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Fundamental AcousticsLaboratories / Est. 1958
Aerial view of the Calder Ridge Field Station and antenna fields

Private research foundation / Calder Ridge Field Station

A continuous record of signals that do not resolve quickly.

Fundamental Acoustics Laboratories studies persistent low-frequency signals in ground, water, atmosphere, and sky. Most candidates are rejected. A small number remain under formal review for years.

Research programsOpen Night WatchJoin Field Array
1958
Institute founded
1971
Calder Ridge record begins
31,240 average monthly
Field Array contributors
26
Public catalog entries
Institute brief

The Laboratories are built around one expensive habit: never stop recording.

The public record begins with a small Ohio field station in 1958 and becomes continuous at Calder Ridge in 1971. The institution is private and non-profit, funded through the Renner Endowment, private research grants, philanthropic support, and the Field Array contributor network.

The work is deliberately conservative. Detections enter the Persistent Signal Catalog only after ordinary explanations, instrument fault, local interference, and chance coincidence have been tested hard enough to be useful.

Institutional record

The proof is in the reports, offices, and open dockets.

FAL publishes the operating facts it can release: annual summaries, report IDs, access states, public staff records, recruiting dockets, and data products. The public site should read like an institution because the record is structured like one.

Annual report

FAL-AR-25

2026-03-28

The 2025 summary records the Laboratories' first full year with the modern public catalog, the expanded Field Array client, and the current Stratis triage pipeline operating together. The year was defined less by a single finding than by a change in scale: more of the old record became searchable, more public source records were cross-linked, and more candidates were rejected before consuming analyst time.

Recording
100% station uptime, excluding planned calibration windows
Archive
418 media items stabilized or indexed
Reserve
31 months at current burn
Policy
No funder review before release
Read 2025 report→
Accountability
Dr. Naomi V. Ellison

Director

Directorate correspondence routes through External Affairs and program review before staff interviews or record changes.

Research programs

One record, five disciplines

All research
TRPest. 1958

Terrestrial Resonance Program

Persistent low-frequency signals in the solid earth.

Program file
CASPest. 1969

Celestial & Aerial Signals Program

Persistent signals of apparent celestial or atmospheric origin.

Program file
PSCest. 1974

Persistent Signal Catalog

A standing record of anomalous detections, ours and the literature's.

Program file
DAIest. 2003

Distributed Analysis Initiative

Volunteer compute at the scale the work now requires.

Program file
FIGest. 1961

Field Instrumentation Group

The arrays, hydrophones, and detectors behind every measurement.

Program file
Facilities

A remote site with the useful absence of noise.

Calder Ridge is not designed as a campus showpiece. It is an instrument: distance, controlled access, quiet RF conditions, buried lines, and a staff trained to treat routine noise as an adversary.

Facilities overview

Long-baseline field arrays

Shielded ELF/VLF receivers, GPS-disciplined clocks, and low-noise feeds spread across a private rural tract.

Hydroacoustic record

Moored and suspended hydrophone systems for persistent signals in water, archive-matched against oceanic literature.

Analysis rooms and archive

A continuous record is only useful if it can be replayed, remeasured, and challenged decades after capture.

Public instruments

Night Watch puts the sky and the catalog in the same frame.

Browse bright-star data, constellation lines, catalog entries, and source-backed historical detections. The tool is built as a public instrument first, with room for future record layers only when they are ready for public release.

Open Night WatchSignal catalog
Catalog selection
FA-0447
The Calder Ridge carrier
FA-0688
The 1979 event
FA-0902
The calendar resonance
FA-1044
The quiet band
FA-1180
The March coincidences
Research notes

From the public scientific record

News and commentary
research

ASKAP J1745-5051 and the value of resolution

A long-period transient comparison source moved into the resolved column after optical, radio, and X-ray work tied it to an accreting white-dwarf binary.

Read note
release

Night Watch: the sky and the record, together

A public instrument for browsing the sky alongside catalogued detections and source-backed historical entries.

Read note
release

The Persistent Signal Catalog opens to the public

The Laboratories release a public subset of the standing anomaly record, with literature entries and FAL entries in one system.

Read note
research

What the NANOGrav background teaches a laboratory built on patience

A 15-year pulsar timing data set shows why slow, correlated signals require institutional memory.

Read note