"Foo Fighter" over Saudi Arabia 1944

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Deleted member 16321

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Since three frames of [Fly-by] are garnering global attention I thought this might be worth processing.

I've been examining old aerial survey photos and came across a number of frames which include a white speck that appears to move along with the aircraft filming it. I thought it looked interesting and unidentified so I stitched it together into an animation.

I'm not certain of the frame intervals or camera used.

The frames from the sortie in question start half way down this page NCAP.org starting with frame L_001 - serial ending 019 and run until frame serial number ending 105.

(Note the location tag changes from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain after frame 0063 but the sortie number remains the same).



This should be easy to debunk as the full resolution images are available from NCAP.org and they are all geotagged, so we should be able to recreate the flight path and get definitive answer as to whether it's a real thing, cabin reflection, the moon, or a film defect etc.
 

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  • SaudiFooFLargeThumbs1944.mp4
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That's a speck of dust during the printing process. Note that it jumps around from frame to frame, then disappears. I don't know exactly what the mechanism looked like that did the printing, but the dust speck got stuck in/on some part of the mechanism, and was in a slightly different spot as each frame of the negative was printed. Then it got removed or fell away/off.

Those are B-17 engines, btw. And... the props aren't synchronized. Tsk, tsk.
 
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It may be, but how do you convince someone, also speculating, that it is not advanced tech that flew off at hypersonic speed?
 
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It may be, but how do you convince someone, also speculating, that it is not advanced tech that flew off at hypersonic speed?
The burden of proof is on the one claiming something extraordinary.

Metabunk is often a victim of it's own success, we've shown what so many things actually are that it is now expected and sometimes erroneously assumed that if we can't identify something then it must be an extraordinary object. But this is not the case.
 
The burden of proof is on the one claiming something extraordinary.
I totally agree. It's useful, however, to include in the body of evidence in these discussion threads things that are verifiably ordinary, showing our working. Simply saying something is a speck of dust etc is fine - and probably correct - but demonstrating that it is so seems to be required here otherwise it is just speculation on a level with those claiming something extraordinary. Examples of similar ordinary occurrences are needed to help people avoid falling into the trap of seeing things that are not there.
 
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It may be, but how do you convince someone, also speculating, that it is not advanced tech that flew off at hypersonic speed?
You can lead a horse to water, but...

Perhaps show them examples of an easily recognized bit of dirt or hair that exhibits the same kind of motion under the same circumstances; we've all seen projected movies where a small bit of fluff wiggles around at the edge of the image for a couple of moments before blowing away. Convincing examples for other events may be difficult to find. But if you are dealing with someone who has already convinced himself about the "advanced tech", lots of luck! The hardest words in the language to say are "I was wrong".
 
You can lead a horse to water, but..
And there are bread crumbs too! (the full resolution images are available from NCAP.org).
movies where a small bit of fluff wiggles around at the edge of the image
I think this is different to the "hair in the gate" defect you describe, the frames aren't made for animation but rather single shots for later compositing and the film moves through the camera more slowly. Although, as gets some discussion here, the development of aerial photography film is an almost comically physical process and prone to the introduction of foreign objects at many different stages of its handling.
 
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I think this is different to the "hair in the gate" defect you describe
Agreed -- my search for examples of hair in the gate doesn't turn up anything that matches the action of a speck of dust in the "printer" jumping around between frames of an animated image -- the hair sometimes wiggles, but it wiggles in "real time" since it is being filmed wiggling in real time, unlike in the animation example where there may be several minutes of hair/sped movement between frames. An amusing example can be seen on YouTube in which the camera is actually shaving off hair-like shreds of the film, resulting in what one commenter describes as "chest hair in the gate." As you can see, the hair doesn't flicker and jitter around, when it moves, its monvement is captured naturally.


Source: https://youtu.be/mW8_MOjmIbw
 
I'd like to see Metabunk introduce a CAPTCHA to the "post reply" button with multiple choice questions derived from prior posts. :)
 
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