International UFO Bureau does its own research

Perhaps the worst research paper of all time was self-published this month by the International UFO Bureau. Please attend...

This month we are greeted with a new paper that purports to have found the same “frequency” expressed in both of two UFO videos that were found online, and conjectures that this is consistent with some new science-fiction propulsion system. It treats this discovery of said frequency as a major new discovery giving even more support to the belief that online videos are evidence of alien visitation.

Melissa Madrigal and her alien friends

The paper is called “Cross-Case Frequency Analysis: 5.04 Hz Emissions Observed in Dual UAP Events” and it was written by a Melissa Madrigal, who identifies herself as the Director of Research for the International UFO Bureau. You can get a copy here.

Who are these folks?

• The International UFO Bureau (IUFOB) has been around since 1957. It is a nonprofit and its members are UFOlogists from all backgrounds. It is independent, lacking any connections to academic or research institutions.

• Melissa Madrigal provides little verifiable background information. She appears to be a spiritualist who seeks “to uncover the hidden connections between human biology, consciousness, and the greater mysteries of the universe.” Her LinkedIn page says she has “a background rooted outside traditional institutions” which we can assume means she has no educational or professional background relevant to researching the sciences or technologies discussed in her paper. Her claimed role as Director is Research is not corroborated anywhere on the IUFOB website that I could find, and she has no entries at all at either Google Scholar or Academia.edu.

Her paper does not have a formal abstract but this is a snip from its opening page:

This report presents a comparative technical breakdown of two independently captured UAP events: One filmed offshore in the Gulf of Mexico; The other recorded from the Florida coast by a civilian witness. Despite being separated by time and distance, both display the same anomalous emission frequency: 5.04 Hz, a signature previously linked to theorized plasma or electromagnetic propulsion.

That raised so many red flags for me that I felt a deeper dive into this paper was warranted. So I read the whole damn thing, so you don’t have to, and marked it up extensively. Here is my review of Madrigal’s work:

Lack of any peer review or institutional validation

Although she leans heavily on her statement that her paper was reviewed by two anonymous fellow IUFOB UFOlogists, that is not how peer review works. Her paper has not been submitted for publication anywhere (it’s not formatted anything like an academic paper), and neither she nor the IUFOB have any academic affiliation (at least not that they’ve mentioned).

Thus I categorize the paper along with so many that I see: It was developed in isolation, without expert collaboration, and without any feedback from subject matter experts. This is not how research scientists work; it is how crackpots work.

The entire paper is based on a fundamental error

Her basic claim is that the objects seen in the videos — basically just lights in the sky at night — are faintly pulsing at 5.04 Hz. This is not detectable to the viewer, but she claims to have found this cycle in their light output. She also says a 5.04 Hz audio tone is also heard.

Almost certainly, neither of these frequencies are actually present. We can determine this because the videos were shot on smartphones, uploaded to social media, underwent the social media servers’ post processing including high compression and reduction of dynamic range, and then downloaded and viewed by Madrigal:

• 5.04 Hz audio: Smartphone microphones have a low cutoff frequency that’s well above 5 Hz. Of course this varies by model but it’s always going to be at least 20 Hz. The phone’s analog-to-digital converter also eliminates non-audible frequencies. If there is any such tone actually in these videos, its source is not the original audio that was recorded, but more likely the post processing done by the social media company. TikTok and Instagram, for example, resample the audio at 64kbps to prioritize speech, and low frequencies are eliminated.

• 5.04 Hz variation in light output: A smartphone typically records at either 24, 25, 30, or 60 frames per second, so a 5 Hz pulsing of light could certainly be recorded, but there is no way to justify a claim of two more significant digits (5.04). However, the aggressive compression algorithms used by the social media companies are known to introduce such patterns. Compression artifacts usually occur in the 5-10 Hz range, and were introduced into these videos because they are added to all social media videos. Madrigal does not address this in her paper, demonstrating an unacceptable lack of domain expertise.

In summary, the fact that these videos came from social media is a sufficient explanation for everything she found that she considers to be consistent with alien spacecraft.

No chain of custody on these videos

These are random videos found on social media. They were not taken under controlled conditions, and we have no idea of all the places they might have been before and after being loaded onto social media. We have no reason to believe they may or may not have been manipulated. Madrigal never mentions attempts to obtain the original recordings. This weakness alone makes them essentially useless as evidence of anything.

Misunderstanding of infrared

In a section titled Infrared Mapping Analysis, Madrigal discusses the “Consistent heat signature” emitted by one of the objects:

Across multiple frames, the object presents a strong, centralized thermal emission, indicating an active light or heat source.

These were smartphone videos. They were not taken with thermal cameras. There is no thermal data present in these videos, infrared or otherwise.

Invalid use of fast Fourier transforms

Madrigal writes “Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analysis confirms that a dominant emission frequency of 5.04 Hz is present in the signal.” An FFT is an algorithm to display a frequency’s change over time. In principle it’s an entirely appropriate tool for Madrigal to have used — if she had had the original material.

Applying FFTs to these social media videos was fundamentally flawed because typical smartphones record at 24-60 fps. According to the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, the sampling rate must be at least twice the highest frequency to avoid aliasing. With frame rates of 24-60 fps, the maximum detectable frequency would be 12-30 Hz. However, 5.04 Hz falls well below this range, making it theoretically detectable — but that's where the technical problems begin.

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram compress uploaded content, introducing artificial frequency artifacts and removing low-frequency information to reduce file sizes. They apply high-pass filtering that eliminates frequencies below 20-30 Hz to reduce bandwidth requirements. Compression also creates false high frequency signals and “blocking” artifacts that generate artificial frequency patterns in the 4-7 Hz range — exactly where the claimed 5.04 Hz signal appears.

Smartphone cameras and their processing pipelines are not designed for precise frequency analysis of light emissions. The automatic gain control, noise cancellation, and other filtering applied by smartphones would likely eliminate or distort genuine 5.04 Hz signals before they could be captured. The FFT analysis becomes meaningless when applied to heavily processed, compressed video data that has undergone multiple stages of digital manipulation — fundamentally altering the frequency domain representation of the original signal.

Lack of windowing

Windowing functions are an important part of FFT analysis, and in this case was essential to reduce spectral leakage. Madrigal made no mention of this in her paper, again betraying an unacceptable lack of domain expertise.

Fabricated references

Madrigal bases her claim that 5.04 Hz is consistent with the propulsion system of an alien spacecraft upon “a ResearchGate study titled ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and Harmonic Frequency Analysis.’” No such paper exists.

Lack of citations

The paper is full of assertions about exotic propulsion systems and their associations with 5.04 Hz and other things — never once giving a reference. For example, Madrigal claims “Alignment with Military UAP Observations & FOIA-Backed Patterns” with no supporting reference or citation at all.

Fabricated claims of a frequency-propulsion relationship

Madrigal repeatedly asserts that 5.04 Hz matches plasma propulsion frequencies. Plasma propulsion engines are a real thing, but there is nothing remotely 5.04 Hz about them. Two types, the Hall thruster and the magnetoplasmadynamic thruster, operate at 1-60 MHz and at 10-10,000 Hz respectively. No known propulsion technology is associated with a frequency of 5.04 Hz.

Confirmation bias

Madrigal consistently interprets all her findings, valid and invalid, as supporting her alien spacecraft hypothesis; while dismissing alternate explanations without even bothering to investigate them.

False Precision

Claiming to detect frequencies to the hundredth of a hertz (5.04 Hz) from low-resolution video analysis is scientifically implausible.

Other failings to adhere to the scientific method

• No control group videos. A proper analysis would have included the same analysis applied to similar videos of known objects.

• Researcher bias. Madrigal and her associates are professional believers in alien visitation, with very clear preconceptions. There was no scientific objectivity here, nor any disclosure of conflicts of interest (which are obvious).

• Data integrity problems. The lack of any chain of custody for the videos, and the lack of any verification of authenticity, means the entire paper analyzed worthless source material.

• No standards for what constitutes a match. If Madrigal had any threshold for statistical significance, she never mentioned it. Are the patterns she claims to have found statistically significant, or could they have occurred by chance? No methodology was given to make these determinations.

If the UFOlogists wish to gain acceptance of their beliefs from the scientific community, they are going to have to do far better than this utter sadness of a paper. It has no peer review, improper methodology, lacks any verifiable data, and fails to adhere to scientific standards. And, consequently, comes to the exact conclusion its author set out to justify:

Together, these two events form more than anomaly. They suggest architecture. A system displaying repeatable patterns, trans-domain behavior, and controlled emissions… This appears to be an engineered platform.

To all UFOlogists: please do better.