  In July 2021, faculty from the UAlbany Department of Physics participated in
a week-long field expedition with the organization UAPx to collect data on UAPs
in Avalon, California, located on Catalina Island, and nearby. This paper
reviews both the hardware and software techniques which this collaboration
employed, and contains a frank discussion of the successes and failures, with a
section about how to apply lessons learned to future expeditions. Both
observable-light and infrared cameras were deployed, as well as sensors for
other (non-EM) emissions. A pixel-subtraction method was augmented with other
similarly simple methods to provide initial identification of objects in the
sky and/or the sea crossing the cameras' fields of view. The first results will
be presented based upon approximately one hour in total of triggered
visible/night-vision-mode video and over 600 hours of untriggered (far) IR
video recorded, as well as 55 hours of (background) radiation measurements.
Following multiple explanatory resolutions of several ambiguities that were
potentially anomalous at first, we focus on the primary remaining ambiguity
captured at approximately 4am Pacific Time on Friday, July 16: a dark spot in
the visible/near-IR camera possibly coincident with ionizing radiation that has
thus far resisted a prosaic explanation. We conclude with quantitative
suggestions for serious researchers in this still-nascent field of
hard-science-based UAP studies, with an ultimate goal of identifying UAPs
without confirmation bias toward either mundane or speculative conclusions.
