similar sites around the world are small outposts, Skinwalker Ranch functions like a central hub. Which raises the most dangerous question of all, a hub for what? For what kind of activity? For what kind of intelligence? And toward what purpose? Because investigating the ranch is not just an intellectual exercise, it carries real physical risk.
Over the course of the project, team members have experienced injuries and illnesses that defy easy explanation.
Radiation burns appearing without an identifiable source, sudden neurological symptoms, disorientation so severe it required medical evacuation, headaches, pressure sensations, nausea, and cognitive impairment that correlate not with stress or fatigue, but with proximity to specific locations and specific experimental conditions. Dr.
Taylor himself has acknowledged experiencing acute physical effects during investigations. Symptoms that appear suddenly, intensify rapidly, and then subside once the team withdraws from certain zones or ceases certain activities. Other personnel have required hospitalization. Some developed conditions that physicians could not readily classify within known exposure models. This is why the operational posture has changed. Taylor now speaks openly about safety protocols that did not exist in the early seasons.
restricted zones, time limits for exposure, protective equipment, continuous medical monitoring, formal risk assessment procedures, not as television drama, but as standard practice in environments where unknown energetic or radiological hazards may be present. And this is where the implications become truly unsettling. If the phenomena exhibit intelligence and if that intelligence can interact with physical systems and biological tissue, then observation itself may be a trigger. Measurement may be a provocation. Experimentation may not be passive. It may be interpreted as intrusion. In such a scenario, the act of studying the system alters the system and the system responds in ways that can be harmful. So why is Dr. Travis Taylor speaking more openly now after years of careful restraint? Because the data no longer allows ambiguity. For most of the investigation, he walked a narrow line between scientific responsibility and professional caution. to speak too boldly risked sensationalism to speculate prematurely risked undermining credibility. For years he chose conservative language, deferring conclusions emphasizing uncertainty, insisting on more measurements. But there comes a point in every serious scientific inquiry where restraint becomes distortion. When patterns repeat, when correlations persist, when independent systems confirm the same effects, when controlled experiments yield consistent predictive outcomes, at that point we need more data stops being caution and starts becoming avoidance.
The body of evidence becomes too coherent to ignore, too structured to dismiss, too responsive to be written off as chance. years of measurements, terabytes of sensor data, repeated experiments, consistent correlations, observable reactions. For a scientist whose career is built on evidence, there is only one intellectually honest response when the data reaches that threshold. You say what it implies, even if the implications are deeply uncomfortable. And what the data now implies is that Skinwalker Ranch is not just anomalous, it is interactive. At some point, a scientist has to acknowledge what the data is actually saying. And that is what makes this moment so unsettling. If this is what Dr. Travis Taylor is willing to say publicly on camera in a program broadcast to millions, then this is almost certainly the minimum he feels intellectually obligated to admit, which leads to an unavoidable question. What has he seen that he still cannot talk about? What data exists that is considered too disturbing, too sensitive, or too destabilizing to release because what he is now acknowledging represents a threshold. A line has been crossed. And what comes after that line is not simply deeper understanding. It is escalation. The investigation at Skinwalker Ranch is no longer being treated as an open-ended scientific curiosity. New safety protocols, stricter access controls, more advanced instrumentation, and tighter operational procedures reflect a shift in mindset. This is no longer just about observing and collecting. It is about managing risk, about limiting exposure, about controlling variables that may no longer be passive. In other words, it is about containment. You do not talk about containment unless you believe you are dealing with something that can cause harm, something that can propagate, something that can react in ways that exceed your ability to predict or control. You do not move from documentation to mitigation unless you believe the system you are studying is capable of escalation.
That shift in language from curiosity to caution is perhaps the most revealing signal of all. There is also a more disturbing implication. If the phenomena at the ranch exhibit intelligence, then they are not simply allowing themselves to be studied. They may be studying back, testing boundaries, probing responses, measuring how far the investigators are willing to go, how much risk they will tolerate, how persistent they will be in the face of danger. In any interaction between two intelligent systems, observation is never one-sided. Dr. Taylor did not arrive at Skinwalker Ranch looking for confirmation of extraordinary ideas. He arrived as a skeptic, armed with instrumentation, methodology, and a commitment to rule out every conventional explanation before entertaining unconventional ones. For years, he did exactly that. He resisted premature conclusions. He demanded repeatability. He insisted on correlation across independent data streams. He tried to force the anomalies back into known physical categories. But the patterns did not collapse. The correlations did not go away. The responses did not stop. And eventually, the only position consistent with scientific integrity was to acknowledge what the evidence implied, even if the implications were deeply uncomfortable.
Not belief, not faith, not speculation, forced recognition. Which brings us to the most chilling possibility of all. If the system operating at Skinwalker Ranch is intelligent, if it is responsive, if it exhibits awareness and adaptive behavior, then it has never been unaware of the investigation. It has known about the sensors, the experiments, the drilling, the transmissions, the rockets, the monitoring. From the very first moment the first piece of equipment was powered on, it would have registered that intrusion. Which means the anomalies may not be random. The equipment failures may not be accidents.
The physiological effects may not be collateral. The timing may not be coincidence. They may be responses.
Deliberate, selective, and purposeful reactions from something that understands it is being observed and has chosen how to answer that observation.
And that is the point at which the investigation stops being about discovering whether something strange exists on Skinwalker Ranch and becomes something far more unsettling, understanding what is aware of us there and why it has decided to engage. And that raises the most disturbing question of all. If whatever is operating at Skinwalker Ranch has been aware of the team from the very beginning, if it has been choosing how and when to respond, if the anomalies, the interference, the physical effects have been deliberate rather than random, then what is it trying to communicate? Or more unsettling still, what is it trying to conceal? What boundary is it defending?
What truth is it preventing from being uncovered? That question is what makes the story of Joe Rogan’s encounter with the ranch so compelling. Rogan once described sitting in a darkened room watching footage he was told should not exist. An orb of light, self- luminous, moving through the interior of a house with apparent purpose, not drifting like dust. Not floating like a balloon, it changed direction. It paused. It reacted to the presence of people. It behaved as if it were aware of being observed. When the video ended, Rogan, a man who has watched fighters rendered unconscious, who has interviewed murderers, cartel members, and people who live in the darkest corners of human experience without visible fear, reportedly sat in silence. His face had changed, not curiosity, not excitement, something closer to unease. And then they told him something that made it worse. You can’t unsee this, he was told. Once you know what’s out there, once you understand what’s happening at Skinwalker Ranch, it doesn’t go away. The idea stays with you. The question never really leaves.
That struck a nerve because Rogan has admitted many times that the paranormal terrifies him in a way physical danger never has. Not an intellectual fear, but a deep childhood level dread. ghosts, unexplained presences. The idea that reality might contain intelligences that operate outside the rules we rely on. He has said that the possibility of something watching from just outside our understanding unsettles him more than any human threat, which makes his engagement with Skinwalker Ranch significant. He has described it as a form of confrontation, almost like exposure therapy, a way to face something he had always instinctively avoided. He wanted to look directly at it, to hear from people who had been there to see if rational explanations could finally dissolve that unease.
Instead, what he encountered only deepened it. The witnesses he spoke to were not fringe believers. They were scientists, military personnel, law enforcement, engineers, people trained to observe, measure, and doubt. And yet, their accounts shared the same core elements. phenomena that reacted to observation, that interfered with equipment in patterned ways, that appeared to anticipate actions, that produced physical effects on human bodies, and that left experienced professionals struggling to reconcile what they had seen with any conventional model of reality. For Rogan, the most disturbing part was not the idea of something unknown. It was the idea of something unknown that is aware, something that notices when it is being watched, something that responds. He has said that once you accept that possibility, even tentatively, reality never quite feels the same. The universe stops being a passive stage and starts feeling like an environment with other occupants, some of which may not want to be understood. That is why his reaction matters. Joe Rogan is not predisposed to mystical thinking. He is skeptical, confrontational, grounded in physical experience. If a place like Skinwalker Ranch can leave someone like him unsettled, if it can reactivate a fear he has carried since childhood and never been able to rationalize away, then the stories surrounding that remote 512 acre property in northeastern Utah deserve more than casual dismissal. Skinwalker Ranch has become a convergence point for reports of UAPs, luminous orbs, electromagnetic disturbances, radiation spikes, GPS failures, poltergeist like activity, anomalous creatures, and physiological effects on humans and animals. The name itself comes from Navajo tradition where skinw walkers are described as malevolent shape-shifting beings, entities that can move between forms and inflict harm through means that defy ordinary explanation. Whether one interprets that legend symbolically or literally, the modern data from the ranch suggests something equally unsettling, a location where multiple classes of anomaly overlap, where observation provokes response, and where the boundary between the physical and whatever lies beyond it appears thin.
And if Dr. Travis Taylor is right. If the phenomena are not just occurring, but interacting, not just manifesting, but responding, then the question Rogan was left with may be the one that ultimately defines the mystery of Skinwalker Ranch, not simply what is there, but why it is chosen to make itself known. The Navajo people do not speak of skinwalkers casually. Even naming them is traditionally avoided because to acknowledge them is believed to invite their attention. They are not treated as folklore in the modern sense, but as real malevolent intelligences that can cross boundaries, manipulate perception, and attach themselves to places and people. The fact that this ranch carries that name is not coincidence. It reflects a long-standing reputation, one that predates television crews, government sensors, and modern scientific instrumentation.
But Skinwalker Ranch is not just an artifact of indigenous mythology. It is one of the most heavily investigated anomalous sites in the world. It has been examined by physicists, aerospace engineers, intelligence contractors, and military linked research groups. It is owned by Brandon Fugal, a billionaire real estate developer who has poured millions of dollars into deploying spectrum analyzers, radiation monitors, magnetometers, LAR, high-speed cameras, and hardened sensor arrays. This is not a fringe operation. It is a full-scale instrumented scientific test range. Its modern notoriety began in the 1990s when the Sherman family bought the property and almost immediately encountered phenomena so extreme they eventually abandoned their home. Silent craft hovering over their fields. Luminous objects maneuvering intelligently.
Cattle found mutilated with surgical precision, organs removed, blood completely absent, no tracks, no signs of predators, no evidence of human involvement. But what broke them was not any single event. It was the pattern, the sense of being observed, of being targeted, of being interacted with. They reported objects moving without cause.
Electronics failing in specific moments.
Voices heard in the sky speaking unknown languages, enormous wolf-like creatures that seemed to absorb gunfire without injury and then vanish. The fear became so intense that the family slept together in one room on the floor, afraid to be separated. These were not superstitious people. They were ranchers accustomed to predators, weather, isolation, and danger. Yet, whatever was operating on that land reduced them to a constant state of vigilance, and dread.
Eventually, they fled and remained largely silent for years. This is the environment Joe Rogan chose to confront.
Not a campfire legend, not a blurry light mystery, a location with a documented multi-deade history of phenomena that have terrified families, confounded scientists, and resisted every attempt at conventional explanation. And the phenomenon that affected Rogan most was not a distant UFO or a radar trace. It was the orbs, not vague lights that could be aircraft or atmospheric plasma, but small self- luminous spheres that move with intention. They change direction abruptly. They pace people. They appear indoors. They pass through solid walls.
They react to being observed. They behave less like physical objects and more like mobile points of awareness.
Rogan has spoken about one account in particular that unsettled him deeply. A workingclass man, someone with no interest in publicity or theories, reported that a glowing orb entered his home directly through a wall. It moved slowly through the room as if surveying it. It paused. It adjusted its position when the witness moved. At one point, the man felt that it was not merely present, but aware of him, engaging with him through its movement and proximity.
Not communicating in language, but in intent. What made the story powerful to Rogan was not the strangeness of the event, but the credibility of the witness. There was no embellishment, no attempt to connect it to aliens or secret programs, no desire to be believed, just a simple statement.
Something impossible came into my house, behaved as if it was conscious, and then left. Rogan also described being shown an exceptionally clear photograph of an orb taken at a Skinwalker ranch to related event. Not a smear of light, not a lens artifact, a defined, structured, luminous sphere with internal complexity captured sharply enough to rule out most conventional explanations. The image had been examined and could not be easily dismissed as reflection, dust, or digital error. And these were not isolated stories. Over decades, dozens of credible witnesses, scientists, security personnel, ranchers, and investigators have reported the same class of object. Small, luminous, maneuverable, apparently intelligent, capable of entering enclosed spaces, interfering with electronics, and reacting to human presence. That consistency is what transforms folklore into something far more troubling.
Because when a phenomenon repeats across time, across observers, across instruments, across cultures, and across investigative methods, it stops being anecdote and starts being evidence. And what the orb phenomenon suggests is not simply unknown technology or exotic physics. It suggests presence, not passive light, not random energy, but mobile, responsive, purposeful awareness, which brings the question full circle. If something at Skinwalker Ranch is intelligent, if it has been watching, responding, adapting, and interacting for decades, perhaps centuries, then it is not merely a mystery to be solved. It is a presence to be reckoned with. And the most unsettling possibility is that it has never been hiding at all. It has been allowing itself to be seen. According to multiple witnesses, the orbs do not merely appear. They interact. They approach people. They enter enclosed spaces. They alter their movement in response to human behavior. They seem to register when they are being watched.
That alone suggests intelligence. An intelligence operating through mechanisms that violate known physics creates a form of fear very different from ordinary danger. It is not the fear of being attacked. It is the fear of realizing that the rules you rely on to understand reality may not be complete and that something operating beyond them may be aware of you. When Joe Rogan talks about these encounters, the tension in his voice is unmistakable.
This is not entertainment for him. It is not a fun mystery. It strikes at something fundamental in his world view.
Because if the orbs are real and if they are truly intelligent and interactive, then the questions become unavoidable.
What are they? Where do they originate?
And what are their intentions? There is footage from Skinwalker Ranch that has never been released publicly. Not because of sensational conspiracy or government suppression, but because those who possess it believe widespread exposure would create a kind of fear that is difficult to contain. Not panic, but existential unease. The fear that comes from realizing that reality may be inhabited by intelligences we do not understand and cannot easily categorize.
Rogan was shown some of this material in a private screening away from cameras and public discussion. Scientists and investigators who have worked on the ranch. People trained to be skeptical and methodical presented him with documentation they could not reconcile with conventional explanations.
Close-range footage of luminous spheres maneuvering with precision. Objects accelerating instantly, making right- angle turns at speeds that would destroy any known aircraft. Orbs passing through solid structures. Movements that suggested not randomness but intent. And most unsettling of all, behavior that appeared responsive to observation, as if the phenomenon were aware of the cameras and either indifferent to them or deliberately allowing themselves to be seen. According to accounts, the material went beyond orbs. Thermal imagery captured figures with heat signatures that appeared and vanished without corresponding physical forms.
Audio recordings contained vocal patterns that did not match known human speech or animal calls. instruments failed in sequences that looked coordinated, as though something were intentionally disrupting the monitoring process rather than merely interfering by chance. What disturbed Rogan was not just the strangeness of what he saw, but what it implied. The activity did not appear random. It seemed selective.
Certain people experienced more encounters than others. Certain areas became active only when specific experiments were conducted. In some cases, phenomena appeared to follow individuals beyond the ranch itself.
Equipment malfunctioned when particular researchers entered certain zones.
Activity intensified when investigations focused on specific locations as though the system were responding to scrutiny.
This is the fear of knowing, not the fear of a ghost story, but the fear that comes from evidence, from realizing that something may be present, aware, and capable of interacting with us in ways we cannot predict. Rogan has described his reaction as a mixture of fascination and deep unease. Part of him wanted more data, more clarity, more understanding.
Another part recognized that every additional piece of evidence made it harder to retreat into comfortable skepticism. The more he learned, the more difficult it became to dismiss the possibility that our picture of reality is incomplete in a profound way. Those who showed him the footage told him something that stayed with him. Once you see this, once you understand what it suggests, you cannot return to not knowing. Your relationship with reality changes. You begin to wonder what else may be present, what else may be watching, what else may be interacting beyond the limits of our current understanding. What sets Skinwalker Ranch apart from other allegedly haunted or anomalous locations is the consistency of reported intelligent behavior. Not vague feelings, not isolated stories. Decades of accounts describing phenomena that appear to observe, to respond, to adapt. Objects that move with apparent purpose.
Electronics that fail at moments that seem calculated rather than random. Orbs that appear when specific individuals are present, as if tracking or studying them. Even the cattle mutilations follow patterns that define natural predation.
Surgical precision. Organs removed cleanly. Blood absent, no tracks, no struggle, not the signature of animals, but of tools and planning. Families who lived on the ranch did not describe their experiences as impersonal disturbances. They described them as targeted voices calling their names, objects of personal significance moved, activity intensifying when they attempted to investigate and diminishing when they tried to ignore it. A persistent sense not just of strangeness, but of being noticed. And that is the most unsettling implication of all. Not that something unknown exists there, but that whatever exists there may be aware, may be deliberate, and may be choosing how and when to interact. What shifted Rogan’s perspective wasn’t any single video, any single witness, or any single experiment. It was the convergence, the way independent lines of evidence, human testimony, sensor data, controlled experiments, and physiological effects kept pointing toward the same conclusion. Whatever is operating at Skinwalker Ranch is not random, not passive, and not mindless. It behaves as if it is aware. That awareness is what creates a uniquely disturbing psychological impact. Not the fear of being attacked, but the fear of being evaluated, of being studied, of being tested. Rogan has described this as far more unsettling than the idea of a dangerous animal or even a hostile human. A predator follows instincts. A human adversary follows motives we can at least imagine. But an intelligence that operates outside known biology, outside known physics, and outside known psychology offers no familiar framework.
You cannot anticipate its priorities.
You cannot infer its limits. You cannot be sure what it considers relevant, threatening, or interesting. At Skinwalker Ranch, the activity often appears to escalate when attention increases and recede when it is ignored.
Instruments are placed and the phenomena shift location. Sensors are aligned and the events occur just outside their range. New detection methods are deployed and the manifestations change character. In some experiments, activity seems to peak at the edges of measurement, producing just enough signal to be undeniable, but never enough to be fully captured. That pattern suggest not randomness but adaptive behavior as though the system understands the active observation and modulates its responses accordingly. For a scientist, that is the definition of an interactive system. For a human being, it feels like being toyed with.
This is the aspect Rogan finds most troubling. The possibility that the phenomena are not merely present, but engaged in a form of psychological interaction. Not overtly violent, not openly communicative, but demonstrative.
Showing what they can do without revealing how or why. establishing superiority of capability, creating uncertainty rather than delivering answers. It is the kind of intelligence that does not need to attack to intimidate. It only needs to display control. Rogan’s long experience interviewing people also plays a role here. Over decades, he has learned to recognize patterns in genuine testimony.
the hesitation, the lack of narrative polish, the emotional disorientation that comes from encountering something that does not fit existing categories.
The blue-collar witness who described the orb in his house did not speak like someone promoting a belief system. He spoke like someone trying to integrate an experience that had shattered his assumptions about reality. There was no confidence in interpretation, only certainty about what he had seen and confusion about what it meant. That kind of confusion is difficult to manufacture. It carries a different psychological signature than storytelling or selfdeception.
Rogan has also emphasized the consistency across witnesses who had never met, people from different backgrounds, different regions, different belief systems, describing the same class of object, the same behaviors, the same sense of being observed or engaged. When such accounts align, especially when they emerge from individuals who have nothing to gain by speaking, the probability of coincidence or collective fantasy diminishes.
What further unsettled him was the demeanor of the scientists and engineers involved. These were not believers searching for confirmation. They were professionals trained to eliminate variables, to distrust anecdote, to seek mechanical explanations. And yet they were the ones documenting repeatable patterns, implementing safety protocols, and quietly acknowledging that the phenomena were behaving in ways no passive physical process should. Rogan did not come away from Skinwalker Ranch with a tidy theory. He did not leave convinced of a specific origin, whether extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or something else entirely. What changed was more fundamental. He left with the sense that there is an intelligence operating in our environment that does not announce itself openly, does not fit our categories and does not behave like a natural force. An intelligence that seems to watch, an intelligence that seems to respond. An intelligence that may be less interested in being understood than in demonstrating that it cannot be controlled. And that realization more than any single sighting or story is what lingers.
Because once you seriously consider the possibility that something unknown is not only present but aware, the universe no longer feels empty. It feels inhabited. And not all inhabitants, especially the ones who do not follow our rules, are necessarily inclined to reveal their intentions. What ultimately shifted Rogan wasn’t any single piece of evidence. It was the cumulative weight of everything taken together. multiple independent witnesses with no incentive to fabricate sophisticated instrumentation capturing correlated anomalies and his own visceral reaction to engaging with the material. He wanted to remain skeptical. He searched for conventional explanations. But the convergence of credible testimony and documented data made comfortable dismissal impossible. And this is the most important part of his experience.
Rogan did not become a blind believer.
He did not abandon critical thinking or begin accepting every paranormal claim.
What changed was something more subtle and more powerful. He reached a point where intellectual honesty required him to admit that something was happening at Skinwalker Ranch that he could not readily explain away. Coming from someone with his platform, his reputation for challenging guests, and his instinctive resistance to extraordinary claims that acknowledgement carries real weight.
There is a concept in psychology sometimes referred to as the knowledge burden. Once you are exposed to information that fundamentally challenges your model of reality, you cannot simply erase it. You can reinterpret it, minimize it, or push it aside, but you cannot return to the state of not knowing. The mind has to accommodate the possibility and that accommodation creates a persistent low-level tension. Rogan has described this effect in relation to skinwalker ranch. Before the paranormal existed for him largely as abstraction, ghost stories were entertainment.
UFOs were speculative curiosities.
But after seeing the footage, after speaking directly with witnesses and investigators, after confronting data that did not fit within known physical frameworks, the unknown became concrete, not proven in a final sense, but no longer safely dismissible. The fear he describes is not fear of attack. It is not fear of physical harm. It is existential. It comes from realizing that reality may contain intelligences and processes that operate beyond our current understanding that may be aware of us and that may not be bound by the constraints we assume govern the universe. It is the unease that arises when the foundation of certainty cracks even slightly. This is why those who showed him the footage warned him beforehand, not because the images themselves were grotesque or traumatic, but because they carried implications that are difficult to unlearn. Once you seriously consider that credible people and sophisticated instruments may be documenting phenomena that violate known physics and exhibit intelligent behavior, the sense of living in a fully understood world is gone. Rogan has spoken with combat veterans, survivors of extreme violence, and people who have witnessed the darkest aspects of human behavior. Those experiences are horrific, but they still operate within a known framework. human psychology, human capability, human limits. What Skinwalker Ranch introduced was something different. The possibility that there are non-human intelligences, or at least non-human systems, interacting with our environment in ways we do not yet comprehend. Since then, he has noted a subtle shift in himself, a greater openness to the idea that some anomalous experiences people report may be real. Not automatic belief, but the loss of automatic dismissal. And that loss itself creates uncertainty because skepticism is most comfortable when it can rely on firm boundaries. Once those boundaries blur even slightly, the mind has to live with unresolved possibility.
He has also been careful about how much detail he shares. He acknowledges the impact. He references what he was shown, but he avoids exhaustive description.
That restraint suggests an awareness of the same knowledge burden in others.
Some information once absorbed alters perception in ways that are not easily contained. And this is the deeper implication of Skinwalker Ranch. If even a portion of what has been documented there is accurate, it is not merely a curiosity about one isolated property in Utah. It challenges our assumptions about the structure of reality itself, about intelligence, about observation.
about what may coexist with us beyond the limits of our current models. Rogan did not leave with answers. He left with something more difficult. The recognition that the questions themselves may be far more profound than he had ever suspected. If the orbs are real and intelligent, then the most unsettling question is not simply that they exist, but what they are. Are they technological, suggesting the presence of an advanced civilization whose engineering operates on principles far beyond our own? Are they biological, implying forms of life that evolved along pathways so different from terrestrial biology that our categories of organism and machine no longer apply?
Or are they something else entirely?
Entities that do not reside solely in our familiar dimensions of space and time, but intersect with our reality from states of existence. We do not yet have language or mathematics to properly describe. The behavior reported at Skinwalker Ranch makes these questions unavoidable. The phenomena do not merely appear. They respond. They approach.
They retreat. They evade. They seem to choose when to manifest and when to withdraw. And the effects they produce are rarely overtly violent. Instead, they are psychological.
Disorientation, fear, a sense of being watched, the demonstration of capabilities that should not be possible, delivered in a way that destabilizes certainty rather than inflicting direct harm. That raises the disturbing issue of intent. What kind of intelligence expends energy not to communicate clearly, not to destroy, but to unsettle, to create ambiguity, to provoke awareness without offering explanation, to reveal just enough to shatter assumptions, but never enough to resolve the mystery. It is the behavior of something that is neither indifferent nor openly hostile, but curious, perhaps testing, perhaps establishing dominance through incomprehensibility. There is also the question of scale. If this level of activity is occurring at Skinwalker Ranch, a site that happens to be under sustained scientific scrutiny, what is happening elsewhere? How many similar interactions go unnoticed, misinterpreted, or dismissed because they occur in places without instrumentation, without investigators, without a cultural framework that allows them to be taken seriously. How much of our reality is shaped by phenomena that we have trained ourselves to ignore because they do not fit our models. For Rogan, these questions intersect with themes he has explored for years. The limits of human knowledge, the nature of consciousness, and the possibility that intelligence in the universe is not confined to biological organisms or technological civilizations as we currently understand them. Skinwalker Ranch becomes in that context not just a location, but a case study, a place where abstract philosophical questions manifest as physical, measurable, yet still inexplicable events. And that creates a particular cognitive burden.
We are accustomed to believing that everything unknown is merely not yet explained. That with better tools and better theories, all anomalies will eventually be absorbed into the framework of science. But Skinwalker Ranch suggests a more troubling possibility that some phenomena may persist at the edge of understanding, not because our methods are incomplete, but because the phenomena themselves operate outside the domains our methods were designed to probe. This is where the story connects to the highest levels of government. In 2007, the Defense Intelligence Agency sent a senior physicist to Skinwalker Ranch. His name was Dr. James Latsky. He was not a paranormal investigator.
He was a specialist in advanced aerospace systems and threat assessment, trained to evaluate extraordinary claims with extreme skepticism. His assignment was straightforward. determine whether the reports surrounding a remote Utah ranch were meaningless noise or something that merited serious national security attention. From the Pentagon’s perspective, the expectation was routine. Review the site, examine the data, interview the witnesses, identify conventional explanations, close the file. Latsky arrived in July of 2007 with security personnel and representatives connected to the property’s owner at the time, billionaire aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigalow. Bigalow had already invested millions of dollars into instrumenting the ranch with infrared cameras, electromagnetic sensors, radiation detectors, seismic monitors, and environmental recording systems.
This was not folklore being investigated with campfire stories. It was an active test site, collecting continuous data.
What Latsky encountered there did not close the file. It opened one. Within months, his assessment helped trigger the creation of a covert Pentagon program, later revealed as the advanced aerospace threat identification program funded at $22 million and tasked with studying not only UAPs, but the broader class of phenomena associated with places like Skinwalker Ranch. And the most unsettling detail is not what happened during the investigation.
It is what investigators reported after they left. lights appearing near their homes, unexplained knocks and sounds, pressure changes in sealed rooms, children waking in fear, describing figures and presences, experiences that mirrored what witnesses had described on the ranch itself, now occurring hundreds or thousands of miles away. For some of them, the investigation did not end when they drove off the property. It followed them. And that is why so much of what was learned remains classified. Not because of embarrassment, not because of misinterpretation, but because the implications extend beyond one location, one study, or one set of anomalies. They suggest that whatever is being observed is not confined by fences, property lines, or perhaps even by the simple notion of place. Which leads back to the question that haunts everyone who takes Skinwalker Ranch seriously. If these phenomena are intelligent, and if they are aware of being studied, then the investigation may never have been one-sided. It may have always been mutual. Nothing was being hidden.
Everything was being recorded. The visit was supposed to last only a few hours, but as daylight faded, Bigalow’s team suggested staying through the night.
They told Latsky that whatever was happening on the ranch tended to intensify after dark. He agreed, not because he believed the stories, but because dismissing claims without observing the conditions under which they supposedly occurred would be unscientific. Not long after nightfall, while standing near one of the ranch’s central structures, Lacatsky witnessed something he would later admit he could not explain. In front of him, suspended in open air, a three-dimensional tunnel of light appeared. It was not a beam, not a reflection, not a projection. It had volume, depth, structure, a luminous yellow white form extending horizontally like a corridor made of energy. And then, just as abruptly, it vanished. The entire event lasted less than 30 seconds. What made it impossible to dismiss was not just what he saw with his own eyes. It was what happened across the instrumentation at the exact same moment. Electromagnetic field monitors spiked. Radiation detectors registered a brief but distinct anomaly.
Temperature sensors recorded a sudden localized drop in the air surrounding the phenomenon. Independent systems calibrated separately and operating on different physical principles all reacted in synchrony. For a physicist trained to recognize coincidence, noise, and equipment failure, that convergence was deeply unsettling. Latsky spent the rest of the night reviewing the data and questioning the researchers. By morning, he no longer regarded the ranch as a collection of strange stories. He regarded it as an active, measurable anomaly. And before he left Utah, he heard something even more troubling.
Multiple members of Bigalow’s research team claimed that after working on the ranch, the phenomena did not remain confined there. They followed them home.
When Lacatsky returned to Washington and delivered his briefing to the Defense Intelligence Agency, it did not sound like folklore. It did not sound like misidentification or mass hysteria. He described synchronized sensor anomalies, multiple trained observers witnessing the same events, and data sets that could not be explained away as malfunction or environmental noise. His conclusion was blunt. Whatever was occurring at Skinwalker Ranch was real, repeatable, and significant enough to justify a formal classified investigation. Within months, the Pentagon quietly authorized a program that would later become known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Applications Program or AWS SAP.
Publicly, it was framed as research into future aerospace threats and advanced technologies.
Privately, its core mission was to understand the phenomena associated with Skinwalker Ranch and to determine whether similar anomalies were appearing at other locations. The budget was $22 million allocated over roughly 2 years.
The existence of the program was known to only a small circle of officials. The contract was awarded to a research organization connected to Robert Bigalow, a decision that later raised questions. But from the government’s perspective, it was logical. Bigalow’s team already possessed years of data, a fully instrumented site, and direct access to the only location where such phenomena appeared to occur repeatedly.
Starting from scratch would have meant losing both time and opportunity. Once OAP was formally underway, Skinwalker Ranch changed. Additional sensors were installed. Spectrum analyzers, radiation monitors, magnetometers, seismic equipment, and highresolution optical and infrared cameras were expanded and hardened. Security protocols tightened.
Access was restricted. Scientists, engineers, and intelligence analysts rotated through the site under controlled conditions. Every anomaly was logged. Every data stream was cross-cheed. Environmental baselines were established so that mundane explanations could be ruled out before anything was classified as truly anomalous. The ranch was no longer just a place where strange things had been reported. It had become a monitored intersection between known physics and something that did not obey its rules.
And for those involved in OAP, the most troubling realization was not simply that the phenomena were real, but that they appeared to be interactive. They did not occur at random. They manifested in response to instrumentation, to human presence, to specific experimental setups. In some cases, the activity seemed to anticipate the investigator’s actions appearing just outside sensor range or interfering precisely when data collection reached a critical point to intelligence analysts and physicists alike. That suggested something profoundly unsettling. Not just an unknown process, but a system that was aware it was being studied. Some personnel worked there for weeks and reported nothing. Others experienced disturbances after a single brief visit.
There was no clear dose response relationship. No threshold of exposure that could be mapped or controlled. The effects did not scale in a way consistent with radiation, chemical contamination, psychological stress, or any known environmental hazard. They appeared selective, sporadic, and personal. And that selectivity is what deeply unsettled program leadership. If this were a contaminant, a pathogen, or an energetic field, the effects would follow gradients. Proximity would matter. Duration would matter.
Protective measures would matter. But the pattern emerging from the reports did not follow physical laws. It followed something closer to attention, interaction, engagement. Investigators who had actively participated in certain experiments, who had been present during specific high activity events, or who had focused their work on particular regions of the ranch seemed more likely to report follow on phenomena. Others who remained peripherilally involved, even if they spent comparable time on the property, often experienced nothing at all. That distinction forced an uncomfortable hypothesis into internal discussions. Whatever was occurring at Skinwalker Ranch might not be passively affecting people. It might be selectively interacting with them, not exposure. Contact. By the end of the program’s first year, internal briefings no longer framed the ranch as merely an anomalous environment. It was being described as an initiating system, something capable of triggering events that extended beyond its physical boundaries and followed individuals into entirely different locations. The language shifted from sight specific effects to persistent phenomena associated with prior proximity. In intelligence terms, that implied tracking. In psychological terms, it implied targeting. And in physical terms, it implied that whatever mechanisms were involved were not constrained by distance in the way conventional forces are. Robert Bigalow had warned of this early on. Years before the Pentagon became involved, his own research staff had quietly compiled case files on what they called hitchhiker effects, disturbances that appeared to follow personnel home after particularly intense encounters on the ranch. At the time, even his own scientists were reluctant to formalize the pattern. It sounded too much like folklore, too close to classic haunting narratives, too far outside the boundaries of what a serious research program wanted to acknowledge. OAP changed that. Once multiple government investigators, trained analysts, and their families began reporting the same classes of phenomena. Unexplained lights, pressure waves, localized temperature drops, synchronized knocking patterns, shadow-like movements, and electronic malfunctions. The issue could no longer be dismissed as imagination or stress response. The reports were independent. The witnesses were credible. The patterns overlapped. Most disturbing of all, the phenomena did not appear to be random manifestations of energy. They often mimicked earlier events recorded on the ranch itself, as if replaying behaviors in a new environment, the same knocking sequences, the same luminous forms, the same sudden environmental shifts, almost as if whatever process was responsible had learned the human context and was reproducing it. This forced a final deeply troubling realization. If the ranch was not merely a location but a point of interaction, and if that interaction could persist beyond physical separation, then the investigation itself might be altering something. Not just gathering data, but creating relationships. Not just observing, but becoming part of the system being observed. For an intelligence agency accustomed to dealing with adversaries, surveillance, and feedback loops, the implications were stark. You cannot safely study a system that studies you back without understanding the rules of engagement.
And at Skinwalker Ranch, there were no visible rules, only responses.
That is why so much of OAP’s work was ultimately classified. Not because of embarrassment or misidentification, but because the pattern that emerged challenged foundational assumptions about containment, locality, and control. The phenomena were not bound to the ranch. They were not bound to instruments. They were not even bound, it seemed, to space in the conventional sense. And once that possibility was seriously considered, the investigation stopped being about unexplained lights in the sky. It became about something far more unsettling, an unknown intelligence, capable of initiating contact, capable of selective interaction, and capable of following those who attempted to study it. Others experienced immediate and intense disturbances after only brief exposure.
There was no way to predict who would be affected, when the activity would begin, or how long it would last. Duration on the ranch did not correlate with severity. Some researchers spent weeks there and reported nothing. Others were present for a single day and returned home to a cascade of anomalies that lasted months as formal interviews expanded. Even individuals who initially insisted nothing unusual had followed them began to recall small, easily dismissed moments. Doors found open that had been locked. Electronics activating on their own. Fleeting visual distortions in peripheral vision.
unexplained sounds that seemed to carry intent rather than randomness. When these fragments were documented and compared across personnel, geographic regions, and time frames, the pattern became impossible to ignore. Skinwalker Ranch was no longer just a research site. It was a point of initiation, a place where interaction began, but did not remain confined. And that forced investigators to confront a far more dangerous possibility. This was not a localized anomaly. It was a mobile one.
Something capable of attaching to human observers and manifesting in entirely new environments, crossing state lines, entering private homes, appearing in the presence of spouses and children who had never set foot on the property. At that moment, the investigation fundamentally changed. Passive observation was no longer sufficient. If the phenomenon reacted to attention, then controlled interaction might be the only way to understand its operating rules. OAP scientists began designing experiments meant to eliminate coincidence, contamination, and human interference so completely that any remaining effect could only be attributed to an external agency. One of the most revealing tests took place inside a sealed secured trailer. The setup was intentionally simple. A small table was placed at the center of the trailer. On its surface, researchers scattered children’s jacks and a rubber ball in a random arrangement. The trailer was locked with tamper evidence seals equipped with internal and external cameras, motion sensors, and environmental monitors. Air pressure, temperature, humidity, and electromagnetic background levels were logged continuously. No person could enter without triggering alarms. No vibration, air flow, or mechanical system could move the objects without being detected. Hours later, when the team returned, the scene had changed.
The jacks, originally scattered, were now arranged in neat rows, grouped by color. The rubber ball had rolled from one end of the table to the other. No seals were broken. No alarms had sounded. Environmental conditions remained stable. The cameras showed no intrusion and no visible force acting on the objects. The experiment was repeated under even tighter controls. Sometimes the objects moved, sometimes nothing happened at all. The inconsistency itself was critical. Natural forces do not choose when to manifest. Equipment failure does not demonstrate selectivity, but intelligence does.
Other controlled tests produced similarly disturbing results. Sudden flashes of light appeared in sealed rooms and were followed immediately by camera failures, as if the recording itself had triggered a response. Narrow columns of freezing air moved through enclosed spaces, ignoring ventilation paths and thermal gradients, affecting only specific locations. Electromagnetic spikes appeared only while instruments were actively recording, then vanished the moment the systems were powered down. The pattern was unmistakable. The phenomenon did not behave like weather.
It did not behave like geology. It did not behave like random electromagnetic interference. It behaved like something that was aware of being observed. It reacted to instrumentation. It altered its behavior based on experimental conditions. It manifested just enough to be undeniable, yet never enough to be fully captured. By the end of these trials, the conclusion was no longer speculative. Skinwalker Ranch was not hosting a passive anomaly. It was hosting an interactive one, a system that responded to attention, adapted to methodology, and selectively revealed itself. a presence that did not simply exist in the environment, but engaged with the investigators as if the investigation itself were part of the experiment. In other words, the researchers were no longer just studying the phenomenon. They were participants in it. As OAP continued documenting events at Skinwalker Ranch, the investigation crossed an unspoken threshold inside the Pentagon. What had begun as an effort to understand unexplained phenomena was now raising questions that went far beyond physics or aerospace. The problem was no longer simply what the phenomenon was. It was what it could do and whether it represented a category of threat for which no existing security doctrine had prepared them. From a defense perspective, the most alarming development was the off-site activity.
If something encountered on the ranch could follow investigators home and manifest inside private residences, then physical distance offered no protection.
Several ASAP personnel held highle security clearances and routinely worked inside classified facilities. The question became unavoidable. If the phenomenon could appear in a suburban bedroom, what prevented it from appearing inside a secure military installation, a command center, or a sensitive research lab? That possibility forced leadership into territory no intelligence framework was designed to navigate. If the activity represented a form of surveillance, one capable of tracking individuals without electronics, signals, or physical devices, it exceeded anything known in human technology. Such a capability would render every concept of perimeter security, encryption, and access control obsolete. For a time, analysts considered whether a foreign adversary could be responsible. Russia and China were quietly evaluated as hypothetical sources, but the theory collapsed under scrutiny. The same class of phenomena had been reported in the Uenta basin for decades, long before the existence of modern satellite networks, quantum sensors, or advanced stealth systems.
That left a far more unsettling conclusion. The phenomenon might not be human. This was not a hypothesis officials were comfortable entertaining.
It cut across deeply held assumptions about sovereignty, threat modeling, and technological competition. Yet, the data forced the issue. The activity demonstrated awareness. It responded to observation. It altered its behavior when experiments changed. It appeared to select individuals rather than simply affect locations. These were not the characteristics of weather, geology, or random electromagnetic effects. They were the characteristics of an intelligent adaptive system. Briefings prepared for senior leadership converged on the same points. The phenomena were real. They were measurable. They exceeded known technological capabilities. Their origin and intent were unknown, and most critically, they appeared capable of bypassing physical security entirely, interacting with human environments without regard for distance, walls, or controlled access.
OSAP leadership also warned of another dimension of risk, human cost.
Investigators were reporting sustained psychological stress. Families were experiencing disturbances they could not explain. There were no established medical or security protocols for dealing with an influence that did not respect physical boundaries and could not be screened for, shielded against, or reliably predicted. Participation in the program now carried unknown long-term consequences, something no government agency could ethically require of its personnel. At that point, Skinwalker Ranch ceased to be merely an unsolved scientific puzzle. It became a liability. The Pentagon found itself facing an impossible choice. ignore the phenomenon and risk overlooking a genuine unprecedented threat or continue probing it and potentially expose more people to an influence that could not be contained, could not be neutralized, and whose rules of operation were completely unknown. That dilemma would soon force a decision, one that would quietly reshape the program, limit what could be studied, and ensure that much of what had been learned would never be discussed publicly. Because when an intelligence agency encounters something it cannot classify, cannot control, and cannot defend against, the only remaining option is often the simplest and the most unsettling. Stop looking and hope that whatever is there chooses not to look back. The investigation established several points that could no longer be dismissed as speculation.
First, that the phenomena associated with Skinwalker Ranch were not isolated incidents or misinterpretations, but repeatable events documented by multiple independent sensors and trained observers. Second, that the activity demonstrated adaptive behavior reacting to human presence, experimental setups, and attempts at measurement. Third, that the effects were not confined to a single geographic location, and in some cases appeared to follow individuals after contact. manifesting in environments far removed from the original site. These conclusions did not fit into any existing category of threat. They were not ballistic, not cyber, not biological, not nuclear. They did not resemble espionage, terrorism, or conventional warfare. Yet, they demonstrated capabilities that, if attributed to a foreign power, would represent a strategic breakthrough beyond anything currently imaginable.
The problem was that no adversary could plausibly be responsible and no known technology could account for the behavior. Within classified assessments, the language shifted. Analysts stopped using terms like anomalous events and began referring instead to unidentified intelligent phenomena. Not as a claim of extraterrestrial origin, but as a description of functional behavior. The system exhibited information processing.
It responded to stimulus. It altered its output when conditions changed. It showed selectivity and apparent awareness. Those are the operational hallmarks of intelligence regardless of origin. The ranch itself was reclassified internally not as a hot spot, but as an interface, a place where something intersected with our environment strongly enough to be observed. The hitchhiker effects suggested that the interface was not fixed to the land but could extend along human attention and interaction as if observation itself created a pathway.
From a national security standpoint, this was deeply destabilizing. Every model of defense assumes locality. You protect borders. You secure buildings.
You shield networks. But an influence that does not respect distance, walls, or electromagnetic isolation invalidates those assumptions. You cannot deter what you cannot locate. You cannot shield against what does not propagate through known forces. You cannot negotiate with what does not communicate in any human framework. This is why when OAP was dissolved, the most controversial aspects of its findings were compartmentalized and effectively buried, not because they had been disproven, but because they created strategic questions no one could responsibly answer. How do you brief Congress on an intelligence that may not be human, that may not be technological, and that may not even be bound by the same physical constraints as we are? How do you justify funding for a program whose subject cannot be contained, targeted, or even reliably engaged? So, the program was restructured. The focus narrowed to UAPs, propulsion anomalies, and sensor correlations in airspace. The ranch, the off-site effects, the interaction studies, and the psychological and familial disturbances were excised from the official narrative. They did not disappear. They were simply moved into deeper classification where unresolved problems are often placed when no policy framework exists to handle them. But the implications remained inside restricted briefings. The legacy of OAP was not that it failed, but that it revealed the presence of something operating in our environment that did not fit the categories of natural phenomenon, human technology, or known biological life, something that interacted selectively responded to observation, and in certain circumstances appeared to initiate contact rather than merely react to it.
For the officials who reviewed the full record, Skinwalker Ranch was no longer a curiosity or even a mystery. It was a warning, a demonstration that our assumptions about isolation, control, and observational safety might be fundamentally flawed. That there may be intelligences or systems capable of perceiving us, engaging with us, and withdrawing at will, leaving behind data we cannot fully interpret and experiences we cannot easily forget. And that is why even after the program ended, even after the funding was reallocated and the files were locked away, the question that haunted those involved did not go away. Not what did we find, but what found us first. The investigation ultimately established several conclusions that could no longer be dismissed. First, the activity associated with Skinwalker Ranch was real and measurable. It was not the result of faulty sensors, exaggeration, or misidentified natural events.
Independent instruments operating on different physical principles repeatedly recorded anomalies that violated known expectations of physics and engineering.
Second, the phenomena displayed behavior that appeared responsive and adaptive.
It did not manifest randomly. Activity often intensified when monitoring increased and diminished when observation ceased. experiments rarely repeated under identical conditions as though the system adjusted its behavior in response to being studied. That alone separated it from weather, geology, or electromagnetic interference, all of which follow consistent mechanical rules. Third, investigators concluded the phenomena demonstrated capabilities beyond known human technology.
Instantaneous acceleration, localized manipulation of temperature and electromagnetic fields, and apparent interaction without physical contact were all documented. No aerospace platform, no surveillance system, no known propulsion or sensing technology could account for such performance.
Whether this represented an unknown natural process, an advanced intelligence, or something entirely non-human remained unresolved. Most troubling of all was the realization that the phenomenon was not bound to location. OAP data showed that exposure, not geography, mattered. Individuals who spent time at the ranch later experienced related effects in entirely different states, sometimes thousands of miles away. This fundamentally changed the model. Skinwalker Ranch was no longer considered the source of the activity. It was the point of initial interaction. These conclusions directly shaped every follow-on effort inside the Pentagon. Later programs focused on unexplained aerial phenomena adopted OISAP’s data standards and methodological rigor while carefully avoiding its more controversial implications. The subject was not abandoned. It was narrowed, compartmentalized, and placed under deeper classification. Years later, fragments of the program began to surface. Physicists such as Halputoff spoke cautiously about aspects of the research in limited public settings.
James Latsky later co-authored a book confirming the government’s involvement.
Though key sections remained redacted, these disclosures confirmed what insiders already knew. The investigation did not debunk the reports surrounding Skinwalker Ranch. It validated them. OAP did not solve the mystery. What it did was more unsettling. It demonstrated that the phenomenon was real, interactive, and not confined to a single location. It showed that something could respond to human attention, adapt to observation, and persist beyond the boundaries of the site where it was first encountered.
When the program was shut down, the public assumption was that the government had lost interest. In reality, interest never disappeared. It simply changed form. What ended was the organizational structure, not the concern that had created it. The findings were too disruptive to be discarded. They were absorbed into classified channels where their implications could be managed quietly.
Internally, a final understanding took shape. Skinwalker Ranch had never been the problem itself. The ranch was not a container holding the phenomenon. It was a trigger, a place where interaction became visible, where something that normally operates beyond perception briefly intersected with the human world. OAP’s data ultimately led to a realization that redefined the entire risk profile of the investigation. Once exposure occurred, distance no longer mattered. time no longer mattered. The activity did not remain confined to a location. It appeared to follow individuals into their homes, their families, and potentially into secure work environments. From a policy and security standpoint, that single conclusion made the problem unsolvable.
You can secure land. You can restrict facilities. You can terminate contracts and shut down programs, but you cannot contain something that attaches to people rather than places. Continuing the research meant knowingly exposing personnel to an unknown influence for which there were no countermeasures, no shielding, no medical protocols, and no way to reverse or even reliably predict its effects. There was no ethical framework that allowed an intelligence agency to compel employees and their families to accept open-ended risk from a phenomenon that could not be defined, controlled, or defended against. From that moment forward, long-term study was no longer just scientifically difficult.
It was institutionally impossible.
Years later, fragments of what had been learned began to surface. Former officials cautiously acknowledged the existence of the program. James Lotsky publicly stated that what he witnessed at the ranch could not be reconciled with known physics. Other researchers confirmed that off-site effects were real, documented, and among the most troubling aspects of the investigation.
Yet the majority of the data remains classified, not because it was inconsequential, but because its implications were destabilizing. It challenged assumptions not only about technology, but about locality, causality, and the limits of human control. The most unsettling conclusion OSAP reached was also the most straightforward. The phenomenon did not behave like a natural force. It did not behave like weather, radiation, or geology. It did not behave like a malfunctioning system. It behaved like something aware. It reacted to observation. It adapted to scrutiny. It showed selectivity. It appeared to initiate contact and then withdraw when understanding approached. Whether this represents non-human intelligence, an unknown layer of physical reality, or a system of consciousness operating beyond current scientific models remains unresolved. OAP did not end with answers. It ended with a boundary the government chose not to cross again.
Skinwalker Ranch ceased to be a project.
It became a lesson, a demonstration that some investigations do not fail because they lack evidence, but because the evidence forces questions no institution, no doctrine, and no security framework is prepared to confront. And if the central finding is correct, if the phenomenon is not bound to land but to interaction, then the final most disturbing possibility remains open. It may not be finished with