Davenport introduces a proposal he presented at the recent MUFON Symposium. He explains how passive radar technology, which requires no transmitter of its own, can detect objects in the atmosphere by measuring reflections of existing commercial radio and television signals. Using multiple time-synchronized receivers and GPS-accurate clocks, the system can triangulate the location, velocity, and acceleration of any reflecting object overhead.
Davenport reveals that the U.S. Navy already operates a similar system called the Fence, a line of transmitters across the southern United States capable of detecting objects as small as a grapefruit at 15,000 nautical miles. He proposes that civilians build their own receiver network using the Navy's transmitted signal at 216.98 megahertz to independently detect and track unidentified objects in the sky.
Key Moments
Something flew across America on the Fourth of July: Davenport tells Art the National UFO Reporting Center has logged a couple dozen reports indicating something appeared to traverse the entire United States on the evening of July 4, 2004, an apparent flap that's hard to formally document but qualitatively unmistakable.
Witness Jim's silent black triangle over Seattle's I-5: Live witness Jim describes a perfect, silent, gray-paneled black triangle gliding north up the Interstate 5 corridor near downtown Seattle, with three dim white lights and a fluid 'swimming pool at night' interior, which he matches to the 1990 Belgian wave that NATO scrambled F-16s to intercept.
The 'bombshell' idea: borrow meteor-burst tech to find UFOs: Davenport recounts that as a 1980s venture investor he saw a Seattle company bouncing radio signals off the ionized trails of meteors, which led to his epiphany: if you can detect a meteor that way, you can detect anything else in the atmosphere that reflects radio waves, including unknown craft.
Passive radar explained for civilian UFO hunting: Davenport walks through the difference between traditional active radar and modern passive radar, which transmits nothing of its own and instead listens for the thousands of FM, TV and other transmissions in the ether bouncing off objects in the atmosphere, processed through heavy computation.
What if UFOs use a stealth cover? Add quantum sensors: Responding to a listener, Davenport stacks complementary passive sensors - thermal emission, sound, magnetic anomaly, chemical signatures - and points to emerging quantum-physics techniques used in optical astronomy as ways to spot craft that defeat conventional radar reflection.