The F-18 Super Hornet’s gun-cam sensor struggles to hold its target as the Navy pilot tries to get a better look, zooming in and out, switching from infrared to TV mode. The target is a featureless UFO, an oblong blob dubbed the Tic Tac in small Navy circles. The footage ends when the Tic Tac, pure white now in TV mode, shakes the lock-in, and slips off the frame to the left. Silent, no audio. End of sequence.

Using metadata recorded on the margins, testimony from radar operators, and countless hours of analysis logged by the all-volunteer members of the Scientific Coalition for Ufology, retired Silicon Valley design engineer Peter Reali is trying to make sense of the senseless. On 11/14/04, radar aboard the USS Princeton swept the Tic Tac at 80,000 feet and pinged it less than a second later rematerializing at 20,000 feet. Reali tells his audience how his efforts to invoke the “null hypothesis,” a statistical sampling that aims to prove a peculiar event is actually common or ordinary, have failed.

The Scientific Coalition for Ufology is using technical analyses of phenomena like the Tic Tac video to goad mainstream science into taking a good hard look at The Great Taboo/CREDIT: cnn.com

He has employed models for linear and parabolic acceleration, and neither come close to conforming with known technology. So he decided to expand the reported blink-of-an-eye descent envelope, sixfold, from the 0.78 second sweep of the scope to six seconds. At six seconds, the velocity is a 10,227 mph blur, packing an acceleration rate of 310.56 g-forces.

“Just in perspective,” Reali says, “an F-18 starts to come apart at about 8 or 9 gs.” Power requirements to attain that kind of speed within that interval? 9.75 gigawatts, or “the equivalent of 2.2 tons of TNT being detonated per second.” More ridiculously, factor the descent speed at the 0.78 seconds painted by radar, and the maximum velocity becomes a preposterous 780,000 mph. And the Tic Tac pulls 18,385 gs – “that’s a liquefying process” – requiring the energy of a small tactical nuke, or 1.5 kilotons of detonated TNT per second, to make that happen. Or at least, that’s what we would need to do it.

A few in the SCU’s Scientific Conference on Anomalous Phenomena crowd chuckle uneasily. Soon enough, many of the assumptions touted in the March 15-17 discussions in Huntsville, Alabama, will face spirited challenges on social media. Which is precisely the point. SCU’s mission statement – to study the UFO phenomenon dispassionately, without drawing conclusions, sidestepping interpretation, applying whatever scientific methodologies that fit, and to air it out openly – convinced the Cal-Berkeley-educated Reali to climb off the fence and tackle the math. And with no promise of answers or payoffs of any sort, he was able to prove, to his own satisfaction, what the Tic Tac most definitely is not.

Reali is exactly the sort of card-carrying problem-solver that SCU is encouraging to join its efforts. And after having conducted frame-by-frame surgery on the Tic Tac incident, the nonprofit will soon release its 270-page breakdown of the event, first brought to light by the NY Times in 2017.

SCU has already given selected members of Congress advance copies of that report. Logical move. Lawmakers, after all, funded the still largely opaque Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program outed by the Times two years ago. And in the unlikely event curiosity emboldens congressional staffers to visit SCU’s website, they’ll discover more evidence for what might pass for hyperadvanced technology than anything collected in more than 60 years of radiowave research by SETI, which Congress also once funded.

The paper will likely indicate that SCU board member and former MUFON director of research Robert Powell was onto the Tic Tac trail a year before The Times spread the news. Congressional aides may be surprised to learn how, in 2008, Powell broke new ground in the anatomy of an incident the Times did not cover. Using federal radar records to reconstruct the flight path of a UFO that threatened the no-fly zone above President Bush’s home in Texas, Powell’s FOIA flushed out F-16 sorties the military initially denied had occurred. Those staffers will learn that the Tic Tac footage has company, in the infrared spectrum to boot. In addition to the other recorded and publicized caught-on-camera F-18 UFO chase sequences, Powell and colleagues Morgan Beall and Rich Hoffman published their analysis of the Aguadilla encounter captured by federal agents in 2013. They’ve included substantial dissenting opinions and rebuttals.

In fact, any science wonks on Capitol Hill’s payroll will find links to studies that could and do pass peer-review screening, including assessments of UFO-related power outages and luminous spheres that pose potential air-traffic safety hazards. And it should become pretty clear to website visitors that SCU and its eclectic list of inquiring multi-disciplinary minds are national pacesetters in evaluating and publicizing current technical data on The Great Taboo.

But as Reali cautioned his audience, curiosity on this scale is not a luxury item. Near the end of his presentation, he resurrected the late Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet air force lieutenant colonel some people credit for saving the world. In 1983, just weeks after MiGs shot down a civilian Korean jetliner that strayed accidentally into Russian airspace, an early-warning system reported that American ICBMs had just launched at the USSR. Petrov, the duty officer, correctly judged it be a false alarm and ignored protocols to set the one-way wheels in motion. The culprits: a reflection of sunlight off high altitude clouds over North Dakota, and a computer glitch.

And in this age of rapidly evolving detection technologies, at least one SCU panelist argued that the public’s right to know should be trumped by the possibility of provoking unintended consequences. Stay tuned.