You're walking out to the car, expecting yet another uneventful trip to work. It's winter, and the sky is dark: making the light in the sky stand out against a background of stars. Something about it seems out of place -- it shimmers a bit, and seems to dance in front of your eyes. Your imagination jumps at the possibilities -- is this is? Could it be some kind of alien ship? Is this going to be your UFO experience? After a second, your rational mind takes over, and comes up with a list of easy explanations: it could be Venus, or landing lights at the nearby airport, or maybe it's just a star after all....

What if you knew?

Dr. Ron Milione, a PhD Electrical Engineer specializing in military communications systems, believes that he has the answer...and for $375, you can have it to. I like Ron -- he's an easy-going fellow, and despite his technical knowledge and impressive credentials, he takes an easygoing attitude towards life that's hard not to agree with. He works by day at BAE Systems as an Engineering Project Manager on Combat-ID Systems,  moonlights after-hours and weekends with a variety of interesting projects, and the occassional alt-science, UFO, or paranormal convention. Two weeks ago he sent out a few photos of a recent trip to Montaulk, and this week he's been talking with the legendary John Hutchison about building a scale-replication of the Philadelphia Experiment.

The reason he built the detector should be obvious -- it's a magnetometer-based design to measure an EM signature and record it on a chart for later analysis. The idea draws from his daytime experience in engineering, and after-hours passion for alt-science & the paranormal. He's described the workings of the device pretty well online, and in all honesty it's not the technology that makes it impressive -- nor is it the application. What makes this device profound is the fact that it has the potential to once and for all end the debate about UFO's.

Over the last 50 years, the UFO phenomenon has evolved into an all-out brawl between mainstream science & advocates of UFO's as being vehicles from another world. Ask either side what the truth is, and they'll pull out reams of paper to show you that they're correct -- congressional reports citing mass-hysteria, Majestic documents describing ET-autopsies, and psychological tests conclusively demonstrating that UFO-abductees are either sane or crazy, depending on who sponsored the tests. At the end of the day, though, all that we have is paper -- making UFO's into a modern pseudo-religion that becomes "an issue of faith".

UFO's aren't about faith, though: If they're here, we should be able to detect them. The skeptics would say that we already do detect them -- our imagination turns clouds, stars, planets, and shadows into alien craft that never existed in the first place. It's back to faith, because all of our current methods of UFO-spotting rest on subjective methods of analysis that seem unreponsive to any argument either for or against.

So in reality, it's possible that Ron Milione's done more than just build a detector -- this device could also be a tie-breaker, because the magnetometer is the beginning of a new type of measurement that relies on the EM-characteristics of a craft, and not just the reported shape, speed, or other arguable factors. Nobody's going to argue a reading like 16.56 megahertz, and if a value like that repeatedly shows up in UFO sightings but never appears from aircraft, then we can take this measurement as a means to both understand how they work, and how to refine the equipment to tell us more.

Milione's done something else as well: he's found a simple device that both critics and advocates can agree on. If witness testimony is unreliable, then let's base our observations on multi-spectrum analysis to find discrepancies that the naked eye might not see. Also, it's equally possible that if UFO's don't exist, this tool will serve as a means to counteract overly-imaginative perceptions. Not every light in the sky is an ET mother-ship, and knowing that something's not a UFO could be equally as important as knowing that something else is.

The current model uses a chart-recorded, but Milione's already talking about the possibility of building smaller, lighter units that could display an actual image on a screen through a laptop interface. Would be worth a thousand bucks to buy a tool for detecting, photographing, and performing spectral analysis on UFO's? You bet! Compared the kind of camera-equipment that die-hard UFO buffs often purchase, that's chump-change to open up a completely new spectrum for analysis.

Even more interesting are the long-term possibilities: including linking a series of these small, inexpensive detectors on the Internet to not only detect UFO's, but track their movements over large areas, and report trends encompassing large geographies. Picture the same thing that it takes months to plot using today's spreadsheets, displayed in a real-time map online.

The technology for large-scale shared-processing projects like this are already here, thanks to innovative software design like the kind used in SETI at Home or the massively-parallel online cancer research project. Taking this even a step farther out, and you begin to realize that if you can capture & analyze EM signatures, then it also means that you can not only detect UFO's, but classify them into types by their unique electromagnetic characteristics.

Who knows what something like this could tell us? Would it turn out that most of those lights in the sky that we're questioning really are just stars, or will it turn out that ET is far more prevalent in our airspace than we ever guessed? It's been said that some questions were never meant to be answered, but I don't think that this is one of them. Depending on the data, it could mean bad news for Prophet Yahweh, good news for the Disclosure Project, or a final validation for the thousands of abductees looking for someting to give them peace of mind.

Whatever the case may be, it may also give us closure on the UFO issue, and let us once again move on with our lives. I don't know about you, but for me that's worth $375 bucks.