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Russian Officials examine camp site. On January 23, 1959, ten students and young graduates from the Ural Polytechnic Institute set out for a winter trek through Russia’s northern Ural Mountains. One turned back after a few days with joint pain. The other nine continued. Their leader was a 23-year-old engineering student [...] Read more →
When you leave Earth’s timezones behind, how do astronauts keep track of time — and how long does it take to get there in the first place? [...] Read more →
A photo of a purported UFO over Passaic, New Jersey in 1952. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Before 2017 the standard government position on UFOs was approximately: not our department, probably misidentifications, please stop asking. That position collapsed in December of that year when the New [...] Read more →
In December 1980, US Air Force personnel encountered an unknown craft in a Suffolk forest over three nights. The deputy base commander recorded it in real time. The tape is public domain. In the early hours of December 26, 1980, a security patrol at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk, England reported [...] Read more →
Edward James Ruppelt – St. Louis Post-DispatchPhoto published on Mar 08, 1953 From 1952 to 1969, the United States Air Force ran the longest official UFO investigation in American history out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. They called it Project Blue Book, and by the time they shut it [...] Read more →
Roughly 44,000 kilograms of meteoritic material falls on Earth every day. Most of it lands in the ocean or burns up entirely on the way down, but a meaningful fraction reaches the surface intact, and some of that ends up in fields, deserts, dry lake beds, and beaches where a metal detector [...] Read more →
SDR Radio for Beginners: How to Listen for Anomalous Signals A $25 USB dongle has turned an entire generation of hobbyists into radio operators without licenses, technical training, or any hardware beyond a laptop. That’s not an exaggeration — the RTL-SDR dongle, originally designed as a cheap television receiver for [...] Read more →
Most people who want to run a serious sky-watch spend about forty-five minutes planning the observation setup and then three hours sitting in an uncomfortable chair getting cold. The uncomfortable chair problem is actually important — if you’re miserable by midnight you’ll pack up before anything happens, and the most interesting things at [...] Read more →
Geiger counters have long been used in the recovery of exotic materials that may contain radioactive particles. From detecting meteorites to space debris the instruments have held their place in modern history since the dawn of the atomic age. In 1979 the instruments played a significant role in the recovery [...] Read more →
The argument about Bigfoot tends to go one of two ways: either you’ve never looked at the evidence closely and think it’s obviously ridiculous, or you have looked at it and can’t quite explain certain things away. The serious researchers — and there are serious researchers — don’t claim certainty. They claim [...] Read more →
Science in Plain English · Particle Physics · 2023 A plain-English review of the landmark 2023 ALPHA experiment that finally answered one of the oldest questions in physics — and why one man who died in 1727 deserves a share of the credit. Reviewing: Anderson et al., [...] Read more →
Author’s Note ON APRIL 27, 1949, the U.S. Air Force stated: “The mere existence of some yet unidentified flying objects necessitates a constant vigilance on the part of Project ‘Saucer’ personnel, and on the part of the civilian population. “Answers have been—and will be—drawn from such factors as [...] Read more →
The Money Pit was discovered in 1795 by a teenager named Daniel McGinnis who found a circular depression in the ground on a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia and started digging. Oak platforms appeared every ten feet. At ninety feet, the bottom flooded with seawater through a system of [...] Read more →
When Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt walked into Rendlesham Forest in December 1980 with a team of airmen, he brought a radiation detector. This wasn’t theatrical — it was standard procedure for a military officer investigating an unknown object near a base that housed nuclear weapons. What his equipment found was elevated radiation [...] Read more →
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Metal Detecting for Meteorites: A Practical Field Guide 
Roughly 44,000 kilograms of meteoritic material falls on Earth every day. Most of it lands in the ocean or burns up entirely on the way down, but a meaningful fraction reaches the surface intact, and some of that ends up in fields, deserts, dry lake beds, and beaches where a metal detector can find it. Meteorite hunting is one of the few citizen science pursuits where you can hold something in your hand that hasn’t been on Earth in four billion years.
The detection works because most meteorites contain iron-nickel, which is highly magnetic and responds well to metal detectors. There are exceptions — some stony meteorites have lower metal content and are harder to detect — but the majority of finds, particularly the iron and pallasite classes, are straightforward targets. The same magnet test that metal detector users do in the field (hold a magnet near the rock; does it stick?) is the standard first screening tool.
Location selection matters more than equipment. The best meteorite hunting grounds in the US are dry lake beds and desert playas where there’s minimal native metal contamination and where meteorites sit on the surface for centuries without being buried or disturbed. The Atacama Desert in Chile and the hot deserts of North Africa and Oman have produced extraordinary numbers of finds. In the continental US, areas like the dry lake beds of the California desert, the ranch lands of Kansas and Nebraska, and strewn fields from documented falls are productive. The Meteoritical Society maintains a public database of known meteorite finds worldwide, which is where you start your location research.
For detector selection: VLF (Very Low Frequency) detectors are better for discrimination — separating iron meteorites from terrestrial iron trash — while PI (Pulse Induction) detectors go deeper and work better in highly mineralized soils. Garrett and Minelab are the most trusted brands in serious meteorite hunting. Entry-level Garrett machines in the $200-350 range are capable tools for beginners. PI detectors from Minelab start higher but produce results in ground conditions that defeat VLF machines.
When you find a suspect rock: the magnet test first. If it sticks, look for a fusion crust — the dark, glassy coating that forms as the surface melts during atmospheric entry. Fresh meteorites have pronounced fusion crust. Weathered ones may have lost most of it. Inside, if you can make a small cut or find a natural break, iron meteorites show a distinctive crystalline structure called Widmanstätten pattern, produced by extremely slow cooling over millions of years. Nothing on Earth forms that pattern naturally.
If you find something you can’t identify: photograph it from multiple angles, note the exact GPS coordinates, and contact the Meteoritical Society or a university geology department before cleaning or cutting it. Provenance matters enormously to researchers, and an uncontaminated find with documented location data is worth far more to science than something that’s been wire-brushed and mailed around.
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