At the start of this season (six) of Skinwalker Ranch, they posted a segment on the recovery and analysis of some small pieces of what look like ceramic tile.
They think this came from an alien artifact buried deep underground, but it seems to be something an archeologist fished out of the spoils pit, so lacks a clear chain of custody to prove its initial location.
They take the samples to Dr Brian Patchett at Utah Valley University, and he put it in a SEM.
They do a variety of scans, the first one displayed shows the artificial-seeming texture lines on the tile.
They then show an animation that seems to show some holes getting bigger.
They then use the time-tested diagnostic technique of "turning it off and on again", and get a new image (on the left here)
The holes seem to vanish.
Dr Patchett says: "I've never seen anything that is capable of doing this. This stuff is fixing itself."
Dr Taylor says "Yes, it's healing, that's exactly right"
So I asked ChatGPT and it suggested a couple of possibilities. First there the phenomenon of "charging artifacts" where electrons build up on the surface, kind of like static electricity, and this messes with the image.
Secondly, note the 5.0 kV on the left and 10 kV on the right. Higher voltages penetrate samples more, so can reveal sub-surface details, making the same area look very different. Like in this example:
Wanting some human input, I posted this on X
Source: https://x.com/MickWest/status/1955058756888432830
I quickly got a reply from Arnold Kruize, an SEM expert who used to work for Tescan (the SEM used here). He gave a detailed analysis of what is going on, and gave me permission to share here:
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Because this hits right into my area of expertise (25 years) I thought I might give you a bit more insight into what is shown here. I now work for JEOL and in the past also worked for and with Tescan (the SEM brand in this video)
At first, he loads two samples on carbon tabs, and the material seems to be ceramic.
Then he images these samples at 20kV, using the Secondary Electron Detector.
Ceramics are mostly insulators and don't conduct electricity well. In a SEM this will cause problems, and the higher the voltage used the heavier the effect: The electrons that are used for imaging can't escape in a normal way, causing local charging and discharging effects. These effects usually result in many different kind of imaging artifacts. One of them is this rectangular patterns 3:19 into the video. "it doesn't look like mother nature" someone says. But of course this looks weird if you don't know what really happens when you are looking with improper conditions or not well prepared samples.
At around 3:40 the holes seem to get bigger, but this is just the charging effect, also at 3:46 this is exactly what happens in the top right of the image. You can see something light up and get darker. The longer the same area is bombarded the samples gets charged up, creating a local electric field which charges and discharges. Someone asks isn't this just the beam doing this? Well, it's just exactly that! In combination with an insulating sample.
Then they "switch it off" , but at 4:09 it is still in external scan mode. The external scan is used for the EDAX system that's attached to this microscope. This system identifies the chemical composition of what you're looking at.
Now... if you are looking at "alien material", the first you would like to know is what it is made of, wouldn't you?
Well, this is what the EDAX system is for. The only reason not to show this is because they would probably reveal that the material is something like alumina or some other very common ceramic material. Because the system is coming out of external scan mode I guess they just finished with the EDAX measurement and concluded it's nothing special.
Then they compare two images. One taken at 10kV and one at 5kV. Indeed they are different. But the magnification is really low for a SEM, and the penetration depth difference of 5kV vs 10kV is not the reason for the differences in the images. It's all charging effects. I guess they did a relatively long EDAX analysis, at 10kV (you generally use a higher voltage to excite more electrons and get a better spectrum) , while heavily bombarding the sample, after which the charging effect of the sample is in full effect.
Any experienced microscopist would not bother looking at this sample this way when the charging effect is so heavy. Standard practice would be to go to Lowvac mode (20-100Pa pressure) to eliminate charging, or simply coat the sample with a conductive layer to avoid charging effects. Using 1kV is another trick that can be used to reduce charging effects, but the Tescan Vega system is not so good at imaging under these conditions, and you can't use the EDAX at 1kV. Also, on these systems 1kV is not for novice users, because this requires heavy manual adjustment of this microscope.
Also, Dr. Patchett seems to be an expert in a different field of Physics and I don't see any track record on electron microscopy. What I see in this video is a novice user improperly analyzing a non conductive sample, making many beginner's mistakes.
and a follow up when I asked why there was such a pronounced difference in the side-by-side image if it was just charging artifacts:
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The side by side images are indeed from the same area. The change in voltage has some effect, but I believe extensive scanning on the same area completely charged up the parts that are bright; they discharge, which will saturate the secondary electron detector. The dark part is simply dark because it has not charged up that much and not releasing so many electrons. How exactly the charge buildup has distributed is hard to say, but the charge effect is really severe.
Any somewhat experienced microscopists would notice and not base any conclusions on this. It is just really bad data. Charging is SEM users biggest foe and learning to identify it is given on a training on day 1.
Also locally heavily charging samples will create its own electric field and deform the image, and in time make it even move or change shape. The effect can even be so severe you can use a charging sample as an electron mirror. I have once seen the polepiece of the microscope that way.
Proper way to do this is to apply a 5-10nm carbon coating. Then the charging is gone, and nothing will move. But will make for less attractive TV eh.....
I am on vacation now, but next month back in the office and in the lab. Can stick a random piece of quartz or alumina in the SEM and likely reproduce these results. If only they showed the EDX spectrum I would have known what kind of ceramic they were looking at. EDX provides the microscopist with the chemical composition within weight1%.
I also got
a useful response from "MinuteofZombie", on X:
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I watched this carefully kind of expecting to "gotcha"
@MickWest
on this clip.
I've studied a lot of SEM techniques and ordered SEM as NDI of ceramics, metals and composites.
Sad to say this clip is very dishonest about what's going on. It's hard to believe the physicist operating the instrument doesn't understand what's happening:
A very widely understood effect of SEM at accelerating voltages near or above 10 kV on insulating materials is that the electrons you're firing at the material stick around and build an electric charge. Over the course of several seconds or a few minutes, a local electric field forms in the region that you're imaging and this begins to deflect incoming electrons, causing the imaging brightness in the region to drop, causing black spots to grow in size.
This is a well known beam-sample interaction artifact in SEM, especially with insulative materials like ceramics. The fact that it goes away after you turn the beam off is exactly what you expect because the charge held in the material dissipates. This doesn't happen at lower voltages because the electrons don't penetrate as deeply and can dissipate along the surface more rapidly. Porous material has higher capacitance in the bulk.
The physicist saying "oh my God it's healing itself" is quite disappointing. It is hard to imagine he has that little familiarity with SEM so as to interpret that this way.
@BrandonFugal
I'm not a habitual SWR shit poster but this is definitely a party foul.
Then I asked " do you think it is more the result of charging artifacts than subsurface penetration from the different accelerating voltage?"
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It's a beam-sample charging artifact, but it's caused in part by the greater penetration of higher beam voltage. It probably does imply that this sample is porous in the bulk. There's a lot to say about the appearance of natural or industrial SiC in that part of Utah. It could be a natural moissanite formation but that's quite rare in North America. Drilling additives and runoff could be in the area, as there's lots of nearby drilling. A good SEM characterization technician would know how to discriminate— the type of porosity, and distribution of metals and oxides in the pores, is quite different between the two, even if we're considering exotic manufacturing, the internal structure of an NHI ceramic will arguably look even less like natural SiC. Wouldn't be hard for an honest assessment to quickly and easily determine natural or industrial origin.
I'm going back to this clip from Episode 1 because it's actually something that happened much later in the season - the latest episode repeats it. I was a little confused as to why they were showing the same segment twice, but it seems to be a "flashforward" to give people something more amazing to look forward to while they do the usual season of rocket experiments and radio interference.
Ultimately, though, it seems like they just found some normal bits of ceramic and somehow fooled themselves (with bad analysis) into thinking it was a "self-healing" material (and hence of alien origin).
The fact that they did not consult with other SEM experts seems typical for the show. The producers are uninterested in solving mysteries, as that's not their job. The SWR team seems willing to trust the opinions of a few people who really should know better but seemingly don't.
