USS Omaha "Transmedium" Sphere Descending To the Sea

Also what's your speed calculation for it given the 6 or so minutes it takes to vanish? 150 miles in 6-7 minutes is around 1300/1100kts which is faster than a commercial airliner, it's Concorde speeds.
The plane wasn't flying directly away from the ship, so I'm sure the vector going towards the horizon is smaller than the plane's cruising speed.
 
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Given the specificity of date/time/location and direction of view, if it were a commercial airliner we'd be able to find it on historical FR24 tracks. Like was done for the Chilean video.

I don't have that level of access though. Not sure if Mick has looked.
I've looked and I was unable to find good candidates. That does not mean there are any. It's possible (although unlikely) that the time is wrong. Also possible it was a flight that's not being tracked, like military.
 
Forgive me for being a bit lazy and not reading through this entire thread to see if this has been mentioned before. To me it's obvious, the IR tracking tech. now has the ability to follow a commercial airliner until it disappears below the horizon. In fact I took a few minutes to model it on Walter Bislin's advanced earth curve calculator.

http://walter.bislins.ch/bloge/inde...056805-1~0.0065-12-11012.5179-114.960376-81-9

Target is at 35,000 ft, starting at a distance of 150 miles and at 25 mile intervals out to 300 miles where it's below the horizon with standard refraction.

This morning was another yell at the TV moment, because ABS's 'This Week' was teasing us with the what I consider now debunked 'UFO' videos yet again.

I did some similar calculations at #128 above. I assumed a cruising height for the plane of 33,000 feet and worked back from that. On that basis it would need to be about 250 miles away from the observer before it went over the horizon, and somewhere between 180 and 200 miles away at the start of the video. With those figures the speed of the plane would not be unfeasible. I haven't looked to see why we get different results, but the extra 2000 feet in altitude could be responsible. Or my method could just be too crude.

My biggest doubt about the hypothesis was whether the plane could be detected in IR at these distances, so I'm interested to see that you think it could. Do you have a source for that?
 
My biggest doubt about the hypothesis was whether the plane could be detected in IR at these distances, so I'm interested to see that you think it could. Do you have a source for that?
I've been under very dark skies where stars and planets could be seen almost all the way down horizon. I was told far out at sea the conditions can be ever better. I also have a full spectrum camera, and the IR filter really does cut through the haze. To the ships IR tracking system, plane engines will appear as a really bright light source, so it might be possible to see them down to the horizon at any distance if conditions are right.
 
I've looked and I was unable to find good candidates. That does not mean there are any. It's possible (although unlikely) that the time is wrong. Also possible it was a flight that's not being tracked, like military.
Most likely this is why the clip was identified as a UAP event. Odds are it was picked up on radar first, but all we get to see is the leaked video.
 
At 42 seconds into the Omaha sphere video , someone say's "Woa, it's getting close"

Doesn't this go against it being a plane that flies away from them, and goes over the horizon?
 
At 42 seconds into the Omaha sphere video , someone say's "Woa, it's getting close"

Doesn't this go against it being a plane that flies away from them, and goes over the horizon?
At that time it appeared to be getting close to the water.
 
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One thing that can also explain this is the final stages of space junk or meteorite debris that burned up higher in the atmosphere. Nothing big but there is space junk falling that from time to time lands in the ocean like that china lower stage that crashed into the Indian Ocean earlier this month. Notice on this meteor report from July 20, 2019 (I think the last night of the observation), there was a fireball in Northern California that was heading south towards a region outside San Clemente Islands where this even was recorded at around midnight.

https://ams.imo.net/members/imo_view/event/2019/3089

There is a similar website from NASA that has telemetry from satellites of fireballs and meteors entering the atmosphere. I found it when trying to report a bright fireball but can't remember the link but I should be able to find it again. Basically, if something entered from space whether its the remains of space junk, a meteorite or fireball, or a flying saucer, it would be available to see if the atmospheric satellite measured it and we can eliminate those based on date/time of military reports. I'm still thinking this is a terrestrial vehicle or flare but also good to see what entered the atmosphere on those days in that area.
 
I'm not sure why they'd be so amped up to send out a helicopter if they were getting radar returns on the object and knew it was 200+ miles away. Anything is possible I suppose but I'm not really buying the jetliner hypothesis. Not to mention we have similar sightings where it really did turn out to be a jetliner and the IR signature doesn't look anything like the Omaha video. Those sightings were much closer than 200 miles though.
 
In most cases where it's been most likely a plane, the issue seems to be that someone seems to have drastically miscalculated the distance to the object and mistakingly eliminated possibilities.

The bokeh triangle was said to be 700 ft away, the official Chilean video investigation also seems to have discounted the much more distant aircraft it ended up being.
 
In most cases where it's been most likely a plane, the issue seems to be that someone seems to have drastically miscalculated the distance to the object and mistakingly eliminated possibilities.

The bokeh triangle was said to be 700 ft away, the official Chilean video investigation also seems to have discounted the much more distant aircraft it ended up being.
This is just an example of common issues with spatial awareness. When you have no good references, distances and size (ergo speed) are very hard to judge. When flying above haze, you have no easy references so something can look close but is far away. It's quite hard to tell if a balloon is a fast moving nearby object or far away massive object unless you know what size it is already. Wasn't the Chilean video taken from the air (from a helicopter) of a distant plane?
 
So that theory gives us three possibilities:
  • The 'sphere' was returned by radar accurately at 200+ miles away. Why ask for a helicopter intercept at that distance? Helicopter intercepts typically imply fairly close distances.
  • The 'sphere' was returned by radar but the radar and/or operator miscalculated the distance for some unknown reason. How likely is this?
  • There was no return either because radar wasn't used (why?) or it couldn't get a return (again, why?)
I'm not sure any of this seems likely enough to warrant saying the sphere is most likely an airplane hundreds of miles away. Surely we can agree that if these guys were tracking an object on FLIR they wouldn't just throw their hands up and not even attempt a radar return as well. Even more curious, how was the object spotted in the first place? They'd have a myriad of systems available to them to help ascertain the distance and makeup of whatever they're tracking.

Something I'm not clear on. does the FLIR system have any sort of 'threshold' control? It seems that if it were so sensitive to routinely pick up planes 200+ miles away there would be quite a bit of noise picked up if the range couldn't be dialed in to filter out unwanted fluff.
 
So that theory gives us three possibilities:
  • The 'sphere' was returned by radar accurately at 200+ miles away. Why ask for a helicopter intercept at that distance? Helicopter intercepts typically imply fairly close distances.
  • The 'sphere' was returned by radar but the radar and/or operator miscalculated the distance for some unknown reason. How likely is this?
  • There was no return either because radar wasn't used (why?) or it couldn't get a return (again, why?)
I'm not sure any of this seems likely enough to warrant saying the sphere is most likely an airplane hundreds of miles away. Surely we can agree that if these guys were tracking an object on FLIR they wouldn't just throw their hands up and not even attempt a radar return as well. Even more curious, how was the object spotted in the first place? They'd have a myriad of systems available to them to help ascertain the distance and makeup of whatever they're tracking.

Something I'm not clear on. does the FLIR system have any sort of 'threshold' control? It seems that if it were so sensitive to routinely pick up planes 200+ miles away there would be quite a bit of noise picked up if the range couldn't be dialed in to filter out unwanted fluff.

I believe the weather was overcast and low ceiling which makes the distant airplane unlikely. This was according to the log books someone posted earlier in the thread. So could still have been a drone or flare.

Here is the distance the FLIR can see: Although thermal imaging cameras can see through total darkness, light fog, light rain and snow, the distance they can see is affected by these atmospheric conditions. Even in clear skies, inherent atmospheric absorption places limits on how far a particular infrared camera system can see. In essence, the farther an infrared signal must travel from the target to the camera, the more of that signal is lost along the way. Rain and fog can severely limit the range of thermal imaging systems due to scattering of light off of droplets of water.
http://www.flirmedia.com/MMC/CVS/Tech_Notes/TN_0002_EN.pdf

According to that technical note, even the largest FLIR has trouble identifying an object over just a few kilometers like 5 max yet all can see the sun at 147 million km. It's explained thoroughly in the link.
 
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200 miles is a long range for a radar, depending on the mode it was in it could be out of the set range, the RADAR stuff is just generally assumed to be whatever proponents want it to be and we don't really know enough about the specs/modes of the systems used as they are all highly classified, the FLIR stuff has commercial variants so it's little easier to track down information.

FLIR is just a camera that sees a different wavelength you can turn various settings, but generally you are just going to see stuff if there's enough photons, just like my camera can film the sun because it's huge and luminous even though it's millions of kilometers away.

The manual for a similar system used in the Omaha video is downloadable here if you want to read up on it.

https://pdfcoffee.com/star-safire-iii-thermal-imaging-equipment-operators-manual-pdf-free.html
 
A light source, thermal or otherwise, appears as a point when it's far enough away, which is why I think the object in the video looked round. Since it's a leaked video with reactions from the sailors watching the screen at the time, all we can do is speculate as to what happened before or after. Someone manning the radar station might have known all along the object was far away and didn't 'splash down' nearby.

What I do know, is what we see in the video can be modeled as a flying object passing below the horizon, including a passenger jet at cruising altitude. If the object descended into the water in front of the horizon line, then it would be a different story.
 
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A true what we call “point source” won’t necessarily look round. It will look like whatever the image quality of the optical system is for that particular camera configuration. For sources whose center most areas are saturated the shape will become dominated by the outer parts of the point spread function, which could easily be not round depending on things like internal scattering. There’s next to nothing about an object’s shape that can be gleaned from unresolved, saturated images.
 
I'm not buying the plane theory for two reasons.

  1. They are in an area off of San Diego and LA and this cannot be the first time that they have seen a plane be it Military or Civilian flying off the coast.
  2. I am sure there are other radar/tracking devices on this ship which can tell them the distance of the plane and which way its going - we are talking about US warship here.
Or this is just a scam, where they are dumping stuff to Jeremy Corbell to keep the conversation going on UFO's for some intelligence and/or misdirection reasons.
 
  1. They are in an area off of San Diego and LA and this cannot be the first time that they have seen a plane be it Military or Civilian flying off the coast.
  2. I am sure there are other radar/tracking devices on this ship which can tell them the distance of the plane and which way its going - we are talking about US warship here.

I present as counter-evidence, the Chilean Navy UFO case, where the Chilean Navy and then a 2 year investigation failed to identify a plane 100 miles away.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ex...deo-aerodynamic-contrails-flight-ib6830.8306/

1. They were just south of Santiago Airport, they saw planes all the time
2. The plane was on radar

And yet they thought it was weird UFO, quite close to them, shooting out hot liquid.
 
I present as counter-evidence, the Chilean Navy UFO case, where the Chilean Navy and then a 2 year investigation failed to identify a plane 100 miles away.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ex...deo-aerodynamic-contrails-flight-ib6830.8306/

1. They were just south of Santiago Airport, they saw planes all the time
2. The plane was on radar

And yet they thought it was weird UFO, quite close to them, shooting out hot liquid.
Indeed. The issue with these cases is that as soon as humans enter the equation, human interpretation will happen. And human interpretation is very subjective, which is contrary to what you would like in these (war etc) situations. But, it happens all the time, and hence, like you rightly indicate, it makes room for (huge) errors.
 
Surely we can agree that if these guys were tracking an object on FLIR they wouldn't just throw their hands up and not even attempt a radar return as well. Even more curious, how was the object spotted in the first place? They'd have a myriad of systems available to them to help ascertain the distance and makeup of whatever they're tracking.
Which gets to the problem of trying to figure out what happened from short video clips that show us only part of the incident. And of course, if the clip included information that showed it was a distant plane (or a balloon, or whatever it might be identified as) THAT clip does not get leaked as a UAP/UFO. That filter might be intentional and dishonest, or it might be just what naturally happens when somebody is leaking videos of things that are not identified. No way to tell, yet. But we see it over and over n these leaked vids; for example in Gimbal the clip ends as the Navy jet has turned nose-on to the target and would presumably begin to close on it pretty rapidly, allowing us a closer look, or in Flir1/Nimitz where we don't see what happens after the target is lost and whether there are attempts to reacquire it and whether they are succesful.
 
Mick West said:
I present as counter-evidence, the Chilean Navy UFO case, where the Chilean Navy and then a 2 year investigation failed to identify a plane 100 miles away.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ex...deo-aerodynamic-contrails-flight-ib6830.8306/

1. They were just south of Santiago Airport, they saw planes all the time
2. The plane was on radar

And yet they thought it was weird UFO, quite close to them, shooting out hot liquid.


True, Mick. The difference here is that this was a state of the art US Navy Warship that was tracking this "Object" real time. If we are to take this video at face value, that they did NOT know what they were tracking I would think that they could tell the difference between an airline going over the horizon far away as opposed to an object in relatively close distance to the warship and landing in the water.

If the US Navy with this top of the line warship cannot tell the difference between an object in close proximity to their vessel and an airliner some 100 miles away...then I am not sure we want to tackle China in the disputed Spratly islands area in the South China sea.


I get what your saying.
 
was a state of the art US Navy Warship that was tracking this "Object" real time.
Really? The entire warship was tracking it?

We don't actually have any idea what instruments were tacking the object. It might simply have been something they happened to catch on the SAFIRE.
 
I would think that they could tell the difference between an airline going over the horizon far away as opposed to an object in relatively close distance to the warship and landing in the water.
The upper right text in the video said 'LRF Armed No Return'. This probably means the laser range finder failed to get the distance to the target, perhaps because it was out of range. Is the maximum range past the horizon, I don't know.
 
The upper right text in the video said 'LRF Armed No Return'. This probably means the laser range finder failed to get the distance to the target, perhaps because it was out of range. Is the maximum range past the horizon, I don't know.
The range finder is said to have a maximum of 25 km +/- 5km, i.e. 20-30 km. The horizon viewed from the upper part of the ship would probably be somewhere within that bracket, depending on the exact location of the IR device.
 
All fair points.
My only thought on this is, if an object was close to a US Navy ship, and was unidentified wouldn't they as a matter of protocol track the thing? And correct me if I am wrong wasn't this just a bit after the supposed pyramid UFO sighting that was following some ships.
Or to your point, they were lucky to actually view it.
 
Mick,
I Just listened to the latest Joe Rogan Podcast with Neil DeGrasse Tysson (#1658). They discuss "UFO's". I think one of the most misleading thoughts out there is that pilots are "Trained Observers". Why do we treat pilots as quasi experts on UFO sightings? I am a captain at Southwest Airlines and I can not tell you how many pilots have no clue what they are observing in the night sky. I have so many stories in this regard. In fact I would say most airline/military pilots are shot gun loaded to report a UFO with some interesting language to describe what they are seeing. Things that I have personally heard pilots report as a "UFO" on ATC frequency .... a cluster of mylar balloons tied together and floating through airspace, weather balloons at high altiutde (These things expand to 30' to 100' ft in diamteter at high altitude), Starlink satellites, Missle or rocket trails in the early morning or evening (They can look very mysterious in the sky during those hours), drones (quad copters). Lets out it this way, I know about a captain at American Airlines who is no shit a "Flat Earther". I am not kidding. Pilots are no better than the general population, in my opinion. The only Pilots who are capable of identifying or questioning what they are seeing in the sky are those of us who are alo skeptical or knowledgeable about the night sky, and what we are looking at. I cringe everytime I here a UFO story and the person relating the story says, "Well this was seen by a navy pilot, or an airline pilot." Like this group is qualified to be an expert somehow.... uggghhh
 
Mick,
I Just listened to the latest Joe Rogan Podcast with Neil DeGrasse Tysson (#1658). They discuss "UFO's". I think one of the most misleading thoughts out there is that pilots are "Trained Observers". Why do we treat pilots as quasi experts on UFO sightings? I am a captain at Southwest Airlines and I can not tell you how many pilots have no clue what they are observing in the night sky. I have so many stories in this regard. In fact I would say most airline/military pilots are shot gun loaded to report a UFO with some interesting language to describe what they are seeing. Things that I have personally heard pilots report as a "UFO" on ATC frequency .... a cluster of mylar balloons tied together and floating through airspace, weather balloons at high altiutde (These things expand to 30' to 100' ft in diamteter at high altitude), Starlink satellites, Missle or rocket trails in the early morning or evening (They can look very mysterious in the sky during those hours), drones (quad copters). Lets out it this way, I know about a captain at American Airlines who is no shit a "Flat Earther". I am not kidding. Pilots are no better than the general population, in my opinion. The only Pilots who are capable of identifying or questioning what they are seeing in the sky are those of us who are alo skeptical or knowledgeable about the night sky, and what we are looking at. I cringe everytime I here a UFO story and the person relating the story says, "Well this was seen by a navy pilot, or an airline pilot." Like this group is qualified to be an expert somehow.... uggghhh
Thanks for validating my own thoughts on this subject! I was talking to a buddy of mine last night who was once a Navy fire controlman on a destroyer, and he said the same kind of thing about the radar operators on Navy ships - in this case that most of these guys are kids who are just competent enough to run the equipment, and they often don't have a clue what they're actually looking at. So the idea that any of these guys are "trained observers" is nonsense. ("What class do you take to 'train' as an 'observer?'" he laughed.)
 
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pilots are "Trained Observers". Why do we treat pilots as quasi experts on UFO sightings?

There is a conflation of "we rely on them" with "they are reliable".
It's calming to think that the former leads to the latter.
We like calming things.
 
A large part of the video ( or simply the actual recording of what originally happened ) seems to be missing at around 27 seconds, as we suddenly go in the space of a few frames from the azimuth of the horizon being below -30 to it being +25 or so. You can just make out the horizon azimuth in the frame at 27 seconds and it is way below the -30 mark. Then all of a sudden the very next frames show the horizon azimuth at +25 and it increases to over +30. And you can see the screen is being viewed from a different angle. The ship cannot have rolled from one side to the other than quickly. What happens in the missing 6 or 7 minutes ?
 
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A large part of the video ( or simply the actual recording of what originally happened ) seems to be missing at around 27 seconds, as we suddenly go in the space of a few frames from the azimuth of the horizon being below -30 to it being +25 or so. You can just make out the horizon azimuth in the frame at 27 seconds and it is way below the -30 mark. Then all of a sudden the very next frames show the horizon azimuth at +25 and it increases to over +30. And you can see the screen is being viewed from a different angle. The ship cannot have rolled from one side to the other than quickly. What happens in the missing 6 or 7 minutes ?
It was discussed briefly earlier in this thread. Corbell first uploaded this video to Instagram which has a 60 second limit, so he may have edited it down to get the most interesting parts of the video into one minute. Or maybe this was all he was provided with, perhaps it's two short video clips stitched together. No further information has been forthcoming.
 
I think we've got a good candidate here. The ISS was setting in the north at that time.

iss ocean.png


The apparent speed is correct and the direction is correct - from the observer's left to the observer's right.

 
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Would the ISS show up on infrared? Surely not luminous enough in IR?
I was wondering the same. Since it's reflecting sunlight, it would have more-or-less the same spectrum as the sun (for thermal management reasons, absorption of sunlight by spacecraft is undesirable) , so it would have a significant IR component. But without knowing the exact equipment used to grab this video, is it enough to show up?
 
I don't think it's the ISS, that is only visible around an hour or two before sunrise and after sunset rather than midnight. Also, it was a foggy night with low visibility according to the ship logbooks.
 
I don't think it's the ISS, that is only visible around an hour or two before sunrise and after sunset rather than midnight.
It can be seen much later than one might think. The calculators are very good at estimating apparent magnitudes, and the one Z.W. used shows -.67 at this time. Although the atmospheric extinction dims it, it's still pretty noticeable, especially if they were following it from higher up where there would be less extinction. I've seen the ISS at much later times than an hour after sunset.

(Edited after screenshot fixed)
 
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