Metabunk

In 2001, Donald Rumsfeld said 'According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.' This has been misinterpreted by many people as $2.3 trillion actually going missing. However, it's really just about the way the money was accounted for.

Rumsfeld is asking for more money to improve the accounting systems because the DOD is working with very outdated systems. This means transactions can't be tracked to acceptable accounting standards. As an example he says:

The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it's stored on dozens of technological systems...

[UPDATE - the flashing lights in the video appear to be reflections of the iPhone 13 Pro autofocus system. First suggested by @flarkey]





Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s-TDoc7YLY

Interesting case - some very rapidly flashing and seeming erratic motion of some lights seen from a plane. There are several video clips in Ben Hansen's video. I include one clip here that shows the light in the context of both stars and land.


Initially seems like a reflection, but the pilot says the lights moved around the plane.

Update: Attaching two files submitted to MUFON.

Article:

The Main Astronomical Observatory of NAS of Ukraine conducts an independent study of UAP also. For UAP observations, we used two meteor stations installed in Kyiv and in the Vinarivka village in the south of the Kyiv region. Observations were performed with colour video cameras in the daytime sky. We have developed a special observation technique, for detecting and evaluating UAP characteristics. According to our data, there are two types of UAP, which we conventionally call: (1) Cosmics, and (2) Phantoms. We note that Cosmics are luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky. We call these ships names of birds (swift, falcon, eagle). Phantoms are dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 per cent. We present a broad range of UAPs. We see them everywhere. We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear. Flights of single, group...

A recall petition and an election are very different things. In order to get a recall of an elected official on the ballot, you have to gather valid signatures of registered voters. You need at least 12% of the number of registered voters who voted in the last election for that office.

The signatures must be in-person (not online), so they are generally gathered in the street. Sometimes it's by passionate volunteers setting up tables, and sometimes it's people with clipboards asking other people in bust public places. As you can imagine, this is not the most rigorous of processes, and that plays out in the percentage of valid signatures:

Article:

The average signature validity rate for the 143 successful petition drives featured in this study is 75.33%. This means that...

This looks like a small island or rock in a loch to me. The bottom of the diamond would be the reflection of the island in the water.

If it was a misty morning, where the water ends and sky begins would be unclear.

Edit: to illustrate what I mean, I found this image of a small island in a Loch here from a Google image search. The shape is similar to the object.

The view of a little island on Loch Etive from Ardchattan Priory Gardens
https://blosslynspage.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/floating-island-loch-etive-scotland/


HD Calvine image: https://web.archive.org/web/2022081....wordpress.com/2022/08/watermarked-jpeg-2.jpg
General Calvine UFO discussion...

I was approached by a Korean UFO investigator with the above video of a UFO spotted by a local witness. My first thought was a Starlink train, but they also included a video from a wider angle:



The video was very dark, but I was able to enhance it in After Effects with a combination of:

1. Adjusting Levels
2. "Echo" filter, 15 frames, Echo Operator: "Maximum"

"Maximum" takes the brightest value of a pixel in the last 15 frames, which greatly increases the definition of the edges of bright or dark areas in a noisy video that does not move too much.



I could now see that object seemed to move with the wires attached to the utility pole. I suggested this, but the witness account was of something 500m away, "floating in the sky." I then suggested taking a photo in the daytime from the same location...

The above two slides are from a talk by famous UFO investigator Jacques Vallee. The talk came up because scientist Garry Nolan (who sometimes works with Vallee) mentioned a later aspect of the case (a star-shaped mark on a photo and a giant UFO nobody noticed) in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson.

But someone in the comments pointed out the likely cause in April 2022:

The Paisley Wave 4 months ago
With all respect for Dr. Vallee, the 'crosshair' marks may have a simple explanation. Search for images of blowdryers and you'll see many, especially the older ones, have metal crosshair-shaped grills at their openings. They get hot and can burn the skin leaving marks corresponding with their...

As a skeptic, I often have an experience that many people will find familiar. I'm talking to someone. They tell me something I know to be wrong. I explain why they are wrong. They refuse to believe me. I continue to try, sometimes over days or weeks. They still won't get it, and sometimes their false belief becomes even stronger. What is wrong with them?

The inability of the true believer to see reason is a frustrating puzzle. One of the most common questions I get in interviews is, "why do people fall for conspiracy theories?" I explain that it's often just a chain of chance, circumstances, and being in an unsettled time in their life with too much spare time. But that's not the "why" the interviewer is looking for. They want to know what is wrong with the conspiracy theorist. Specifically what is mentally wrong with them.

A Desire to Pathologize​

There seems to be a natural desire to pathologize unconventional beliefs. Many of these conspiracy theories seem...

[Source: WVNY Twitter]

The shape of this UFO is not entirely uncommon, a horizontal-oriented diamond is sometimes seen when distant lights are out of focus. For example, in this "UFO" video of a plane, which is just the out-of-focus lights - an effect called "bokeh"
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ex...fo-burwell-fen-uk-c-130-landing-lights.11959/


What's unusual here is that the shape is dark and slowly moving. Is this a case of "dark bokeh"? I'd never really thought about such a thing before, but of course, it's quite possible. Like here:


I put a fleck...

Travis Taylor (the former chief scientist at the Pentagon's UAP Task Force) made a very specific claim on CBS 8 News Now:

From recent calculations I've done, if this device [i.e. Gimbal], whatever this object is, is further away than 8km, then it has to be at the temperature of the melting point of aluminum, and if it's further than 50km, it's at the melting point of steel. That's how hot it would have to be to show up in this way in this sensor. So, it's not a jet that's 50 miles away, and we are getting glare of it

This comes from work he showed at a recent UFO conference, where he presented an overview of analysis that he claims demonstrates a limit on how far away the Gimbal object can be.

He bases this around a notion of "saturated" that seems poorly defined. Essentially he's using it as a synonym for "overexposed". That means for an individual pixel in an image it's brighter than the maximum value the digital...

This video from a Debrief article published today shows three small white dots passing by a runway, viewed from a infrared camera (white hot) mounted to an Apache Longbow helicopter as it takes off.

Source: https://youtu.be/-oNIqlLXtLI

Article:

Captured by one of the U.S. military’s flagship attack helicopters close to midnight on November 6, 2018, roughly 40 miles northwest of Tucson, Arizona, the video appears to show several unidentifiable objects maneuvering unlike any known aircraft.

“Wow! Are those three really fast moving jets up there?” exclaims the Apache helicopter’s co-pilot and gunner as three objects suddenly appear, dashing across the sky as the aircraft prepares to take-off.

“Probably. Probably some A10’s or some F-16s,” the Apache’s pilot replies, before admitting...

Sitrec is a Situation Recreation tool that's just starting out in development. It's born from the Gimbal Simulator, and that's the only situation it's recreating - but eventually I'll extend it to GoFast, Nimitz, Aguadilla, Rubber Duck, mysterious DHS video #4, - and hopefully make it available so others can use it on arbitrary videos. You can see (and use) it here:
https://www.metabunk.org/sitrec/

The goal is to allow real-time analysis and visualization of the possible 3D interpretations that might fit a 2D video (and any other data for a particular case) and see from that what is the most likely scenario.

This is very much a work-in-progress, and not really usable for much right now, but I'm starting this discussion thread to track the progress and get feedback and ideas. The initial goal is to replicate and check the work of @Edward...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs

The "Gimbal" UFO is the poster child of modern UFO videos. Leaked in 2017, and officially released in 2019, it's considered by many to show a genuine anomalous craft, exhibiting flight characteristics beyond current human technology.

But is it? There are four observables in the video, four things you can check yourself, that demonstrate that the most likely thing we are looking at is actually a camera artifact. It's probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.

This does not mean it's not a "UAP", or that it's not unidentified, or that it's not an amazing craft - it just means it's not actually exhibiting any incredible behavior, and so this opens the door to more mundane possibilities, like a distant small jet, just flying away, the...

Source: https://youtu.be/c8A1tGBOK9k


What are these strange trails of light?

They might be CGI but the YouTube poster claims a reverse image search has not brought up anything.

They might be flares but why don’t we see the plane(s) that dropped them or the smoke?

Here is an example of a flare drop in daytime:

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PVL6sDZaknE

Reddit r/UFOs post...

[Admin: The Following video contains a summary of the key parts of this thread]
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDkqKa_NQAo

A few days ago, a youtube video was posted on Reddit r/UFO's showing an object flying by a drone, with the description:

I usually cover politics, but when Sam Chortek and Jimmy Chappie came to me with this exclusive UAP footage, I had to break the story. This video has never been seen by the public until now. The RAW FOOTAGE can be downloaded here: https://youtu.be/bVmGhxYrkug All Rights Reserved. 2019. For media inquires, contact BrianJosephHanley@gmail.com.

New links to the "raw" footage soon appeared...

[ADMIN: Turns out this was a hoax

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9nKGrRRZqk

Article:

UFO observed in the sky from Montpellier to Perpignan: a hoax signed by Rémi Gaillard!​

The Montpellier troublemaker revealed the deception this Saturday.

"In 1938, Orson Welles made believe in an invasion of aliens on the radio. A century later, thanks to you, I just made the same hoax", explains this Saturday in a video posted on Twitter the troublemaker from Montpellier.

In this sequence of 2 minutes 30, he indicates having acted with the complicity of Loic Spadafora founder of Météo Gard - Héraul, an information Twitter account dedicated to "forecasts, news and live monitoring of meteorological phenomena", and Marie, breeder of horses in the Hérault...

There's an apparent aricraft with the callsign "AVRORA" that shows up on FlightRadar24. It's the subject of several threads on Reddit, but nobody seems to have figured out what it is.

The track initially looks like a standard trans-pacific route, but it's not. There's only two segments, one in the Arizona desert, and one off the coast of the Russian Kamchatka peninsula. There's no data for the path in-between (which is just an interpolated great circle).

The Kamchatka location just shows up as occasional sporadic results, over several days, with very low air speed.

The Arizona segment is very different, a steep slope and several tight turns of a 0.5 mile diameter circle at about 26 knots

(These tracks are extracted from the raw JSON files using a custom Python script)

What could this be? I think there's a few options, in no great order

1. ADS-B Spoofing - i.e. not...

This video was posted to the UFO Reddit last night


Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/qnckv6/can_anyone_explain_this_happened_in_la_last_night/

I did some initial investigation over there, brightened the video and worked out the location and direction the photo was taken from.

Its here:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@34.0...4!1sO4fUqA7i3Rlih-gxbBJjSg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

St Louis Street Los Angles looking down Judson Street towards an intersection on i5/i10/US101

So it follows that this likely is intersection lighting in the fog, however I am unable to find a matching lighting structure on the intersection, I used Bing and Google maps and various street view angles.

Google...