The Science Behind “America Declassified” – White Sands

Unintended Consequences My adventures as a scientist-host with the Travel Channel television series, “America Declassified” took me across the blinding flats of the White Sands Missile Range, which had unintended consequences. Unnervingly, it deposited a sliver in my mind that I simply cannot ignore. In forging outward across the staggeringly-immense, derelict runways we now know […]

Exploring a Logarithmic Temporal Technology Scale

In a previous, fairly soft-content post, I mused about the possibility of the existence of a logarithmic pattern in history that relates, in a predictable way, the subjective perceptions of technology within a civilization to their pace of technological advancement. (In a sort of tongue-in-cheek gesture, I called it the McGee Scale of technological advancement.) At […]

Escape Trajectory Artifacts at WAC-7

Just a quick update today on something I’ve been excited to talk about for some time: I’ve been working during the past year with Dr. Colleen Beck of the Desert Research Institute on long-term planetary science/space archaeology crossover research, the first fruit of which has just hit the cyberverse. In short, in an upcoming presentation […]

The Science Behind “Chasing UFOs” – Episode 2

For those who might like to delve more deeply into (or simply know more about the science behind) the second episode of National Geographic’s TV series “Chasing UFOs,” including industrial archaeology, cargo cults, radioactive tunnels, and orienteering troubles, check it out! Direct link to my article on the NatGeo TV blog here: http://tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/30/the-science-of-chasing-ufos-dirty-secrets/ Cheers! Ben

Xenoarchaeology Critical Mass

Xenoarchaeology Rising 2011 has been a good year for the nascent pursuit of xenoarchaeology as serious science. After beginning a conversation with a 2010 Viewpoint article I authored in the journal Space Policy, which was intended as a broad, conceptual justification for the further development of xenoarchaeology as a field, I was rewarded with a generally favorable review […]

New ideas on the altar of science

How are ideas that had once been considered speculative best adopted into the practice of serious scientific investigation? How are speculative ideas most effectively graduated from the realm of science fiction and introduced into scientific discourse? By what benchmarks of conceptual “distance” are speculative concepts evaluated before being considered too fringe for serious consideration? These are questions with which I find myself […]

Foraging for Nuclear Rocket Secrets

I spent this past Thursday at the National Archives in Chicago as one of the few humans in the last three decades to track down the project files for the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) Program from the 1960s. The experience of using the National Archive was exactly like and completely unlike what I’d […]

Xenoarchaeology Online

I am excited to report that my article, “A call for proactive xenoarchaeological guidelines – Scientific, policy and socio-political considerations,” has been published online by the journal Space Policy as an in-press corrected proof as it awaits publication in an upcoming issue. (I mentioned working on it previously in a post here.) The thrust of […]

Alien archeology – now a real science?

Well, I’ve done it. Making good on a promise I made to myself while presenting a poster at the Society of American Archaeology conference in 2008, I recently submitted an article to the journal Space Policy outlining a framework for a science that doesn’t quite exist yet: Xenoarchaeology. “Xeno” is Greek/Latin for “foreign” or “stranger.” […]