The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch | S6 E12 | Ceramic Lab Tests - Cleaned Crushed Identified [HD] [2025]

Transcript

A normal ceramic would not be floating in a liquid. >> Yeah, it is sort of unusual to have something that looks like a rock floating dlorane. >> Wow. Wow. Wow.

Wow. Dr. Clark's analogy about the ceramic floating in this liquid cleaning solution was spot on. There are rare pore ceramics that do float, but we believe this ceramic could be part of what destroyed multiple drill bits in the mesa. So, how could it be light enough to float like that? More and more, this stuff is proving to be something very strange.

>> We're going to dry that out. So, we're going to drive off the solvent in preparation for crushing the sample for subsequent analysis. >> Okay. So, we've got a hot plate over here. It's getting warm, so it's just forming bubbles underneath it.

>> After the cleaning process was done, next it was time to dry out the sample and then pulverize it into tiny particles for compositional analysis. But the question was, would it break apart easily? >> Okay, let's go use the mortar and pestle. The >> moment we've been waiting for. >> Yes. >> So now you finally get to crush it up.

>> We have a whole series of moments of truth here. >> So it is crushing. It's crushing pretty easily, >> except there's one large piece in here that is less happy to get destroyed. There was one piece in the middle that took a little bit more. >> You clearly didn't put 15,000 PSI pounds of pressure per square inch on that sample right there like the drill did on the ranch.

>> No, >> we were all stunned that most of the ceramic samples broke up into dust very easily when Dr. Clark started grinding it up in the lab. When we found that stuff, it was right after an industrial drill struggled for hours to break through it. >> You look at it and it looks so brittle and I'm thinking there's no way that that is what's stopping the drill. >> I would say no.

Looking at this unless it was behaving somehow differently while in the mesa, >> right? Yeah. >> We didn't know what to think. I mean, during our previous lab test with a scanning electron microscope, we watched this stuff morph from having a smooth surface to opening up with all kinds of holes and then literally going back to its original form. So, does it really have the ability to change physical characteristics? What is this stuff? >> Well, we're going to dissolve this in acid so we can do quantitative analysis. >> All right.

>> Okay. After those strange results, Dr. Clark prepped the ceramic materials to run them through the atomic emission spectrometer or AEES. It emits a plasma beam that excites the electrons in the material to identify the elements in them. We conducted a preliminary elemental analysis back on the ranch, but this equipment is much more sophisticated.

So, we absolutely wanted to confirm just what's in this stuff to figure out what it actually could be. So, we have the results of the AES here. And so, what we can see here is titanium and calcium, >> which comes as no surprise, >> right? Yep. >> And it's so high here that it's actually going off of our calibration curve. >> That's interesting.

>> And next is iron. When we look at our sample, we see that it has the iron. >> Okay, >> got it. >> And here we have aluminum. Nice solid aluminum just like you would expect to see.

>> Yep. So there's aluminum in the ceramic. >> Yep. >> Yeah. Now when we go down, so this is venadium.

>> Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Venadium is is in it. >> That's what this is telling us. >> Okay.

>> Remember? >> Yeah. >> Those metal flakes. >> Yes. >> Did have trace amounts of venadium. >> They sure did.

So the other pieces of metal that we pulled out 3 years ago now, uh, they had venadium on the surface. So that must mean it's embedded in the material somewhere. which is even more interesting when you think about it. >> Yeah. >> What makes a venadium interesting? >> Well, I do know that venadium is very durable and used in the construction of military vehicles and spacecraft.

Why in the world would that be in the mesa? >> What are the properties of venadium and what makes it interesting? Well, I do know that venadium is very durable and used in the construction of military vehicles and spacecraft. >> This is pretty interesting. Every test that we've performed on the ceramic materials that came out of the mesa only adds more evidence that something incredible is buried on Skinwalker Ranch.