Hey friends! Long time no talk. Since I don’t have cable, I relied on The History Channel website to upload episodes of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch at 3 A.M. EST. After Episode 5, they decided to paywall the rest. At that point, I had switched over to purchasing the episodes at 3 A.M. EST when they were uploaded to YouTube. Well, NOW it seems they will not be uploading the episodes to YouTube until the NEXT WEEK’S episode airs. So that’s fun. 

Anyways, let’s just cut to the chase and get into The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch Season 5 Episode 11 Bad to the Drone.

This Is Not A Drill Pt. 6

We join Thomas Winterton, who is at the Mesa Drill Site with Mark Construction. Dr. Travis Thomas, Dragon, Kaleb Bench, and Erik Bard arrive. Thomas reminds them (us) that they stopped drilling recently because the beacon, attached to the drill’s head, isn’t communicating with the beacon receiver. This means the team from Mark Construction is drilling blindly. 

At this point, the only course of action is to pull the drill out completely and either replace or recalibrate the beacon. If this doesn’t work, it’s a job stopper. Think about it. Travis reveals they’ve been at this for five weeks and we’re maybe halfway through the Mesa. It feels like we’ll get to the season finale, which is literally a week from now (when I’m writing this), and will still have no resolution. I’m not expecting them to pull it off, get guerilla X-ray images of what’s inside, and bust this case wide open! It would just be nice to, I don’t know, have them complete a single hole and not drag it out over five episodes of Skinwalker Ranch. 

Travis has an interesting idea. He posits the idea of grabbing a handheld RF meter and tracking the drill head by hand. 

Now that the drill head is out, they test the battery from the beacon. It works perfectly. There is nothing wrong with it. So why does it keep losing connectivity? The new battery gets inserted and tested. Things are working! The drilling gets back up and running, only for things to quickly go wrong. Shortly after the drilling starts, the beacon loses communication with the beacon receiver. 

The team from Mark Construction tells them it’ll be about a week until they can replace the beacon and get back to drilling. 

Great. More drilling next week. 

The Drone Goes On

3:01 P.M. The Triangle. 

The whole team meets up with Preston Ward and Tyler Johnson of Sky Elements. Sky Elements are back from last season when they lit up the night sky with hundreds of drones. Now they’re back. With 1,000 drones! They will be flying the drones around the cone-shaped anomaly imaged on LIDAR from technologist Pete Kelsey in Episode 7 The Cone Zone.

Travis tells us through voiceover that Sky Elements will, “launch a thousand illuminated drones to various altitudes in a preprogrammed formation of two parallel lines.” 

Here’s the gear we’re working with for data collection: Erik has the surveillance cameras up as well as live GPS monitoring everything, Kandus Linde and Tom Lewis will be in the east with high-speed cameras,  Jim Royston and Sam Deriso (OmniTeq) will have sensor boxes placed around, a FLIR will be running, and a high-speed sky-facing camera will be placed in the center of the Triangle. The cherry on top of the sundae is with a high-speed FPV drone through a virtual reality headpiece. It will be piloted by Kaleb McEwen. 

10:11 P.M.

To get things started, Travis and Dragon decide lighting off a rocket will be a good kickstarter. That usually gets the phenomena going. Travis lights off the rocket and Sky Elements arms the drones. The rocket goes off without a hitch, but the drones…not so much. They run a blink test on the drones, which is supposed to show every drone in unison. If you could have guessed it, they do not blink in unison. 

Travis grabs our attention when he notices a bright UAP heading east. It’s a strong white light that eventually blinks out of existence. That’s when the drones go down. They completely lose all connection to the thousand drones. Simultaneously, Jim Royston loses their antenna signal, too. All of their equipment is down. The antenna, positioned in the dead center of the Triangle, starts receiving the dreaded 1.6 GHz signal. And that’s the only one getting it. Then, the signal jumps to the sky-facing antenna at the launch pad, and finally jumps to one more antenna—it’s almost like it’s playing hopscotch. 

At this point, Sky Elements is able to scrape together 200 drones for flight. They’re ready to go, and there’s no time like the present. The 200 drones take off. By the time they reach resting altitude, they realize only 196 have lifted off. Once in the air, the drones should be still until their programming starts. For some reason, the drones are wiggling in and out of formation. While these were going up, Kaleb McEwen was flying his high-speed FPV drone. 

Something happens and Kaleb loses his drone. The screen just goes black. 

Since they could only get 200 drones into the sky, they call it a night. 

The Evidence

11:10 A.M. 

We join Travis, Erik, Thomas, Dragon, Kaleb, and Jim Royston at the Skinwalker Ranch Command Center. Preston and Kaleb, of Sky Elements, join on video. Erik pulls up the first video, which was the UAP Travis pointed out after firing the rocket. There’s a second video from a different angle, which makes it look incredibly smaller than the previous video. It definitely does not look like an aircraft. 

Dragon reveals to Kaleb McEwen that he found the FPV drone, and the GoPro was still attached to it! It was found near the top of the Mesa. even though it wasn’t flying near the Mesa. Erik pulls up the drone video. It’s flying in midair near the 200 drones when suddenly there’s a loud THUD and the drone spirals down. Travis seems pretty insistent that it was not a bird. A FLIR video clip reveals another UAP flying in the area of the FPV drone. 

The final video Erik shows is of a small UAP flying around the bottom left of the screen. It quickly splits into two distinct orbs. When Erik adjusted the contrast of the image, those two UAPs quickly turned into four UAPs. Jim tells Erik to let the clip keep playing, and more UAPs start zipping around the screen. It’s truly captivating. 

Final Thoughts

For some reason, this episode of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch feels like a bit of nothing. The whole drone fiasco was entertaining to watch, but I want to watch drones. Not drone issues. Are the issues compelling? Sure! It’s just that the past five episodes have been about drilling and issues with drilling, which leads them to stop drilling. Not every episode has to have this amount of, what now feels like, forced drama. 

There are so many parts of the Skinwalker Ranch that we haven’t gotten to see in almost two seasons. Explore other parts of the ranch, set up more thermal cameras where the portal was, and investigate the ghost rumors! Do something interesting. You have a few episodes left this season, Fugal. Make them good. Please.