The day after he received word he’d won another valuable grant from the US Navy to help America up its undersea exploration game—and a few days after meeting with Meta officials in London about their plan to lay $10 billion worth of fiber optic cable at the bottom of Earth’s oceans—“Dangerous” Dan Orange strode into the Los Gatos Lodge and began to chow down with local Lions Club members.
“Krazy” George Henderson, an 80-year-old Capitola resident, eagerly awaited the presentation from the global expert in seafloor mapping.
“I saw him speak at a function over in Santa Cruz,” he said. “It was great.”
Henderson, who used to live aboard a boat, knows a thing or two about peering into the depths with sonar.
“When I’m cruising…I’m looking for rocks and stuff,” he said. “He’s got five ships.”
Henderson says he understands the geopolitical significance of undersea exploration.
“It’s critical,” he said. “Not for me, but for the Navy, and defense.”
Plus, Henderson is a pioneer of the waves himself.
He’s credited as the professional cheerleader who invented “the wave,” which occurs with human arms in the stands at sporting events.
Orange is known to many in the region—as “Dangerous Dan”—for his folksy and informative contributions to the Friday morning KZSC radio show The Bushwhacker’s Breakfast Club.
And after the Lions discussed dues and plans for assisting with St. Patrick’s Day festivities at Campo Di Bocce, it was time for Orange to blitz through a vast quantity of data about the digital technology horizon.
Orange, who lives over the hill in Santa Cruz, made his first appearance in front of the Silicon Valley service club weeks earlier, and returned armed with responses to questions sparked by the first talk.
Despite the complexity of the subject matter—about our fiber optic future, facing off with nation-state adversaries and how to find oil at sea—the older audience appeared to soak in the speakers’ words like sponges mopping up a spill.
He talked of the “transducer” and “receiver,” the “backscatter anomaly” and the “spaghetti survey.”
At one point, Orange showed a slide with a colorful blotch that stood out from the rest of the chart.
“This is how you de-risk a frontier basin,” he said. “When we go into these anomalies, we get a lot of oil. When you go away from it, you don’t get much.”
He brought up facts that downplayed the impact of wind farms on bird populations and distributed a chart that depicts the web of influence the Koch brothers can use to spread disinformation.
Orange echoed a main petroleum industry talking point—that cheap hydrocarbons have lifted most of the world out of poverty over the last century or so—but also said undersea mapping can help make the case for alternative energy production.
“What I’m doing is I’m over-sampling,” he said, revealing how he’s capable of finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. “I am successfully imaging something that’s 18 inches in diameter.”
The Lions were quite taken with the thimble-sized styrofoam cups with scribbling on them that decorated the round tables.
“Every 30 feet you go down, you go up one atmosphere,” Orange said, explaining how they miniaturized. “I have been down 13,000 feet.”
One eager listener asked just how vulnerable the cables are.
Orange replied that, despite a State Department pronouncement that two of the most recent undersea cable breaks in the Baltic Sea were “not the result of nefarious actors,” based on his conversations with top subsurface minds the prior week, “not everyone is convinced.”
In response to a question from this reporter, Orange confirmed he has yet to discover Atlantis, or anything of that nature.
“No aliens,” he said.
Phil Knopf, 82, a Los Gatos Lion, found the luncheon fascinating.
“He really knows stuff,” he said.
John Lochner, a two-time mayor of Los Gatos, said he also enjoyed it, though he admitted it went a little deeper than he could totally follow.
“I didn’t understand a lot of it, but it was very interesting and informative,” he said.
Farzon Almaneih, the founder and CEO of Los Gatos-based IT company One82, said he was surprised at just how much information the group seemed to take in.
“I was really impressed, I was taking stock in the audience,” said Almaneih, whose company previously contracted for Space Systems/Loral, now a part of Maxar Technologies. “I don’t know very much about the Lions, but that was pretty technical information…I did feel like I was in the room with a lot of really smart people.”
Orange confirmed he has been tapped to continue modernizing the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research’s Auxiliary General Oceanographic Research vessels with the newest generation of subsea sight tech.
