Brandon Fugal

It's non-fissile in this predominant form but is radioactive enough to account for what the team found with GPR and (in the next episode) apparently have a hard time drilling into (depleted uranium is hard and used in armor-piercing ordnance).

Also, the large doses of ionizing radiation the team experienced are evidenced each time the ground is disturbed causing radon and other gaseous forms of radiation to escape into the local environment and cause burns, dizziness, nausea, etc. plus other electromagnetic anomalies.

This helps explain @travisstaylor1's exposure when he uncapped the well. The Navajos and Hopis knew the area had "something" wrong with it, so their curses actually bore resemblance to reality.

"I curse this land. Don't go near there because you'll get sick and die." (i.e. hallucinate due to dizziness, or see beams and balls of light that are actually pockets of radiation releasing into the atmosphere and ionizing pockets of air making them glow). Cherenkov radiation.

The point of radiation a mile above could indeed be due to a lensing/focusing effect of the ambient radiation being focused upward into the atmosphere due to the concave shape of the deposit below the ranch.

My intuitive guess without doing all the math is that the focal point above a concave (parabolic dish, like the Arecibo Observatory) area with diameter of 1,000 feet could be sufficiently high as to produce the measured effect above the ranch.

Battery drain and electronics issues can be explained by cathode degradation in LiON batteries and other components that suffer from various effects of ionizing radiation. Spacecraft systems have to be hardened against space radiation, so @History needs the same hardening.

My question to @BrandonFugal is whether the film crew also experienced technology anomalies and battery drains. The radiofrequency anomalies may also be related to ionizing radiation escaping the ground in large quantities and at various intervals.