The trial of Jason Halstenberg began in earnest this week, with the prosecution wasting no time in laying the foundation for and then constructing the first stories in a high rise of circumstantial evidence to prove that he was the instigator of the Line Fire, the fourth most destructive wildland conflagration in San Bernardino County history.
As boldly, Halstenberg’s two defense lawyers at the earliest opportunity undertook to eat away at the edifice of evidence being erected against their client, moving rapidly to deconstruct the assumptions upon which the theory of Halstenberg’s guilt is based and to deride the flimsiness of certain items of evidence gathered by the investigators, who were looking into suspicions of arson-associated activity in the area around the area of the Line Fire’s origin even before that fire was set and within the first hour of the blaze, just as it was growing beyond the possibility of early containment.
Established during the first three days of testimony, eight witnesses were called, including two arson investigators employed by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Those investigators indicated they are absolutely convinced the Line Fire was the product of an arsonist who at least twice previously on September 5, the day the inferno began, used a distinctive ignition device to set the fires, one so rare that the lead arson investigator on the case testified he had not encountered such an implement in more than 500 fires he had previously worked on. The individual responsible had thus left what was tantamount to his calling card at the scene of Line fire’s origin, prosecutors through those investigators and one of the witnesses suggested.
Using the testimony of others who took the stand this week and submitted to questions regarding their own observations and/or footage caught on security videos installed at their homes or on their vehicles, the prosecution as testimony wrapped up this week had begun to lay out but had not quite cinched up its argument that Heustenberg and his equally distinctive dual cab, white short bed Chevrolet pickup truck was present in Highland, in close proximity to all three of the fires that had been set in the crucial time frame prior to and during the fires being lit, and that he is thus unmistakably identifiable as the firebug.
The defense team fought to keep pace, suggesting that the evidence being presented by the prosecution as damning of Halstenberg, while no doubt consisting of artifacts found at the scene of the three lit fires, was in multiple respects too fragmentary to paint a reliable snapshot of actual events. Furthermore, the defense contended, the state’s expert witness consisting of the arson investigators had not gathered evidence and then evaluated and analyzed it non-prejudiciously in accordance with scientific method to reach a determination a posteriori but had formed a conclusion a priori and then selectively focused on certain artifacts remaining in the wake of the fire to support a finding of Halstenberg’s guilt while discounting or ignoring evidence that pointed to some other factors unrelated to the defendant having sparked the blaze. The investigators, the defense sought to suggest to the jury, had postulated the existence of an ignition device they had never seen, of which no intact example exists and which they had not bothered to recreate, to offer up speculation that Halstenberg had used it to touch off the fire.
What became known as the Line Fire began in a field of dry vegetation north of Baseline Road in east Highland on September 5, 2024,  a sweltering day near the end of the hottest summer in Southern California in the last 130 years.
A team of firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which serves as the contract fire department for the City of Highland and maintains three fire stations within the 18.57-square mile city, responded shortly after the blaze began, but was unable to contain it after its progression accelerated upon reaching a slope and the fire migrated north toward the foothills, transforming into a raging inferno. A CalFire incident management team was activated on September 6, as the steep terrain of the area into which the fire was spreading created challenges.
Light rain on September 7 and 8 sporadically aided firefighters in their containment efforts, but the fire persisted and soon regenerated along a widening front. With the escalation of the surrounding heat, the fire began to expand rapidly into the San Bernardino Mountains, spreading northward and upward against the dry vegetation-covered mountainside in what through what is referred to as the chimney effect. This prompted evacuation orders for the communities of Running Springs and Arrowbear Lake, thereafter followed by evacuation orders to those in the communities of Angelus Oaks, Seven Oaks and all campgrounds and cabins in the area; Green Valley Lake north from Highway 18 along Green Valley Lake Road; the community of Forest Falls; and the community of Mountain Home Village. Those orders pertained to 11,400 structures under what was deemed to be immediate threat.
On Tuesday, September 10, as the Line Fire was galloping northward and upward through the forest, it overran and destroyed the Keller Peak Fire Lookout, erected in 1926 near Running Springs, the oldest of a handful of remaining original towers put in place by the U.S. Fire Service.
By September 19, the fire was threatening 56,100 structures, including 11,400 under evacuation orders and 44,700 under evacuation warnings.
For the next ten days, the fire defied containment. The California National Guard was deployed, including four UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, two C-130 aircraft and hand crews to suppress the fire. The fire persisted and toward the end of September it was not a raging set of blazes but rather innumerable persistent and widely dispersed hot spots. On September 29, a large flare up intensified the burning, and it progressed into the Bear Creek and Santa Ana river drainages. With Seven Oaks and Angeles Oaks lying in the fire’s eastward pathway, those communities were subjected to evacuation orders. A military police company was brought in to assist with the evacuations.
In the response to the Line Fire, over 7,000 firefighting and emergency personnel were deployed, including those from immediately adjacent jurisdictions, further away in California and some from Nevada and Arizona. The fire was not officially confirmed as 100 percent contained until December 23, 2024, at which point it had charred 43,978 acres, making it the fourth largest fire in San Bernardino County history in terms of geographical size, after 2003’s Old Fire, which burned 91,281 acres and destroyed 993 homes; the Grand Prix Fire, also from 2003, which burned 69,894 acres and destroyed 194 homes; and the Willow Fire in 1999, which burned 64,000 acres.
There was an early intensive effort by California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection arson investigators to ascertain the origin of the fire and whether, as it appeared, it had been deliberately set. Through an analysis of video footage recorded at various locations in Highland including areas surrounding the fire itself and two fires earlier that day which appeared to have malicious origins, cell phone data and information extracted from license plate readers previously put in place in at least two locations on streets approaching the fire by the sheriff’s department, which serves as the contract law enforcement agency for the City of Highland, investigators concluded that Halstenberg, who resided in Riverside County, was a prime suspect.
A warrant for Hlstenberg’s arrest and a search warrant for his home at 1394 Detroit Street in Norco was obtained and served on September 10. Halstenberg was taken into custody and items found at his home and in his vehicle were seized. He has been held without bail, pending the outcome of his trail, since his arrest.
San Bernardino County District Attorney Jason Anderson assigned Deputy District Attorney Justin Crocker and Deputy District Attorney Andrew Peppler and Deputy District Attorney Justin Crocker to the Halstenberg case. The defendant is represented by Deputy Public Defender Justin Ewaniszyk and Deputy Public Defender Luke Byward.
The trial is being held before Judge Cheryl Kersey. Previous pretrial motions were heard by Judge J. David Mazurek.
Opening statements were heard on Monday, after which the prosecution began to put on its case-in-chief. Halstenberg, who was clean shaven at the time of his arrest in September and had closely cropped hair, at a handful of procedural hearing during the intervening months was brought to court in a rather disheveled stated, wearing a dark green protective custody outfit, his growing hair unkempt and a beard that appeared to be growing continuously since his arrest. On Monday, before the 12 jurors who are scheduled to decide his fate and their five alternates, consisting of 11 men and six women, he wore a pitch black suit but no tie. His hair was again closely cut, but his beard remained uncut and untrimmed.
In the opening statement for the prosecution, Deputy District Attorney Andrew Peppler said the facts to be presented at trial will clearly demonstrate Halstenberg, now 35, set three separate fires in East Highland during the latter part of the afternoon of Thursday September 5, 2024, the last of which resulted in the destruction of nearly 44,000 acres and which cost the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known by its acronym CalFire, and the U.S. Forest Service a combined$173.5 million. Indisputable evidence places Halstenberg, Peppler said “at or near” the ignition points of all three of those fires, all within the relatively short span of time in which they began.
Peppler displayed timestamped photos or video stills which he said showed Halstenberg’s white double-cab short-bed Chevrolet pickup near the scene of the three fires.
As damning, Peppler said, were the locations where Halstenberg’s cell phone with its internal geo-positioning device pinged. According to the district attorney’s office, Halstenberg sought to thwart his cell phone’s tracking of his movements on that fateful day, shutting his cell phone off at 3:25 p.m. and not turning it on again until 6:44 p.m. The three fires set that day were started sometime after 4 p.m., with the final fire, which led to the historic conflagration, beginning at around 5:40 p.m.
When the arson investigators caught up with him, Halstenberg falsely maintained he had not been in Highland on September 5, Peppler said, claiming he was at his Norco home the entirety of that day.
A license plate reader in Highland proved otherwise, according to the prosecution. Unaware of the layers of photographic, video, digital and electronic signals evidence investigators had accumulated to prove he was in Highland prior to the fires being set and while they were being ignited, Halstenberg insisted to investigators, “I don’t go out and drive around. You know, that area is not the best,” according to a graphic Peppler had displayed on the courtroom’s video screens.
According to Peppler, when investigators confronted him with a photo showing him in the parking structure at the San Manuel Casino in Highland, Halstenberg radically changed his tack, acknowledging he was in Highland that day, where he had done some gambling at the casino before returning to Norco.
It is the prosecution’s contention that Halstenberg had designed makeshift incendiary devices consisting of blue-lined yellow paper containing coins to provide them with some nominal weight which were then fashioned with large industrial staples, which he then lit and flung out of his truck’s passenger side window as he was driving by the dried-out vegetation at the side of the road. According to documents filed with the court by Peppler and Crocker, a DNA match with Halstenberg was found on five coins — three nickels, a dime and a penny — that prosecutors say investigators found on Baseline Road proximate to the ignition point for the line fire. Investigators have surmised and the prosecutors are alleging that those coins came out of the ignition device Halstenberg used to start the blaze that grew to become the line fire. In addition, a quarter was found very close to the point of ignition of one of the fires Halstenberg is alleged to have started earlier that day, which burned itself out, and pennies were likewise found near the starting point for another fire that is believed to have been the product of his handiwork, but which a passerby doused before it grew any larger.
At the scene of all three fires that the prosecution alleges Halstenberg lit on September 5, investigators found in addition to those coins remnants of blue-lined yellow paper, some of which was charred. At the site of the fire that burned itself out, in addition to the quarter and the yellow paper, an investigator found an industrial staple.
According to the prosecution’s timeline, Halstenberg departed from his residence in Norco around 11 a.m. Shortly before noon, Halstenberg’s distinctive white Chevrolet pick-up was caught on a security video pulling into a parking garage at the San Manuel Casino. Other security video footage establishes that he went into the casino and that at 1:29 p.m., he withdrew cash from one the casino’s automated bank teller machines. In short order, he took his leave of the casino.
Halstenberg’s cellphone pinged off various cell towers around Highland between 1:49 p.m. to 3:25 p.m., and indication he was driving around the city. At 3:25 p.m. his phone contact with cell towers abruptly ended, an indication he turned his phone off or its batter had run out of electricity. The smartphone remains dead for 3 hours and 19 minutes, until 6:44 p.m., at which point three fires were set in Highland, the last of which was the Line Fire, at that point having grown to a point that it could not be contained by the firefighters that had responded to it. The first of those fires is believed to have started at 4:11 p.m., followed by another at 4:26 p.m.. At 5:45 a third fire – which grew to become the line fire – was caught on the dash, side and rear cameras of a vehicle heading east on Baseline Road. Based on the limited size of that fire at that point, it appears the fire began around 5:40 p.m.
The timeline on the eventually successful attempts to start a fire of ferocious proportion matches the temporal window in which Halstenberg was in Highland and falls within the 3-hour-and-19-minute window during which he shut off his phone in an effort to prevent investigators from connecting him to his mission of destruction, prosecutors maintain.
Even more disturbing is evidence that Halstenberg’s arsonous activities most likely did not confine themselves to the havoc of the Line Fire in 2024, the prosecution contends.
Halstenberg’s creativity in devising the yellow paper/coin/industrial staple incendiaries was, by extension, reminiscent of artifacts found at two similar fires that had taken place in or near the San Bernardino Mountains in 2023. In those cases, arson investigators  came across cigarette boxes that contained paper towels and coins. On a hunch, the crude but potentially effective devices were subjected to a DNA analysis. According to the prosecution, the trace DNA found on those devices was found to match Halstenberg.
In his opening statement for the defense, Deputy Public Defender Luke Byward sought to underscore the validity of what Halstenberg had told investigators when they initially confronted him about his presence in Highland On September 5:  “I was just in the wrong spot at the wrong time.”
With regard to the allegation of a DNA match, Byward pointed out that Peppler and Crocker were stretching not only science to draw that conclusion but the standards of the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office. Traditionally, Byward said, the district attorney’s office has not relied upon DNA evidence to allege guilt or obtain a conviction unless the evidence presented represents a 100 centimorgans finding.  A centimorgan corresponds to a 1 percent DNA match. In this case, Byward said, the DNA match stood at 30 centimorgans, essentially a 30 percent match, meaning tens of thousands of others in 2.2 million population San Bernardino County could have contributed the DNA that was found on the items prosecutors are trying to link to Halstenberg. Moreover, the DNA on some of the coins found at the Line Fire location showed multiple contributors, Byward said.
The prosecution was attempting to cherry pick the evidence being presented against his client, Byward said, latching onto evidence that indicated guilt or, more accurately, potential guilt but disregarding or burying evidence which exonerated, or tended to exonerate, Halstenberg.
In this regard, Byward said, the investigators in looking into the circumstances of the fire and the prosecution in building its case against Haklstenberg both seized upon video and other evidence establishing that Halstenberg and his truck were proximate or near to the three fires but that the investigators had purposefully not obtained videos from homes in the areas closest to those fires would demonstrate Halstenberg’s vehicle was not at the actual spots where the fires originated. No evidence of any kind, including video footage, places Halstenberg at the fire ignition points, Byward said.
Indeed, Byward said, there is evidence to show that law enforcement officers deliberately disabled their bodyworn video cameras as they were about to encounter evidence or testimony that clashed with the investigators’ and prosecutors’ emerging theory of Halstenberg’s guilt.
Byward said the defense was unafraid of the unadulterated evidence that had been churned up by the investigators, as long as it was presented in its total context, unaltered and in its entirety rather than selectively and piecemeal.
“I want to show you everything, everything, with nothing hidden,” Byward said.
At least some of the evidence the prosecution is going to present was  found days after the fire, Byward said, and could have originated with dozens of people who had come upon the scene after the fact. The coins associated with the Line Fire, Byward said, were distant from the fire’s point of origin and no measurement of that precise distance was made by investigators.
The first witness called was CalFire Captain Michael Watanabe, who oversaw the fire company working the day shift out of Highland Fire Station 2, at 29507 Base Line Street on September 5, the station most proximate to the three fires in Highland that day. According to Watanabe, he and his crew responded to a fire just off of Bacon Lane, a road which runs north-northeast from Highland Avenue and makes a 90 degree turn. According to Watanabe, that fire was reported as occurring around 4:19 p.m. That fire, which was located a short distance away from the road on the west side of Bacon Lane just south of the lane’s curve, consumed a single bush and had not spread to some surrounding vegetation, when the firefighters arrived and put it out quickly. Watanabe said the fire was restricted “to a single bush that burned itself out.” Watanabe testified that the fire, labeled for identification purposes as the Bacon Fire, was suspicious in that it had started in an ornamental bush that was irrigated on a regular basis as part of landscaping maintained by homeowners association next to a drainage area. Because “it didn’t make sense that a single bush would catch fire spontaneously,” Watanabe said he had contacted the administration with CalFire to have an arson investigation team look into the fire’s origin.
Watanabe related that having completely doused the Bacon Fire, he and the other firefighters cleared the scene at 4:39 p.m. and he contacted Battalion Chief Matthew Kirkhart to suggest that an arson investigation unit looking into the fire’s origin and texted Fire Captain Specialist Michael Franklin, an arson investigator. He and his team returned to the fire station, where they turned their attention toward getting dinner, when a woman driving a Tesla, who in subsequent testimony that week was identified as Marlene Acuna, arrived at the station, honking her horn to get the attention of the firefighters there. She told them about a fire just north of Baseline east of the fire station.
According to Watanabe, he walked to the front of the station where he could see a vegetation fire on the north side of Baseline. He contacted the department’s dispatch center and got a wildland fire response going. Upon the station’s two engine companies, which were the first to arrive at the scene, becoming engaged, Watanabe said he observed “a quarter acre fire” that “was moving pretty good at a moderate rate of speed” in a relatively flat area between Baseline Road and the northlying foothills, which he estimated to be “less than one mile per hour.” He could tell Watanabe, said that “more resources” were going to be needed and that the “whole battalion,” meaning six or seven engine companies, was “going to show up.”
He directed the two companies he was commanding to attempt a “wildland hose lay,” meaning to get water pouring into the lateral sides of the blaze. Ultimately, however, Watanabe said, the fire “hit the toe of the slope and started to pick up speed.” With he intensification of the winds blowing to the east north east, he said, the fire “started to outpace our hose lay.”
Thereafter, with the fire headed into the foothills and expanding upward and outward, the opportunity to contain the fire was lost.
During his cross examination by Ewaniszyk, Watanabe said he wrote a report or narrative about the Bacon Fire on the day following or in the days following September 5 in which he concluded it was arson related but that he did not forward that report/narrative to the district attorney’s office. He said the fire seemed suspicious because “We don’ get a lot of those types of fires where on one is around and a single bush catches fire.”
Next testifying was Fire Captain Specialist Joshua Williams, who is employed by the California Division of Forestry and Fire Protection both in the capacity of a firefighter and a sworn law enforcement officer, in which capacity he functions primarily as an arson investigator.
Williams was present at the Line Fire on September 5 and was also detailed to inspect the Bacon Fire there after. In carrying out that investigation, he saw a “burn scar” in the midst of maintained “ornamental vegetation” to the west side of that portion of Bacon Lane that runs in what is roughly a north-south direction. He said one bush was completely consumed and there was some burning to surrounding bushes. He found near what he determined was the fire’s point of origin two coins, a quarter and a nickel and two razor blades.
Testifying over the course of three days with other witnesses intersticed between his direct, redirect, cross examination and re-cross examination was Fire Captain Specialist Michael Franklin, also a dual firefighter sworn law enforcement officer/arson investigator. He was the lead investigator on the California Division of Forestry and Fire Protection/Highland Fire Department investigation of the Line Fire.
Franklin worked in conjunction with other CalFire arson investigators on the case, he testified, including Williams, Andrew Arthen, Jan Rybczynski and Bennet Milloy and Officer Joshua William, while under the supervision of Battalion Chief Kirkhart.
Under direct and redirect examination by Deputy District Attorney Crocker used his direct and redirect examination to give the jury the first and likely most comprehensive exposition of the prosecution’s theory of Halstenberg’s culpability extending to the action investigators and the district attorney’s office believe the defendant engaged in on September 5, 2024 which initiated the conflagration.
According to Franklin, Halstenberg had assembled an incendiary device consisting of yellow paper with blue lines folded to contain coins to give the contraption weight and fastened in some fashion with string, rubber bands or industrial staples and twisted at the end. He then lit the paper and while driving west in his pickup truck on Baseline Street, flung the flaming paper assemblage out the truck cab’s open passenger side window into the parched vegetation in a field proximate to the slope north into the San Bernardino Mountain foothills.
Franklin testified that late in the afternoon of September 5, 2024, he had been called upon to conduct an analysis/investigation of the origin of the Bacon Fire in Highland and was en route to that location when, due to the Line Fire breaking out north of baseline, he diverted to the field north of Baseline Street where that blaze had started. Upon arriving at that location, he said, as he was walking toward where several fire companies were involved in trying to arrest the fire, as he approached the back of one of the fire engines parked facing east at the edge of Baseline Street’s westbound lane, he saw coins lying on the street near the white striped line between the street’s shoulder and the driving lane.
Franklin said he took mental note of the coins shortly after his arrival, but was engaged in other tasks at the time. Those coins, he testified, were proximate to what was later determined to be the Line Fire’s point of origin.
Franklin postulates that the coins were in the device as described, consisting of the lit folded and twisted yellow paper and that they were supposed to provide it with substantial enough mass that the flaming object could be cast far enough away from the street to make It deep enough into the vegetation to ignite a fire that would grow larger still. Franklin suggested that the coins he found had come out of the device as it was on its destructive trajectory out of Halstenberg’s truck and in the direction of the hillside. Nevertheless, according to Franklin, the burning paper achieved the malicious intent Halstenberg had for it by lodging into some of the dried vegetation at the scene, which included Southern California’s ubiquitous tumbleweeds.
Bolstering this theory, according to Franklin, was that three days after the fire began, on September 8, 2024, he returned to the general area of the Line Fire’s origin in the field north of Baseline Street and while walking eastward on Baseline came across a piece of blue-lined yellow paper burned at its periphery. According Franklin, he measured the distance from where he found that scrap of paper back to that spot on the street immediately adjacent to the fire’s point of origin by pacing it off. The 60 paces he took to get there, based on what he said was his three foot stride, translated to approximately 180 feet, he estimated.
Implied by this theory was that the paper, in the prevailing eastward winds, had made its way from where the fire began on September 5 to where Franklin found it on September 8.
Crocker used the courtroom’s three overhead visual display screens to show the jury, Judge Kersey and courtroom observers a close-up photo or video still of the yellow blue-lined paper in the street’s gutter amongst leaves and dried-out vegetation debris.
Alive to the possibility that Franklin’s theory might prove compelling to some or all members of the jury, Ewaniszyk in his cross examination of Franklin sought to propound that moral certainty to support a finding or guilt beyond a reasonable doubt cannot be based upon theoretical proposals of the fire’s causation or speculation.
Attempting to capitalize upon Franklin’s acknowledgment in his response to Crocker’s question as to whether he had ever seen an incendiary device that incorporated coins that he had no experience with such an apparatus, Ewaniszyk asked why he had moved to the assumption that the coins he had seen on the road when he first arrived on the scene of the Line Fire on September 5 were associated with the ignition of the fire.
“You never opined in a previous case that coins were part of an ignition device, right?” Ewaniszyk asked.
“No,” Franklin responded.
When Ewaniszyk pressed him on that issue, Franklin said he had, despite the novel nature of such a coin-involving design, reached the conclusion that the fire had been initiated by the paper-wrapped coin utensil. Franklin said he was inexorably driven to that conclusion by the consideration that coins were found at or near the scene of all three fires that were started in Highland that day, that Halstenberg was known to have been at or near the ignition points of all three of those fires and that two of the features of that incendiary device design – coins and yellow blue-lined paper – were found in his truck.
While in response to Crocker’s inquiry Franklin said he had never previously personally encountered an incendiary device that utilized coins, he said within the canon of arson investigation literature, known as the PMS-412, there is reference to items such as coins, nuts, bolts, rocks and other such relatively dense objects being used to make enveloping flammable material such as paper or cardboard throwable.
Franklin said that “It just seemed out of place for there to be coins lying randomly all over the road.”
The coins in a device are intended to assist in allowing the firestarter to “throw it further,” Franklin said. “There are multiple reasons why you want to do that. If you can throw it further you would be able to get it further into the vegetation.”
Though he had not dealt with a device using coins, he said he was well aware of the use of the basic components contained in the device he believes Halstenberg employed. He cited as examples a napkin wrapped around heavy duty stormproof or waterproof matches or a cardboard box such as a cigarette box stuffed with paper. Such devices are designed, he said so that once lit and smoldering the fire or embers that are created will remain lit for a longer time.
He said that ignition such devices are commonly used by arsonists “to avoid detection to give you [i.e., the arsonist] time to get away.” Franklin said it is the goal of arsonists to “put time and distance” between them and the fires they light as they grow into a conflagration.
Ewaniszyk, noting that the Line Fire’s point of origin was next to a roadway, cataloged multiple ways in which a vehicle could create sparks to ignite a fire, such as exhaust backfiring, metal scraping on asphalt, the disintegration of a catalytic convertor and engine or mechanical malfunctions. Franklin concurred, but said there was no tell-tale indicators of any such causes in or near the ignition point for the Line Fire. Ewaniszyk parried by positing that such indicators might not be left over after a fire.
Ewaniszyk boxed Franklin in by asking whether he had actually reproduced a working model of what Franklin had concluded was the ignition device. Franklin sad he had not. Ewaniszyk then quoted a passage from the arson investigator’s handbook which called for such recreations and testing of devices to which an act of arson is attributed to be carried out. Franklin said that the passage did not require that such recreations be undertaken but advised that doing so could be but was not necessarily part of the investigative process.
There ensued a polemic between Ewaniszyk and Franklin over the use of scientific method in carrying out investigations. Scientific method involved testing theories in such a way and using such methods to try to disprove them rather than trying to sustain them Ewaniszyk said. He asked Franklin what physical testing he had done.
“There was no physical testing,” Franklin responded.
Rather, he said, he had engaged in “cognitive testing.” He implied that by not recreating the incendiary device Franklin concluded Halstenberg had used and testing to see whether it worked, Franklin had violated the principles of scientific methodology.