Improved instrumental techniques, including isotopic analysis, applicable to the characterization of unusual materials with potential relevance to aerospace forensics
Garry P. Nolan · Jacques F. Vallee · Sizun Jiang · Larry G. Lemke
Summary and citation · read the original at the source · none found
In one page
Garry Nolan, Jacques Vallée, Sizun Jiang and Larry Lemke wrote the paper the field had been missing: not a claim about what a strange material is, but a published, peer-reviewed method for finding out. The first part surveys modern mass spectrometry and the sharp gains Silicon Valley instrument builders and biomedical laboratories have made in the last decade — machines that can map which atoms, and which isotopes of those atoms, sit at which point in a sample, down to a scale far below a human hair. The authors’ point is that these instruments were built for tissue but work on anything. The second and third parts put them to work on the simplest case, a solid sample, and compare the results with isotopic analysis done years earlier, then set those measurements against what the witnesses and field investigators of a well-documented, still-unexplained incident actually described. The lesson they draw is general: this is how you do aerospace forensics on a material nobody can yet identify.
Why it matters hereChapter 1 is the evidence ladder, and this paper is a rung of it built in public — instrument, chain of custody, comparison against a prior analysis, published in an aerospace journal with referees. Chapter 11 and chapter 9 both depend on being able to say what an unusual material is actually made of, atom by atom and isotope by isotope, before anyone argues about where it came from.
What it claims
01The problem the paper sets itself is stated plainly: the precise characterization, analysis and eventual identification of unknown materials arises in many fields and takes many forms depending on the substances under study. Method comes first; identification comes after.Abstract, opening sentence, Progress in Aerospace Sciences 128, 100788
Published and peer-reviewed02Part one reviews the common modern mass spectrometry techniques applied to such studies, together with the improvements made to those technologies in recent years by Silicon Valley companies and other teams working on precise biomedical research.Abstract, part one, Progress in Aerospace Sciences 128, 100788
Published and peer-reviewed03The instruments were developed for sensitive biological work, but the authors state that they are applicable to a wide range of non-biological materials — which is what makes a biomedical imaging laboratory a credible place to characterize a fragment of unknown metal.Abstract, part one, Progress in Aerospace Sciences 128, 100788
Published and peer-reviewed04Parts two and three report practical experience applying these techniques to the simplest case — solid materials rather than liquids or gases — and compare the results against isotopic analysis undertaken previously on the same material.Abstract, parts two and three, Progress in Aerospace Sciences 128, 100788
Published and peer-reviewed05The authors then correlate that isotopic analysis with the patterns described by the witnesses of a well-documented, still-unexplained incident, initially thought to be of aerospace origin, which gave rise to a deposit of unknown material, and with the accounts of the investigators who handled it in the field and in the laboratory.Abstract, part three, Progress in Aerospace Sciences 128, 100788
Published and peer-reviewed06The closing claim is the general one: the lessons of this specific investigation apply to a wider range of issues in the reverse engineering of complex, esoteric materials, and in aerospace forensics as a discipline.Abstract, closing sentence, Progress in Aerospace Sciences 128, 100788
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paerosci.2021.100788LICENCE. Published as Progress in Aerospace Sciences volume 128, article 100788, issue dated 1 January 2022 and available online 9 December 2021. The open-access licence was checked directly on 2026-09-08 as the brief required: Crossref lists only Elsevier’s text-and-data-mining and article-sharing policy links, Unpaywall returns is_oa false with oa_status closed, an empty oa_locations list and has_repository_copy false, and OpenAlex agrees — closed, licence null, no repository full text. No Creative Commons statement exists on the article, so this page reproduces none of it and stays summary-only. SOURCE. The publisher’s full text is paywalled and ScienceDirect returned HTTP 403 to every fetch attempt. The summary and claims below are written from the authors’ own published abstract, read on 2026-09-08 from the Jiang Lab publications page at sizunjianglab.com, together with the Crossref and Unpaywall bibliographic records; locators therefore cite the abstract and the article’s own three-part structure rather than interior pages, and the complete paper is at the source. AUTHOR AFFILIATIONS, as recorded in the article metadata: Garry P. Nolan (corresponding author) and Sizun Jiang, Department of Pathology, Stanford University; Jacques F. Vallee, Documatica Research LLC, San Francisco; Larry G. Lemke, NASA Ames Research Center, retired. ONE ATTRIBUTION NOTE. The abstract does not name the incident whose material is analysed; secondary reporting identifies it as the December 1977 Council Bluffs, Iowa case, and that identification is reported here as secondary, not as the paper’s own words. RELATED PAGES. Vallée is also an author on the Defense Intelligence Reference Document on anomalous field effects on human biological tissues at /library/stm-82735ac79c; the isotopic-signature literature this page sits beside is at /library/stm-8d25007d87; and the materials-science bottleneck the site returns to is stated in the Pais superconductor filing at /library/stm-ac45e5fd5e.
How to cite it
Garry P. Nolan, Jacques F. Vallee, Sizun Jiang, Larry G. Lemke (2022) Improved instrumental techniques, including isotopic analysis, applicable to the characterization of unusual materials with potential relevance to aerospace forensics. doi:10.1016/j.paerosci.2021.100788
Where it sits in the curriculum
The evidence ladderGravity control and superconductorsPlasmoids, charge clusters and the orbs