Basement: Marc D'Antonio | UFO Propulsion, The Fifth Dimension, and 40 Billion Habitable Worlds

Summary

Podcast Summary

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

Episode: Basement #010: Marc D'Antonio | UFO Propulsion, The Fifth Dimension, and 40 Billion Habitable Worlds
Date: April 6, 2026
Guest: Marc D’Antonio – Astronomer, MUFON’s chief photo/video analyst, VFX company CEO

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Overview

This episode features Marc D’Antonio, an astronomer and expert in visual effects, delving into exoplanets, UFO propulsion theories, anomalous personal experiences, the nature of life in the universe, and the intersection of science, technology, and the unexplained. With personal anecdotes, science deep-dives, and lively humor, Marc and host AJ explore everything from Marc’s childhood missing time event to advanced physics theories about UFO travel.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Marc’s Early Life: Missing Time, Fear, and the Stars (00:53–18:50)

• The Missing Time Experience (03:06–07:29):
  • At age 9, Marc had an episode of missing time during a school field trip, later experiencing convulsions and complete amnesia about the day.
  • He became inexplicably terrified of the stars at night, feeling watched, yet responded by demanding a telescope.
  • Quote: “Even as a nine-year-old, I... attack things head on. When you're scared, you punch back, right?” – Marc (08:00)
• Turning Fear Into Passion (09:08–10:43):
  • Looking at the stars became his obsession, eventually driving him to become an astronomer.
  • He wrote to NASA/JPL with his own space station plans at age 9 while recovering from heart surgery, inspiring a letter (and a box of space memorabilia) from Gentry Lee, who would become a legendary NASA scientist (15:26–18:04).

2. Astronomy, Outreach, and Building Observatories (18:52–33:58)

• Building Telescopes and Observatories (18:52–23:58):
  • Early attempts at constructing telescopes and cameras, often with improvised materials.
• Outreach: Sharing the Night Sky (20:49–27:43):
  • Marc built an observing dome (nicknamed “the minion”) in his yard, streaming live astronomy to the public.
  • Later built remote observatories in Arizona, networked for collaborative and public skywatching, even offering data for community science.
  • Quote: “When you make it understandable to people, they start asking questions... There are no stupid questions. If you don't know, you don't know. I was you once. Just ask.” – Marc (21:56)

3. The Exoplanet Revolution and Habitable Worlds (34:09–56:12)

• How Many Are Out There? (34:12–35:52):
  • There are roughly 5,200 known exoplanets, but the true number is vastly higher.
  • Kepler and TESS telescopes are expanding these numbers rapidly.
  • Red dwarfs are the most abundant stars and likely hosts of planetary systems.
• Searching for Signs of Life (42:44–46:57):
  • The chemical building blocks of life, such as amino acids, can be created through natural processes and delivered to planets by meteorites.
  • The “Populated Universe” hypothesis: Life—possibly intelligent life—exists throughout the universe, mainly carbon-based and bilaterally symmetrical.
• Drake Equation – New Numbers (53:18–56:12):
  • Recent analyses suggest between 25 million and 40 billion habitable worlds just in our galaxy.
  • Quote: “That doesn’t mean intelligent life, but it sure does give it a fighting chance, doesn’t it?” – Marc (54:48)

4. Alien Evolution, Implants, and the Troodon Speculation (49:04–53:10)

• Could Life Look Different?
  • Explores alternative evolution on Earth—the Troodon dinosaur possibly becoming an intelligent, perhaps reptilian, species absent extinction.
  • Quote: “I do believe you could have races out there that may have developed off of a reptilian branch.” – Marc (51:10)
• Mutations, Selection & UV Radiation
  • Natural selection and DNA mutations may be boosted by UV radiation, driving the diversity of life.

5. Advanced Astronomy Tools & Detection Techniques (56:12–68:16)

• Telescopes and Imaging (63:29–66:39):
  • Advancement from film/eyepiece to digital, remote, and even proposed orbital telescopes capable of imaging exoplanets directly.
  • The future includes building massive telescope arrays in space, further transforming astronomy’s capabilities.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Gentry Lee’s Impact (15:49):
  “He read every page, every comment and he circled things... ‘This is a good idea. We do this. It’s called a CO2 scrubber.’... He wrote me a letter: ‘Dear Mark, your space station plan I read with enthusiasm.’” – Marc
• On Personal UFO Experiences (70:29–88:56):
  • Three-night encounter at his house: unexplained knocking, a blinding flash of light, and a subsequent medical mystery involving a nasal polyp (later removed and mysteriously lost by pathology), coupled with dog fear and physical symptoms.
  • Quote: “Where does science go in the face of the unexplained?... Sometimes the unexplained could be tomorrow’s science.” – Marc (152:36)

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UFOs and Navy Submarine Encounters (89:02–107:14)

• UFOs/USOs: The Fast Mover Incident (95:11–98:13):
  • Aboard a Navy sub, Marc overhears sonar operators detect a “fast mover” underwater object moving at several hundred knots—anomalous for any known technology.
  • Upon inquiring later with a high-ranking military engineer, received a telling “I can’t talk about that.”
  • Quote: “All he said was, ‘Let’s keep it that way [a good trip],’ and walked away. By saying nothing, he said everything.” – Marc

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Disclosure, Government, and Hollywood's Role (107:14–111:45)

• Disclosure & Media Influence (107:14–108:16):
  • Hollywood films (e.g., “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Close Encounters”) are seen as prepping the public for eventual contact.
• Douglas Trumbull Collaboration (108:25–115:02):
  • Longtime partnership with the renowned VFX artist; together attempted to build a UFO detection system, the “UFOTOG.”
  • Quote: “We could use you now. Can you come up and meet?” – Trumbull to Marc (109:17)

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UFO Photographic Evidence & Hoaxes (120:18–132:19)

• Marc's Role at MUFON (120:25):
  • As chief photo/video analyst: “About 99.5 or 6% [of sightings]... can be explained.”
  • Sights like birds, drones, dust, or atmospheric artifacts are commonly mistaken for anomalous objects.
• Notorious Hoaxes Debunked:
  • The Dome of the Rock (Jerusalem) case was a film class project; discrepancies in multiple video angles exposed it as a fake.
  • Turkish UFO videos likely reflections or camera artifacts.
  • Quote: “Many times people capture ordinary things in an extraordinary way.” – Marc (121:07)

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The Fifth Dimension & UFO Propulsion Theory (139:18–176:32)

The Fifth Dimension Concept:

• Randall–Sundrum Model (RS1) (139:27–157:00):
  Explains how gravity’s weakness compared to other forces might be due to its origin in a hidden fifth dimension. If manipulated, this could allow “gravity avoidance” travel without violating relativity.
  • Quote: “UFOs don’t need engines. They just need the ability to translate from one dimension to another.” – Marc (153:07)
  • RS1/Kaluza-Klein gravitons at CERN (157:00–159:06)

Technological Implications:

• UFOs as mini particle accelerators: Their round shape is for generating Kaluza-Klein gravitons, opening a path into the fifth dimension.
• This theory explains classic UFO characteristics: sudden appearances/disappearances, "impossible" maneuvering, radiation burns (from synchrotron radiation).
• “If we can do this, we can get to Alpha Centauri in about 20 minutes.” – Marc (164:12)
• “It's not anti-gravity... it’s gravity avoidance.” – Marc (190:51)

Future Power: Fusion Possibility (179:50–182:09)

• Latest fusion advances (e.g., Livermore Labs) could provide the required power someday for such propulsion.

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The Fermi Paradox, Biosignatures, and Why Disclosure Would Be Underwhelming (184:48–189:14)

• Earth’s Oxygen Signature:
  • Earth’s atmospheric oxygen has been a beaming “marker” of life for 2 billion years; any advanced civilization looking for life would have known of us long before humans arrived.
  • “It’s a blazing blue beacon in the universe.” – Marc (186:18)
• Disclosure:
  • Likely to be anticlimactic vs the drama of Hollywood; “That’s it? Where’s the fireballs? Where’s Will Smith?” (188:27)
• Reverse-Engineering Claims:
  • Marc is skeptical but open-minded; most technological leaps like lasers, fiber optics, or transistors likely human-derived, not seeded from crashed UFOs.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Topic             | Start (MM:SS) | |------------------------------------------|:------------:| | Marc’s Childhood Experience | 02:06 | | Space Station Letter to NASA | 12:16 | | Arizona Remote Observatories | 26:40 | | Exoplanets & Number Estimates | 34:22 | | Carbon-Based Life & Drake Equation | 46:57/53:18 | | Navy Fast Mover Submarine Story | 95:11 | | Three-Night Encounter/Sinus Implant | 70:38/76:51 | | Analyzing UFO Evidence & Hoaxes | 120:18 | | Fifth Dimension Propulsion Explanation | 139:18 | | Fusion, Technology & Disclosure | 179:50/184:48| | The “Blazing Blue Beacon”/Contact Climax | 186:09 |

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Final Thoughts & Resources

• Marc offers all his astronomy images freely at SkyTourLive.org and educates the public with open streams and classes.
• His book, “The Populated Universe,” delves into the abundance of habitable worlds and the scientific case for life’s ubiquity.
• The podcast concludes with a reflection on how cutting-edge theoretical physics might explain the UFO mystery—without breaking known laws—and a challenge to distinguish between science fact and fiction as our understanding advances.

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Notable References

• Robert Schroeder’s “Solving the UFO Enigma” – Proposes the “gravity avoidance” propulsion using fifth dimension physics.
• Lisa Randall & Raman Sundrum’s RS1 (1999) – Real theoretical physics research into extra dimensions and the hierarchy problem.
• Lawrence Livermore Fusion Breakthrough – Referenced as signifying real progress toward fusion as a practical energy source.

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Marc D'Antonio's appearance bridges hard science and mystery, blending personal encounters, deep physics, and a resolutely rational approach to phenomena that remain at the edge of our understanding. Whether you’re a skeptic, believer, or curious in-betweener, this episode has plenty of material (and inspiration) for further exploration.

Transcript

[A.J.]

Today we've got Marc Dantonio. He's an astronomer, MUFON's chief photo and video analyst, and the CEO of a visual effects company that builds stuff for Hollywood and defense contractors. He also co developed a UFO detection camera system with Douglas Trumbull. He's the guy who did the visual effects for 2001, Blade Runner, Star Trek, Close Encounters. I mean, he's a legend.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah.

[A.J.]

So he gets paid to analyze UFO footage and make UFO footage, and it's like hiring a counterfeiter to authenticate money. I love it. At nine years old, Mark had a missing time experience on a school field trip. He came home terrified of the night sky. So what did he do? He asked his parents for a telescope. He turned that fear into a career. So the aliens scared him and his response was, I'm gonna find you. That's not a career, that's revenge. This guy's like nerdy Charles Bronson. Today we're covering exoplanets, how life spreads across the universe, and what Mark heard on a Navy submarine that the government won't talk about. Oh, he spent some time with seamen. Stop that.

[Mark Dantonio]

What?

[A.J.]

And Mark has a theory that might explain how UFOs actually move without engines. And I'm telling you, it's a good theory and backed by real science. There's also a three night encounter at his house involving knocking, a flash of light, and something in his sinus that he can't explain. And neither could his doctor. It sounds like his doctor skipped the alien biology classes in med school. Eh, I had a great time hanging out with Mark. He's super smart and also very funny. And I'll prove it. Let's go down to the basement. Mark, welcome to the basement.

[Mark Dantonio]

Wow, aj, so good to be here. Thank you.

[A.J.]

I'm so excited to have you here.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's so much fun. It was a great time. And a long time coming, right?

[A.J.]

It was.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But it's really cool. Good to be here. Thanks, man.

[A.J.]

So you have a super long resume and a very wide breadth of experience, but I want to start with age 9. Got your lunch, you get on the school bus.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, okay. We're going there now.

[A.J.]

Let's do it.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. So, hey, so check this out. Age nine. You're in third grade. Okay. You're excited. You're going on a field trip to a pond.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. How much fun, right? I got. My mother gave me a bag lunch with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some of those fluorescent orange crackers with peanut butter in them, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get on a bus with my bag lunch holding in my hand, okay? And I sit down at the sea, you know, making the squeaky sounds in your shorts? Because I was wearing shorts. It's near the end of the year, okay? And we get to the. We get to the pond. We're all getting off the bus. Next thing you know, I'm getting back on the bus. Wait, what's going on? I still have my bag lunch. I'm holding it the same way, okay? And the kids are bouncing around like, what's going on? So I say, when are we going to the pond? And they turn and look and they're like, ah, you idiot. You know how kids are. Slap, push, punch. You know, we've been there all day. Where were you? Where were you? I don't know. I don't remember the day. It was the first true missing time I've ever experienced. I never experienced anything like that. I didn't know what it was. So I just sort of stayed quiet in the bus, got back to the school, walked home. I was a. What they call a walker.

[A.J.]

Okay, well, hang on. Did the kids know you were gone? Were you just.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, yeah, A couple of them said, where were you all day?

[A.J.]

So you. So they were aware that you were not there?

[Mark Dantonio]

They were aware I was not there, okay? And I don't know. To this day, I don't know where I was.

[A.J.]

You have no memory of what?

[Mark Dantonio]

No memory.

[A.J.]

You ever thought about doing regression or something to figure that out?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, I have, and I'm a little concerned about it. First of all, let me just finish the other part. I got home with that lunch. I put it on the counter. My mother says, why didn't you eat your lunch? We love our moms, right? And see, I said, I don't know. She goes, okay, well, go outside and play. I'll call you for dinner. So I went outside and played with my friend from next door. I distinctly remember a weird feeling coming over me out there. And then next thing you know, I'm on the ground in convulsions and seizures, and I'm banging my head on the ground. Bang, bang, bang. But it wasn't me. Here's the weird part. I'm doing this, and I'm looking at the ground, seeing little red ants running around going, oh, check out the ants. Look at the ants. But I'm still hitting my head really, really hard, hitting ants and thinking, wow, I'm hitting the ants. Hey, I'm squashing the ants. And it wasn't Me? Well, they called the ambulance. Of course they put me in the ambulance. It still wasn't me.

[A.J.]

Wasn't you.

[Mark Dantonio]

Meaning you weren't in control.

[A.J.]

You're just kind of just watching it happen.

[Mark Dantonio]

Exactly. I was a passive observer watching this happen. It wasn't really me. So guess what? I'm watching this. I'm in the ambulance and I say to the ambulance drivers, I say, hey, can you run the siren?

[A.J.]

Right. So you're not frightened?

[Mark Dantonio]

No, I was like, this is cool. And they put on the siren. I'm thinking, wow, cool. They're putting on a siren for me. I wasn't worried at all. I should have been worried.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

I wasn't, A.J. i didn't have a worry in the world. I have no idea why I wasn't worried. I get that hospital, the doctor sees my head has a bump on it, of course, because I was banging my head in the ground. Right. Oh, it's okay. He had a concussion. Okay, so take him home. We'll have the nurse pluck out the dirt that's embedded in his forehead. Okay, that was the worst part. That hurt like you can't believe they're plucking dirt out of an abrasion. Okay, if you get an abrasion, imagine plucking dirt out of it. The pain is. Ah, that's just painful. Makes people have jelly legs. Right? So anyway, that was the worst part. I just wanted to go home, so.

[A.J.]

Well, hang on. What did mom say? Where were you? Teacher chaperone?

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, no, she never knew that I missed all that time.

[A.J.]

You didn't tell her?

[Mark Dantonio]

I never told her.

[A.J.]

Of course we were not going to tell her.

[Mark Dantonio]

I'm not going to get. Right. Well, you're going to take me to a psychiatrist now. No way.

[A.J.]

No.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, I'm not going to the doctors again. The hospital was scary to me, so I didn't want to do it, man. So I ended up going home. And the worst part was, besides picking all that stuff out of my forehead, I know that's nasty sounding, was that they wouldn't let me sleep for the night because the doctors told them keep them awake.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And my mother, of course, going overboard. You can't sleep tonight. You're going to have to stay awake. And that was the worst part because I was really tired and I mean, and anyone that has seizures and convulsions knows that afterwards you're fatigued, your body has just gone through this tumultuous muscle tensing and relaxation. Tensing. And it's like doing a workout in like 25 seconds, 30 minutes, whatever it takes. And so I was just totally fatigued. I couldn't even sit up in the table at the hospital, I kept wanting to fall over. And so that's probably why the doctor said, don't let him fall asleep. Keep awake, you know, like, okay, Marky. Okay, Marky. That's what they call me.

[A.J.]

So is this missing time because of seizures or is there. Did something else happen? Just speculate.

[Mark Dantonio]

My speculation is something happened, okay? I came home perfectly fine. If I was having a seizure, I would expect I would be dirty, filthy, have problem, have abrasions from, you know, having done it. I had nothing, Nothing, AJ Nothing on my body indicated anything until I had that seizure before dinner, pounding my head in the sand. Okay, with that, there are people listening

[A.J.]

who have the same experience. What would you. Would you tell them to seek medical help? Keep it quiet? What do they do?

[Mark Dantonio]

Do I look like a good example? Okay, I didn't. I've never sought medical help. I've never tried to do a regression. You know, I'm sure I'll get offers to do regression, but you know what? I'm kind of scared of that. Okay? I'm. I'm.

[A.J.]

That's a fair answer.

[Mark Dantonio]

I'm not. I'm not gonna lie. I'm not like some big brave guy that's gonna say, oh, of course I'll do it. You know, I'm. I'm scared of it.

[A.J.]

When you're nine, did you think this could be an alien abduction or did you not have that frame of reference?

[Mark Dantonio]

It wasn't there quite yet. But here's what happened after that, unlike any other time after that. When I got home from the hospital, when I went out to play the next day, it was fine. When night came, I was completely afraid to go out and let the stars see me. Right? The stars. Wait a minute. The night is usually frightening to people. It wasn't the night. I didn't care about that. But the stars were scary to me. Something I felt was looking at me. I mean, that's how I was putting it together as a nine year old. It was scary. So I literally, and I think you may know enough about me to know that sometimes I attack things head on. And even as a nine year old, I kind of did that. It doesn't mean I'm brave and, oh, look at him go. No, no, it just means I was scared. And sometimes you attack things when you're scared. When you're scared, you punch back, right? I'm scared. Bang. You Hit without thinking. So I did, in an intellectual way. I actually. I told my parents, I want a telescope. I want a telescope. Mom and dad, you're afraid of the

[A.J.]

stars, yet you want to see more of them.

[Mark Dantonio]

I want to see more of them. And I said, I've got to know what's going on. And I was scared to death. And the first time I went out there looking at them, I was literally like this. And I felt, this is so stupid. It's just a star. You know, I didn't even know what stars were at that point. At the point at nine years old, I thought, well, were they alive? Were they. Were they something? Where are they? The points in the sky? Yeah, we know. They're. They're balls of hot gas. Oh, okay. That's what I knew of stars back then.

[A.J.]

But something's pulling you to look.

[Mark Dantonio]

But something was making me.

[A.J.]

Making you look.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, I looked at the moon first. I'm comfortable with that. This the moon. All right, so I'll check out the moon. Wow. Look at the craters, mom and dad. Look, show them the craters. Wow. That's nice. Mark. Mama, do your homework. Okay, Mom. Right. So then I looked at star clusters, and I saw these beautiful clusters of stars. I wonder if there's anyone looking back at me right now from there. What an odd thought. Is it?

[A.J.]

I don't know if it is, unless I'm odd also.

[Mark Dantonio]

Duh. Hello.

[A.J.]

That's why we get along.

[Mark Dantonio]

I think we get along.

[A.J.]

But.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that you're wondering who's there, who's looking back. Yeah. And so that persisted. And so Starting around age 9, just as I reached age 10, I had to have surgery back then, heart surgery. It was very big to surgery. And had it at Yale, New Haven Hospital. And I started, you know, embedding myself and looking at the telescope because that's what I could do. I couldn't do any kind of athletic stuff. They wouldn't let me. Doctors were way over cautious and conservative back then. They wouldn't let you do anything because

[A.J.]

of a heart condition.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. They had to fix a valve problem. Right. Like in your car.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

So, you know, fix the valve. So they fixed the valve. They. And now they basically have to recuperate. So I didn't even. They wouldn't even let me climb stairs. I had to walk and I had to go to a special school that was all one floor. Okay. It was weird. So anyway, they're over cautious, but I sunk into the telescope and I started looking at stuff and the more I looked at stuff, again, still fearful. Okay. I began to think, I got to figure out what's going on out there. You know, I'd say it's scratching my head. This is something crazy out there. What is this? I'm gonna figure this out. I'd grit my teeth and I'd force myself to look at something that's scary in the sky. And I'd say, I'm gonna figure this out. Now, was it just a mental thing? Maybe. But guess what? Guess what it did. It turned me into an astronomer. Because at age nine, I felt. I said to myself, I'm gonna. I'm gonna be an astronomer.

[A.J.]

Well, doesn't that lead us to you writing to JPL as a 9 year old?

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.

[A.J.]

I actually, we have to get. I mean, this is very. You have your. I don't know if you know how weird you are. In a great way. In a great way.

[Mark Dantonio]

I'm out of here. No, no, you're right. I mean, I definitely feel that I am a little weird sometimes.

[A.J.]

But I just mean this.

[Mark Dantonio]

I try to do it in a good way, man. You know? And most of you understand.

[A.J.]

Yes. Most of us don't have this third or fourth grade experience. We're writing to jpl. So can you. What did you. What did you send to them?

[Mark Dantonio]

To NASA while recovering from the surgery?

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

I was bored. I would look at my telescope. But during the day, what do I do? I read books. I'd read books and I realized, we need a space station. We need a space station. I didn't know that NASA had space stations on the docket and thoughts. I didn't. So I created them. I actually built. I created a space station plan. Okay. It was like eight pages of torn out notebook paper. Okay.

[A.J.]

With blueprints and not even just notebook paper.

[Mark Dantonio]

I drew, you know, by hand and I drew space stations. I made two dumbbells in an X configuration that were rotating at just the right speed so that you get gravity, Earth gravity. At the. In these dumbbells, you're a nine year

[A.J.]

old figuring out how to do one G with centrifugal force.

[Mark Dantonio]

Absolutely. And, and you know. Okay. How did that happen? I don't know.

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. But I did.

[A.J.]

You know, again, it happened during that pond experience.

[Mark Dantonio]

I was. Whoa.

[A.J.]

They. They gave you, they, they, they gave you the seed.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, okay, that's scary now. All right, now you're making me think.

[A.J.]

Well, all right, we'll keep it happy.

[Mark Dantonio]

So, yeah, that's all good. All right, So I I built this space station plan, and I put in rotation to have Earth gravity. I didn't call it 1G. I didn't know what that meant, okay? I said, this will make. If it's rotating, you know, we'll get Earth gravity, okay? And because there was There. There were things out there in the literature talking about space stations rotating, stuff like that. So I. I put it together, made twin dumbbells in an X configuration. The access hatches were, you know, as you get closer, you get zero G at the center. Right. Well, I didn't know that, okay? I just think you climb a ladder to go to the next one. I never put that part together, but it was one. It was. It was rotating with Earth gravity at the ends. I had pigs in there. I had cows, okay? You know, pigs for meat, cows for milk. I mean, I did all that stupid stuff that just obviously is impractical. But I also talked about cleaning the air. How do you clean the air? You got to clean the air inside your space station to get rid of carbon dioxide. I knew that because I read books about what we exhale. So I also figured there has to be a way to get rid of carbon dioxide out of the air. So this box here is the thing to remove carbon dioxide, all right, and replace it with oxygen. Now, we don't do that part, but we do scrub CO2, right? So I didn't know what that was, but I said it's needed for a space station because where are you gonna otherwise get the oxygen? Of course, the animals are gonna need it, too, right? You know? So anyway, I did this whole stuff. I wrote it all up, and I draw these pictures, arrows everywhere, in pencil on notebook paper with blue lines. I love it. I box it up and I put it in a folder, actually, and I sent it down to NASA. And the NASA person that read it must have had a field day, okay? He was a NASA scientist. He read it, and for whatever reason it struck him, he actually wrote back to me. Not.

[A.J.]

Who was he? What was his name?

[Mark Dantonio]

I'll tell you. I'll tell you, okay? Because that's part of the.

[A.J.]

I don't want to step on the punchline.

[Mark Dantonio]

No, no, no, no. You're fine. You're fine. But so this. This NASA guy writes back to me, and he provides me with this giant box, which I said was my space box. It was full of cloth mission patches from missions. It was full of books. It was full of models. It was full of all the stuff a kid could dream of. If you're a Space nut.

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

And I labeled it space box. I had it for decades, tattered, worn, many of the things got lost to time, but I still had the box with a few things in it left. And in my space station plan, in, in the manila envelope, he read every page, every comment and he circled things and little call outs and he wrote things like, this is a good idea. We do this, meaning the carbon dioxide thing. He says it's called a CO2 scrubber. And we do this now. Good thinking. Wow. And then he wrote me a letter, okay. Which said, dear Mark, your space station plan. I read with enthusiasm. I just love that line. Wow. I had a scientist read something I wrote with enthusiasm. I didn't think I'm nine. I'm thinking I'm an adult, right? That's how you think. And then he says, stick with the, they called it back then the manned space program. Right? Stick with the manned space program because you've got a future, you know. And he signed it, his name, Bert Lee. Gentry Lee. Gentry Lee today. And probably retired by now, but he is JPL's head engineer. The Outer. Outer Space Robotic Missions Directorate.

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

And I literally said, I can't believe this. Okay, this is cool. And now back then he was just a NASA scientist. So let's jump ahead 45 years. Okay. I remember Gentry Lee. I should write him and find out if he remembers this. He won't, but I'll do it anyway. I wrote him, he writes me back, I don't remember this, but that's the kind of stuff I did. He says we should stay in touch. This is so cool, you know, and it's really neat. Now I was in Pasadena because I was at a conference out there, right? And I was presenting, so I was presenting for A E. So I couldn't leave, I didn't have a car. But I wanted to go to JPL in the worst way to see if he was there to make an appointment to meet with him and say hi to him. Finally after all these years. I didn't get that chance yet. But man, that guy single handedly took a nine year old kid and cemented that he was going to become an astronomer.

[A.J.]

That's a real gentleman to do that, to take that time to do that.

[Mark Dantonio]

He was amazing, you know, and I've always given him kudos for this. We've talked about this, I think in the past. I know your brother and I talked about it. Gino. For me to get where I am, I've stood on the shoulders of giants, you know, none of it is. I can't say it's all me, you know, I don't have that kind of ego, you know, I've stood in the shoulders of giants. I was helped along the way and I never forget who helped me. And I always make sure I name them and make give them that credit that's due them, you know. So that's how it works, you know. But it's so cool, you know. And so here I am, some weird astronomer guy who believes UFOs exist and believes that we might have alien life on our planet. How the heck did that happen?

[A.J.]

So the 9 year old kid goes into astronomy and you start building telescopes.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, I actually started making a reflecting telescope which I never finished because I was grinding the mirror. But as a nine year old kid I was also very much unable to focus, you know. So I was grinding this mirror with a friend Mike, and we're grinding it in his basement and, and I'm like looking around and thinking, man, you know, hurry up and finish, let's get this thing so we can look at the sky. So the mechanics of making a telescope weren't so exciting to me. Using them and looking at stuff, amazing. And I said, but wait, I want to take pictures with them. And I'm thinking, how do I attach my camera to a telescope? Now I didn't know that they have adapters. So I made one, you know, no lie out of a paper towel roll. And the camera I built out of nothing, I built it out of cardboard. You built a camera? I built a camera, a one shot camera using the Instamatic film they used to have was film camera, you know, and they use a screwdriver to wind it to the next picture. I figured that's about right. And so I would actually make this camera. And then I had the cardboard attached to this paper towel roll in the telescope. I had no way of focusing it. So what I did was I figured, well, here's where the film is and that's got to be where my eye is. So I would look with my eyes. I took my mother's ruler and I went like this. How far away am I, you know, from the eyepiece? And so I got pictures, but of course they're blurry, you know, crappy photos, blurry. But you could see the kind of the star and you could see a sort of a moon crater, you know. But it wasn't, it wasn't unsuccessful, but I figured I wanted to take pictures, so that's how I did it. I couldn't afford a camera.

[A.J.]

How do you end up building basically a missile silo on your front lawn?

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, my. Years later, let's talk about, you know, you're doing astronomy, right? I want to do astronomy, and. But I wanted also to share it. You know, I took my astronomy into public outreach. I felt that that is a. A rigorous application of astronomy is how we're going to leave the planet eventually. You know, astronomy, physics, astrophysics. Okay. And maybe even cosmology. Okay. Is how we're going to get there. All right? So I wanted to be an astronomer to do that. So how do you do that? Well, you. You have to bring other people into the discussion. You know, you hear people talk who are in. In a university, and they're over your head within five minutes, you know, and you're like, well, what about the people that are watching over here? How are they going to. They're not going to get it. So I made it my effort. I made an effort to make it so that I take the complex and make it digestible. Okay? Because even if you don't understand all the science, you should still be allowed to be in the discussion.

[A.J.]

That's why you're perfect for tv, is because you'd make it accessible to all of us.

[Mark Dantonio]

Maybe, I guess, you know, maybe that's why they found me. Who knows? Okay. But the point being that if you can make something like that digestible, well, okay, it's a commodity of sorts. But I don't think of it that way. You know, I. I don't go after opportunities, you know, I mean, this came from someone else, you know, And I said, oh, I'll do it. Sure, that sounds fun, you know? Right. All good. So. But the point being that when you make it understandable to people, they start asking questions, and they always start the same way. This may be a stupid question. And go, no, no, stop. There are no stupid questions. If you don't know, you don't know. I was. You once just ask, and they're set at ease and they ask their question. Well, the black holes really suck, you know? Right. Like, yeah, that's sort of true, but we don't understand gravity yet. We just know that they do. Yeah. And then they go, we don't understand gravity. Oh, that's another discussion. You know, so, yeah, so obviously, you know, obviously, that's very important.

[A.J.]

So tell us about the dome that you built. I just. I love the story.

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, so I wanted to be able to bring astronomy to the masses like we're talking about. And to do it, I needed to have a Telescope that was always accessible. I did not like the inconvenience of having to bring it out 150 pounds of telescope, Mount it, align it with the North Star so that I could make it properly follow the stars. Because you have to do that for telescopes for those who don't know. And by doing that, what I did was I bought a dome for my front lawn. It was the only dome in the entire town of Terryville, Connecticut. It's this big giant white minion on the front lawn. Okay. I dressed it up as Stuart the Minion. In fact, for Halloween. Okay. And people are stopping. Look at Stuart Banana. You know, they're taking pictures of this giant minion on the front lawn.

[A.J.]

How big is. Because my HOA won't let me put up a flag. How do you get a dome? How big is this thing?

[Mark Dantonio]

I don't have an hoa. That's fine. It was an eight foot diameter. Okay. Okay. So it stood about maybe eight feet tall, eight feet wide. You know, it was really, really nice. Okay. I think they called it a standard 2 meter dome. But anyway, I put my computer in there, the telescope was in there and it was protected from the weather mostly, except when we had like violent winter storms that ripped the shutters off and filled the whole thing up with snow. Telescope, computers, the whole nine yards. But luckily it was cold and I took everything out and I blew it out with my air gun and managed to recover perfectly. Right. So it wasn't perfect solution, but it was great. And so I'd go in there, it'd be February, it'd be like minus three outside and it has to be minus three inside too. You can't heat a dome because there's a slot and the warm air would go out and do this to the view. Ah.

[A.J.]

You need to keep everything the same.

[Mark Dantonio]

Ambient temperatures, the outside. And when I worked in a parallax program at a big observatory, we had a 20 inch refractor that was like 35ft long, massive dome. You'd have to open the dome hours before you're ready to start doing observations of nearby stars. Okay. To gauge their distance. And when you did that, it could be 10 below zero or 5 degrees and you got to be in 5 degree weather. Not only that, you had to also work in a dark room in the dome at the same temperature to develop all those, those plates. It was actually glass plates because back then Yale University could actually measure these glass plates with a. What's called a measuring engine back then. That's how they did it then. Now it's all digital. Thank you. Okay. But it was crazy, so I'd be in there. So I'm used to the cold. Hate the cold, you know, and the gloves are never good enough. Right. You can't use heated gloves because it gives off heat, and heat causes you have problems with your image. So you got to be the same temperature. Just breathing can be a problem in a small dome.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

So anyway, I built a dome. The summer months. Great. Okay. I had broadcast stuff in there I broadcast to the Internet and I would actually stream it on YouTube. Okay. And that was the whole sky tour livestream thing. Right. And so people would come in, and they still do, from all over the world. And just watch as I produce the universe live in real time. And we produce these images for people and. And I say for people because everything we image, I give away. We have a [e-mail] they can go on there and go grab the images we took a week ago. Even if they couldn't attend, they could see what we took.

[A.J.]

The streams are a lot of fun.

[Mark Dantonio]

They are.

[A.J.]

And you have another observatory in Arizona?

[Mark Dantonio]

I do. I have two there.

[A.J.]

And you can. Can you control that remotely?

[Mark Dantonio]

I do. You do, yeah. Because I had the one on the front lawn in Terryville, Connecticut.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

The minion and the minion. And I controlled the minion with WI fi, like, oh, okay, network for a period of time. And then I realized, you know, that way I could be inside the warm house while doing it. That's a huge leap from being in 20 degree weather because I'd be saying, and this is. Oh, gosh, you know, I forget because I'm so cold and people are saying, oh, we're feeling pain for you right now. I was like, see, that's the wrong thing, wrong message. So I ended up working out the WI fi thing, and then I'm inside. Wow, what a difference. I have a warm room now that I'm working from. Then I realized I want to put these in Arizona somewhere. So I convinced a friend, let me put one on his land. Okay. And that was the first one in Arizona out in the Sonoran Desert. You're right. You're right. On 14 miles of dirt roads after the pavement to find the observatory.

[A.J.]

Are you triangulating objects like AVI's doing with the Galileo project?

[Mark Dantonio]

Interesting you mentioned that, because the other observatory in Arizona is in Benson, Arizona, which is 220 miles away. So if we image the same object from both telescopes, we could indeed do that. Okay. As long as you know the exact look angles and exact position and altitude of the telescopes. We can do the calculation. We haven't, but we can. And that was precisely why I wanted to have them separated like that. Because if you see something in the sky, in fact you can. You know, I talked to avi's team. Ezra Kelderman was on his team. I talked to Ezra and several of his team members because I wanted to offer them a Galileo site, you know, so I have a potential Galileo site for them, you know, if they want to ever use it, and so forth. But I was also talking to them because I could maybe help them automate some of their processes. After all, I had the right software to be able to control my dome out there. And it's not even a dome, it's just a flat roof, okay, where the roof comes off much quicker to acclimate that way. And so I wrote a control program. Does housekeeping stuff. Turn on power, move off the roof, do this, do that, check the temperature, blah, blah, blah. And so that all works great. So then when I do the actual work, I'm in Connecticut, 2600 miles away. And I thought, you know, this is a far cry from my front lawn, but if something went wrong on my front lawn, what would I do? I'd put on my hat and go out and fix it. Can't do that when it's out in Arizona. So I had to make it bulletproof as best I could. Sometimes we lose power for a bit. Everything gets upended. I had to have back doors to be able to shut things down.

[A.J.]

Even though that only happens when you're live, by the way, right? Isn't that weird?

[Mark Dantonio]

How did you know that? There's been times where I get in and. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to sky through Live Stream. Hey, guys, Mark Dantonio here. Blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden it's all gone. It's like, it really. It really fills your heart with fear when you lose connection. But what I did was I circumvented that by having a secondary Internet. The Internet out there was okay in Benson. We're sharing it with nine other professional astronomers on that plateau out there. And sometimes the Internet goes out and then everybody's out of the water, including me. So I put a Starlink in. So now I'm connected to Starlink. The backup is the regular, you know, regular Internet they provide. So I'm paying an additional 120amonth for the peace of mind to know that from 2,600 miles away I won't lose connection to this telescope, you got to have it.

[A.J.]

And the bitter irony that you're using Starlink, the bane of every astronomer on the planet.

[Mark Dantonio]

I've said that so many times. You have to do it. Yeah. I'm taking pictures of these beautiful nebulae, and depending where you are in the sky. And the thing is, a typical session, for instance, I'll be sitting there looking at objects in the sky, and I've got people from all over the world watching. Right. And I've been a performer all my life. I started as a magician early on. I do a lot of talks. I speak all over the country. I'm very comfortable in front of cameras. I'm very comfortable in the sets. I'm very comfortable. I know my marks. I know. I know where to be. And that just came with time. Right. So all that said, I started to think, well, you know, I can't let any dead air occur. I've got to fill the space with something. So I put music in the background, some of which I make myself. Okay. And others of which I use from, like, the YouTube galleries. I hate those. But, you know, I haven't mixed in all my own stuff yet.

[A.J.]

But it makes it a show. It really does. You put on a show.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's a production. Yeah, it is. It really is a production. You're right. And, you know, you want to add other things. I used to have other overlays and things, but I'm one person doing eight things at once all the time, and that makes it really hard. Now, I'll tell you this, with a friend of mine, partner, who was also a magician, we built a robot together. And the robot would work at trade shows and go and talk to people. We actually worked an inauguration in Washington, a robot robot.

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

And the robot gave. It was. At the time, it was president's daughter, and we're giving her a tour of the Smithsonian.

[A.J.]

Which president?

[Mark Dantonio]

It was Clinton. Okay. So it was Chelsea. Okay. Okay. And we had her sign the robot and all that stuff, whatever. So anyway, it was an opportunity. And Electronic Data System eds, Ross Perot's old company, brought us down and said, we would like you to take Chelsea around the Museum of American History. Okay. So the museum escorted her around, talking to her, interacting with her friends. Now, what no one knew is that I was inside that thing.

[A.J.]

No, you were in the machine.

[Mark Dantonio]

I love it. Now, being magicians, though, AJ Being magicians, we figured out how to make this large thing looks small. Clever use of black and white colors allowed us to make it look impossible for a regular sized human to fit in there.

[A.J.]

This is your VFX training as well?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, it was absolutely okay. And so I ended up doing this Esco, escorting her around.

[A.J.]

Can we hire you to do parties or anything? Because that would be super fun.

[Mark Dantonio]

They have. I've worked in. In Phoenix. I'm all over the place with this. This silly thing. Okay.

[A.J.]

What did you name it?

[Mark Dantonio]

Sammy. Okay. Sales and merchandising. Informal.

[A.J.]

I knew it had to be something like that.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. And you know, it was sort of like a follow on from the craze with R2D2 and Star wars and all that. And you believe it or not, we called George Lucas to find out if he would have any problem with us doing this. And the response we got from. From his people was, go for it. More power to you. Now you can't do that anymore. But we're grandfathered in.

[A.J.]

You are.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, hell yeah.

[A.J.]

So Disney's lawyers can't tie. Good for you, man.

[Mark Dantonio]

Grandfathered in.

[A.J.]

Good for you.

[Mark Dantonio]

But, you know, I don't do a whole lot of it. You know, I don't do a whole lot of it anymore. I'm an astronomer. I don't have time to sit inside a can and run around. But it's a lot of fun.

[A.J.]

It sounds it.

[Mark Dantonio]

Unless you roll over something on the ground that smells pretty bad because then you have air conditioning that's pulling in from the. The ground. You know, we had that happen too.

[A.J.]

What drew you to exoplanets? Everybody loves exoplanets.

[Mark Dantonio]

I know. That was. What'd you ask?

[A.J.]

How. What drew you to. Oh, specializing or. Well, how many are out there? How do we find them?

[Mark Dantonio]

There's. There's. There's like about 5,200 known ones right now. And with. But that's. That's a low number. But we got to understand that that's in a small area of sky relatively. When Kepler went up there. Kepler's like a laser beam. It would focus on one star at a time. Is there a planet crossing in front? Are we seeing a light curve where the light dips a little bit and then comes back up? Are we seeing that or not? Okay. And then came along TESS Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. It looks at like a 96 degree by or not a 96 degree by 24 degree field? Something like that. And it's not a laser beam pointing a star by star. It's looking at whole swaths of stars and saying, are any of these transiting?

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. So the idea was I should be able to Find thousands more. Well, the test candidates are still being studied. There's thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them. And I'm working with a group with what's called Las Cumbres observatories, and we have time on big telescopes to actually do transit studies. And I'm working with another, a kid who knew nothing about astronomy and has come a long way. Kid Kyle. You know what? I give him kudos. He would always say embarrassing things about astronomy and things we're looking at when he was first starting. Now he's an exoplanet scientist in his own right because he's managed to do the diligence. And I'm really proud he's done this. If he hears this, he's going to say, oh, he talked about me.

[A.J.]

You painted forward.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, but I am. I mean, because the thing is, I've helped him to understand what was going on. I would advise him, and he's. He's taken it to heart and he's worked really hard. So I don't have an ego. I don't care. You know, I mean, who cares? You know, Someone has to say it, right? Someone has to study unidentified objects. Someone has to study plants around other stars. Why did I start? I started because I figured the stars aren't actually looking at me, but something around those stars might be. And so I started getting drawn to exoplanets. In fact, part of my book, the Populated Universe, has a whole section on stars that might be habitable, you know, and talks about why they would be habitable. That's a key point. You know, there's no guarantee of intelligence. And right up front, we know that intelligence is a circuitous path you follow, and by luck, you get some intelligence. Well, every creature has intelligence of some level. We as humans will call it rudimentary. For everything below us, aliens would probably say we're rudimentary. Of course, we always heard that, the word, just ants. We're not ants. Okay? To aliens, in my view. And the reason is because they know we can hurt them. All right? When you as a human, you're far more intelligent than an elk. But if you go into a middle of a herd of elk and say, hey, come here, I got to put this radio collar around your neck, okay, you're gonna get trampled to death. Okay? So even though the elk is not nearly as smart as you, he can kill you. That's true, right? So we have to keep that in mind when we talk about alien life. What are they going to do? Are they going to just stop Us and put a radio collar around their neck. So you walk into the house with a big radio collar. Hey, you got any pizza left? With this giant collar around your neck? Right. How's that gonna work? You know, we're not going to notice. Well, of course we do. So that the concept of implants, for instance.

[A.J.]

Hang on, hang on. Before we get to aliens, there's something about transiting that I want to ask you that just occurred to me. So we know that transiting is the star. Luminosity dims a little bit. A planet goes in front. Do we have to be oriented to the orbital plane? And what stars are we missing? A ton of transits because we're just not oriented properly.

[Mark Dantonio]

We absolutely are.

[A.J.]

Really?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Because if you look at my hand.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

If we see a solar system like this and there's a planet going around it, nothing. The only way we would know is if the star does a little wobble. Right. And that's because the planet might be a Jupiter sized planet. And as they go around each other, this one moves more, the small one moves more, but the big one moves a little bit. So if you look just at that motion, you'll see a little bit of motion. Now that's called astrometry. Studying the positions of stars, it's the most error prone method. It is. Why?

[A.J.]

Why is that?

[Mark Dantonio]

Because we can't measure those positions accurately. Why? Because we're looking at stars. They're just ever points of light to us, you know. And when people understand that, they look at like Betelgeuse in the night sky. The upper left star in Orion, it's a bright red star, right? Well, it used to be bright blue. Okay. It evolved to a supergiant. And so when it stopped fusing hydrogen into helium, it went off the, the, the little snaky line we call the main sequence. Where stars are, that are burning hydrogen into helium. We call them normal stars. The sun is one. Okay. Alpha Centauris, those, those stars are others, okay. And of all kinds. So. But once they stop, they leave that main sequence because now they're going to fuse other elements. And when they do that, they swell and they become these gigantic much cooler red supergiants. Betelgeuse is one such star, but it's still just a point of light to us. But with something called interferometry, we can actually see the shape of Betelgeuse. It's one of the very, very few stars. That one in Antares and maybe a couple others that are as massive. Okay. We can actually see their, see the shape. And that's it.

[A.J.]

That's amazing, though.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. No other stars. Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years away. Okay. Two stars going around each other with a third one, the red one, going around. That's Proxima, where we have a planet or two going around that one. Okay. As well. Well, those two stars, closest ones to us, we can't see those because they're sun sized. If you put Betelgeuse, where the sun is, it would almost reach Jupiter's orbit in radius.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And then you got to make that a huge thing and huge diameter.

[A.J.]

So Proxima is a rocky planet. Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah.

[A.J.]

I mean, how do we know that?

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, we don't.

[A.J.]

We. Oh, don't tell me that. I want. I want. I want the answers. I want to know that there's oceans.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, I know. Proxy, Proxima is, is a red. Red dwarf. It's a tiny little star. But red dwarf stars are the most prominent or, sorry, most prolific number of stars in the whole universe are red dwarfs. Okay. The largest count are these red dwarfs. That said, the red dwarfs also have the most amount of planets around them statistically and in all likelihood, practically. So if that's the case, that means that the most likely life forms might be around these stars. Right. And you might say yes. Well, if you look at Jupiter and you look at its moons, the Galilean satellites, where you got IO, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Right. Well, IO is going like this around Jupiter. Its same face is facing Jupiter. It's tidally locked to Jupiter in the same way that our moon is tidally locked to the Earth. So around a red star, any planets going around one of these red stars are likely going to have to be close to it for it to be in what we call the habitable zone. Right. And if that's the case, it also means for these little red stars that those planets are also tidally locked. So if you're going to develop life on a planet like that, it's probably going to be kind of on the sunset dark side.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Where it's on the front, it's going to be scorching hot.

[A.J.]

So kind of just on the delimiter, I would.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, the terminator.

[A.J.]

The terminator, yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

And at that point, you might see life develop a little further in. Then what would life look like there? If you ever looked at cave creatures on our planet, cave creatures in the dark, they tend to have no pigment. Right. They look kind of whitish gray.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Operative word, gray. Right. But the ones that have eyes Some of them don't. Okay. But if they have eyes, they're very big, just like the grays we see in literature. Long before we thought and knew that there might be planets around m stars, people were seeing gray type aliens. Now, is it possible, and I just asked that question as a brain teaser, Is it possible that gray aliens come from these red stars, the stars that are the most numerous of any type of star in the universe? Is it possible? I can't say no. I just can't say no. You know, and so they have zero pigment, they're kind of grayish looking, they have big eyes. Is it possible that they are red star occupants?

[A.J.]

Wouldn't the red stars be older stars?

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, here's the thing about those stars, the red stars. Okay. Our sun is a 10 billion year lifetime. We're about 4 1/2, 5 billion years in. Good. We got time.

[A.J.]

Yellow dwarf.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, it's a yellow dwarf. Okay. Okay. Actually, it's a white dwarf. Okay. A white whitish star.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. A white star. It's called a dwarf, but it's not like a white dwarf. That's. Again, we're astronomers. Like to, like to confuse you, but think about this.

[A.J.]

Pluto's a planet.

[Mark Dantonio]

Hey, it says so on my shirt.

[A.J.]

Attaboy.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. It says I need my space. And it shows Pluto's one of the planets. The whole ring Team Pluto. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So we, I knew Clay Tombaugh. You did? I met him. Yeah. We were at an astronomy conference together,

[A.J.]

and I said, did you get into a shoving match?

[Mark Dantonio]

No, I. I agreed with him. I felt that Pluto was definitely a planet.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. Back then, there was no doubt there still was a planet. Anyway, so when we talk about forgetting

[A.J.]

where I was, we're talking about red stars.

[Mark Dantonio]

Thank you. Okay. So when we look at the red stars as being most numerous in the universe, one of the things that's interesting about them is that they're kind of flary. They give off a lot of ultraviolet flares, especially when they're young. Right. And if we look at the sun, for instance, we know it is a yellow star. It's actually not in space. It's white. Okay. It's. It's yellow because some of the blue light is being taken from it, okay. Before it gets to our eye because of our atmosphere. So it looks yellow in the sky, but in space it's white. Okay. And that's the, the condition, all right. That causes that is something called Rayleigh scattering. The, the problem is that as we get through more air, we see the sun through more air. What's happening is more of the blue light is being removed. So the sun starts looking redder and redder and redder as it goes to sunset.

[A.J.]

Sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

Or red as it sun rises. And the reason is just because of all the atmosphere, removing the blue light from that red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet spectrum coming to us from the sun. Okay, so with the blue left out, you only have the red, orange, yellow, and some of the green. Okay. So it looks predominantly red. So anyway, that relates to the green flash people see as well. So all that said, when we talk about these red stars, these little guys, they're like little percolators. The very first star to form in the universe as a red star is still existent and still percolating. Really, they live trillions of years.

[A.J.]

Trillions of years?

[Mark Dantonio]

Trillions, not billions. And why? Because they're a little different animal than stars like the Sun. The Sun. One of the things I had to do in astronomy was build a star computational model of a star and make it work at all levels. And I had to build a core. I had to build this envelope outside. The core has a radiative energy that comes out from the core for a certain distance, and then it turns to convection near the surface. Well, the red stars are convective throughout their entire diameters, and that means they can dredge from outside back to the inside hydrogen fuel. So the very first star in existence that's a red star is. Is still alive today, so to speak.

[A.J.]

So if we only if we're what, 13 and change billion years in, how do we.

[Mark Dantonio]

13.8.

[A.J.]

Then how do we know it can survive for trillions? What is it?

[Mark Dantonio]

Models. Models predict that stars like this are. Are utilizing hydrogen at a certain rate. And based on their mass, we know how much hydrogen is in their outer envelopes, and we can calculate what their longevity is. Number comes out to trillions of years. So what does that mean for life? Life has a long time to potentially gestate on a planet like that. It can come and go. There could be flares that wipe it out, but it'll keep coming. Right. I think the universe provides these templates. Okay, DNA is a template undoubtedly provided by the universe. Right. Adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, nucleotides. These guys make up DNA. And that DNA is something that has been brought to our planet by asteroids, comets, and meteor impacts.

[A.J.]

Okay, I think they just found another one last week.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, exactly Right, with the proteins. That's right. And see the Murchison meteorite was famous because it brought some amino acids to our planet. Okay. And when there was a famous experiment called the Miller uray experiment in 1951 or 52, and what they did was they had a flask and it was filled with the hypothetical primordial atmosphere on our planet. They bombarded it with lightning and there's a spark gap. A week later, there was a brown sludge in the bottom. They examined it. Amino acids. Now what does that mean? It means that even the Earth, with its thunderstorms and its rudimentary atmosphere, was creating the building blocks of life by itself. Also brought by comets and meteors and asteroids striking the planet.

[A.J.]

So you think there's tons of life out there?

[Mark Dantonio]

I do. I think that there's tons of life elsewhere. Is it intelligent? Well, that's the question. I had an argument with my director of the observatory when I was getting my degree. I said to him, I think it's a populated universe out there. Now, ironically, that became the title of my book later. Years, years and years, decades later. But I said to him, I believe it's a populated universe. Look at us, we're carbon based. We're bilaterally symmetric. Same on the left is on the right. Okay. Carbon is the basis of life on planet Earth. Right. And it's probably the basis of life everywhere in the universe. That's my guess. Okay. And so I said to him, I believe. I believe that it's not just here where this has happened. I believe it can be in existence all over the universe in a variety of ways, in a variety of levels and capacities. Do I think that every life form is intelligent? No, I don't. Okay. Intelligence takes a certain path. Right. I will say this, though. When the dinosaurs were rendered extinct by the chicxulub impact, there 65 million years ago, there was one dinosaur whose cranial capacity was accelerating in size. And it was called the Troodon. That's T R O O D O

[A.J.]

N. I did an episode on it.

[Mark Dantonio]

Did you really?

[A.J.]

Yes, that's the Reptilian race. They come from there.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. And so? Well, you know what? That's funny because I used to say, ha. Reptilians. What a stupid thing. But then, why not then? And then why files? Then I realized, then I realized that I'm really being short sighted here because I'm looking at this in terms of Earth development and I love alternate histories. I do. So I work through what would happen if dinosaurs didn't get rendered extinct.

[A.J.]

Love it.

[Mark Dantonio]

What would happen? How would life change on the Earth? Well, it would still go on like it's been going on. There will still be evolutionary, you know, mutations. Right. Mutation followed by adaptation is evolution. And that's exactly what we see.

[A.J.]

The Troodon was starting to form a opposable thumb.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yes, exactly. So this thing is very important.

[A.J.]

Yes, it is.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. And bipedalism is very important. Well, the Troodon was already kind of bipedal. Okay. So was it going to reach that status? We don't know.

[A.J.]

We don't know. But it figured out that, hey, caves are kind of safe.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yes, that's exactly. I see. Did do that. He's a smart guy, that guy over there.

[A.J.]

Well, that's a. I love alternative history. Also without. So without that. Let's just speculate. Without Chicxulub.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah.

[A.J.]

Is the Troodon become the apex?

[Mark Dantonio]

It would. It would become one of the smartest dinosaurs, I would think. Given no other downfalls, no other impacts events, no other biological catastrophes or anything, the true dawn may have actually proceeded. Now, would the Trudon be conscious of that? I don't know. You know, who knows, right? We can speculate. But I do believe, and this is why I changed my idea, And I kept thinking to myself, don't go down that path. You're going to become that, that guy that thinks reptilians are all around us or something. I'm not. Okay? I'm not that guy. But I will say this. I do believe that you could have races out there that may have developed off of a reptilian branch.

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

I do believe that. And here's why. If you look at how life develops on a planet, right, you have an ancient ancestor, and then what do you have? You have. You have all this radial branches coming off it, right. Radiative adaptation, okay. All moving out in all directions. Every one of those is a different creature, different animal, different version of the same species.

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

And those do this radiative adaptation, many of those branches die off. In other words, they're not successful. Now the question is, where do the mutations occur? They occur in the DNA to begin with. Right. What's causing that? What do you think? I'll ask you a question. What do you think is causing the adaptations and the say, the mutations in

[A.J.]

creatures just to survive?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Right. There's environmental pressures, Right. And this one happened to be born with a thicker hide than usual. And guess what? It's going to survive the new glacial age and.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Its offspring will probably have thicker hides too. That's right. That's natural selection. Okay. But the other thing, too is we had a. We have a son, a young son. And that young son. Young saying all wrong. The young sun actually is spewing all this ultraviolet radiation. And what does that do to our DNA?

[A.J.]

It makes it unravel.

[Mark Dantonio]

Exactly. It unravels certain nucleotides and reassembles them another way. It causes mutations.

[A.J.]

Yes. You got a shield from that somehow.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yes. And. And. And thank you for the atmosphere.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Doing that. Okay. The atmosphere was a little thicker. We had up to 33 oxygen in our atmosphere at one time, which is why dinosaurs are so big and hulking. Okay. But today a brontosaurus. A brontosaurus couldn't survive.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, it couldn't have the. The oxygenation in its tissue required to survive. So we'd have to give it an oxygen mask or make a little pocketbook one. Like, who was. I think it was. I think it was Gino that said it. Like, Paris Hilton would have a little pocket.

[A.J.]

A little pocket dinosaur.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, get back.

[A.J.]

That would definitely happen.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, Pocket tights or anosaurus pocket. Right. Hey, Rex, so give me a read

[A.J.]

on the Drake's equation regarding life doesn't have to be intelligent. How many planets do you think?

[Mark Dantonio]

All right, well, okay, here's the thing. When. When Frank Drake finally first did that equation, okay, it only came out to one planet. Ours.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And the reason was because that's all we knew. There was many parts of the equation he didn't have answers for. Like how many planets out there are habitable? We didn't have. You'd have to guess. We only knew one one times one is one. Right. And so we had to do that, and that makes sense, but there's an. There's an Italian team and another team. They each did their. Their analysis of the new Drake equation using what we now know about exoplanet populations. The numbers are now staggering. Okay, we have about 150 billion stars at the low end in our galaxy. At the high end, 400 billion. We can't even see the other side of our galaxy. You know, I mean, it's blocked by the central bulge and all the dark dust. We're looking through tons of dark dust all the time in our universe, in our local universe.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And we can't see the other side. We're guessing based on the architecture here, we're saying symmetrically, it must have. Like that. Okay. That said, when you look at the number of stars, let's say 150 billion. Right. Now, the estimate is right now with this. This Italian Team, I think it was, that came up with 25 million Earth, like, planets in our galaxy. 25 million. I know it sounds like a lot. Want more?

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Okay. That's at the low end. Okay. And if it, if you go to the high end, it looks like Maybe we're talking 40 billion B, with a B, as in Baker. 40 billion potential habitable worlds in our galaxy. Now, that doesn't mean intelligent life, but it sure does give it a fighting chance, doesn't it? It does, yeah. So that's, that's the possibility that we're looking at right now. And so it's between 25 million and 40 billion. Kind of a range, man. Okay, but. And again, it depends who you talk to. You know, everybody has their own take on Frank Drake's work, and I'm kind of in the middle. I don't go to the 40 billion range. I actually think it's. It's more of a percentage of the stellar population. So based on the stellar population, the fact that M stars are the most populous in any galaxy all throughout the universe, I think we're probably looking at maybe 10% of the star numbers in a galaxy might actually be habitable based on metrics provided by studies and so forth. So I'm kind of being a little more conservative. But 10% of 15 billion,

[A.J.]

that's plenty. What technology do we need to definitively identify that kind of planet? Transit's not going to do it. Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Transit gives us an idea of how many. See, we say, okay, if we're seeing this many, there have to be statistically this many more that we're missing.

[A.J.]

We're still kind of guessing.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's right. It's still a gas.

[A.J.]

And what about spectrometry? What about color analysis for atmospheres? Is that enough?

[Mark Dantonio]

I've done spectrometry. It's a spectrometry, too. And creating the bands, look at the different absorption bands and stuff. I've seen it. I got one going in our observatory, actually. We're putting in a new spectrometer, actually, to make another telescope capability, and they show us what a star is made of. But if a planet passes in front, again in front of the star, then that planet's atmosphere is going to pollute the star spectrum with its own spectral lines.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

And that pollution we call contaminant in the spectrum gives away the planet's condition. So if you see lines come and go periodically, another big one, you know that there's a planet doing this, you know, contaminate, contaminate, contaminate. Right. Exterminate. Right. So it's like we see that contamination show up in a spectrum and bam. Now we're looking at some really interesting findings because now we're saying, wow, that looks like a planet. And now based on the spectral lines, we might be able to actually determine what's in the planet's atmosphere too. James Webb is doing that.

[A.J.]

That's what my next question. What. Have we seen anything in the color that makes us go, wait a second.

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, the thing about the spectra is, yes, we're looking at spectra and they do tell us what's in there, but it has its own limitations too, because we're only as good as the quality of the spectrum coming from the distant planet or whatever. And one of the things. For instance, I'll give you an example. James Webb made news a couple years ago with a finding in, I think it was Kepler 18B. Okay. It was one of those planetary atmospheres. Now, the planetary atmosphere was like hydrogen. It wasn't oxygen. Okay, but it doesn't have to be. Okay, the, the hydrogen atmosphere. All right, was that was the atmosphere around this planet. But it looks like the. James Webb is also showing another compound called dimethyl sulfide. Everybody knows what dimethyl sulfide is, even if they don't know that name.

[A.J.]

If you eat corned beef and cabbage, you know it.

[Mark Dantonio]

Good for you. Yeah, it's actually, yeah, it's the smell that's only created by life on Earth. And it's created when you, when the tide goes out. You smell the, the mud. Yeah, you're smelling dimethyl sulfide.

[A.J.]

So we've, we've seen that.

[Mark Dantonio]

We all know that. And. Well, okay, they had a finding showing dimethyl sulfide. And they're saying. Well, that was a very aggressive analysis. A repeat analysis that was more careful didn't seem to show it. However, it's on the radar now as a target compound to look for because dimethyl sulfide is only created by life. And if we can find oxygen in a planetary atmosphere of any quantity, then it's very likely it was created only by life because phytoplankton. I'm sorry, man, you're breathing bacteria poop, brother.

[A.J.]

That's that. We are.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's why we're here. You know, we're breathing. We're breathing the waste product from phytoplankton.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah.

[A.J.]

So we're mostly nitrogen. So think of a distant planet.

[Mark Dantonio]

Would.

[A.J.]

How do I phrase this? Color analysis? Can we tell that there is some oxygen in There, or does the dimethyl sulfide, is that overwhelm the color?

[Mark Dantonio]

No, dimethyl sulfide is sort of a minor player. And when you're saying color, we gotta be careful what you mean by that. Because when we're talking about the different, the spectrum, there's different locations in the spectrum where these spectral lines will appear.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And they're at different nanometer wavelengths. Okay. And so when we do talk about that, they could be in the red and they could be in the blue end or whatever, you know, green or anywhere in between or multiple sites at once. Okay. Hydrogen is usually in the red end of the spectrum, but there's a blue line in there too that you can see too. So there's a lot of different things. But if we look at a planetary atmosphere, James Webb won't be able to find oxygen directly. And it was always known that was true. And the reason is because. And I've seen these lines in my spectroscopy that I've done, I've seen the oxygen lines in our own atmosphere affecting my stellar shots. And it's actually down in the red end of the spectrum. And it's visible. Okay. It's in the visible spectrum. Now, if this is the visible spectrum, okay, James Webb is like 2, 200ft that way, where it's looking in the red. If this is red, it's often that far infrared. Okay?

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

So now how can it see oxygen if oxygen occurs here in the spectrum? Right. It can't. So somehow there has to be a way. Is. Can it see it? Well, it can, because what happens is oxygen atoms in an atmosphere collide, and when they collide, they create an infrared signature that's out there that the James Webb can see. Oh, I didn't know that. It's an inferred oxygen. I love it. Yeah. So it's got that. It's got the eye out for that too. So, you know, and spectroscopy went from being kind of like a basic science in the 1800s to being this mega science. Now back think about this, right? I mean, this is a truth. Everything we ever knew about astronomy is just by looking at the simple light coming from something. Right?

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Radio waves are light, just invisible light. Microwaves are light, just invisible. Gamma rays are light, just highly energetic blue light. Right. So. So obviously everything we ever looked at in the stars, it's just the light. And the other thing which I find interesting too, and this is sort of an aside, but I'm going to take you there because I think this is cool. Universe is a time machine. Every time we look out at the universe, we're seeing it as it was, not said, not as it is. You see the moon 1.3 seconds ago. You see the sun eight minutes ago.

[A.J.]

Okay, Betelgeuse could be gone already, right?

[Mark Dantonio]

Exactly. And Betelgeuse is like 640 light years away. Meaning it took light 640 years to get here. Well, if Betelgeuse blew up way out there, okay, well, the light of it still being there is still traveling to us. So it's still coming to us. If this is us, it's still coming to us. And when that supernova finally reaches here, we'll see it. Yes, but that'll say ah, when we see the light. It happened 640 years ago. And I don't. I have a talk I'm doing now. I'll be doing it on Contact. And it's about the time machine universe. We're going to talk about what was going on on Earth when the light we see tonight left that object.

[A.J.]

I love that.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's so cool. It is. And it puts it in terms of Earth history. And people say, wow, you mean that object, when the light that we see tonight left that object, Earth wasn't even formed yet. That's right. And now you're seeing light. All that travel time it took to get here, Earth evolved, Earth became a planet. Earth went through five major extinction events and then boom, we're here now. Pow. That light comes in and it's gone. And you're witness to it. It's kind of a cool thing.

[A.J.]

I love it.

[Mark Dantonio]

It is. It's neat.

[A.J.]

Before we break and come back and talk UFOs, where is telescope technology going? Like, what's the future look like? What, what, what are we going to see?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, and see Earth based telescopes are, are still progressing. Right. We have the Very Large Telescope, we have the Vera Rubin Telescope, actually applied to be their outreach astronomer, actually, but alas, they wanted somebody else, which is fine. Okay. But it would have been a Tucson job. Right. But that's okay. So anyway, I ended up looking at technology of telescopes. And for me, for me, the telescope pictures we're taking today with our remote telescopes are the equivalent of some of the space borne telescopes of the past. So we're finding that people with just the ability to put a telescope somewhere, a modern telescope, they have the ability to see things that just were not ever possible. I'll be able to take spectra of stars and maybe see the pollution in a spectrum from a planet. And so telescopes are progressing to the Point now where even anyone who has no knowledge of science can do real science. Okay. Of course, we guide them, right. We try to get them successful. We want them to be successful. Right. And so we're doing these streams, right? These live streams. And we have these two. They're not large. One's a 10 inch, one's a 12 inch telescope or 11 inch, okay. And at different locations. Sometimes I'll run them both at the same time, and people can see a wide field view of the universe and a narrow field view of the same thing. And then they can see all these things. But the telescope technology, we have to also couple it with remote technologies. How do you remember it used to be an ip? She looked in, right? See? And then how many times when I was teaching astronomy for a science center, I would put something in the telescope view and then someone let me see and they pull it. I don't see it.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

And I'd like. No kidding. No kidding. You don't see it. All right.

[A.J.]

You just bump it with your elbow, like. Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. So to get rid of that, I wanted to put a camera. So I started with a regular film camera. Not film camera, but a digital camera. It was a Sony A7s. I stick it on my telescope, take pictures, and pump that out over the Internet to show people live. Well, that gave way to dedicated cameras, dedicated instrumentation, and now you can't look through the telescopes that I have without looking at a screen. Now, that's less romantic, that's less nostalgic. I agree. However, it's way more instructive and way more capable. And that's what I do. And so the telescopes came a long way. Their, their manufacturing processes are probably a hundredfold better than they were 30 years ago. Okay. And the electronic arm for getting this stuff transmitted digitally has. We're probably heading to a technological singularity with that. I mean, we're, we're climbing that slope so fast, and it's fantastic.

[A.J.]

What if we unlock the ability to build in space and can construct a giant array? Not a 20 foot. That's 200ft.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's a plan. What's a plan?

[A.J.]

What would we see? Well, could we finally image the exoplanets with something like that?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, actually. And here's the thing, okay. If we make a large telescope, okay, There's a limitation of what it can see, okay. The Dawes limit. Right. And that limit has to do with aperture and aperture. Aperture, aperture, aperture. The larger aperture, the smaller thing you can image. Right now, the James Webb is 21ft in diameter. Hubble's eight. Why was it eight? You know. No, I'll tell you. Because eight feet fit inside a rocket tube, okay? You can't take us. You can't take a circle and fit it any other way.

[A.J.]

Makes sense.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's going to take eight feet either way. Either diameter is diameter. You can't. Sorry. Diameter's diameter. You can't change that. But the James Webb was a departure. They used those hexagonal folded mirrors and they unfolded 21ft out in space. First time we've ever done that. Okay. And so that 300 plus things had to work right, for that thing to deploy, right? Yeah, I counted every one of them. I bet I followed that thing. I want that thing to work. I wanted that thing to work in the worst way. It was fantastic, you know, and you know, I've known pioneers. I've known a woman that worked at Goddard Space Flight Center. She was on the team that landed on Erosion, okay, and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. And she, believe it or not, was a Catholic nun. Go figure. Yep. She was a PhD scientist. Who knew? She was at my table in my house.

[A.J.]

Let's not discount the clergy's contribution to astronomy.

[Mark Dantonio]

No, no, we certainly can't. But we can discount that we actually make judgments of people when we look at them for sure. Namely Mark d', Antonio, who shouldn't have. And I know it's an aside, but she was sitting at my table and she says, you know, I really like the Hubble Space Telescope. I'd love to see some pictures. Oh, would you like me to print you out some pictures from the Hubble? Oh, yes, please. So I went down, got my best photographic paper, printed about four or five of these nice shots. Helix Nebula, other things, really nice. Brought them up, sat down with her and I'm telling you, yeah. And this, see this? This is hydrogen gas emission. It's making it look red. Okay, now that got teal blue. That's oxygen. And what it's doing is it's ionizing. Making electrons jump off the atom, momentarily absorbing energy when they come back in. Called recombination. It gives off light. And she's nodding. Oh, oh, okay. Meanwhile, the other nun, who's a relative of mine, is laughing. I'm going, wait a minute, what are you doing, Sister Florence, you shouldn't be laughing at me. Okay? I'm thinking. And meanwhile I'm telling her these things and she's nodding. A little white haired old lady. I judged I was wrong because Florence said she's an astrophysicist. And I went, oh, my God. And she goes, she works at Goddard. She landed on an asteroid. I'm like, that was you? She goes, yeah. I was blown away, man. I was blown away. I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy. I love it. Oh, yeah. And that was Sister Mary Ellen. I can't believe it. She was a wonderful, beautiful person. You know, she passed, unfortunately, but. But Brian, she took all that with her. Now, when Osiris Rex went out. Okay. To do the asteroid sample, sample return, I contacted the team and said, what are you doing? Are you doing any kind of photo dots or anything like that? Oh, yeah, we do. Do you have someone you want to put on there? I absolutely do.

[A.J.]

What's a photo dot?

[Mark Dantonio]

They put a little micro dot on the, on the probe. Okay. And it contains all the photos and images. Oh, of people that you want to memorialize.

[A.J.]

Got it.

[Mark Dantonio]

I put her in there and they accepted it. So now she is circling the sun for a billion years. You know, I think that's really cool.

[A.J.]

Once again, Mark Payne it forward. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back talk about UFOs.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah.

[A.J.]

All right. Time to enter the realm of the weird.

[Mark Dantonio]

So wait, this isn't all weird.

[A.J.]

We're just getting warmed up.

[Mark Dantonio]

This is great, man.

[A.J.]

A story you told. I forget where it was, but it was a three night story.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, that.

[A.J.]

Take us to night one with the knocking.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, that. I will tell you though, you know, when you're a science guy, you don't expect this stuff to happen to you, but what do you do when it does? You know, I mean, I even did a talk, even had a lecture called where does science go in the face of the unexplained. Now, the unexplained could eventually be science. Okay, we never thought we'd break the sound barrier, Right. Until we did. Right? We never thought we'd find planets until we did. So there's a lot of until we dids out there. Okay? And so where does, where does my thought process go when I know there might be alien life here? Never experienced it. Don't know if it was. Not sure if it was, you know, it's really here or not, but investigating it to try and find if it is. And then suddenly you wake up one night and you think, why am I awake? And you look over at the clock, it's lit. It's exactly 3:15am Right? And then you hear this. That. What's that going on? And then you look and it's coming from like the peak of the window

[A.J.]

roof sets a three just like that.

[Mark Dantonio]

No, what is that? It's happening. Something's going on up there. I don't even know what it is. And it's just persistent, you know? Now, at the time, I rescued greyhounds from the track, as had my dogs. And I had these two greyhounds, all right? And they sleep underneath a window to the right side of the bed, okay? My wife is next to me. Sleep. And there's a window, and there's a screen. It's August, and you can hear the sounds of the night out there. And there's one street light you can see through the window, which is annoying to me. Whatever, right? So as I'm sitting there thinking, hearing this thing, I'm like, whatever. And they go back to sleep.

[A.J.]

Did that knock wake you or did you wake.

[Mark Dantonio]

I'm not sure if the knocking woke me up first. And then I heard follow ons. Okay, so maybe, I don't know. The next night, okay, same thing. I wake up. Come on. Again, I'm hearing this like. And it's like a rhythmic thing like this, you know? And then I look at the clock. 3:15am Again. What is this? You know, what's going on? Are you.

[A.J.]

Are you frightened? Are you annoyed?

[Mark Dantonio]

I'm annoyed. I think it's like a woodpecker, right? That's like mentally handicapped. And he's banging on my vinyl siding or something, you know? So I get up and I go over quietly to the dogs sleeping under the window. And they're looking up. They're hearing this thing up there. And they're going. They're looking up there, too, with their heads up in the air. So I lean over them, grab the windowsill, and I push my face against the screen to kind of look up. I didn't want to open the window because I didn't want to open the screens. I want to scare away whatever was. I thought it was an animal. Next thing you know, I see this blanket of white light in my view, just a total white flash. Now, when you have a flash, okay, you see a hot spot, and then it fades away, right? Well, that hot spot that fades away is something that you're used to if you get flash blinded, right? This was a blanket white. It was just a pure white flash in my whole vision. The same across. Same intensity across the whole vision.

[A.J.]

A flash or a sustained.

[Mark Dantonio]

No, it was just like a boom, okay? And all of a sudden I couldn't see. My eyes weren't working for a moment. And then I'm Just. I'm just holding onto the sill, looking out again. I take away my face from the screen and I'm looking out at nothing. I can't see anything. Just like I haze of whitish, you know, after image. And then I start to see that the street light in the distance, and it starts to fade back in slowly and stuff's coming in around it. Like I was just flash blinded.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

What is that? Why? I've never seen a flash blind like that.

[A.J.]

Does nothing frighten you, Mark?

[Mark Dantonio]

No, that. That was. That was actually this whole.

[A.J.]

Good. I need to know your.

[Mark Dantonio]

I was terrified. By what? You're terrible. Okay. There's terror here.

[A.J.]

Good.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. There's Tara coming. Promise. Okay. So as I'm sitting there and, you know, waiting for my vision to come back, I thought, I've been flashblind. What the heck? And now I'm curious. I got to know what that is. Well, first of all, I look down because I'm leaning over. The dogs, they're sleeping under me, and they were just perfectly fine down there. I looked down and they're not there anymore. They're gone. What the heck? Where the dogs go. And I turned on the light and I started looking for Tycho, my male greyhound, of course. And Tycho is hiding in a laundry pile inside the closet. Hiding. Not. Not just sitting elsewhere in the room. Hiding in the laundry pile. He sunk down behind the laundry pile and curled up. And he wasn't. He didn't want to come out. His ears were back. Something scared him. And Kepler. Kepler, the female. Okay. Was outside the room, hunched down in that. That minimal surfaces pose. I don't want to be seen. Okay. And she was scared to come back into the room. And both dogs, from that point forward, just as an aside, never slept under that window again. They'd sleep in other positions in that room or in a different room next door. They would never come back under that window again.

[A.J.]

I think every pet owner seen this. Your cat or dog, like, is. Sees, like, what do you see that I don't see?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, they. Something scared them.

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, and so after I got my vision back, I was like, what is going on? So later on in that day, I. I basically forgot about it. I came home from work. I was actually working a quote unquote, real job at that point. And when I came home, I went outside, looked up at the window from the outside, looking to see pecks into the vinyl siding like a woodpecker.

[A.J.]

And it.

[Mark Dantonio]

Maybe I hit a nerve when I turned my head or something. You Know, but it was just a flat blindness. It was the weirdest thing. So then that third night, now I wake up again. I'm like, oh, man.

[A.J.]

Now tapping again?

[Mark Dantonio]

No, I'm not hearing any tapping now. Now I'm just awake, and I'm thinking, is this 3:15am Again? And I went to turn my head. I couldn't move my head.

[A.J.]

Oh, no.

[Mark Dantonio]

So then I went to move just my eyes, and my eyes wouldn't move. My. My eyes wouldn't move.

[A.J.]

Sleep paralysis.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's more than the hypnagogic type thing because I use that for meditation, actually.

[A.J.]

So you know what that is?

[Mark Dantonio]

I know it is. I get into it on purpose so I can actually relax and sink, you know? It really feels good when you do it, right. So I'm sitting there going, what the heck's going on? I tried to move my eyes. You can. You can move your eyes. I couldn't even move my eyes. My eyes were fixed, and they wouldn't if I tried to move them. It felt painful, like something was restricting it. And I thought it was like a medical thing that happened. I'm thinking, oh, no, I'm gonna die here. No one's gonna find me. Or something. You know? Weird thing. So at that point, I watched from the side. I saw something eclipse that streetlight. I couldn't look at it, but I saw it in my peripheral vision. I can see my hand here. In peripheral vision. While I'm looking at you, I see my hand.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, I saw something pass in front of that. That rough, you know, dim outline of the window passed in front of it. And then it's doing this. It's coming toward me, getting bigger in my vision. I'm like, what the hell is this?

[A.J.]

You can't see his shape?

[Mark Dantonio]

No, it's dark.

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

But then it extended something, and it had like a look like a wand, like a magician's wand, but it was like a pen, but it was glowing soft white. And it's here, right here. And I. I'm looking at you in the same way that I had to look because this is where my eyes were stuck. Fix that. Fixated on. I couldn't move and look down, and it wouldn't let me. But I saw for all the world, gray, long fingers.

[A.J.]

Oh, come on.

[Mark Dantonio]

Like a hand. And then I felt something going up in his sinus, and it was like, whoa. And then it was morning, and boom. I was lying with my hands on my sides, face down in my pillow and unable to breathe.

[A.J.]

Okay, why couldn't you Breathe.

[Mark Dantonio]

Because I moved my hands up, and I pushed out the pillow like that. And I looked down on a pillow filled with blood, concave, like I was sleeping in a lake of my own blood. And it came out of here, out of this sinus, and it felt like someone punched me really, really hard. Now, could that have been just a strange nosebleed with a wild dream? Sure.

[A.J.]

Sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

Over three nights with a knocking and frightened dogs. And the frightened dogs. There's a lot of concurrent things going on that make this really strange.

[A.J.]

What are you feeling when you wake up? Are you frightened? Are you? Do you. I have to go to the doctor.

[Mark Dantonio]

You would think that you would. Anyone that goes through such a terrifying encounter is going to say, I got to get to the doctor and get my face checked. No, no. Instead, what does Mark do? Mark goes and takes a shower, goes to work, and forgets about it. Now, wait a minute.

[A.J.]

Okay?

[Mark Dantonio]

Think about that. That's not right.

[A.J.]

It's not.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's not proper behavioral response. Okay? So it took me two full years of not being able to breathe out of this side of my nose the whole time. From that night forward, this was blocked forever. So it's like this. It was like this side only. This the right side only. I go to the surgeon, ear, nose, and throat doctor in Hartford, Connecticut. Okay. All public record, which is cool. I go into his office. Yeah. Doctor, I can't breathe out of this thing. And when did this happen? About two years ago. No. Oh, okay. Let's take a look. He looks up there.

[A.J.]

You didn't tell him what?

[Mark Dantonio]

No.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Not just that point.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. I'll get to that, though. So then he looks up there, and he says, holy cow. He says. And I said, those are words you don't want to hear a doctor say. He laughs. He goes, oh. He goes, but I will say this. You've got something huge up there. And I went, really? Yeah. He goes, I. I think we can get it out. And I said, okay. And how can we do that? He says, well, we can numb it up, and I'll. I can reach up there. We can use a special lasso. And then. And. And get rid of it. It's. It's a. Looks like it's. It's something we call a nasal polyp, but it's, like, the biggest one I've ever seen. He said, no lie. Those were his exact words. I'm like, wow. And he's been in business, like, 40 years at that point.

[A.J.]

Mm.

[Mark Dantonio]

So he goes up there. He snares that. He Pulls it out. It's this big size of my two thumb stacked, and it comes out through that little hole. Okay. I felt like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

[A.J.]

That's what I'm. That's what I'm thinking of.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, yeah. And it's like, you know, get it out. Right. That's what it felt like to me.

[A.J.]

Did you see it?

[Mark Dantonio]

Of course I did.

[A.J.]

What is it?

[Mark Dantonio]

I. It's. It's a. It's a. Looks like a fleshy mass. Okay. Okay. It's disgusting looking. Okay. And it wasn't moving. Nothing moving. My first words. Can I have that? I did. I want that.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

I want that. Yes. Okay. Oh, no, no. We have to send this down to pathology to make sure it's not a malignant, you know, tumor or something. He says, but I'm pretty sure it's benign. He said, but you can absolutely not have it. And. And now. Yet he still doesn't know anything yet. So I said, okay, well, can you at least have them check the center of it to see if there's something in there that doesn't belong there? And he said, oh, you mean like a splinter that a machinist might get? Yeah, yes, exactly that. Yeah, I can do that. Why? Oh. And you know what's coming next? I told him the story. You did? A little bit. Okay. Yeah. Not to the detail. I said, she even shared with you. He laughs. He goes, oh. He goes, I'm sure it's not aliens. I go, of course not. Who would think it's aliens? No, maybe me. I don't know. And he says, all right, call me in a week and I'll let you know. Okay, thanks. I left. I call in a week. Yeah, Hi. It's. It's Mark. I was. Oh, hold on. Doctor has to talk to you.

[A.J.]

Oh.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, right. Yeah. Oh, and my heart's going, what happened? Maybe it's like my head's gonna fall off. You know what's gonna happen here? He gets on the phone, hey, Mr. D'. Antonio. Just want to let you know it's probably benign. Nothing to worry about. Okay. Oh, so you don't have the results from pathology yet? And his response was no response. He paused and he goes, well, I've seen these before. This looks benign. He says, but in. In all honesty. Hate those words, in all honesty, because that's what happens before you lie. It is in all honesty. I send it down to pathology, and they can't find it.

[A.J.]

They lost it.

[Mark Dantonio]

They lost a sample of someone's tissue.

[A.J.]

Is that Something that happened in his career often.

[Mark Dantonio]

He was just losing his response. I've been doing this for, whatever at the time, 35, 40 years. He said, this is the first time this has ever happened in my office. I went, of course it was. Now, he says, but it's. It's. It's not a problem. It's benign. Okay. All right. Thank you. So I left and wasn't happy with that outcome. But I said, I don't know. I don't know where it went. Maybe it really was lost. Maybe it really was just some kind of stupid polyp, you know? However, two years later, I went in again for something else. And you know how you feel in the intake sheet?

[A.J.]

Sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, they always say I'm. I'm. I'm pregnant and lactating and, you know, I always do. I make funny cartoons because.

[A.J.]

Don't. You don't do that.

[Mark Dantonio]

I do, because the medical assistants, they. You know, my wife's a medical assistant, and she has to read those, too. And so I'm stealing that bit. Go on. You should. I entertain them, you know.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

As well, because I'm a consummate entertainer that way. I just want people to have fun, you know, so these things are meaningless. Many times. So. But then, for my. My career, what do you do? I told him, I do special projects for the Navy. Okay. Okay. So. And I just left it at that, you know. Well, I go in, I sit down. He walks in with the sheet. He's reading Intake. She's laughing, goes. He goes, my medical assistants love you. This is funny stuff. I drew cartoons of pictures, you know, all that stuff. So, you know, you're 45 minutes waiting for a thing that's like 45 minutes late. I'm gonna draw cartoons. Darn you.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. I'm gonna entertain myself. Okay. So anyway, he sits there and he looks and he looks at the thing. He says, special projects, huh? You know? Yeah. And I. I told him some more details. And then he does something I never saw a doctor do in my entire career of going to doctors. Entire, entire life. He hopped up on the exam table next to me.

[A.J.]

I don't like that at all.

[Mark Dantonio]

No, I don't like it. I was like, awkward. Yeah, awkward. I was like this, like. And I go. And he goes. You know, he's looking out the window like we're two kids on a cliff looking over a lake or something. Just wistfully. Yeah, yeah, wistfully. Remember, because I just gave up my top secret clearance this year.

[A.J.]

This year.

[Mark Dantonio]

So he was cleared when you know it. And I looked at him and. Huh, that's interesting. Now, I know from having done work in that arena that you report everything down to your, your handlers, the people you work for, at all times, because otherwise you're liable. You actually can be criminally charged if you knowingly don't report something that you should have. Yep. So he probably called and they probably said, okay, where is this thing you took out? And he told them, you know, in the pathology department here at Hartford Hospital. And so they probably then said, okay, thank you. Okay, bye. Under oath, under polygraph, he doesn't actually know who took it. Under oath, under polygraph, he can't say who took it and where it went?

[A.J.]

No, it's all compartmentalized by design.

[Mark Dantonio]

You got it.

[A.J.]

So what, what do you think it was?

[Mark Dantonio]

Did.

[A.J.]

Could you feel metallic? Could you taste metallic? Plastic?

[Mark Dantonio]

No. But what I found out, what happened after was what made me realize there was something more to this. Okay. Now, yes, I suspected there was more to it because of the terrifying encounter.

[A.J.]

Of course.

[Mark Dantonio]

However, I second guessed myself. Did it really happen? You know, did it happen that way? And as I reproduced and recreated the results in my head, watch it, watch the events over again, over and over and over, I came to the conclusion this was real. Man, I had no other way to say this wasn't real other than say it happened. It's as real as me talking to you right now. Is this real or is this Memorex? You know, is this a brain dream? No, we objectively can decide what reality is.

[A.J.]

Sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

And I decided that that was actually reality that actually did happen. So sometimes when it was taken out at first, I would be driving down the road and I'd feel a burning pain right where it used to be. And I hear a high pitched whine in my head. Really, really loud. Yeah, I'd have to pull over. And it persisted for like two years afterwards. It would do that every now and then. No pattern to it. Okay. And then it went away for like a decade.

[A.J.]

No more tapping, no more light. No more.

[Mark Dantonio]

Nope. And then recently it started happening again. I started getting. I mean, within the last eight months to nine months, I started feeling this pain. From now, from nine months ago from today, I would feel this pain again and hear that high pitched whine. I'm like, what the heck?

[A.J.]

You know, Mothership's trying to find you.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, well, know what it is? If you, if you have an electrical circuit, you know all about this, you design a circuit, you try to put charge through a circuit, and the component is substandard. It's going to go pop, and it's going to burn. Right. Or something's going to happen. You're going to have a short circuit. All right? It felt very much like, and sounded very much like a short circuit going on up in there. Was it? I don't know.

[A.J.]

Have you had it looked at since?

[Mark Dantonio]

I have had it. Just your science. I've had multiple MRIs. Okay. And the MRI show? Clear. It's clear, you know. So what's going on up there? Why is it doing that? No one knows. You know, this is weird stuff. And like I said, where does science go in the face of the unexplained? I can't explain this, man. Aj I'm at a loss for words.

[A.J.]

So you're doing some special work for the Navy, and you end up somehow on a submarine.

[Mark Dantonio]

Now, that was decades ago. Actually.

[A.J.]

I always felt like UFOs. UAP. I still call them UFOs. I always felt like there's more of them in the ocean. And your experience on that sub was very interesting to me. Can you tell us?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, you know, I'll tell you right now. Everybody's always looking up for UFOs, okay. But there's a growing number of people looking under the water for USOs. Unknown submerged objects. I've always said to people, they go where we are not. Okay. Because if you're a science team gonna study elk in the Yukon, what are you gonna do? You're gonna go right out in the middle of the elk herd and say, hey, come here, let me study you?

[A.J.]

Nope. You set up a blind.

[Mark Dantonio]

It will kill you. You set up a blind. Yep. And you watch them from a distance. You tranquilize one. Abduct it. Yeah.

[A.J.]

Put something in its nose.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tag in the ear. Okay. Well, the elk don't notice that, but humans would, you know. Hey, Frank, where'd you get that tag? I don't know. Got some pizza. I mean, right? We're not gonna do that, Right? We're gonna notice that stuff. So the bottom line is that they're gonna. They're basically gonna say, we need a surreptitious way to do it. So they use sinus, potentially sinus implants. Right. That's one of the things Roger Lear was into. Okay? All that. And maybe that's happening. Maybe that's real. You know, my experience seems to indicate it was right. I can't say. But when I was on the submarine. Okay.

[A.J.]

And why were you on a submarine?

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay, well, first of All I did some project work for the Navy, and I literally was asked, would you like to go out on a submarine? U.S. sub? Yeah. Who would want to go out on a super pipe with end caps in the middle of the ocean?

[A.J.]

You know this guy.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. But go on. Well, at that point, I was making submarine models that actually functioned. I actually made working subset. He had real ballast tanks, and these are models, but they would go in lakes, World War II, German U boats, modern submarines. I had research subs. Like the Alvin.

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. I did engineering talks for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution using the Alvin I created, which could dive deep and come back to surface. Oh, it was so cool.

[A.J.]

Super cool.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Really cool stuff. You know, there's engineering there, real engineering. So that was kind of neat to actually go through all that. Well, anyway, as a thank you for some project work, they said, you want to go for a trip on the sub? Yeah. I didn't know what I was getting into. I've only been at subs at the dock up to that point, and I had been in the Virginia class, the Seawolf class, But I was able to go all over the boats. I mean, to be honest, I could go anywhere. I've been in. In dry dock with some of the boats and in places that people normally don't get a chance to see. And so I said, I want to go. So I showed up at the sub base. I think it was like 5 in the morning. The boat left by 7:30am But I never even realized we left the dock until I started to feel this. The whole boat swimming around under my feet. And I thought, oh, I'm getting, like, dizzy. What's going on? Well, that's the river in the water, causing the boat to move and do this compound motion in the water. And, man, I got seasick. I'm not proud, man, I was seasick. Sick as a dog, Right. So I thought, oh, man, I have to have dinner with the captain later in the wardrobe. Oh, no, I don't want to be sick. No, no. And I was scared. So once we got out to sea. Okay. And they dive the boat, it feels like everybody listening and watching feels right now you can't tell you're moving. Okay. There's no motion, except when you go through water of a different temperature, you get a little bit of vibration, and that's how you know that you're moving, because you're getting that vibration of. Okay. Warmer water up front, colder water at the back translates through the hull. Okay. And that stuff is. That's how you know you're moving? That's the only way you know if you're moving at high speed. As you turn, they bank, so you kind of feel a little weird and heavy, but you never feel like you're being whipped to the sides. You either get heavier or you just feel that vibration. So it's very, very little force. So anyway, all of the motion while we're on the surface, the boat doesn't dive until it's way out into the Atlantic. And as I said, it's a sewer pipe with end caps. It rocks and rolls, brother. And that thing, it just knocked me for a loop. And I was like, oh, my gosh, why did I come on this boat? The hallway's doing this, and I'm trying. Okay. Yeah. So I talked to the kid that passes the doctor on the boat, and they gave me this weird thing called a patch. Oh, I never saw that before. I thought it was like witch doctor science. He just stuck it on my neck right there. So you should be okay in a little while, sir. Okay. What was that? Scopolamine. Whatever it was. Well, they tried in the Navy before. They tried it on us. Now you can get one.

[A.J.]

Sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

All of them go to cvs. You can grab one, get in the airport. That's right, exactly. But the Navy had them first. Okay. And I tried one of these new things, and it worked, but it took hours, a couple hours to work. So while it was trying to work, I sat down, I asked permission to sit next to the active sonar and just watch the kid do the sonar. And once under the water, okay, the boat felt like we feel now. And I was like, okay, if I can, I can handle this as long as my stomach comes back. I dreaded eating in front of the captain and having, you know, you keep watch, checking your watch, like, oh, man, you know, this is bad. So anyway, as I'm sitting there, I'm actually sitting up straight now in a submarine. It's not quiet. It doesn't sound like it does in this beautiful studio in the basement with a cool window. Okay? It doesn't. It sounds. There's a cacophony of sound. There's stuff going on all the time. You hear high pressure air. You hear people talking. You hear machinery. It's really, really loud in a boat, so it's hard to hear yourself talk. And then when you make announcements over the intercom, everybody has to stop and listen. No matter what your converse, what your conversation is, you got to stop and listen, because that dominates, and you let it pass. Just like at the airport, you know, when they start making these announcements, you know? You know, you know when songs out, please come back. Yeah.

[A.J.]

When you hear the whistle, you stop moving.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, you do. And you just stop moving and listen and let it pass. So anyway, several of those things happen too, but while I'm sitting there, I'm drifting off, sitting up vertically, you know, And I even. I made the mistake of trying to move the chair closer to the sonar station. They're locked down, man. Okay? And they looked at me go, haha, newbie, you know, yeah, you're the noob man, you know? And so I go, sorry. And so I'm trying to get my stomach back. I close my eyes, I lean back, cross my arms, and I start to drift off to sleep. All right, Thinking, okay, I'll get my stomach back. Dinner will be great. It'll be fine. I'm not gonna have a problem. All right? Right. This is all good. And while I'm thinking that, I'm hearing consonar Khan, sonar. Fast mover. Fast mover. What? What? I'm like, now my heart's going, I'm thinking, is that a torpedo? Are we gonna die out here? What the heck happened? Oh, my gosh. I should never have come in this cruise. Of course, I should never have come in this boat. I'm thinking, I'm. No, this is bad. I can't believe this. The executive officer XO comes around the corner, just saunters, ring around, really calm. What do you got? I'm like, I'm thinking, faster, dude. There might give me a torpedo. We might have to maneuver, you know, get away, you know, drop decoys, do whatever you gotta do, you know. And that's what I'm thinking. I didn't say. I'm just sitting like this, you know, like a little worried. And the kid at the sonar turned to the side and he's away from me. And the XO is up there talking down to the kid who's facing away from me. Remember I told you it's noisy in a boat? He gives the bearing in the range, which I did not hear, okay? But then the XO said, how fast is that moving? And the kid did a calculation and he turned and he put his arms out like this and said, several hundred knots, sir.

[A.J.]

Several hundred knots.

[Mark Dantonio]

Hundred. Several hundred knots. And he's like this, like it. What's going on? You know, he doesn't understand what it is. Now, sonar guys are supposed to know everything they hear. Yes, that's their specialty. That's why they Go to school. That's why sub school is so important. They have to learn all the sounds. They can tell if there's barnacles, okay, On a frigate's propeller, okay, And. And which one it is and how many rpms it's turning. And all that stuff. All that stuff from the sound.

[A.J.]

Did you see his waterfall display?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, that's just water. It looks like the Matrix to me. I don't know what it is. You know, it's so.

[A.J.]

You couldn't see a shape.

[Mark Dantonio]

There's no shapes, okay? It's this lines, okay? And this apparently was a transient, which I didn't even see because my eyes were closed, okay? And so he. He says to the xo, several hundred knots in the XO without missing a beat. It's okay, son. Log it and dog it. Yes, sir. He said, well, sir. Yes, sir. Now log it and dog it. What? No. Hey, come on. No, no, no. Now, seasickness, whatever, it's gone. Of course, my adrenaline went poof. Out you go. And I got up like a big shot. Because I'm a big shot, right? I'm a vip, man. I've been invited.

[A.J.]

I'm special dinner with the captain.

[Mark Dantonio]

You see where this goes, where it's going? I get up, I go up to the xl. Sir, excuse me. I know what these fast movers may be. Is there anything I can help you with, sir? And he looks at me and he goes, dantonio, correct? Yes, sir. He says, you having a good trip so far? Sir, yes, sir. Let's keep it that way. And he turns and walks away. So I was like, okay, I'll go back. I sat back next to that sonar, squirming like a little kid thinking, wow, this is crazy. I got to get off this boat. I can't wait to get off. I got to research this. What are these things? But his.

[A.J.]

His calmness in that moment told you something, didn't it? That this is something that they see all the time.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's what struck me. It's like, why was.

[A.J.]

He wasn't even phased.

[Mark Dantonio]

It was the term fast mover. Now, the kid had never seen a fast mover before.

[A.J.]

Like 80 knots, maybe it's a concern. 350 knots.

[Mark Dantonio]

No, it's several hundred.

[A.J.]

Several hundred. So what's the fastest, fastest sub on Earth? 40?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, maybe. Okay. And see, the thing is about the torpedo. Let's talk about torpedoes. Yeah, because I thought it was a torpedo. The fastest torpedo on the planet is owned by the Russians. It's a rocket torpedo. It spews steam out of its nose and coats that torpedo body with a laminar flow of steam. So effectively, the torpedo is racing into its own vacuum. I love.

[A.J.]

It's gorgeous. I love it.

[Mark Dantonio]

Right?

[A.J.]

But still, how fast?

[Mark Dantonio]

But that's 200 knots. However, it's the loudest thing in the ocean.

[A.J.]

Right?

[Mark Dantonio]

You can hear that thing anywhere in the ocean. It's what's called a desperation weapon. You fire it, they know where you are, you're dead. It's the last thing you ever do. Okay? It's the last act of defiance, you know, it's like a mouse giving an eagle the finger. Right, right, right. So much for you. So the bottom line is, okay, it wasn't the squall torpedo. It was something else that was really quiet and moving several hundred knots. And I. I wish I heard the bearing in the range, you know, the angle off the boat in the distance. I didn't have that information. I couldn't hear that.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

So when I got off the boat, finally, I raced home and I started trying to figure out what these USO's were because this, this sounded like a USO to me. And now I'd heard about them, I studied them, never expected to see or hear from of one. And as I'm going through the USO stuff, I'm learning way more about them than I thought I actually knew.

[A.J.]

What are you seeing? What are you learning?

[Mark Dantonio]

More navies see them than ever before. The Russians I knew saw them. They're not the only ones, of course. Other people in our own navy did. And I started talking to other submariners and they said, oh, on our boat, we call those jellyfish. Which is kind of the joke because jellyfish don't move right. In the water column. Right? They don't move. But if it's moving several hundred knots, you don't know what they're called. They call it jellyfish just to be funny.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And just because that's it. I mean, they have to officially call it something, you know, so there's other boats that call them by, by that name.

[A.J.]

Have these been photographed? No, they have.

[Mark Dantonio]

This is sonar stuff, you know, it's all sound, sound, sound coming to the boat through passive arrays. All right? So they just don't have any idea what it actually is. Now, in the 50s, there was a five sub task force with another task force of surface ships off Puerto Rico. 60, I think it was 1960. And one of the subs heard something and it started giving chase. It didn't know the people in the boat did not know whether this was part of the exercise or not. So they're doing what they think they got to do. Give chase. Right. They chased it for two or three days. It was going full ocean depth and then going all the way to the surface within seconds. It was letting them approach and then rocketing off at high speed within seconds. Yes. So this is.

[A.J.]

There's no people doing that.

[Mark Dantonio]

Correct. We don't know. Not people.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Not people. Nor even if it's aliens. There's no aliens. Okay. That can race and do like a 90 degree turn in the sky either, as we may get to. Which they don't have to. They don't have to.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

All right, so the point is, something was out there. And they. They showed that this in fact was not a machine issue. A fake problem. An enigma with the machine. The machines are all working, right? Sonar system are all on top of their game, doing their thing. So what was it? To this day, we don't know. Now, the. There was another. There was a Japanese freighter traveling to Japan, another incident, and this was like the Kusagawa Maru or something like that. And it was traveling when all the people that. All six crew members on this boat watch these silver discs flying out of the water. Okay. And they actually had the presence of mind to mark the latitude and longitude of where. This was interesting. Yeah.

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

Of course, I researched that. You know where that latitude and longitude put them? Right at the southern end of the Marianas Trench. Exactly. At the southernmost point, the deepest place on Earth that.

[A.J.]

Where we can't go.

[Mark Dantonio]

The Challenger Deep. Jim Cameron can go there.

[A.J.]

Well, he can, but.

[Mark Dantonio]

And Trieste did. Trieste did. True, but a different part of it. Right. So isn't that interesting? Why there? You know, is that the point being the. Because they could. I've said this before and you heard me say it. They go where we are not. So if they go where we're not, well, we're never there. So they're safe there. But wait, Mark. The pressure is incredible. Of course it is. So how do they mitigate the pressure? Oh, that's something else. Which we'll get to. But I do want to finish up on that fast mover thing. Let's do. Took me. It was like two years after that trip. I had to do a job for the Joint Chiefs. I was actually building a model for the office of the President. Okay. It was an advanced model showing a concept, and that's what I can say. So I bring it down and I deliver it to one of the chiefs and I sat with them. And I know I shouldn't have said it now. Oh, no, come on. All right, Mark, you know. Yeah, I shouldn't have said it. My brain was saying, don't say it, don't say it. But my words were already coming out because, see, my mouth says things before my brain gets engaged sometimes. So what came out of my mouth was, sir, what can you tell me about the fast mover program? Exactly. And I'm sitting there and I immediately, literally, physically went, oh, literally cover my mouth. Like, oh, I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have said that. And he just looked at me and he smiled. He goes, I can't talk about that. I'm sorry. Oh, it's okay, sir. Never mind, never mind, never mind. And he said, thank you so much. He says, great work. We'll do follow on stuff with you. And they did. So that didn't hurt me, luckily.

[A.J.]

But again, that gave you information.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, yeah. By saying nothing, he said everything. I mean, and so when I drove home from Washington D.C. back to Connecticut, that's like a six hour ride. I don't remember the drive, of course. Right. Because I was only thinking. I. I just drove on autopilot and got back. It wasn't like missing time.

[A.J.]

No.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. Because for six hours I was ruminating about everything I was learning and all the past trip and all this stuff. Stuff. And all the knowledge. I was thinking, it's like, wow, they're here. Holy cow, they're really here. And they're living in the oceans.

[A.J.]

Do you think organizations like Arrow A Tip are connected to the usos or is there another organization tracking that?

[Mark Dantonio]

I think that the thing is there might be. I know the Navy does. Okay, we know that for sure because

[A.J.]

we see them go from air to water and back.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, yeah. Well, remember the XO said log it and dog it.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And by the way, that was decades ago. We're not talking about last week or two months ago. We're talking decades ago when that actually occurred. So they were tracking them way back then in our US Navy. Okay, okay. Understand that. So now you come forward now and you look at Arrow and a tip and all these other project activities, and you have to say, now these aerial objects that people are seeing, are they also the same as the underwater objects? And I believe they are. Because based on, you know, going Transmedium and Darcy Ware has done a great movie on this called Trans Medium. It's. I'm not plugging, but hey, it's a great movie.

[A.J.]

Watch.

[Mark Dantonio]

Right, so. But Transmedium Capabilities will be automatic depending on the technology used to move that ship around. Okay, so that said, they could be the same object. The. The. The Kitchikawa Maru folks saw these silver discs coming out of the ocean and flying. Well, they're transmedium. Right in front of you. Water to air, water to air, water to air. Over and over as they see these disks come out. Right. So clearly they can do both. All right. And there's reasons why they may be able to do that. Right. So hearing from, literally one of the people that works for the President of the United States say to me that this is something I can't talk about to me is an admission that it exists, but kind of all knew that, you know, at that point. But hearing it from that level, it just, like, blows your mind, actually say, wow, I can't believe I heard this.

[A.J.]

So what's your take on the current disclosure narrative? Do you think we're being prepared for disclosure day, or is it a psyop?

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, you know, I do a lecture about, in part, why the government's actually assisting in disclosure, and one of those things is they work through Hollywood, too.

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

Think about the show, the movie, the Day the Earth Stood Still.

[A.J.]

Of course.

[Mark Dantonio]

Right. Okay, great. Well, that was a. That was a message. That message was, we warn you about using powers and nuclear power. You got to be very careful. Blah, blah, blah. Okay, then. Remember movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Well, in there, the aliens are benevolent, but they don't have a concept of time. They return people they stole decades earlier, but to them, it's nothing. But to the people coming back, like, where am I? Right, right. So that actually was a cool disconnect. And of course, you know, I work with Douglas Trumbull, who did the effects for that movie. Okay. I didn't work with him then. I worked him for 10 years. But he was a grandfather to me.

[A.J.]

Well, just as an aside.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah.

[A.J.]

Douglas Trumbull has built the most famous UFOs in movie history. Was he a UFO believer?

[Mark Dantonio]

As a matter of fact, he was.

[A.J.]

He was.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's how we met. I did an NPR show about X Files of Connecticut, and during the NPR interview, they said, well, you know, this. This special effects guy, Douglas Trumbull, my idol. I mean, I. I've watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001, like, dozens of times. I love that movie. I loved how Trumbull created all the.

[A.J.]

Everybody on the planet has seen his work, of course. Everybody.

[Mark Dantonio]

Everybody. Yeah. And so he said, next time, I'm gonna get you on with Doug Trumbull. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, that's always like, wow. So I didn't wait. I got home from that interview on npr, and I wrote an email I found for Douglas H. Drumble, and I wrote him telling him everything. Half hour later, I get a one page email back from the man himself. Wow. Whoa. And he says, been to your website, fxmodels.com.

[A.J.]

wow.

[Mark Dantonio]

Excellent in every respect. We could use you now. Can you come up and meet, like. I'm like, hyperventilating at that point. I'm gonna meet the. Oh, my gosh.

[A.J.]

Blade Runner. Oh, my goodness.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Yeah. So I meet the guy. I go up there to his. To his studio.

[A.J.]

His studio?

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, yeah. It's a studio out in the middle of the woods in Massachusetts. Okay. And I meet in his office. I look around this office. Oh, there's Blade Runner paraphernalia. There's the helmet from Brainstorm. You know, I mean, all these things all around, everywhere. Okay. I thought to myself, gee, wouldn't it be cool if I did some cool props? And he had them on display in his office someday, you know? And that happened eventually.

[A.J.]

So what did you get in his office? What'd you build?

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, we worked on. There was an Apple iPad Pro commercial for the Super Bowl. Okay. We did that commercial on site. And I was in charge of doing just one artifact, one effect for one small shot. And as time moved on, Doug put me into many other shots, and I ended up doing 13 different pieces of that commercial. And I even brought my son in to do a particular comet crash into the Earth's atmosphere.

[A.J.]

Wow.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. And I had him build the comet and everything, and he now works for the biggest TV station in Connecticut. And so he stuck with his journalism and. And stuff, you know, and so forth. So is it as a point of fact, you know, Doug called me his chief scientist, which was hilarious. And so I would always talk. He'd always ask me, this is. He doesn't need my opinion, okay? This guy has every right to be arrogant. Has every right to just say, look, go away. You bother me. And I'd accept it because he earned that right, in my view, okay? With all the work, his body of work. But instead he'd say, mark, what do you think of this? And I've said to him several times, he would always yell at me, you want my opinion? He goes, I wouldn't ask you if I didn't, you know? And he'd smile. And so I gave him my opinion. And so we had A relationship where he valued what I said. And he was actually very corroborative. He would actually.

[A.J.]

Well, it's super handy to have a scientist around and collaborative.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, especially with. With. With. With. With, you know, space stuff and other types of things.

[A.J.]

Didn't metamaterials land on your desk when you were working with Doug?

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, they did.

[A.J.]

You got to tell us about that.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, yeah, I. I held metamaterials. Supposed metamaterials.

[A.J.]

Yeah, From. From retrieval.

[Mark Dantonio]

They came. Yeah, they came from some type of retrieval. And I'll be seeing one of the guys that actually had them contact. Gotta remember his name. But he came from mit, a materials lab. And he came in with the receipts, with the results, and he said, okay, this piece here. And they had a container.

[A.J.]

He brought the pieces.

[Mark Dantonio]

I held them in my hands. I got photos of me holding these in my hand.

[A.J.]

So are they light, are they heavy? Or they.

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, you know, to me, they look like normal pieces of industrial cut off, you know, what is that? You know, I mean. But he goes, let's study the isotopes of these. Oh, this honeycomb piece of material. And I recognize that because in my shop I have a laser cutter, and I have a honeycomb as the base underneath. So it looks like my laser cutter honeycomb. He goes, yeah, that's where the similarity ends. Look at the isotopes. And we went through the spectral analysis, and he read me all these settings and stuff, and it's like, well, that isotope doesn't exist.

[A.J.]

Doesn't exist?

[Mark Dantonio]

No, that one doesn't exist on Earth in a stable form. Yeah, it's in there now. That isotope is in this piece.

[A.J.]

What metals were those in there?

[Mark Dantonio]

I don't know.

[A.J.]

Don't know.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's the thing that the metals. The metals had a combination of multiple different types of metals. I mean, it's weird to say this, but you know how alloys are, right? They're conglomerations. Well, this is one of those, but I don't remember the specifics. He said we could detect certain known metals, but then there's some we don't know. And this one here, there's an isotope in here that we can't produce on Earth. So we don't know why this one is in this piece, that your metal that's sitting in the palm of your hand right now. I'm like, wow.

[A.J.]

Isn't it true that different isotopes could be a signature of coming from a different world?

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, yeah, if they're stable on Earth, then maybe not, but if they're not stable on Earth. And you find them built into a mechanism that is produced on another world, well, then they could be stable in that thing. And even on Earth, they'll be stable because they're locked in. But you can't make them on Earth. Yeah.

[A.J.]

I've heard someone comment on those metamaterials, that, yeah, we can do that in a thousand years with a billion dollars.

[Mark Dantonio]

Exactly, exactly. So. And that's the whole point. It still smacks of advanced technology, doesn't it?

[A.J.]

Why did MIT choose you guys to look into that?

[Mark Dantonio]

Because Doug Trumbull. Doug. Doug is. He's done presentations for them in the past. And so let's bring this to Doug Trumbull because they knew he hunted UFOs. He def.

[A.J.]

He definitely worked. He definitely worked SAPS. He just didn't tell. He had clearance for sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

No, he didn't. As a matter of fact, when we were working on the. The UFOTOG system, which was a UFO detection system, we were making some strides, and he got a call from some DOD guys, and they said, we'd like to come see what you're doing. He said, absolutely effing not.

[A.J.]

Wow.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. No, you're not welcome.

[A.J.]

Wow, my hero.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, go F yourself. He did not want to be. Didn't want. Want them in the room. You know, he wouldn't accept them in there.

[A.J.]

Are you able to explain how that UF photog works?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Ufotog was interesting because the system that Doug had developed even before I came along. Okay. Was that it would track objects in the sky. Now, Doug, coming from a camera background, a physical, practical camp background, he focused on having a system that could spin around really fast. And he had telescopes and cameras and detectors all aimed at one spot in the sky. And he could track a jet you're going through the sky and then gather information about it, you know. Okay, what's the. What's it spewing? What's it doing? A spectral analysis. Okay. What do we got? You know, what's this made of? That kind of thing? So it had that kind of capability, but we wanted to expand it more. And I said to Doug, because he had this all in a Humvee on a hydraulic lift. Remember, he's a showman. He was a movie maker. So he wanted something look cool and flashy.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

I said, doug, how about if we do something a little different? What if we make platters which each have cameras and make these platters have a solar panel to power them, and then just put the platters out in the desert, have them communicate with each other, set them up in a triad so all three are linked to each other. Okay. And I got that, that idea from War of the Worlds where the Martian landers would land in triads and then they would, in triangles, like right, talk, you know, cover the entire United States. I thought we can do the same thing as more of the worlds. We'll put one here, one here, one here, separate them by like two miles each. That way if this one detects something and then this one down here detects the same thing, we can triangulate directly. Right. Because it means it's far enough away that this one can see it too. But if this one sees it, this doesn't. This doesn't. This is a local event.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And we're just going to get the data for the one. Okay, let's do that. So we started working on centralized servers, trying to figure out a way to get that data to go there in one place. And you know, Doug ended up getting sick, you know, and passed away obviously a few years ago, which broke all of our hearts, you know, and his wife Julia, beautiful lady, you know, very, very understanding and amazingly supportive man of that, of that man. And man, he could be, he could be a bear. Sometimes when we weren't doing, we were doing a commercial for espn, it wasn't working out right and it was two in the morning and he was just getting downright tired and he was just sinking deeper in his chair and he says, I don't know how we're going to get this thing to work. And we finally did, of course, because that was Doug, you know, we always make it work. Well, so he ended up, we ended up working, you know, to try and figure out how we're going to get the telemetry to work. I was working on little XP transmitters, trying to figure if that will work too. And then we actually had an idea for getting the communication to go. Have it making a round robin at all times. You got anything? Got anything? Got anything? Polling and then extracting the data, making it available in a centralized database.

[A.J.]

Did you get it working?

[Mark Dantonio]

No, no, we didn't, unfortunately. And that's okay. That's okay because we put the, we put the feelers out to get other people involved too. We wanted to make sure that people could do it. Right now there's other projects out there doing similar kind of things. But as I started to get further into this, I thought these platters would be really cool. They'll be self sufficient and you know, all the cameras will be looking, you know, it's better to have single high pixel cameras pointing at a different pot of space with overlapping fields than to have one big giant all sky. Because the all sky is going to have limited resolution. It's going to have warpage and distortion. A singular camera wouldn't. So if we have enough cameras, we can cover the whole sky. All right. And be able to have a high resolution digital zoom capability on every field that we see something in. And then we could stitch those together. And we wanted to work on having a methodology for auto stitching views and stuff and to recreate, say, motion and then tie them to other units to be able to talk to each other.

[A.J.]

Well, this sounds like you still have ambition to build this.

[Mark Dantonio]

I sure do. I sure do.

[A.J.]

I hope you do.

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, there's another guy I talked to a guy named Dave Mason. Okay. He's been on television a lot doing some stuff, but he's also an inventor. Okay. And David and I, whenever we get on the phone, three hours passes and we don't even realize it because we're talking about things to do. So I would definitely team up with Dave and he would team up with me, I'm sure. And we would actually make this happen because I know we can solve a lot of these problems. There's ranches out west that people say this is all happened. There's TV shows about it, you know. Okay. I think we can solve those. Okay. Because in, in the network's view, they don't ever want them solved because if you solve them, the show's over.

[A.J.]

That's right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And the profits go right down the tube. So we don't want that solved. Make sure you always have questions so you can have a next season. So there's a vested interest in not figuring it out, but we're science guys. Yeah, you figure it out and blow it. Blow wide open now. Yeah, we'll get a lot of people mad at us. Can't launch rockets anymore. Oh, well.

[A.J.]

Oh, well.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. So what? Too bad.

[A.J.]

So to set up our next break, I've heard a lot of different theories on UFO propulsion. Yours is my favorite. Because it's not propulsion at all.

[Mark Dantonio]

It isn't.

[A.J.]

All right, so we'll talk about that in just a minute.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, wow.

[A.J.]

What percentage of photos of UFOs that come across your desk can be explained?

[Mark Dantonio]

About 99.5 or 6% that.

[A.J.]

What is it usually? What?

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, a lot of people photograph airplanes, birds, dust motes that are captured in a flash. They call them orbs. Right. I mean, but not all of any of Those things are planes, dust motes, you know, or whatever. They could be actual things. So we have to carefully examine these to see if we can determine what the conditions were that may have led to them mistaking something ordinary as extraordinary. Because I always say many times people capture ordinary things in an extraordinary way.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And that's because of the way cameras operate. Right. They, they do this for us. Cell phones. Cell phones don't just take a picture. That's not how they work. They're actually stacking all the time. They're actually taking multiple pictures and stacking them together to get the final result. Okay. And so that can introduce its own set of artifacts into images. So it's a, it's a pretty, pretty extensive science, you know, and it's hard to know what people actually took a picture of what they thought they saw. Because you asked 10 people what they saw in the sky looking at the same event, you get 10 different ideas. Right. I proved that when we were training people out in the Sonoran Desert at a boot camp that was like a three day boot camp out there. And I affixed a very, very bright light to one of my drones and I flew it up in the air, turned on the light, and started flying it toward people away left and right until they noticed. And I was on the other side of the building from where they were and I heard them all saying, look at that. What is that? I don't know. I think that's a Navy jet. No, no, no, it's something bigger. Okay. Maybe it's a triangle. I'm not sure. It's moving fast. It's got to be moving hundreds of miles an hour. I listened to all this stuff. Yep. I'm chuckling because I'm thinking they're demonstrating everything that happens with people. They all see a singular event a different way, and that's okay, but they have to really try to isolate what it is they're seeing in the sky. Right. So when I look at an object in the sky, there's only so many things it can be. Right. Well, that's either a star or it's a satellite. If it's moving, it might be a satellite. It could be a high altitude aircraft where you don't actually see the FAA lights, you know, from that altitude. It could be a black project. I mean, it could be something like that. True. We've seen some of those, probably.

[A.J.]

Sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. And not even known it. Okay. Stealth fighter was a black project for a while. B2 was a stealth. Stealth bomber was a black project for A while.

[A.J.]

We see weird stuff here over Vegas

[Mark Dantonio]

all the time, you know, and that's just not the Elvis impersonators.

[A.J.]

No.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, exactly.

[A.J.]

Have you ever had a sighting yourself? Like an in person sighting?

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, the in person event I had was strange. I had. Okay, first of all, with our remote telescopes, with our skytour livestream telescope out in the Sonoran, I have an all sky camera, very high end. I built it, you know, myself. Make sure it captures everything really nicely. And I caught something flying through the sky on that all sky over the course of the night. And it did a time lapse. And every single line of it corresponded to like 15 seconds. So for 15 seconds it was going here, then 15 more seconds was going there, then it was going here and here. It literally went. But it was a faint light.

[A.J.]

Do you have that footage that we can show when we cut this together?

[Mark Dantonio]

I indeed will.

[A.J.]

Okay, great.

[Mark Dantonio]

I will send it to you. You'll see the actual photograph of this thing moving through this guy.

[A.J.]

Yeah. So if you're just listening, Mark is indicating what it. It may. It goes across the sky and then upwards.

[Mark Dantonio]

It veered off on like a 40 degree angle. And I've never seen anything do that before. That was weird. I've seen airplanes turn. That's fine. But they have FAA mandated lighting on them, don't they?

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

You can register and recognize what you're looking at. Okay, but wait, Mark, what about a black project? Could have been a black project. Could have been someone of ours. But to fly in a configuration where you don't have lights, that is only used in wartime in battle zones, it's not used over the continental United States because ATC needs to know what's up there.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, so it is kind of interesting that this happened. The second thing that I saw, again, another all sky image, was this little tight circle way up in the sky. Right. Very, very tiny circle, sort of faint, but it was a perfect circle. It was over crossed two frames, all right. That were each 12 seconds long. Okay. So over 24 seconds, this thing made a complete circle in the sky.

[A.J.]

How high up do you think?

[Mark Dantonio]

Hard to tell. It's a single point vantage point. Right. But it was. It was high enough so that if it was any kind of light that was on a vessel or a craft or a plane, you would recognize the relative brightness. You know, when something has a brightness of a certain amount, it's kind of certain altitude. You can kind of guess. Sure. All right. But in this case, this object was a sort of a dim brightness. And it was. It curled around in one image, it curled half the circle. In the second image, it went the rest of the circle, same brightness. So I thought, well, is that maybe a fighter from Luke Air Force Base, because it was nearby. But if it was a fighter, you might say, well, maybe it's a F18 Hornet. Or maybe it's a, say an F16 or something. Okay. And they have a jet nozzle one, a singular jet nozzle, an F18. They might blend one this scene from the ground. Okay. If it's high enough. And you'd see it as it was going away from you. But what about the other half where

[A.J.]

it's coming towards you?

[Mark Dantonio]

There's no nozzle there.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

So that one perplexed me. So those two things I saw were very, very perplexing. Now, we've seen, like, reentry of a Chinese rocket. We've seen that. We've seen Starlink launches and Falcon nines. That's all cool. I've seen them live. I've seen them. They're cool.

[A.J.]

But you know what they are now?

[Mark Dantonio]

We know what they are now.

[A.J.]

Have you ever seen a good hoax? I mean, it's so hard to hoax a VFX artist who's an astronomer, who's been doing this since he's nine.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's a tough call to try and hoax our photo analysis team. Right, Right. For sure. I tend to see a lot of things, but they try, don't they? They always do.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Like, I'll give you an example. There was a hoax known as the Dome of the Rock hoax.

[A.J.]

It's one of my favorites. There's a few different angles.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, go ahead.

[A.J.]

I love it.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. That few different angles was really important to me. Okay. But that's what undid it.

[A.J.]

Was it?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, absolutely.

[A.J.]

Okay. Tell the story. Because everybody knows. Knows that sighting.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, I figured that's. That's why I brought up because I prayed. It's pretty popular. The Jerusalem Old City Dome of the Rock footage when I got was like, wow, you're hearing people talk about it. Right. But you're hearing people milling about and you're not really hearing a specific comment about that thing other than maybe just an exclamation. And then it does a little. It looks like it's rotating and then it takes off really fast. Okay. That's the thing. But when it takes off, it flips. Flashes the whole city.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. Momentarily. Okay. However, there's other images of that. And in the other images, the other videos of this, you see a close up, say, of this ufo, and it looks like it's spinning and it has lights on it and stuff. You do a comparison between that and the other video. They're totally different. So what we saw in this close up is not what was in this distant shot. Okay. Because you can tell when something's flashing. The bottom light should be going, like, brighter and dimmer. Brighter and dimmer at that frequency. It wasn't. So that was wrong. Mmm. So then I might disappoint you.

[A.J.]

Yeah, you are. I mean, I knew. I knew it was fake, but I love it.

[Mark Dantonio]

So it is really interesting.

[A.J.]

It's a fun.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's fun in that part of the city. The city never sleeps. There's always people out. Yep. Why wasn't reported by anybody else? Why was there only like three people reporting it? And it just happened to be the people that filmed it.

[A.J.]

Right. Just showed up.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. And they were at this vantage point and then somebody was down filming it from below. They saw it. Okay. Supposedly. What do you think the chances are that all three of those people knew each other? Chances are pretty high. Yeah. In fact, they did. They were all in a film class.

[A.J.]

Oh, no.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yes, they were. And the guy that was. That was the teacher is the one that basically accepted them doing this little project to fake this. Okay. Hey, you know what? It's kind of cool because one of the first things you do when you're doing compositions in compositing is you'll use something simple like a flashing light, because that way you don't have ships to worry about. And shading and shadows. That's a problem. You know, having been in the 3D world, I was a 3D, done 3D animation for television and for myself for. For decades. So I'm familiar with how people fake stuff. And when I watched this footage, I thought, there's something wrong here and I'm going to figure out what it is. And when I watched the three different versions of this thing, every one of them was different in ways that made it a fatality in terms of being an actual event. And then we found out that there was an Israeli reporter, I believe, that actually made the break. Breaking news that these were a film class project that was done. And that was like, wow, that's. That's. Now I get it, you know.

[A.J.]

Can you break my heart one more time? Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

Which. Which one?

[A.J.]

It's. It's a sighting that's happened many times over Turkey. Where in some of the frames, it looks like there's two pilots in the craft.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, that one I'VE seen that. I analyze that one, too, and one of the. One of the issues I had with that one was that the reflection we're looking at is something that's. It's a curved reflection. Yes, that's what I'm looking at, a curved shape. Right. So you're saying, oh, well, the ship is like, you know, it's got a little like a delta wing. Maybe it's like out of Stargate or something. Right. With that little curve to it.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

And you see those two things sticking up? Well, that one, it. People said, look, if you zoom in. Fatal words, if you zoom in, you can see aliens. No, if you zoom into anything, you see pixelation. And then your brain makes it into something that you want it to be. Okay. Like bunnies in the clouds. Oh, it's a bunny. No, it's not. It's. It's Satan. You know, whatever. Right. You know, you can make whatever you want because your brain manufactures it. That the pareidolia takes over at that level.

[A.J.]

They hate the P word.

[Mark Dantonio]

They do. They do. It's the P word. That's right. Sorry. But that one. Let's talk about that one now. That one, it looks like right now. And I haven't gotten any more data on this, to be honest, so we'll let it rest as a potential unknown. Okay. So it won't break your heart entirely. Okay. Okay. It looks like a potential lens reflection at the edge. Okay. That we're looking at there.

[A.J.]

I know exactly what you mean.

[Mark Dantonio]

You do, don't you?

[A.J.]

I do, yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

I mean, you kind of got cameras all around. You kind of know. Right. You get some kind of weird reflections, especially when you have bright lights on the water. And in this particular case, there were bright lights on the water. You know, there was a distant ship. And that distant ship at sea could have caused an edge reflection in the barrel of the camera. And I leave it at that because it could have been that, you know, was it that? I can't say for sure. And that's the mystery, isn't it?

[A.J.]

Are there any that you haven't solved that you're like this. This is the real deal that, you know, the.

[Mark Dantonio]

The two I caught in the all sky cam? Yes, they're mine.

[A.J.]

But still, those are points of light.

[Mark Dantonio]

They're points of light.

[A.J.]

Any craft shapes?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, I haven't seen any that I could be say are convincing. I know. I'm sorry. But I'll tell you this, okay. Remember the Belgian triangle?

[A.J.]

Sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. The end photograph of the Belgian triangle. Well, that was found out to be a model. Okay. And it was a Styrofoam model with lights on it. And that's why it was so blurry, because they couldn't, you know.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

But they used that as a potential for being the. The Belgian triangle. And they ended up becoming the. The standard image of the Belgian triangle. A hoax image was created as a. And said it was a standard triangle. I'll tell you this. My sister, who doesn't believe in this stuff, her name is Beth, called me at two in the morning one day and said, mark, there's something outside my window. Well, is it a person? No, it's a craft over my house. I don't know what to do. She doesn't believe in UFOs. Never has. Very practical person. Okay. I said, describe this thing to me. I didn't say, is it a triangle? I said, describe it to me. Well, it looks like a triangular shape. It's really dark. But at the ends, where. At the ends of the end points, there's like these red lights. Really? How big are the lights? Well, they're about. She tried to say that they're like balls sticking up in the three corners. Okay. I said, is there anything in the middle at all? No, I don't see anything in the middle, but it's moving slowly across the yard. It's pretty high in the air. And I heard this humming sound. I don't know where it's coming from. And I open the window and I hear it. It's coming from up above my house. Now, my sister is not a hoaxer. My sister is practical. And this was. I'm listening to a shaking voice, and she was panicking. I said, all right, calm down. It's not going to hurt you. All right? Is it moving away? It's moving toward the trees at the end of the yard. And it's going to go over and it's going to end up in. In the rest of Plainville, Connecticut. She said, but I can't really tell. I go, why? Because all the power's out. Oh, yeah. Plainville's out. All the lights are out. All we see. I'm. All I'm seeing is this thing in the sky. Wow. So is the power outage related to this thing in the sky? Maybe. But a power outage isn't going to wake someone up out of a sound sleep. No. Either, you know. So what was that? So she witnessed something that I wished I could have seen. Okay. And, you know, I thought that was a really, really interesting observation because I'm glad that you said that.

[A.J.]

I thought you're going to tell me it was a drone, but.

[Mark Dantonio]

No, but something we don't know. And, and again, she's, she can observe, obviously she's very good at it, but she's not someone that can say exactly what she's looking at. Right. Either. So she left it to me. But by describing it, she literally was describing a triangular craft that had lights at the three vertices, you know, and they were red, a dull red. But she said they were weird looking. The lights were kind of weird, hard to look at, but not too bright. Yeah, and I've heard that before.

[A.J.]

I have too.

[Mark Dantonio]

And she's not, she hasn't into that, any of that.

[A.J.]

I heard sometimes the lights seem to be moving within the shape, but.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. And they're hard to look at because they're, they're weird. It's a weird type of light that the eye can't really.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Figure out. And that might be perhaps part of the propulsion or whatever we're looking at. Who knows?

[A.J.]

So, so last one. Phoenix lights.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, yeah.

[A.J.]

Flares or why is it seen across the whole southwest all night? What happened?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, that's the, you said, the last part you said is very important.

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

Seen across the southwest. All across the southwest. The Phoenix lights were not the flare drop exercise that is so often shown. That was an actual flare drop over the Estrellas. Been there. I've been in the Estrellas looking at that site. Okay. Those were flares, parachute flares, but they're not the Phoenix lights. There's no actual imagery or video of the actual Phoenix lights. There's.

[A.J.]

So what we see are those are the flares.

[Mark Dantonio]

Those are the flares. That thing that's popular from 1994, whatever it was, that. That's the actual flare drop that occurred. But that's not the phenomenon that occurred all across Arizona.

[A.J.]

Nobody captured it.

[Mark Dantonio]

No, it was like, as far as I know, if there's stuff out there, I haven't seen it, you know, none of us have, you know, as far as I know. But that was not the flare exercise that, I mean, that was not the, the object. That was actually the flare exercise, you know. And the thing about parachute flares is the first one that comes out is the first one to go out. Right. So they drop and the lowest one is the one that has dropped the furthest, meaning was first out. So it goes out first, then this one, then this one. Well, those are parachute flares.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Because their lifetime is, you know, based on, you know, how Long they burn. The first one out is going to burn, you know, for say, 12 minutes or eight minutes, and then it goes out, but it's going to fall the furthest as well, and then the second one will be a little higher. And that's what we saw was sort of in a weird line, but the news grabbed onto that flare drop and said, this is the. This is the Phoenix Lights. But everybody's saying that's a flare drop. And they were right. And it was not. Unfortunately, it doesn't discount that the Phoenix Lights actually occurred. What it says is you accurately said that this is a flare drop, and it was. What you didn't say, though, was that people all across Arizona saw this boomerang of lights moving through the sky silently. And I'm sorry, but when you look at something like that and you get cases like that, people who don't even know each other reporting the same thing across a path that you can then extrapolate, that means something.

[A.J.]

You just said early in the break, that's how your analysts work. You separate them.

[Mark Dantonio]

I do. I do. I separate the analysts, and I have them do all the work separately. And then we combine our research at the end to come to a common consensus. Only after we. We've done all of our own diligence. I think that's the way to do it.

[A.J.]

I agree.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, so when you have all these separate people around Arizona reporting a certain thing kind of all the same way. All right, that means something.

[A.J.]

I agree. My gut tells me it's something, but my gut isn't good enough. I like to. I like data.

[Mark Dantonio]

Me, too. I'm a data guy. And sometimes the data doesn't tell us everything we need to know or everything. It doesn't tell us exactly what's happening. We don't know. No. So Phoenix Lights is a bit of a mystery. You know, we don't know what it is, but could we figure it out someday if it occurs again? Right. We can do it.

[A.J.]

Why are most UFOs round?

[Mark Dantonio]

You know the answer, but you're leading me on. I know you. Okay, so this is your.

[A.J.]

Your function, your theory, which I. Which I love.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's not my theory. It's actually a theory of a good friend of mine, Robert Schroed, who wrote a book called Solving the UFO Enigma. I think it's out of print. Okay. But he covers in there that if we consider advanced physics and string theory, that we'll be able to take advantage of multiple dimensions. You know, Avi Loeb even mentioned he thinks maybe they travel interdimensionally as well. I don't know if he mentioned it when he was with you.

[A.J.]

He did.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay, so the actual definition, I'm sure he couldn't talk about because we don't really have a full definition of how that would work. But we do have a concept, and the concept is absolutely thrilling. Okay. Because this is something that. Well, this is something that got me a real cowboy hat. Now, wait, what? Okay, I was presenting in Texas at a big conference, and I told people this, this process, I said, this is probably the only way it can actually work. And I explained how this interdimensional travel possibility can work. And we're going to get to that. And there's a guy in the front row, cowboy hat and boots. After the lecture, he walked up to me and he said, I got to tell you that everything you said, that just. That closed all the loops, man. That's exactly how they work. It's got to be, because everything you said is reflective of everything people have seen. He says, you know, I want you to have this. And he took his hat off his head and put it on mine. Like, that's your cowboy hat, man. You don't give up your boots, your horse, or your hat.

[A.J.]

That's right.

[Mark Dantonio]

He goes, well, this hat belongs to you, my friend.

[A.J.]

All right.

[Mark Dantonio]

I shook his hand and took it up. It's on in my office at home. That's a big deal. Sorry. So why was it so impressive? Why, why does it resonate? The reason it resonates is because it answers the age old question. If the universe is so big and so vast, how can they possibly be here?

[A.J.]

That's my hang up. Is the distance traveling?

[Mark Dantonio]

Not me. Not anymore. Ready?

[A.J.]

I'm ready.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay, so consider this. Everything we've ever done is in four dimensions. X, Y, Z. Moving through time times a dimension. Here's my hand over here on the left. At a certain XYZ coordinate at a particular point in time. One second later is at a new XYZ coordinate at a different time.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

To get here, I move through every point between that first point and this last point. Okay. So motion takes us through specific XYZ points all throughout time. Right. Voyager. 30 years to get out of our solar system, traveling linearly from Earth all the way out. And every point between here and Voyager was crossed by Voyager. Okay?

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

So wormholes, Einstein, rules and bridges. Yep. All in the four dimensions. They are not something outside of our, our time. And when we get into this, people say, well, what about time travel? It's all about time travel. No, it's not. No. It doesn't have to have time travel involved because I believe time is linear. I don't believe we can go back in time and get rid of Hitler.

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

I don't believe we can do that. Okay.

[A.J.]

Block universe theory. You don't subscribe to that?

[Mark Dantonio]

Not really. I mean, I think that. I think that one of my issues is that if we look at the way the universe is constructed, we're looking at it from the point of view of understanding four dimensions. No other dimensions. No other realities. No other possible. Nothing else possible. I had an occurrence in my shop that bordered on interdimensional possibly. Okay, what? Yeah, this is something where I was working on a prop for a movie Doug Trumbull and I were doing. And I was working on this prop. Really excited. It was 3:30 in the afternoon. Okay. In fact, I was trying to finish this thing up to show Doug because I was really excited about this thing. I plumbed it for liquid nitrogen. We're going to have liquid nitrogen spewing out of this thing. It was an EMP device. And so as I'm working on it, I see this semi transparent creature walk into my special effects shop. And I'm rubbing my eyes looking. What is that? You know, it looks sort of like water without the shine. Kind of a glowy. Not glowy, but sort of like undulating mass of something. And I'm taking off my glasses, I'm looking at it going, is that real? And I'm looking at it and thinking, that looks real. So I walk over to it and as it starts moving, it's making rhythmic motions like a dog looking itself.

[A.J.]

What?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, no kidding. It's weird. Okay, now you have to understand, this is on the heels of seeing people that weren't there in my house and also hearing voices of people talking that weren't there.

[A.J.]

Didn't you leave that house?

[Mark Dantonio]

This is my new house. Okay? So now the other problem I have is that about 35 years ago I had brain surgery. You know, I'm not an easy case, man. What can I tell you? They had to put one in. So what happened was they operated. And I thought maybe this was part of the latent injury manifesting 35 years later. 30 years later. Whatever did you say?

[A.J.]

Hey, Doug, do you see this?

[Mark Dantonio]

No, he wasn't in the shop. I was in my own shop.

[A.J.]

Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

Building it to bring up to Doug.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. Or else, Doug, what is this? I would absolutely said it, you know, so. So I had been previously seeing People that weren't there, thinking it was just. My brain is replaying images it saw in the past. I saw a lady in a dress, which scared me because I turned around brushing my teeth and there she was like, oh. And I dropped my toothbrush on the tile and that loud clack made her. She was gone. You know, I was like, what is that? Now, other people would say, you're seeing ghosts. Okay, maybe. Okay. But then I saw a guy walk by my door in a sport jacket. Now, I couldn't really see him. I saw the cut because it was sort of like a grayish, semi transparent thing walking by, but it walked like a person and it had squared off shoulders. It looked like a guy with a sport coat on. I'm like, man, I don't remember seeing that. I literally was saying, well, I don't remember seeing that in the past, but

[A.J.]

I must have same house with the woman.

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. And so then I would hear people talking and they're not saying, you know, go kill your family. Nothing stupid like that. What it was saying was, you're gonna go, yeah, I'll be there. I'm gonna go there. Who are you gonna go with? Yeah, I gotta be there. But you see, at 9 o', clock, I mean, just like random talk like you hear in a crowded room, right? You know, so much so that I went to the doctor and I had to start taking a drug to focus because I couldn't get focused because I kept hearing people talking everywhere around me. It got so bad that one time I was watching or working on my computer and my kids were banging around on the floor above, like, oh, what are they doing up there? Bang, bang. You know, I hear them yelling and I'm thinking, their mother's asleep. I run upstairs, empty, dark. I run upstairs, the second floor, sound asleep in their beds.

[A.J.]

So as a scientist, you know, this sounds like schizophrenia.

[Mark Dantonio]

It does, as a matter of fact. However, it wasn't. I wasn't becoming somebody different, right? I was just hearing things that weren't there. And so I actually wore a brain monitor. I went to a neurologist. I had them at the Air Neurological Institute put a brain monitor on me. I had a thing, the press. Whenever I saw and heard these things, I did okay? Now, this thing that happened, all right, is something that, you know, I'd see an object. I press the button. Okay? I see something, press a button. See something, press a button. They looked at the data. Yeah. Nothing there. Your brain looks perfectly fine. Okay, now cue the dog. The Dog walks in, curls up. It looks like a Pekingese, one of those little yap yap dogs, right? You have a yap yap dog. I'm sorry, but it comes in, it's curled up and it looks like it's licking itself right now, I'm a stable guy. I don't have weird crap going on like this. Okay, so what do you do? You know, where does science go in the pace of the unexplained? I keep saying that, it's like a mantra, but that's what I say. So this thing curls up on the floor and I walk over to it. What happened next changed everything because I stepped on it with my left foot and it felt me step on it and it got up and ran out of my shop, but took my foot with it. What? Yeah.

[A.J.]

How does that work?

[Mark Dantonio]

I don't know. But it felt. You know what it felt like? I can tell you what it felt like. If you wrap a bungee cord around the base of your ankle or base of your foot, okay. And you start to tension and you have someone run away with it, there's only so much ability for your leg to keep putting pressure, to keep you on the ground. Then it's gonna fly out from under you and go flying. You're fly up. That happened to me. My left leg flew out. I saw my left foot briefly in the sky. I felt this tremendous pain in my left knee as it hyper extended. Then I saw my right knee coming up with my right foot. And the next thing you know, I'm falling and I hit my right shoulder on my workbench, my left shoulder on the concrete floor and my head on the concrete floor.

[A.J.]

When was this mark?

[Mark Dantonio]

This was. Oh, gosh, in, in my visual effects shop. This was trying to remember when we did that movie.

[A.J.]

Maybe was trying to get a sense

[Mark Dantonio]

of what was going on. I'm thinking like maybe it was around 2000 and 2011, 2012, maybe, you know, I, you know, I had to think about that. You know, I don't remember directly. And then so now I'm on the floor hurting, and I get up, I'm, I'm, I'm in serious pain. My legs killing me, my head is bleeding over here, my shoulder, I can't even move my arm.

[A.J.]

But aren't you going, what the hell was that?

[Mark Dantonio]

I'm getting up going, wow, what the hell was. This is crazy. And I actually say the words, did you see that? And I'm like, what an idiot. There's nobody here. What am I saying? And I Was like blown away. Because now I'm thinking, well, this is one of two things. We hear of ghosts interacting with people and hurting them and whatever, but I don't believe they can actually hurt you. I think they can make you hurt yourself. Okay. Okay. But you're not going to make me hyperextend my knee. Okay. Or, and I coined a term for this, maybe it's a parallel universe intersection. Ah. And this is a parallel universe creature that just is pushing into our universe because of the concurrent or sorry, say, coincident spheres of universe poking and prodding. They're always moving. Maybe in these certain different ideas about parallel universes, maybe it's poking and prodding where you see a little piece come through.

[A.J.]

Philip K. Dick believe this.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. And if you're there, you see it.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

And then it goes away and it's gone. Right. And if your house is at a potential location where that kind of thing can happen, maybe you see more of those things than other people do. I don't know.

[A.J.]

So time travel. No. Multiverse. Yes. That's where you are.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Okay.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

And I think that's very possible. I mean, and I called it a parallel universe intersection, a pui you know, and I found a lot of other people using the term now, which is cool because I do think we need to research this.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

I'm not saying it's actual. I'm not saying it's real. I'm not saying that what happened to me isn't some strange confluence of crazy. I don't even see, I don't even know what the word to put for that.

[A.J.]

Until we know why the wave function collapses, I think everything's on the table. It's all there.

[Mark Dantonio]

And you're absolutely right. Until we know what's really going on in the quantum world, we're not going to find out what this stuff all means. So this also gave me another revelation, and that was maybe people that see ghosts and people that think there's parallel universes, maybe they work together, maybe they can, you know, two things can be right at once. And maybe there are ghosts and maybe there are multi dimensional beings seen across universes and maybe they just appear in our four dimensional universe in the same way. So maybe they both exist. So I can see Aunt Mabel. Okay. And it's really Aunt Mabel.

[A.J.]

It's really her.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, it could potentially be. And. But maybe I'm seeing a lady in a long dress where I don't even know who she is and she's a parallel universe interloper who's just as surprised to see me as I am to see her.

[A.J.]

Right. That's what's interesting is these, these worlds collide, but they're aware of each other. It's not like you're just observing.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, yeah, think about that. Stepping on this thing and having it yank my leg out from under me. That constitutes rudimentary communication across some gulf.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

And that's. What is that gulf? Parallel universe. I don't know. The ghostly realm, maybe. See, our terms are not. Our terms are not sufficient to describe what's actually happening here. So, and I've said this before, today's paranormal could be. Could be tomorrow's science. We don't know.

[A.J.]

We don't know.

[Mark Dantonio]

We don't know. But today's paranormal could be tomorrow's science. And maybe this is an example of that happening. I don't know. Think about that. Isn't that crazy? It is.

[A.J.]

I didn't expect this story.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, well, I'm, I'm not crazy. Okay. I know that I'm very, I'm very firmly grounded. Okay. But when things happen, I'm open minded enough to say we should explore this. And I think this is one of the things we should explore.

[A.J.]

So let's see if we can explain how that fifth dimension would work.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay, let's talk about in terms of propulsion. And when I say this, it's going to sound crazy until I explain. UFOs don't need engines, in my view. They don't need them. They just need the ability to translate from one dimension to another. How do they do that? Well, we have to go down to the fundamental forces to see that we have a strong force, a weak force, electromagnetism and gravity. Right, Right. And gravity's the weirdo.

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

Right.

[A.J.]

Physics physicists hate that one.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's right, they do. And the reason is because the other forces we can define as functions as a wave function we can just describe as with an equation or as a particle. They're duality. Right. Light is a photon. It's a wave. Okay. An electron is a wave. Okay. And it's a particle. Right. We can define it as a probability equation. Right?

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

Or as a particle that happens with all the quantum particles except gravity, which

[A.J.]

is 10 to the, what, 30 second power weaker than electromagnetism.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yes.

[A.J.]

And nobody knows why.

[Mark Dantonio]

And nobody knows why.

[A.J.]

The hierarchy problem.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's right. And so. Exactly. And why is it? Why is it. Yeah, exactly. Why is that even. Why is that hierarchy problem even there? We don't know. But we have a clue.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

We have a clue. And that clue is because you're not seeing all of it. Okay, why is it, why is it we're not seeing all of it? Because we're in four dimensions? What if there's more? What if there's another dimension? What if there's a fifth dimension? Well, how do we even. What's that mean? What does a fifth dimension mean? Okay, well, we have to change our physics to understand that. Because as I said before, everything we ever done is in four dimensions. We've gone in four dimensions to go everywhere we've ever done. Everything is four dimensions. As such, we only know 4% of the universe. The rest is dark matter, dark energy, whatever that means. Whatever that means. Dark means we don't know, doesn't mean black. Okay, so dark matter, dark energy, who knows? But I'll tell you this, if we talk about the four dimensions, okay, and a fifth dimension, we want to talk about it in terms that give us some kind of grab hold in into the other dimensions. So we have a new construct. And that construct partly is string theory. String theory is not proven. We don't know that it's real.

[A.J.]

Right?

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay, we have no idea. But if we can employ, let's hypothesize for a bit. If we can have a fourth dimensional space with a fifth dimensional space too, that actually corresponds to one particular variant of string theory called Randall Sundrum 1rs1 okay, well, Randall Syndrome 1 states that there's four dimensions and a fifth dimension. If we can access that fifth dimension, there's something that's a quality of that fifth dimension that I use my thumb for, which is very, really, really, really strange. The farther in you go into that fifth dimension. It's exponential.

[A.J.]

It's exponential.

[Mark Dantonio]

The farther you go in, the smaller the universe gets around you. So imagine this. You travel 12 inches out, here you go 12 measured inches on the ruler, go into the fifth dimension some distance, you travel that same 12 inches from your personal measurement on your ship, you're actually traveling a much bigger distance because when you come out, that expands to the size that you actually went. Right? Okay, so that means you could be at the moon. But wait, don't you travel all the distance from here to the moon? Took us like two and a half days to get there. All right, well no, because you're utilizing this other dimension. So what happens is you translate to the fifth dimension from this exit point in your four dimensional space, let's say Earth orbit, you go into the fifth dimension and you translate to a new four dimensional Point over at the moon.

[A.J.]

And you can do that because the space is, I think Klein called it compactified exponentially.

[Mark Dantonio]

So you.

[A.J.]

So you're really just hopping out and back in.

[Mark Dantonio]

You're punching out and punching in, right? That's right. Now think about that. Okay. It makes no sense.

[A.J.]

Before you go on with that.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. If.

[A.J.]

If Rs1, and for people listening, this is a published paper from, from, I think, the late 90s. If gravity originates deep within the bulk and it's compactified exponentially, then that would unify the theory, because gravity would just be leaking back to our dimension and it's exhausted by the time it reaches and hierarchy is solved.

[Mark Dantonio]

You don't need me. You got it.

[A.J.]

Well, so that's how that works. Now, how do we travel in that? Okay, well, that's because that happens at the subatomic level. How do you blow that up?

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, see, that's the problem. We don't actually know how to access it that way, Mark. We don't. We don't know. No one does. Okay. But we actually have. Okay, here is the nature of this. This process. Back in the 20s, Kaluza incline, right. Theorized that there were Kalooza Klein particles, okay. And they theorized that these particles could potentially have uses and characteristics that might be advantageous to us. Right. But back then, they didn't know anything. Right. Well, go to CERN now. And there's a detector on that Large Hadron Collider that was built some years back called Atlas. Atlas. Very different from 3i Atlas. Okay. That's a different detector. What's it do? Well, in part, it was built to do what? Detect Kaluza Klein particles. Why? They're only theoretical because if we can detect them, these are particles that are very, very interesting.

[A.J.]

Why is that?

[Mark Dantonio]

Because they allow us to take gravity and actually quantify it in a way that will allow us to actually utilize it.

[A.J.]

Is this the elusive graviton?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yes. This takes us. You knew that. I know you knew that.

[A.J.]

And Einstein read this paper. I think the first paper from Kaluza held it for two years. He couldn't. He couldn't break it. He couldn't break the math.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Because it actually made sense.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. It's difficult when you're looking at things that don't make sense when you think they. Or that do make sense when you think they shouldn't. Right. And then you're gonna sit on it like he did. You sat on it for a long time. Right. But the point being, let's. Let's. Let's let's draw a picture. Okay? You have a ufo. You asked me why they're circular. I never answered that question purposely, because I want to get to this to answer that, okay. When you talk about how we generate those particles, we're trying to generate them by speeding protons into a circular channel and curving them with magnetic fields.

[A.J.]

Right? Okay.

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, when you take a charged particle like a proton, a plus one charge, okay. Made of three quarks, okay. When we do that, we put them into a ring like that to make them go in a circle. We have to use the magnetic field in containment. Every time you do that, protons want to go in a straight direction. So when you curve them, they generate another form of radiation which you probably know. It's called synchrotron radiation. Yes. That's very dangerous. We don't want that. Okay. That's why certain launch had run colliders hundreds of feet on the ground, blah, blah, blah, okay? The ground protects. So the problem is that that is the way that we're generating particles to look at. And we're doing it crude, it's rudimentary. We don't have an efficient way to generate particles. We just look at how they splash together at the end of the channel, right? And we based look at the base on the basis of that beautiful collision. We can follow the trails and build digital paths that they take and say, oh, look, that's a quark. You know, this one has charm, okay. I mean, and figure stuff out that way. But we're also doing that to try and find collusic line particles. Notice I didn't see gravitons yet, okay? Because the elusive graviton would basically theoretically come from the fact that all the quantum particles are dual. They're dual. We have a wave and we have a particle nature. So we now know that gravity has waves. Where's the particle?

[A.J.]

Right?

[Mark Dantonio]

It's got to exist. We just can't see.

[A.J.]

Can't see it.

[Mark Dantonio]

And the reason we can't, it's not in our four dimensions. It's originating outside in the fifth dimension. Ah, so this means that when we. When we are subject to gravity, we can measure it, we can calculate its effects. We can send. We can send probes outside our solar system on exacting paths using gravity and propulsion. But we aren't actually controlling gravity.

[A.J.]

We're subject to it because RS1 has three provable experiments that should prove that those gravitons are there. And we can't find. None of them work. It's null. It's three or over three.

[Mark Dantonio]

Our technology is, is not to the point where we can possibly do it. I would like to get more information and like to see that we can prove. We have to prove string theory. We have to actually be able to live within Rs1 for some period of time to be able to do this. Yeah, I don't think we're there yet, but I do think that this is the way they operate. And let me paint another picture when we talk about the Large Hadron Collider. It's a big ring, right? And we're primitive. We have a 22 mile ring that we're trying to make these particles collide. And takes us that much time, you know, in size to actually speed these things up to near light speed to collide, et cetera, et cetera. Alien creatures probably being say a thousand years ahead of us would have figured out how to shrink their, their accelerators to generate particles that they could then use for their purposes. All right, so when you talk about UFOs being round, I think they're round. Especially the 30 foot sport model, as Lazar calls it, right? The coop, whatever that is. Okay. The 30, the 30 foot diameter size, I think that they're around like that because the outer ring is an accelerator. These are particle accelerators and they're generating particles that surround the craft and close the loop with gravity. They generate these fifth dimensional particles from their accelerators. And because they have generated these particles, they're pulled into the fifth dimension because that's where they're going. I'll call it this way, going home to. Okay? And they pull every craft in, they pull anything within them into this fifth dimension. Now that's very dangerous, especially in a compressed universe. If anything goes wrong in there, they're toast.

[A.J.]

Right?

[Mark Dantonio]

Figuratively and accurately. Okay. However, if they can pull it off, if they can get in there and they can go in a certain distance, all right, and what they do is they now can punch in at a new point from within there. But based on how far in they go, that point they go to will be expanded to a much bigger distance. So theoretically, you can go from here to Alpha Centauri. And a Stanford physicist figured this out. Last I checked, he calculated that using Kaluza Kline gravitons, if they exist, they're about 10 to the 16 times stronger than the gravitons holding us to our chairs today.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. He said if we can do that and use these particles like that, we can actually get to Alpha Centauri in about 20 minutes. Using this technology, which is what, four light years?

[A.J.]

Four and change.

[Mark Dantonio]

4.3. Wow.

[A.J.]

And 20 minutes.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. And we're not, we're not, we're not traveling four light years. We're not violating the speed of light because we're not using it.

[A.J.]

You just hop into the fifth dimension

[Mark Dantonio]

and pop in, right? It's probably going to be like this, you know, like, like zigzagging through space between here and Alpha Centauri.

[A.J.]

Why would you bounce in and out?

[Mark Dantonio]

Because we can't probably go the whole way. We probably can't generate the energy to so far in that we can make the massive jump. We can't. And maybe when we get the technology, we're going to take a bottle sized spacecraft and send it to the moon in, in two and a half seconds. Whoa, look what we did. And then bring it back. Okay? So, but the fact is if we can't, if we do that, we're going to probably oscillate in and out, okay? And this is key because if you oscillate in and out from the fifth dimension to our four dimensions, if you do it fast enough. Well, now it's like a frequency, right? And if you can do it fast enough, you're not here, you're not there. You're sort of in between, kind of in that little in between path at all times. So guess what? You can be in the deep ocean for as long as you want and not feel any force of pressure. No problem. You can live down there. You can hide from us. You can actually have your UFO sitting on the bottom. You can have your ship on the bottom and just sit there.

[A.J.]

How does that accelerator protect the occupants?

[Mark Dantonio]

Ah, well, see, that's the thing, the accelerator, okay, the central core, all right, is going to be subject to synchrotron radiation as well. Probably very intense, but not as much as the outside.

[A.J.]

No.

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, it could. It's radial in all directions. But the fact being in the interior, you can shield that. We can shield the craft to prevent that.

[A.J.]

But that's a, that's a Taurus. How do you, how do you protect above and below the plane of the accelerator? You don't, you don't, you don't have to.

[Mark Dantonio]

You don't have to because the occupants are inside in the middle and they're protected, okay? They have shielding. So that stuff is going to surround the whole ship.

[A.J.]

Metamaterial would be useful there.

[Mark Dantonio]

No kidding, right? Maybe, maybe there's another wrinkle I haven't talked about. That's micro black holes.

[A.J.]

There's a few wrinkles here, but there's a few. But I, but I love it.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, there's so many wrinkles that it's like, is it even worth talking about? But yes, it is.

[A.J.]

Yes, it is.

[Mark Dantonio]

Because I believe that this is the way that it may actually work.

[A.J.]

I think you, I think you're right.

[Mark Dantonio]

I think so. And I think Bob Schroeder was right too, when he wrote that book.

[A.J.]

So. Micro black holes.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, the micro black holes, okay, here's what they do. Okay, with, with, with a tiny particle, all right, that's 10 to the 16 times more powerful than the gravitons holding us down. It's going to generate a certain percentage of micro black holes. Theoretical construct. We don't see them all the time. Right, Obviously. So if you do that, what are they going to do? They only live a few nanoseconds, a few billionths of a second. But if you keep a flow around your ship at all times, you have a certain net number. If you're seeing a ship using them, what are you going to see? You're going to see the ship shimmer, right? You see it change color, wobble. You might see it wobble, you might see it vanish. And what's it going to eat? It's going to eat some atmosphere, it's going to eat some light, and it's going to eat the gravitons coming from the Earth.

[A.J.]

That's right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And it's going to prevent the Earth's gravity from reaching it. It's not anti gravity. It's preventative. It's preventing the Earth gravitons from getting to it.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

As a shield. Okay, so that's not anti gravity per se. That's actually just gravity avoidance. It's avoiding gravity. Very cleverly.

[A.J.]

Do those singularities affect gravitons out of the bulk, out of the extra dimension?

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, well, would you? Okay, let's. That's a very good point. Okay, when you talk about those, those little micro black holes outside the bulk, they're affecting our Earth gravitons because they're actually consuming them. Right. In the way that we don't even understand.

[A.J.]

Right. Because graviton that emanates from mass.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's right. Okay, so go to the Higgs boson to talk about, you know, why we have mass or particles. That's another show. Okay, but think about this, okay? If we have, for instance, if we have a bunch of these particles surrounding our ship and we have a net number of micro black holes, it's going to eat, like I said, air, light, all that, and give you visual effects that we see in the literature. Okay. Of all the UFOs, we see this stuff happening. Is it possible it's clues, A Klein gravitons in play? Maybe. Is it possible that it's just a distant star shimmering on the horizon? We know it has been. Yes, that's all true. So differentiating between all of this is the tough part within our physics. So if we now see that we eat some of the Earth gravitons, that explains why these things look like falling leaves sometimes to people.

[A.J.]

Sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

And just drifting because the occupants don't have an up or down. In fact, when they disappear from one spot, sometimes they'll vanish out right in front of you and reappear over there. I'm an astronomer. We can say that's the autokinetic effect. Your eyes unable to track things.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

All right. So you, you look where you think you were looking. Isn't so your eyes, your eyes always dancing around. An evolutionary trait of our eyes. Okay. So you're never gonna be able to see a point light in the sky and try and follow it around. It's not gonna work. Okay. Unless it's constant. If it disappears, you'll lose it and it might look like it's appearing somewhere else, not very far away. I've done that before and showed people that they're actually looking at a tumbling satellite making a perfectly straight line. Dash of light, no light, dash of light, no light. They say it's here. Now it's there. Now it's there. Wow. It's a UFO blinking at us. I was taking a picture, guys. It's a tumbling satellite. And there's the proof. So it points out the. The foibles of the human eye.

[A.J.]

Sure.

[Mark Dantonio]

So now take that. Okay. And let's go a step further. So now if your, your Clusa Kline gravitons are eating a little light, a little air, whatever, then they're going to disappear and they're going to get replaced with more. Right. Micro black holes, they eat a little bit of our gravity. Right. The gravitational particles that we haven't found yet. And now the ship is not subject to Earth gravity. Right. If they choose to go from one XYZ coordinate in that point in time to another. Well, then to your eye and right in front of you. If it was this mug, it would literally disappear right out of my hands. And it physically not be there.

[A.J.]

Whoa.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's gone. And then suddenly could appear like here, and it would really have done that. Because when it goes to the fifth dimension, it's really not here anymore.

[A.J.]

It's really not.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. So as long as they can keep those particles flowing, then they can actually do this process and continue to do it. So the question is. But Mark, what about the energy requirements? Oh, yeah.

[A.J.]

And the Hawking radiation as well.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Hawking radiation is very important. Right. What do they do about it? Why don't we see that? Well, Doug and I were actually for. We were using this technique to try to decide if we're actually seeing UFOs or not. We wanted to create Hawking radiation detectors. Very expensive. Okay. And very, very out of reach right now. Well, yeah, yeah. Okay.

[A.J.]

This is when a black hole evaporates. That's when we get the. Yeah, right.

[Mark Dantonio]

And we would not be able to capture that. No, not with our conventional no systems. So we opted for gamma rays. Okay, interesting. And if we see a thing vanish in the sky and we get a burst of gamma rays, well, that might actually indicate that. Because that's going to be another incidental. That might indicate that we're looking at Kaluza Kline gravitons in play. Right. And we have a gamma ray detector on the system. We had one, it was about that big. It was a little horn. And we thought, that's cool. But I want to micro miniaturize it. That's what I told Doug. I want to miniaturize this and put them each on a single platter. Each platter has one, you know, and he's like, you know, you're gonna have like a million dollar platters out there. You know, I don't know if we want to put that kind of stuff out in the middle of desert, you know, I said, well, if we can get funding for doing this, we probably could. And we could gate it off. We could, you know, make sure that they're camouflaged. Right. The cameras need to be able to see, but it could look like it's a boulder. And when no one. I could look for visual effects. Guys. We can make that happen, Right. We can make a camera that can see and smell and taste and we can do all that.

[A.J.]

It's only the most important invention ever.

[Mark Dantonio]

Only ever, right? Yeah. So the point being, okay, if you look at the fact that UFOs then are accelerators, they figured out how to miniaturize. They figured out how to make circular pathways and waveguides that are really small. However, they don't shield the outside, as you've said. And what do we have in history people touch UFOs, what do they get?

[A.J.]

Radiation burn.

[Mark Dantonio]

And burned. What do you think those burns are from?

[A.J.]

Synchrotron radiation.

[Mark Dantonio]

There you go.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

See, now you're picking it up and you're putting it together too. Yeah, this is where we're going. So it's like it seems to all match.

[A.J.]

It does.

[Mark Dantonio]

That's why I got a cowboy hat

[A.J.]

that you deserve that cowboy hat, you know?

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, well, I should have given it to Bob Schroeder, you know, but that was his initial thought process. And I'm really very comfortable with this thought process because I think that looking at the universe as vast as it is, how do we shortcut? I mean, if we travel at light speed, it takes us over four years to get to the nearest star other than our own. Okay. It takes months to get to our own, you know.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

So how do we do that? You know, we have to do it by literally avoiding the speed limit of the universe, which is light speed. And to do that, we need to actually get out of the four dimensions.

[A.J.]

Fortunately, people are experimenting right now to try to solve that. Not for UFOs, although they should keep that in mind, but just to solve the hierarchy problem.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. And everything, I mean, the disparity in the forces, I mean, it's just incredible.

[A.J.]

And everything falls right into place.

[Mark Dantonio]

But again, once we can, once we realize where gravity really comes from, we're probably going to find that the hierarchy problem isn't as bad as we thought.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Because gravity is only partially visible here, we're not seeing the whole thing.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

So if we see the whole thing, well, it might fall right into line and guess what? Unification.

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

Right. We can do that. But it's going to take some time. Going to take some time speculate on

[A.J.]

how navigation would work in the bulk.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's just speculation, but I mean, what would we do? I mean, see, in the bulk, now you're in a compressed universe, right? So whatever distance you travel in the bulk, it's literally going to be a translation to another coordinate from within the bulk, too. Speculating, not actuating. I don't know. Okay, but if you travel a certain distance, you don't have to go far.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

To extend that to a massive amount when you come out, you know, literally, depending how far you can go in. Okay, let's, let's talk about UFOs acting in the atmosphere. People say it's going across the sky at unbelievable speeds.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's, it's making 90 degree turns in the sky. You know, how can it Possibly do that. No creatures could survive that. And they're right. Not even them. They're not making 90 degree turns at high speed. This is a punch in coordinate. All that's changing for them. It feels like we feel right in here now in this incredible studio. Okay, nothing's moving. All that's changing is the scene outside the window.

[A.J.]

They could just be navigating like, hey, Bruce, make a right. We're a little bit off.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, make a left. Or these coordinates.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

I think they're the greatest cartographers in the universe, to be honest.

[A.J.]

Well, they have to be. If you're not.

[Mark Dantonio]

They got to know, Whoops, sorry, Torque, you got us in a star here. I said get out as soon as I can, you know, So, I mean, it's really crazy. So they have to be good cartographers too, but. Yeah, and so the bottom line is, if they're going to be able to go point to point like that, all the changes, like I said, is their view out the window. They go from this point to that point without traveling the distance. Okay, but what do our linear devices capture? Something going from here to here. And if, even if it went dink, dink, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, in a very high speed, to our cameras, to our sensors, it looks

[A.J.]

like it's going boom, right?

[Mark Dantonio]

So we translate it to a high speed. It's not high speed. It's zero speed.

[A.J.]

Zero speed.

[Mark Dantonio]

How about that?

[A.J.]

I love it.

[Mark Dantonio]

And that's why UFOs don't need engines. They're just translating from one XYZ coordinate to another. By doing this transfer into the bulk. All they need is the power generation. And by the way, we keep mentioning power generation, where does that come from? What could do it? What could possibly create the power needed to do that? Bet you have an idea. I'll tell you, huh?

[A.J.]

I might go ahead.

[Mark Dantonio]

I bet you do. Okay, here's what I think. Right now we deal with vision, nuclear science, Right? Yep. We've discovered that if you have exposed fuel rods next to other exposed fuel rods, they generate, you know, these errant particles that come off and heat up the fluid they're in. And basically a nuclear reactor just makes steam. That's all it's for. Yep. Okay, now, but that's dangerous. And if the water goes away, those fuel rods begin to melt, there's nothing cooling them. Right. Witnessed Chernobyl, witness with that graphite reactor, blew the stack, poisoned all of Europe. You know, essentially, there was fallout through all of Europe detected. Okay, And I'll tell You a story about how that was stopped too, if you want, after. But so then with fission power, I liken it to being in a deep valley, like a V, like this. Fission is at the bottom. To make it stop, you got to push the reaction out of that deep valley to get it back to the top. The pushing out is the control rods going down to shut down the reactor, right? That takes energy, and you have to be able to do it. Now, the Russians have a submarine that, that had a kind of a runaway, and they couldn't put the control rods down in, and it ran away. Sailors died. Submarines sunk. Some sailors were rescued. Some died, okay, because of fission reaction gone awry. So they couldn't climb the wall of that, that canyon to get out to safety, okay? That's fission. Now all they have to do is bring my fingers together and go the other way. Now, you have a point. That's where fusion lives. A fusion reaction is very temperamental. And with. Unlike fission, if fission goes out of whack, you melt down, you blow up, you do a Fukushima, you get a hydrogen explosion in your, in your building because you're, you're, you're. You're spent fuel rod pools dry, okay? You get that. However, in case of fission, here's where you are. You're at the top of that, top of that little peak, and you balance that reaction. If it goes out of, out of balance just a little bit, it shuts off. No nuclear bombardment of anything. No ionizing radiation, no Cherenkov radiation, no dangerous results. In fact, one of the fuels for a fusion reactor is tritium. And tritium is harmless to us in a sense. You could rub it on your skin. Ah, look at me. It's like talcum powder. Rub it on your skin. Okay. It doesn't penetrate your skin. Worse. It's not better. It's not even cumulative. So you will. You'll get rid of it. You'll excrete it out.

[A.J.]

But, Mark, they say there's no sustained fusion reaction.

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, they say that, except that Lawrence Livermore lab in San Francisco is making great strides, aren't they?

[A.J.]

They certainly are.

[Mark Dantonio]

They have. That's right. And I knew one of the Lawrence Livermore lab scientists, a good friend of mine. In fact, one of our observatories is on his land in Arizona. Okay? Top nuclear scientists for, for Lawrence Livermore. And so that, that particular, that particular conundrum saying that we don't have fusion. Well, we don't, however. And they always say it's just 10 years away. Right, right. 10 more years. 10 more years. Get your stuff together. Right. Well, anyway, they always say 10 more years. But fusion has come a long way. One of the problems with fusion is sustaining it. Right. Because we look at the sun, we say, well, the sun has a temperature of over 15 million Celsius in the middle, and that's fusing hydrogen into helium. Okay. It's a process called a proton proton reaction. You know, there's deuterium in there and all that stuff. Okay. But eventually you get this helium isotope. Okay, fine, great. Energy is released. Yep, that's what we want. Okay. But we want more energy coming out than we're putting in. Okay. And that's the problem. Okay. So that said, the idea now is, well, we can fuse a fuel pellet and have fusion occur for a split second. Yay. That's a huge. Actually, that's big. Yeah, we did that several years ago. Now they've achieved something else. They actually achieved a sustained reaction. They were able to do more of a fusion reaction than before. And because they're using magnetic containment and so forth, they're actually able to isolate the particles, isolate the heat. And now there's another fusion process that's making its way onto the stage. And that is a fusion process that uses laser bombardment. Okay. That doesn't require the containment like the other. Now, I don't know enough about that yet, but it's very exciting. It's not the cold fusion thing that people were talking about, which of course was debunked fairly. Yep.

[A.J.]

Okay, now I know what you mean. It's, it's been used in sci fi, is using lasers.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. So this, this multiple laser bombardment technique is something that I'm very fascinated by. So I'm going to be following up on that. So next time we'll talk about that. Right. Kind of a thing.

[A.J.]

I look forward to it.

[Mark Dantonio]

Right. So think about it. I mean, if you think about it, that means that fusion reactors are coming. All right, well, guess what? CERN is looking for these KK particles. Lawrence Livermore is working on a fusion reactor. How do you generate KK particles efficiently with a fusion reactor? Marry the two together and now you might generate maybe a little bottle sized probe to go interstellar, you know, and then we'll have, you know, the first aliens coming here saying, hey, hey, no more warp drive. You guys cut that crap out now. We're not ready for you and you're not ready for us. You know, I don't know, it's a joke, obviously, but we're entering that, that whole that whole. Was it Zephyram Cochrane.

[A.J.]

That's right. The first warp drive.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, yeah, we're entering that first. In that first thing. But it's interesting how science fiction leads to science fact.

[A.J.]

It really does.

[Mark Dantonio]

It always does. And in fact, that's kind of weird. And it comes from, I think, a biological evolution. Right. We can't think of anything with our brains that is actually patently impossible to actually do. Our brains don't allow us to do that. Our brains are made from the material universe. We have the knowledge of the universe kind of within us. Right. I mean, based on our, the arc, the archetypal brain. Okay. We know how it's made essentially. We know the organics. Okay. Yeah, yeah. There's microtubules. Yeah. There's a whole zero, you know, I know about zero point energy. All the. No, not even have to go there. I'm talking about just the fact that when you start to think of something fantastical. All right, Is it really impossible to make, you know? Well, we can think of impossible things. I'm going to invent something to make my elbow touch my nose, you know. Well, we know that's, that's an anatomical limitation. Right, Right. But, and we, but we know it's not possible, but we'll say I want to make something like that. But you can't. And we know that. So we know it's not possible. But still we can, we can muse about it, but we can't actually think of a development that is patently impossible to actually do in the, within the laws of physics. Right. Because physics, everything we're seeing now, and I'm sure people are thinking, oh, I got a few, okay. And maybe they do. Okay. But the fact is it's all in your perspective of looking at the laws of physics, the laws at the quantum levels, the laws of the universe. Okay. People have to keep in mind the periodic table is the same here as it is a billion light years away.

[A.J.]

That's right.

[Mark Dantonio]

The elements are the same a billion light years away as they are here. Right. Hydrogen is the most populous. Helium's next. Oxygen is the third most populous element in the whole universe. And then there's carbon. So carbon and oxygen have a love affair.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

They've had it for a long time. And so we're going to get carbon based life. It's going to make discoveries. It's going to probably have intelligence, as we've talked about earlier today.

[A.J.]

Well, let's bring it home by reconnecting to. We were talking about sci fi movies, preparing us for disclosure. Oh, yeah, let's end with that. What's. What's going on?

[Mark Dantonio]

Well, you remember the movie Prometheus?

[A.J.]

Yes, yes, I do.

[Mark Dantonio]

The engineers. The engineers. We're going to wipe you guys out because you were a failed experiment. Right. And we took issue with that. We did. Yeah. We rose up. They had, they had, they had a

[A.J.]

couple of good points, but I get your meaning.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, but, but the message there is humans are a bad invention and you've got to keep your heads down just in case life is seated here. We want to be careful not to get our way out there and start announcing ourselves before our time. Yeah, that's dark.

[A.J.]

I'm more of a dark forest guy. You know, I'm a keep your head down. Kind of like Stephen Hawking, maybe. Keep quiet. Too late. Too late.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know why?

[A.J.]

I do. Go ahead, go ahead.

[Mark Dantonio]

Two and a half billion years ago.

[A.J.]

Yep.

[Mark Dantonio]

Okay. Oxygen built up in our atmosphere.

[A.J.]

I knew you were gonna say that. The blue freaking marble.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, it's a better than that. It's the blazing blue beacon.

[A.J.]

Yeah.

[Mark Dantonio]

In the universe. And you know what? We're how far along in human race? A few hundred thousand, maybe years Overall. Okay. And 4.2 million years away from Lucy, you know, Australopithecus afarensis. Right. Okay. Well, the bottom line is that in that time we're looking for life elsewhere. And what are we doing? We're looking for oxygen in a planet's atmosphere. So it stands to reason that another civilization is going to do the same. I believe that fully. Okay. And I believe that it just takes about 500 years, 300 years, 500 years ahead of us to do it more efficiently than we're doing by far. So for 2 billion years, roughly, we've been announcing there's oxygen in the atmosphere. This little blue, blue beacon. And TESS looks for a swath of planets with transits, and there's no reason to expect it. A TESS type telescope created by an alien race is going to look for an oxygen signature.

[A.J.]

So we could have been visited for thousands of years, then millions, by many

[Mark Dantonio]

different types of aliens. If that's true, and I do believe

[A.J.]

that's possible, and if they wanted us gone, they could do that.

[Mark Dantonio]

Correct. But here's the thing. If you're a civilization that creates technology to travel and ply the gulf between the stars, are you actually going to go to destroy them and conquer them and do an independence day?

[A.J.]

I don't think so.

[Mark Dantonio]

No. You're not coming to do an alien thing like eat the brains either. You're not gonna do that. Okay.

[A.J.]

You think you'd stick your finger in and say, stop messing with the nuclear weapons? You might do that.

[Mark Dantonio]

You might do that. You know, if they had an interest in us, right?

[A.J.]

Or just an interest in resources or,

[Mark Dantonio]

hey, Tord, let's see what they do with the nukes. Okay? You sure we want to let them? Yeah, why not? What could go wrong?

[A.J.]

I hope they're paying attention right now, what's going on?

[Mark Dantonio]

I know, right? But think about that. Isn't that crazy? So the. The bottom line is then that, you know, whereas Hollywood influences what people think, I have a feeling when actual disclosure occurs, people are going to go, that's it? Yep, that's it. Where's the fireballs? Where is the explosion? Where's Will Smith? Where's all. Where's this? Come on, where is it? Welcome to Earth. But where's all that? You know, it's probably not going to happen.

[A.J.]

When do you think. When do you think disclosure day is? Government knows. I don't think that's.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, well, we know that the Navy sees these things, and here's. Here's what the rule is. I found this out, actually, from, you know, the guys we talked to in the Navy. Their operative mission is to observe and report. Do not engage. That's what they do.

[A.J.]

But we want more than. Hey, there's stuff out there that we don't know what it is. We want to know. There's 15 races here. Here's what they look like. The Nordics, the Reptilians, the Grays. We want to know that.

[Mark Dantonio]

Like, people of Earth. Yes, right. We had. Jeff. We had.

[A.J.]

That's right.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. Jeff the Gray. Hey, you know, and he's always getting messed up, right?

[A.J.]

Are they going to tell us that? Are they going to bring out the chart?

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, I don't. I don't think that there is anyone that knows what the chart looks like.

[A.J.]

Oh, no, no. Majestic 12.

[Mark Dantonio]

No.

[A.J.]

Council of nine.

[Mark Dantonio]

I don't know that that was real or false. I can't say. But I'm not gonna, you know, throw water on it and put it in the. You know, put shade on it, because I don't know. Okay. Is it possible? Maybe, you know, maybe. You know, I've read all the books. You know, I love Corso's book, You know, the Day After Roswell. That was fantastic. Talking about seeding technology to societies little by little, or companies. It's great.

[A.J.]

I debunked most of it, but it's a great book.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. You know, the. The. The nut file he had in his, you know, file cabinet and all that stuff? Yeah. Is that possible? Well, it's possible, but do I fully believe it? Well, you know, come on. You know, we're fully capable of creating Kevlar.

[A.J.]

Yes.

[Mark Dantonio]

The transistor didn't just, you know, didn't just appear overnight, actually. It was a combination of a lot of work in the past with looking at, you know, and. Or NAND Gates, you know, and putting together computer, you know, decision making.

[A.J.]

Right. So you're going after the reverse engineering argument. Fiber optics, lasers, all of that.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah, I mean, that. That stuff. I mean, there's no reason we couldn't have created that.

[A.J.]

Right.

[Mark Dantonio]

You know, because we thought of it and we're trying to put it into practice. We are very, very. I don't know what the word is. Creative people. Right. We are. You know, Shannon would say we are creative. Right.

[A.J.]

I'll keep rooting for the. For the graviton. That's what I'm hoping for.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. I think that's pretty cool. I think that that's probably one of the only ways they can actually travel long distances. And it really ties it up in a knot.

[A.J.]

It makes it so elegant, and it makes it.

[Mark Dantonio]

It removes the biggest impediment to visitation that exists in the universe right now. And when I came to that realization, it was like half my head went. I was like, wow.

[A.J.]

I did the same. When I read your theory, I said, by George, I think he's done it.

[Mark Dantonio]

Yeah. And again, I stood on the shoulders of giants. So I'm. You know, I can't take all the credit, but I can tell you I can be the mouthpiece.

[A.J.]

I. Mark Dantonio, where can we find you?

[Mark Dantonio]

Online?

[A.J.]

What can we do to support you?

[Mark Dantonio]

Oh, man. Well, we got a beautiful Patreon. I only have a few Patreon subscribers for our observatories, but would love more. Go to skytirlive.org we are a nonprofit organization. I take no money. I do this out of passion and love for astronomy. And I teach people astronomy. I've taught classes in Bangkok from my house in Terryville, Connecticut. Okay. On astronomy, showing them the live night sky. So we pride ourselves on showing the universe live in real time. You know, AJ and it's one of those things where once you get going, they have this nickname for me. It's Mark. Just one more Dantonio, because I will find. I'll look at this last object. Okay.

[A.J.]

Right. You're doing an encore right now.

[Mark Dantonio]

It's two in the morning and I gotta go to bed. Okay, but wait, just one more. We're so close. Let's do this. And I show them one more encore. People like that. But then all the photos we take are available for free. They can download and see these beautiful, spectacular objects in a way that they've just never seen because they live. People live in light pollution all time. You know, they don't. They can't see what's above their heads because they're not allowed to. The lights ruin their night view.

[A.J.]

Well, I'd love to have you back to go through those images. Also to go through some UFO photos and do some of that.

[Mark Dantonio]

But I like that stuff.

[A.J.]

This has been a joy and a pleasure and a treat. Thank you.

[Mark Dantonio]

Thank you so much, A.J. i've had a great time.

[A.J.]

Bye, everybody. So that's Mark d' Antonio and I went down the rabbit hole after we talked so we can walk through some of this. Mark's credentials check out. He's MUFON's chief photo and video analyst. His astronomy degree is real. His company, VFX Models, does work for Hollywood and the defense sector. He runs two remote observatories in Arizona and live streams the night sky through a non profit called Sky Tour Live. That's all on the record and you should definitely check out his live stream. The Gentry Lee story confirmed. Gentry Lee is the chief engineer for the Solar System Exploration Directorate at jpl. He directed science analysis for Viking missions to Mars. He co created Cosmos with Carl Sagan. Mark says this guy wrote him back as a nine year old. Lee is not documented as exactly the kind of guy who would do that. Douglas Trumbull was very real, obviously. He passed away in February 2022 at 79. That was a great loss. He did the effects for 2001. Close Encounters, Blade Runner, Star Trek, I mean, everything. Mark says that they worked together for a decade building a UFO detection system. That collaboration is documented in multiple interviews. Now the physics stuff, which is my favorite. Mark brought up the Randall Sundrum Model RS1. Now that's a real paper from 1999, published by Lisa Randall and Raman Sundrum in Physical Review Letters. It proposes a fifth dimension that could explain the hierarchy problem. Why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces. The idea is that gravity originates in an extra dimension and only leaks into ours. That's why it feels weak. CERS at ATLAS Detector is actually searching for the signs of these extra dimensions right now, including Kaluza Klein graviton signatures. But so far they haven't found anything, but the search is still ongoing. The book Mark referenced is Robert Schroeder's solving UFO enigma. And Schroeder proposes that UFOs are miniaturized particle accelerators generating collusicline gravitons to punch in and out of a fifth dimension. Now, it's speculative, but the underlying physics is Rs1 collusive Klein theory. That's all peer reviewed and taken seriously. And it would explain why UFOs are round, why they shimmer, and why witnesses get radiation burns, and why they seem to appear and vanish rather than fly. The fusion stuff tracks too. Lawrence Livermore's National Ignition Facility achieved fusion ignition on December 5, 2022. They put in about two megajoules and got three megajoules back. The first time in history more energy came out than went in. And by July 2023, they repeated it and got almost four megajoules out. Fusion is no longer always 10 years away. It happens. But here's what we have to keep in mind. Mark isn't asking anyone to believe in aliens, little green men, grays, or any of that. All he's saying is that the physics exists that could explain explain how interstellar travel works. The Randall Sundrum model, coules of Klein particles, extra dimensions. These aren't fringe ideas. They're on the whiteboard at cern. And in a week or two, we're gonna have a physicist from CERN in here and we talk about this stuff. As for where in the Y Files catalog this fits? Probably the gravity is a lie category, maybe the project anchor episode. Because what Mark's describing really, really isn't anti gravity. It's gravity avoidance. And the math, at least on paper, doesn't break any known laws of physics. It just requires technology we haven't built yet. Allegedly. Mark's book is called the Populated Universe. You can find it on Amazon.

[Mark Dantonio]

And if you want to watch you

[A.J.]

live stream the night sky for free, go to skytourlive.org we'll have some links down below. Until next time, be safe, be kind, know that you are appreciated. That was almost one take Almost.

[Mark Dantonio]

Said I would I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music so I'm singing like I should but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends and it never ends no, it never ends. I feel the crap, cat I got stuck inside mel's home with mk ultra of being only 2 aware did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Or were the shadow people there? The rods were laying on the is just f the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold But I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish handle fish on Thursday nights when they J. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth to the weapons time. The madman sidings and the solar stone still come to a God the secret city under the ground Mysterious number stations Planet Circle 2 Project Stargate and what the dark Watchers found. The Black Knight satellite. Tuesday night with day J2 and the weapons. Of the weapons. Time All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth all through the. Ger loves to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel and camels love to dance when the feeling is right Always in time.