If you still haven’t caught Joe Rogan’s podcast with retired Navy commander David Fravor, do it now. It’s the most detailed eyewitness walk-through yet of the groundbreaking 2004 Tic Tac incident, by one of its most uniquely qualified participants.

Fravor also throws in a hearsay surprise about a military encounter in the waters off Puerto Rico. This one’s extremely weird because it involves the attempted recovery of a telemetry torpedo. The retrieval operation collapsed into a freakout because the projectile got sucked back into the depths by a “dark mass” below and was lost forever. Not even Popular Mechanics could resist addressing an alleged Navy property-theft drama on the high seas. And, given Tyler Rogoway’s recent reporting at The War Zone, it looks like somebody at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division is trying to play catchup.

When a UFO story can make Fox News credible, the world has truly gone sideways/CREDIT Epoch Times

So yeah – Puerto Rico again. Remember Puerto Rico? A long history of countless sightings? And the Aguadilla footage grabbed by federal Homeland Security agents in 2013? The only known government video documentation of a UFO/UAP/UAV/AAV navigating both the atmosphere and the water? Aguadilla didn’t enjoy nearly as much hang time as the Tic Tac anomaly, but the sequence was no less freakish. Part of the strength of that case lay in the rigorous scrutiny the footage was subjected to in a 159-page paper published by the private research group Scientific Coalition for Ufology.

Well, three of those members have just inserted more UFO datapoints into the arena where these debates will ultimately be settled – a peer-reviewed science journal. Late last month, SCU co-founder Robert Powell and two fellow researchers attempted to detail the physics behind the sort of flight activity, unfolding in our atmosphere, that appears to be redefining what is and isn’t technologically feasible.

Powell and co-authors Kevin Knuth and Peter Reali call their piece “Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles.” It’s an attempt to bring an even broader context to SCU’s 270-page forensic study of the Tic Tac encounter, which the group released on its website in April.

“Flight Characteristics” takes three incidents – the Tic Tac, a 1951 sighting by Navy Lt. Graham Bethune near Nova Scotia, the 1986 Japan Air Lines Flight 1628 – and ties them together with these threads: “multiple professional witnesses observing the UAV in multiple modalities (including sight, radar, infrared imaging, etc.),” in which each incident produces “sufficient information to estimate kinetic qualities such as speeds and accelerations.”

“Assuming that any one of these cases we examine is based on accurate reports,” they add, “we show that the UAVs exhibit unreasonably high accelerations ranging from 100 g to well over 5,000 g.” Not very sporting odds for a dogfight. The authors tell readers that “humans can endure up to 45 g for 0.044 seconds with no injurious or debilitating effects.” Meaning: attempt those moves and you’re soup in a can.

The authors ask readers to also consider an analysis of B-52 radar readings from the truly puzzling 1968 encounter at the Strategic Air Command base in Minot, N.D. And they reintroduce scrutiny brought to bear by German rocket scientist Hermann Oberth. In 1954, the man who has an asteroid and a lunar crater named after him made calculations that put UFO speeds at Mach 55. That’s roughly the same velocity the Tic Tac object was tracked at based on radar observations, according to the SCU.

None of these aerobatic abilities comes as a surprise to anyone familiar with this stuff. But the authors are going for something different. “The purpose of this paper is not to prove the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis,” they write, “but instead to focus on the flight kinematics of these UAVs with the aim of building up a body of scientific evidence that will allow for a more precise understanding of their nature and origin.”

In other words, they’re applying equations to recorded observations and data. Not on social media threads and pugilistic websites, but in a refereed science journal. Skeptics may howl, with some justification, that co-author Kevin Knuth is the editor in chief of the journal, called Entropy. The same detractors will also likely pounce on the fact that Entropy is produced by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, which has its share critics complaining about uneven standards for a platform that publishes more than 200 open-access academic journals. Fair enough.

Which defender of the status quo will accept the Entropy challenge and plunge headlong into the physics of The Great Taboo?/CREDIT: Entropy

But Knuth is an associate professor at the University of Albany (SUNY) physics department. He was also a research scientist at NASA Ames designing AI algorithms for its Intelligent Systems division. Reali was a longtime electrical design engineer in Silicon Valley, and Powell worked for 28 years with semiconductor technology. All three made presentations at SCU’s landmark conference in Huntsville, Ala., in March.

What they’re trying to serve up at Entropy are baseline mathematics that neither De Void nor most media outlets have the background or expertise to interpret. In other words, this is a direct challenge to popular mainstream scientists like Neil De Grasse Tyson and Bill “Science Guy” Nye to take a good hard look at the numbers extrapolated from UFO tech in the exclusive language of physics. It would be awfully easy for them to denigrate the report’s venue as an excuse to ignore the research. But these days, wouldn’t that risk cultural self-marginalization, like what happened to Seth Shostak?

Science can be as political as lawmakers, military planners, and proponents of the scientific method want it to be. Nobody can make them see what they choose not to. And, hey, maybe SCU’s numbers don’t add up. But public interest in The Great Taboo is accelerating. Denial and avoidance among those who’ve gotten away with it for so long by saying there’s no data to contemplate are no longer sufficient. Like it or not, ready or not, bright solid red lines are popping up all over the place.