Why:
Rabbit Holes Through Better Design

I wanted to treat these images as a gallery, the way I’d treat a night of concert photos with a bit of sourced context as well.* Other people took every one of them, with whatever happened to be pointed at the sky, from a Navy photographer’s 16mm camera over Utah in 1952 to a gunship crew filming their own screen with a phone nearly seventy years later because the recorder was down. Fine art? Arguable, but that’s what I see them as to a degree. Framable? Yea, but I don’t have that many frames.

The recent-ish release of these files was hard to love in their original form, spread across six releases and hundreds of PDFs, and questionable UI. So I built the version I wanted, every release laid out like a vertical filmstrip, video and images first, and documents right there alongside them. Everything links straight back to the original file, and the only thing here that’s mine is the UI design and architecture and some personal curation.

I really love the idea of serious people documenting all of this with a straight face, maybe with a skinny tie, short sleeve button-downs, and horn-rims, and that still, nobody has fully explained a lot of it. It’s an old interest of mine. Back in school I wrote an argumentative essay for the possibility that something’s out there, citing Project Blue Book and J. Allen Hynek, before anyone had confirmed a single planet around another star. I made my case with total conviction at the time and was awarded a stellar C+.

These days I spend a lot of nights photographing bands in dark rooms, so I know a blurry light when I see one. I edit most of those shows in black and white, which is why every thumbnail here is gray. Plenty of the footage never had color to begin with, since infrared cameras only record heat. Wouldn’t have it any other way. If anyone’s ever going to get a sharp, well-exposed photo of one of these, I’d like it to be me one day.

What’s next? Hopefully another punk trio or a darkwave duo, and maybe a few cryptids.

Listen. Aliens? Who knows, but I’m here for the weird, anomalous, and most likely explainable. For the rest, consider this your invitation to lose a few evenings down this rabbit hole yourself.