My secondary objective was Montgomery, about three hours out of Huntsville. For reasons I’m still trying to figure out, I wanted to explore The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, along with The Enslavement to Mass Incarceration Legacy Museum, where the nation’s history is on permanent trial. I then slid on over to Selma, where the Alabama hills were beginning to blush with dogwood and azaleas. And somewhere in between the capitol rotunda and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, along Highway 80, I paused at a roadside monument to activist Viola Riutto, shot to death by the KKK following the famous civil rights march of 1965.

There used to be a saying that you could read a community by its tallest structure, and if that was ever true, beaucoup church steeples down this way couldn’t hold a match to the colossus dominating the skyline of my primary objective. The primary objective was Huntsville, 200 miles north, home to Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal, where the 360-foot tall replica of a Saturn V moon rocket lords over the landscape.

A replica of the heaviest, tallest, and most powerful rocket ever built continues to point toward the way out/CREDIT: Billy Cox

Go 85 miles west of Huntsville, up toward Tennessee, and you reach rural Cloverdale, population negligible, home to a long-running legend the locals call “spooklights.” Witnesses say the airborne spooklights manifest in different colors and sizes, that they prefer nights and cold weather, and that nobody really knows what they are. Among those attempting to crack this nut is an IT contractor attached to the Army Materiel Command at Redstone Arsenal. His name is Rich Hoffman, and he’s been using everything from drones to 4K cameras and theodolite hardware in an effort to wring every last clue from every last pixel of light.

On March 15-17, at a dining hall conference room near Marshall/Redstone, on the sparsely developed outskirts of “Rocket City,” Hoffman staged what he hopes is the beginning of a sustained and systematic approach to putting phantoms like the Cloverdale spooklights in a box. A self-proclaimed UFO nerd growing up in Ohio, so steeped in the lore that he was even invited to make a presentation at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base as a teenager, the former Alabama state MUFON director presided over what was billed as the Scientific Conference on Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena. Screening out panelists and attendees alike for tinfoil hats, Hoffman challenged the “invisible college” of interested scientists and credentialed academics to get out of the closet and bring their A-game openly to what seems destined to become the most provocative field of research in the 21st century.

How’s this for a hook: What if you don’t have to spend a king’s ransom collecting evidence? What if the data has already been slurped up by the European Space Agency, archived as open-source material, and is waiting for inquiring minds like yours to come and get it?

That was just one of the headlines emerging from the Conference, pulled together by researchers calling themselves the Scientific Coalition for Ufology. SCU produced a surgical analysis of the 2013 Aguadilla incident, where federal border patrol agents used an infrared camera to track a UFO that appeared to dip into the breakers off Puerto Rico before splitting in half and continuing the trajectory. Since then, SCU has become a nonprofit, and three of the main players in the Aguadilla study – Hoffman, Robert Powell, and Morgan Beall – converged in Huntsville to advocate a full-court press on a puzzle that refuses to be wished away or ignored.

SCU’s major draw was Luis Elizondo, the controversial military intelligence operator who told the NY Times in December 2017 about a Bush/Obama-era, under-the-radar Pentagon program that took another look at The Great Taboo. That revelation invigorated mainstream press coverage, at least temporarily, like nothing since the Air Force shuttered its Project Blue Book “study” and told the world to get lost in 1969. But I’ll save the points Elizondo raised in his keynote address for later, because maybe the most promising material lead for SCU’s capacity crowd of 125 came courtesy of Philippe Ailleris.

Ailleris is the project controller for the ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-1, just one of many remote-sensing, Earth Observations (EO) satellites taking the planetary pulse with a vast array of instrumentation. Like a growing number of sleuths, he avoids the image-skewing term UFO, and refers to those mysteries as AAOs, anomalous aerial objects. Though historically impervious to predictability and laboratory controls, AAOs may be running out of places to operate undetected, Ailleris argued. He offered a preview of the coming “big data revolution” powered by EO technology — orbiting platforms bristling with eclectic optics, spectrometers and multiple bandwidths designed to keep tabs on our ailing planet. Some 220 EO sats launched between 2007 and 2018, but a whopping 562 missions are scheduled for the next four years alone. That means every corner of Earth, land and sea, will soon be subjected to continuous environmental scrutiny, 24/7.

Pattern recognition: Simulated coffins hang from the roof of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice/CREDIT: Billy Cox

It also means: In the near future, you’ll be able to dial up an EO satellite and request whatever it collected at any given point in time over, say, Cloverdale, Alabama. Even if the AAO you swear you saw doesn’t show up in an image, maybe associated effects, like atmospheric perturbations or EMG bursts, will light up the negative space. With the right tools and imagination, who knows what scenarios EO databanks might produce.

Ailleris reminded listeners to celebrate the evolution of our eyes in the sky since Sputnik and Explorer took flight more than 60 years ago. Size, shape, velocity, altitude, the potential to identify AAO pattern behaviors on a scale never contemplated – the resident of Holland encouraged the crowd to start thinking about ways to get in front of the shift. “The data is free,” he said. “There are new markets, new actors, a new constellation of satellites.”

Sixty years ago, Saturn V was being assembled at the same time crosses and churches burned across Dixie. As the three-stage behemoth rumbled toward the moon, the global village stood spellbound, as if it glimpsing a chance to escape its own history, to end the devastating old patterns, to start something new. From the hotel, SCU conference attendees could see all that remains, a gleaming monument to an aspiration that only 20 percent of us can remember anymore.

At least one person went home thinking the weekend might’ve been the beginning of a way forward. More later.