#20 – Pete Kelsey

September 22nd, 2025

#20 – Pete Kelsey

[00:10] Angus Stocking (Host):

This is Everything is Somewhere, I’m Angus Stocking. Pete Kelsey is a veteran of the AEC world with deep roots in land surveying and remote sensing, known for turning complex sites into survey grade, photorealistic 3D narratives that inform, persuade, and occasionally change history’s understanding of place. Over three decades, he’s led reality capture projects around the globe, from the Moai of Easter Island to the USS Arizona, and Alcatraz, using lidar, photogrammetry, thermography, and more to build authoritative digital twins for conservation, planning, and public storytelling.

Today, as owner of VCTO Labs, Pete supplies high credibility spatial data for major documentary series like Drain the Oceans, Expedition Bigfoot, and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, bringing context to screens with a surveyor’s rigor and fidelity to truth and also a storyteller’s eye and knack for creating narrative. I have a personal connection with Pete. We collaborated on a couple of content projects for Autodesk in my career as a freelance commercial writer and also Pete’s professional interests with Bigfoot and Skinwalker Ranch and other topics overlap with my fascination with the fringe and conspiracy worlds—for example, crop circles. Pete Kelsey, welcome to Everything is Somewhere.

Pete Kelsey (Guest): Thanks, Angus. Good to see you after all this time.

Angus: It’s good to see you. And I’m very grateful that you made the time today. Since we last worked together, your career has taken quite the trajectory. How and why are you doing what you’re doing now?

Pete: Uh, stubborn, I guess. Let’s see. Well, when last we chatted, I was a full-time employee at Autodesk. While there, my career path evolved from one of the worldwide technical evangelists to, in 2008 when the global economy melted down, the evangelist program pretty much went away and I found myself in the sales organization at Autodesk, which I had never done before formally. It wasn’t long, and I had done the Easter Island project prior to 2008 and was really hooked on what I discovered there—and that was the power of story.

And I started politicking within the halls of Autodesk that rather than leading with a product, in this case software, and then going to find a story that can support the product, I think that’s backwards. I think let’s go find a great story that the product can make even better. And I found some like-minded people in the sales organization. And we did that for a number of years. That was the Arizona; you and I met on the Air Force Academy Chapel project. We did Glen Canyon Dam. I mean, there were a lot of them, and what they all had in common was AEC and specifically Reality Capture.

Angus: I recall from the Chapel project: you were using drones to do photo capture and maybe some scanning, but watching that visually, what we ended up trying to tell there was a story of how beautiful it is and how the renovations were making a big difference on a building that was architecturally strange and difficult in some ways. There were problems with the renovation project and the visuals and the filming really made that clear. And so it became a much better article in print because of your dynamic, kinetic work behind the scenes.

Pete: Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, that one was… look, they were going to completely dismantle this famous building, completely take it apart and then rebuild it because it had problems right from the start. It leaked from day one when it rained—cold in the winter, hot in the summer—it just had a host of problems. So the Air Force decided, “Hey, let’s fix this.” And we raised our hands and said, look, you have to scan. We have to capture this famous building inside and out as step one, so you have that not only as a record, but how about being able to put it back together again just as it was?

How about being able to figure out the problems of HVAC—it’s too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer and it leaks—how could we use the terrestrial laser scanning and the photogrammetric data? How could we use all that in various kinds of simulation and analysis software to remedy them all when the building is rebuilt? That was great. If nothing else, it was a tour de force through the Autodesk portfolio at the time. My God, I think the last count was like 80 products were used on that project. So that was a good one for sure.

Angus: From there, you went on to a lot of narrative-based projects, and you’re doing a fair amount of work with documentary series—the History Channel—there’s a bit of a shock value, and shock’s not the right word, but fringe or kind of “out there,” and you’ve been in some pretty strange places or exotic places, and you’re doing interesting work for TV. I’m most interested in Bigfoot and Skinwalker, and maybe we’ll talk about that. Was that a—what took you in that direction? The Easter Island and Bigfoot—was that a personal interest or is that just where the interests were?

Pete: Well, the Easter Island thing—and this is way back—that was 2007. That was just a bucket list place that I wanted to see. So I was down in South America working and took a week off and went out to the island, but I had all my gear with me. I had all my old RTK GPS stuff and some reality capture gear with me and just went looking for the right person and found her. Then, I guess the rest is history. In more recent days, say the last six or seven years now, I did a series for Nat Geo called Buried Secrets of World War II, which was amazing and great fun, because I’m, among other things, a history nut and particularly interested in the World Wars.

So when they asked me to be involved, I jumped at it, and that led to, “Okay, there’s this guy who does reality capture—geospatial technology—that can make an old story new, can make a familiar story even better.” Word sort of got out that there’s this guy—me—and I got a call from a friend who we had talked about doing something on the Easter Island project with, but it never developed. And he said, “Hey, I’m working with this company and we have this show that’s doing very well—The Curse of Oak Island—in Nova Scotia.” I had never heard of it.

We talked about it and I met with the two owners, the brothers. I guess it wasn’t my best day because that didn’t happen, but it turns out the same production company—Prometheus—was producing another show called The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, another place I had never heard of. So I wound up talking with them and they invited me to the ranch to do some work, drone-based capture. And jeez, within a couple of hours of arriving on site, I was an eye-rolling skeptic. I’m like, this is utter nonsense. I’ll be out of here in 24 hours because of the chase. That was six years ago and I’m still working there. It’s a really, really interesting place.

Angus: I’ve heard people say similar things and I’ve read it quite a bit that Oak Island just never ends. It’s a thread you can just pull forever.

Pete: Yeah. And it’s—I don’t know a lot about the place. I still don’t know a lot about the show other than it’s in like season 15 or something like that. It’s been going on for a long, long time. So whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it right in terms of television production. I do remember once, some years ago, seeing that they were using Civil 3D on it. And that made me feel good because that product and I go way back—to its very beginning actually.

Yeah, the ranch—gosh. And the ranch led to getting a call from another production company—the Bigfoot show, Expedition Bigfoot. And I’ve done, I don’t know, half a dozen episodes with them over the last few years. Again, rolling into something like that as an eye-rolling skeptic, but let’s see where this leads, because I knew that the things that I knew how to do—reality capture, but reality capture specifically tied to the ground, tied to control—would have some value. And hey, knock on wood, I was right. And they keep inviting me back.

Angus: Nice. Actually, if we could drill down on that a bit, I’m a Bigfoot believer, just to put my cards on the table. And the Patterson-Gimlin film in particular is one of the things that really confirms for me the physical reality of this unknown primate’s existence, because I don’t think it’s a man in a monkey suit. Now, some of the work you’ve done for them is you visited the site where that was done, right?

And you did some—and I know we can’t talk about everything; you were saying before we started recording that there’s NDA issues—but could you give us maybe an overview of the work you did on the site of the Patterson-Gimlin film recording? And for listeners, this is the famous video shot on a Super 8 camera in 1968, I think—it’s been a while—that’s very convincing and has always been dismissed as a big man walking in a very well-done monkey suit. So that’s what it is, but please, your turn. Tell us what happened when you got there—what were your objectives, whatever you can tell us about that work—I’m all ears.

Pete: Sure. Well, I had done one or two episodes with them before the Patterson-Gimlin episode, which were fun, which were interesting. And one of them actually scared the hell out of me. That was a famous sighting. We recorded a possible Bigfoot, right? Perhaps there is something in the data that’s humanoid, which is—you know, get your head around that. That was a crazy night. So fast forward to the Patterson-Gimlin episode. The first thing I’ll say about that—in my 30-plus years, that is the coolest, most interesting forensic project I have ever been involved with, ever, because that’s what it was. It was a forensic analysis of the film site.

Angus: That’s a very good word for it. It’s investigating.

Pete: Yeah. So how it began was on the producers—we were talking on the phone and, “Hey Pete, we’re going to be going to the PG film site—what are your ideas? What do you think?” And I remembered something I had come across years and years before during my time at Autodesk—something of a workflow in 3ds Max called perspective matching. And I just blurted out to the producers on that phone call. I said, “What if I could tell you how tall the creature in that film is?” And of course they got really excited—“What, you could do that?” I’m like, “Yeah, I know I can.”

All that is required is that there has to be several items still on site—60-whatever years later—that are visible in the film. So if there are trees, rocks, stumps, whatever, visible in the film that are still physically there, that I can scan with my gear, I can tell you how tall the creature is, not to mention the geometry of everything else. And one of the cast members—Maria, PhD primatologist—you know, in a situation like that, I’m the messenger: here’s the data; you’re the primatologist, you interpret. So anyway, that got a green light really fast. We went to the Patterson-Gimlin film site in Northern California and I scanned it.

Angus: How long a walk-in is that? Or how hard is it to get to the site?

Pete: Well, for me, because I’m not as young as I used to be, it kicked my butt. It was a long drive—I want to say two or three hours—way out into the woods, and then the road ends, and then, oh gosh, maybe an hour hike, something like that. But the terrain was insane. So, my old ass carrying all my gear up and down these hills—it was… I earned that one. But we scanned it—Bryce and I did. Bryce is one of the cast members—and the data came out great. I explained perspective matching to the production company and they found a CG firm or effects house—don’t know the proper term—who put it together and lo and behold we determined how tall—she’s known as Patty—how tall Patty was in the film, which was six foot three inches. And I will never forget hearing the results of that—six foot three. I went, boy, that’s a man in a monkey suit. You know, I’m six foot four.

Pete: So, you know, that’s that. And right away, the people on the show, smarter than I am, said, “No, no, no, no, no. Patty is called Patty because the creature in the film is clearly female.” Apparently, if you look at all the great ape species—of which we are one—males are X percent larger than females across the spectrum. So they do the math—well, how tall would a male have been? And it was something like seven foot eight or something like that. So I went, wow, that’s a good save—well played by the scientific folks—because I thought that was not going to be well received by the Bigfoot community out there.

Angus: I’m a member of the Bigfoot community, for what it’s worth. When you were able to verify height, did that also allow you to verify, for example, stride length and other proportions and dimensions of the body?

Pete: I don’t know whether that happened. Absolutely anything—any measurement you wanted to make to Patty, to the creature in the film—could have been made. Anything: elbow to wrist, length of the femur, anything. Because once we got it all lined up, the geometry was tight based on the point cloud data, the laser scan data.

Angus: I’ll tell you why I asked. There’s a very interesting analysis by a pretty sober writer and expert on Bigfoot. His name was Grover something—I forget the last name. But he had been working from the film and doing his best to get accurate dimensions from a 2D format. One of his conclusions was that the swing points of the arms—the shoulders—using very conservative figures, he had to conclude that the shoulders were freakishly far apart and that couldn’t be. So this was—if it was a human—it was a human that was in like the 0.5 percentile of human extremes of shoulder width. And it would be very interesting, given your ability now to precisely tell bodily proportions—I hope someone has looked at that. How far apart are these shoulders and how does that match up with the human population? It’d be a fascinating factoid to come out of this.

Pete: Yeah, I agree. Sadly, as the messenger, my job is to do the data capture. I hand it off to somebody else and then it’s gone. So yeah, I too would agree that the data is sound—that I can speak to with absolute confidence. The data is absolutely sound. And I too would hope that somebody would raise their hand and say, “Hey, who’s got that data and where is it?” Because it certainly warrants further analysis.

Angus: Well, and that happened with—for example—the film had been around for several decades. And about 15 years ago, maybe, somebody thought to do the image stabilization, which all of a sudden made that much more useful for any casual observer. So there’s a history of, you know, if data isn’t lost, people can go back to it. And I would hope that happens with your work, that it’s part of the record now, depending on the TV producers. Anyway, what else was striking to you about your engagement with Expedition Bigfoot, that series?

Pete: Well, I’m trying to think of a way to say this so it doesn’t overtly sound cliché, but if we’re going to be out in the woods—or just out in the field—for a length of time through all kinds of weather, the people you do that with are really important. Call it chemistry, esprit de corps, camaraderie, whatever. I had a producer tell me once before working on the show—look, and I’m sorry, we’re going to go PG here for a minute—he said, “Look, on this show, we have one rule.” And I go, “Okay, what’s that?” And he said, “We have a no assholes rule.”

Angus: We’re an adult-friendly podcast, I think.

Pete: Okay, good. And I said, “You just made my day,” because if I detected any of that, I’m out. I will leave. I’m at this point in my career where I chase passion projects. So it’s sort of a long-winded answer to your question. Working with the cast is nothing but good. It’s fun. It’s interesting. Talk about a diverse group. Of course, Maria—PhD, primatologist. Russ is this adventurer—you know, he and I are both U.S. Army veterans; we got along from the start. Bryce—my gosh, Bryce—he knows what to say when everybody else is trying to “What was that?” Anyway, forgive me—there’s been a change in the cast in the last few years. Ronnie was around when I was working. There’s a new guy who I’ve met only briefly. I’m embarrassed I can’t remember his name, but he was super cool—another outdoorsman, woodsman—super cool dude.

There was a no assholes rule, but there was also a no BS rule, because that was my rule that I’ve told. Once this sort of road to the paranormal opened for me in this mass media place, I found myself—I’ve told everyone—it’s my rule: yeah, there’s a no assholes rule, but my rule is no BS, because at the first hint of BS I’m gone. Because I still do this for a living. I still work in AEC. Like every other person who draws breath, my most valuable asset is my reputation. No one is allowed to monkey with that. Nobody.

Angus: I’m happy to have your report on behind the scenes there. I would think anyone interested in that show or the paranormal generally would be happy that there are people who are—you’re saying that the cast and crew are sincere, that they’re trying to make an interesting show, but they’re not willing to shade the truth overmuch. There might be some embellishment—making a narrative—but there’s no lies, there’s no factual errors going through.

Pete: Yeah. Look, it’s a constant ongoing battle between science and entertainment. That’s what it is. And sometimes entertainment wins and sometimes science wins. But the winning formula in the business of film production is keep the audience from changing the channel. That is rule number one. It’s a business. So walking that tightrope between science and entertainment—it really comes down to cast and crew. What am I actually going to be walking into? What’s really happening on the ground? Are we given lines—here’s a script? Absolutely not. These things happen live, organically, in the moment. Are our experiments or trips or projects planned out in advance? Of course. Once we’re out in the sticks, no one knows what’s going to happen. Certainly I don’t.

Angus: Well, I’m glad to hear that. Also, it somewhat reflects—there’s a long history of reducing landscape to a pictorial truth in the form of maps, topography, topo maps. And also there’s a storytelling timeline aspect to it. The famous maps that came out of mapping the ebb and flow and the changing banks of the Mississippi River, for example, as they tried to deal with the flood. You’re at the bleeding edge or the avant-garde of a very long tradition of truthfully portraying reality in pictorial form, and I find that very gratifying. Just to switch a bit. A big hobby horse of mine has been crop circles for many years. I’ve been a believer, and my main thing has been—this comes from land surveying—what I would say is that the sophistication of their layout in very short periods of time—how they’re formed is interesting too, of course—but just within a couple of hours to form that pattern—it’s something that I couldn’t do with GPS and a good crew on a dry day.

But this was done going back to the seventies at least—very complex patterns, way more complex than a subdivision—were somehow laid out and made in time windows of an hour or less. And I have just found that, from a land surveyor’s point of view—a geospatial expert, if you will—you couldn’t do that by conventional hoaxing. There might be some shadowy group out there that could do it, but we don’t know who they are. So there’s something very weird and technologically savvy happening. And just out of curiosity, has that ever come up that you know of in the geospatial world, crop circles?

Pete: It hasn’t crossed my radar. Am I aware—I’m trying to think of anybody. I’ve heard of that. I want to say no. But it’s interesting listening to you describe it. Anyone with any land surveying experience could look at a crop circle and probably see it through a different lens like you just described. It’s like, wait a minute. This is complex geometry. It’s fascinating. Now that I think about it for more than a second or two, that’s an itch worth scratching.

Angus: I wrote a nice long cover article for American Surveyor Magazine. I’ll put a link in the description. It gave me a chance to—the perspective that you’re taking with your topics—I think I applied pretty well in this article. But anyway, let’s move on with what you’re expert in. So, Skinwalker Ranch, which isn’t too far from… You’re in Moab at the moment and I’m in rural Colorado. It’s Four Corners country, right? The ranch.

Pete: Yeah, it’s the Uinta Basin. It’s in northeast Utah. It’s close to Dinosaur National Monument, if that rings a bell with anybody listening. Oil and gas country—there are derricks everywhere in the basin, the Uinta Basin. And then there’s Skinwalker Ranch which, six or seven years ago, I’d never even heard of.

Angus: Wow, is it—

Pete: Wow, it keeps… I’ve actually described it, and continue to describe it, as my white whale, which kind of makes me Ahab and perhaps a bit unhinged. But what I mean by that is I’ve gone from walking in there, as I said, as an eye-rolling skeptic to evolving to curious. And frankly, now I’m—

Angus: I’m here for it.

Pete: —pissed off. I mean, I’ve lost three drones, almost four. And seen things, experienced things that not only don’t make sense to me personally, but there are two physicists on the cast. I’ve been watching them for years and when they become speechless, tongue-tied—you know, that’s interesting. So I have no shortage of stories about my six years working there. But when asked, “So what’s going on at Skinwalker Ranch?” I have no idea. I have no idea.

Angus: Yeah.

Pete: The one theory—and it’s just that, a theory; you could even say it’s more of a wild-ass guess—let me see if I can back into this. From the first couple of hours, I was chatting to them about how we could work together. I asked about digital assets—this is a 512-acre property. Hey, I’m an old metes and bounds guy. What assets do you have digitally or even in print? And as most clients still respond with, “Not much, we don’t know what we have.” And I just said, look, well then that’s where we start. Let’s establish a single source of truth and get the ranch mapped.

Angus: So you were doing cadastral work out there?

Pete: Technically, no, because I can’t—I’m not a licensed surveyor. I said, “Let’s fly lidar of the whole place. Let’s fly photogrammetry of the whole place.” I have since then. And that has become the base map; that has become a GIS, if you will, really. So that as things occur or things need to be logged or what have you, now we have a sense of where. It’s my favorite tagline, which is Esri’s genius, which is the science of where. Where matters a lot for a lot of reasons that we measurement professionals know, but it also matters in an investigation like what’s going on at Skinwalker Ranch. It changes the narrative from, “Well, something odd happened over there or somewhere,” to, “No, it happened right there,” with RTK GPS precision.

Angus: Well, and then you can start looking at alignments over time and spatial relationships. Parenthetically, I talked with a gentleman named Jeff Wilson about crop circles and decades of careful work there and a lot of GPS location. To my knowledge, he’s the first one that was able to show that crop circles which had appeared over many years could be found after the fact to fall into very precise alignments covering hundreds of miles. But it was over several years or even decades that these align. And that’s another example of something that would be—I mean, it could be faked or hoaxed, but who would have any interest in doing that?

Why humans? But anyway, to talk about Skinwalker, just to condense it overmuch: this is an area of the world where very strange shit seems to happen repeatedly, regularly, almost predictably. And the closer you look, the weirder it is. You’ve got UFO sightings, you’ve got what looks like magic, monsters, portals, and it just seems to keep happening and almost be susceptible to study. Am I getting the gist of it? You’re trying to actually express how weird it is, but is that part of it—it’s just that it keeps happening? And the closer you look, the weirder it gets?

Pete: Yeah. My first thought is this: this place has been studied by the federal government. This goes back decades. So the federal government had a black program trying to figure out what was going on on this property—I think it was in the nineties, forgive me. Devoted watchers and fans out there are going to be shocked that I don’t have these facts memorized—it’s not what I do. But really, a federal government black program that nobody can talk about. Nobody will talk about. All the results of that research are locked up. Okay, that’s interesting. It is a hard place to describe.

The owner, my friend Brandon Fugal, describes it as the most studied paranormal site on earth. And I’m pretty sure that’s accurate because he’s another guy who is not prone to bullshit. Again, I wouldn’t be a part of the work otherwise. So to put my money where my mouth is, I was talking about this theory—and again, I’ll preface this: this is purely theoretical; I am so under-qualified to even put this out in the ether—but because it’s interesting to other folks, I don’t mind bringing it up. In my world, my work there on the ranch is all measurement. It’s geospatial, it’s mapping, it’s modeling, it’s surveying, it’s what’s where and how things are changing. Anyway, at the heart of that is GPS, and GPS does not behave on Skinwalker Ranch. It never has.

Angus: Got a poltergeist out there.

Pete: And we’re talking regardless of device—whether it’s the simple nav system on a smartphone to the RTK/GNSS gear that I’m using, the GPS navigational systems in a helicopter—FAA-certified aircraft—to the GPS on my drones. You name it. GPS at one moment, one day, will work absolutely fine. And then there have been multiple instances where, “Hey, check this out—the GPS says I’m in space,” or “The GPS says the helicopter is 60 miles from where we actually are.” I mean, crazy stuff. And for me—this technology is at the center of how I make my living—that is the white-whale part. I have gone from skepticism to curiosity to anger to “I need to know what’s going on here,” because there are a lot of people who write me checks who are depending on this data being accurate and precise. And if that’s now off the table, I need to understand why. And so, another long preamble, but the theory—and I hope you’re sitting down—is: well, what could throw GPS off?

And also add: we’ve seen some crazy stuff in the point cloud data, whether it’s from terrestrial lidar, drone-based lidar, SLAM lidar—impossible stuff like returns in the sky at three, four, five times beyond the range of the device; returns underground that have geometry. I mean, crazy stuff. How is this possible? It’s the elephant-in-the-room million-dollar question. Well, the theory that’s being kicked around is: what makes GPS work? I remember an old surveyor teaching me this long ago: at the heart of what makes GPS work is a really accurate clock—the measurement of time. The more accurate the clock, the more accurate you can measure time, the more precise location you’re going to get—and typically the more expensive the sensors. So I said that to the folks at the ranch some time ago, and it’s the one time where both physicists were speechless.

And one of them said, “Well, what if time doesn’t behave? What if whatever the anomaly or anomalies are here on this property are time-related?” And of course my head exploded. That’s beyond my capability to comprehend, much less understand. Anyway, they started going through the list. “Well, if time was compressed or stretched, that would explain the lidar. That would explain GPS not knowing where it is,” because these are all time-of-flight sensors—the key technology therein is a clock, is how time is measured. Batteries will go dead—and this has happened with cell phones, with the production company, with camera gear, audio gear—you know, we go out to do a scene and everything’s at 100%, then in two minutes, half a dozen things are at zero. Get your head around that. So why am I still working at the ranch? That’s my answer.

Angus: Pete, you’re providing me an incredible moment as we speak. I’m interested in this stuff. I’ve read a lot about Skinwalker Ranch and the paranormal generally—I’m a fanboy. And now I have a technical expert who I know personally is truthful—who’s not sensationalizing your experience—and just you, a sober expert who knows how to get a day’s work done in a credible manner—just you telling me that “I can’t make GPS work on this dang ranch.” That is so meaningful to me. That really hits me in the feels. Thank you. Thank you for relating that. It’s super valuable information.

Pete: Yeah. And it makes me want to send up a flare to every land surveyor out there—come to the ranch and see for yourself and let’s get to the bottom of this. But sadly, it’s not my property. Frankly, it’s a dangerous place. I’ve seen people have serious medical issues that no one can explain.

Angus: That could be time related too, right? Our body works in rhythms.

Pete: Very true. Very true. But it’s not my call. Do I keep suggesting: if we could bring in some licensed professionals with gear from 10, 20 different vendors and let’s do a really tightly controlled scientific experiment and see what happens? The trouble is—there we go again—entertainment versus science. They don’t make good bedfellows. So what I’m hoping is that this might happen off season—meaning when we’re not shooting. The other thing that’s really great about Brandon and the team there at the ranch is that the work goes on whether Prometheus is there filming or not. I’ve been there off season several times and done important stuff. And this is on my list to add to that list.

Angus: So two questions occur to me. One is: have you tried doing any optical surveying?

Pete: Not yet. Yeah, elephant in the room. Not yet.

Angus: That’d be a nice comparison. And then the second question is: you’ve been there quite a bit and you’ve obviously got stories. Could you pick out a war story for us? Say we’d met in a bar at a convention—if you’re trying to convey how strange it can be out there, how remarkable—what’s the story you lead with?

Pete: I’ll give you two, and I’ll try to make them both brief. My very first visit there—six years ago, something like that—was during the filming of the second season. I had a VTOL fixed-wing drone in the air flying a photogrammetry mission of the ranch. Pretty straightforward. The company doesn’t exist anymore—sadly, COVID was the end of that small business—but everything was going great. We were troubleshooting. I had flown the same mission three or four times and finally figured out what the issue was. So on the fourth time I put the drone up and the drone was doing what it had done three times before—everything is going perfectly—and then all of a sudden I’ve got a dead stick—no response to the remote controller in my hand. Which is disturbing when you’ve got $30,000 of your own money up in the air. And I could do nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The drone went into an orbiting pattern, fortunately, but unfortunately I couldn’t get it out of the orbit. The battery died and it fell out of the sky. Well, we looked at the data and this portion of the ranch—with the exception of what’s known as the Mesa; it’s about a 150-foot, 30–45 degree slope going up to the top of this Mesa—with the exception of that, the rest of the property is pretty flat. Well, the photogrammetric data had this 30-degree bend in it, which is impossible. I’d never seen that before. I’ve been doing photogrammetry for decades. At the time it made no sense at all and remained a mystery until we started talking about GPS, which of course controlled the drone and all the photos are geotagged based on the satellites, etc. So that was the first thing that happened to me that—okay, now I’m pissed off and I want to understand what has happened.

Second thing, clear in my mind: I was in the helicopter—we were doing a lot of scanning from the helicopter. Unusual stuff—stuff that my fellow reality capture folks might laugh at—like I was using a SLAM scanner, hanging out the door, standing on the skid of a helicopter and getting good data, by the way. It worked and continues to work. Anyway, I’m doing this and we’re going by the Mesa eastbound, and a bright white light about the size of a tennis ball went zipping past us at a much greater speed—right in front of me. Couldn’t have been 10–12 feet from me outside the helicopter. I start squealing on the intercom saying, “Something just went by me,” and unfortunately nobody else saw it, but the cameras caught it. So it was justified, and that was crazy. Short story: have I seen bright lights in the sky in broad daylight on that place? Yeah, I have. Crazy. Can’t explain.

Angus: Famous orb. Pete, I try to keep these conversations to about an hour and I’ve taken quite a bit of valuable time. Before we part, I really want to express that this has been fantastic—a super privilege to speak with someone who’s a qualified and rational scientific observer of phenomena that I know are strange. You keep a nice balance between astonishment and rationality and thank you for doing that for us. Where should people go if they want to know more about you or your work?

Pete: I guess my website, VCTOlabs.com. Perpetually looking for the next great story, which I know geospatial technology can augment. Fortunately, that business model has been proven true and, as you and I both know—especially on the land surveying side—there’s such a shortage of talent and so many of the old guard—you know, you and I approaching retirement, whatever—is… if land surveying and geospatial technology for paranormal investigations are a way to excite some young people to get them to lean in, to do what we do, so be it. That part of what I do feels really good when some young kid will come up and say, “Can you tell me how to learn—how do I get into doing what you do?” That’s the really good stuff.

Angus: Great. And I want to put crop circles on your radar.

Pete: Haha, you have!

Angus: Thanks for listening to this 20th episode of Everything is Somewhere. Twenty episodes seems like a significant milestone for the show, at least to me. During the time it took to produce these, I have survived a fairly serious stroke, had all sorts of reversals while learning how to host and edit a podcast, and gained an at least cursory knowledge about several fascinating topics that were new to me in order to keep up with guests who are experts in a great variety of fields. I feel like it all came together in this episode.

Pete Kelsey is a figure from the geospatial world that I really admire, especially since he has credible expertise in advanced geospatial technology, and since I know from personal experience that he is a rational and level-headed observer, and since he’s a very nice person and fun to talk to. That Pete could speak so knowledgably about the fringe topics that I love, including my girlfriend Patty, was just icing on the cake. Let’s see, what else is going on at Everything is Somewhere headquarters? Well, I received some very nice feedback from Francis Miller, who writes:

“Hello Angus, a quick note to say how much I have enjoyed many episodes of your podcast and especially the ones with Jenny Quillian and Ryan Singer. I have been interested in Christopher Alexander’s ideas for many years and share the honor with him of being an alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge. I have recently written an article titled, The Architecture of Coherence: Applying Christopher Alexander’s Levels of Scale Concept to Non-Fiction Books, which you might find of interest.” That’s at www.francismiller.com/the-architecture-of-coherence. Kind regards, Francis.

Thank you, Francis. Check out his website—I found it interesting—that’s with an I, Miller like it sounds, all one word, dot com.

If you’re enjoying Everything is Somewhere—or even if you’re not, I suppose—I’d love to hear from you. You can send me feedback directly at angusstocking at gmail.com or anonymously. Finally, if LinkedIn is your thing, I hope that you will reach out and connect with me. I’m easy to find.

Also, if you’re enjoying the podcast, be sure to check out amerisurv.com/podcast/ to get show notes, transcripts and links and other information. This episode in particular generated a lot of great links and a great transcript. Also, if you enjoyed this episode, I hope that you will subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify or rate the podcast or the episode. And if you’re feeling especially magnanimous, leave a review. It really helps us a lot. Once you’ve subscribed, you’ll receive automated notifications of new episodes. That’s it for this episode. Stay safe out there, and I hope to visit again soon.

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