SPEAKER_04

The police saw it.

Several other groups saw it in the 1970s.

They all converged on the locale.

And this was like in February or something.

It was winter.

And there was this big pile of molten metal in the middle of this field.

probably 30, 40 pounds of it.

And people tried to explain it away as, well, a helicopter had a giant vat of molten metal, and then you calculate how far and how big a container you would have to have to carry molten metal of this type.

And so I analyzed it with a device that we invented in my lab actually called multiplex ion beam imaging, which is a kind of what's called secondary ion mass spec.

which what you do is you shoot a beam of ions at an object like a sandblaster.

It ionizes the material on the target, and then you shoot off and measure the mass of the objects that you just sandblasted off.

And so what we found was nothing unusual in terms of isotope ratios, except we found a mixture of metals that depending on where you looked in the sample was different.

So it would be like iron, titanium, and chromium of a certain ratio here, but a different ratio of those things over there and over here.

So what that meant was that whatever this stuff was,

didn't come completely premixed.

It wasn't like a milkshake.

It was a slurry of partially mixed materials that somebody decided to drop off.

So again, this is just data.

But my purpose of publishing it was first, and this was published in the Progress in Aerospace Sciences, peer-reviewed.

The purpose was to show you're not going to get thrown out of the academy for publishing this stuff.