Bars: bearing capacity per soil · red line: applied pressure
Reports of "UFO landing marks" — circular depressions, often in a tripod pattern — are a forensically testable claim, not just a photograph. Ground bearing pressure is simple physics: pressure equals force divided by contact area, and every soil type has a well-documented bearing capacity in kilopascals before it yields and sinks. This simulator lets you set a claimed craft mass, the footpad contact area of its landing gear and the soil type at the site, then computes the real pressure each pad would exert and compares it against that soil's bearing capacity and predicted elastic settlement depth. The result is a genuine consistency check: many claimed marks turn out to require either an implausibly light craft (pointing at livestock, equipment stands or natural subsidence) or a pressure so far beyond what the soil could bear that a real craft of that mass would have sunk far deeper than the shallow depression actually measured.