The latest episode of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, Season 7 Episode 9 “Up In Smoke,” blends field drilling, bespoke subsurface sensing and an intensive night-time experiment at Homestead Two.
Mesa drilling and new GPR data
Triple A Drilling attempted a fourth two-foot-diameter vertical borehole on the mesa but halted after reaching roughly 40 feet, beyond the depth where the team expected a buried object. Spoils from an earlier borehole had yielded rusted metal flakes; investigators used a magnet to recover material they judged to be artificial.
Dr. Jan Francke returned with a new instrument he calls a Coded Sequence Reader, developed to reduce interference that had corrupted earlier scans. His processed ground-penetrating radar output produced usable data: an anomaly near 80 feet and, more strikingly, two large metallic signatures near the 290-foot mark inside Borehole One. The team discussed running GPR into the vertical boreholes next.
Homestead Two experiment: lasers, smoke and odd transmissions
The crew moved a laser grid system into Homestead Two and planned a smoke-filled test to make laser paths visible. Equipment deployed for the night included high-speed video, stationary and mobile LiDAR, a GPS unit mounted on the homestead, spectrum analyzers and a thermal drone.
- A 1.6 GHz test signal was toggled and monitored; at several points the signal reappeared and directional antennas traced it to Homestead Two.
- The team played an audio file of a whistle used by Navajo shaman Art Hardy during an earlier ceremony; during playback a GPS tracker showed vertical movement while a 1.6 GHz transmission was received from the homestead.
- With the smoke and laser grid active, live video captured something moving through the beams, though Pete Kelsey’s SLAM scanner inside the house returned no definitive object and onboard radios experienced malfunctions.
Homestead Three heat signature and drone issues
A blinking green light was observed at Homestead Three; a thermal drone inspection recorded an unexplained warmth inside the derelict building. Later in the night the drone lost its signal as it crossed the Bubble boundary, switched to an autonomous mode and was later recovered when it regained connectivity outside the boundary.
The episode juxtaposes subsurface surprises on the mesa with unexplained electromagnetic and visual phenomena around the homesteads, leaving several anomalies unresolved as the team plans further investigative scans.
Source: Horror Press – The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch: Up In Smoke (S7E9)