Metabunk

In the recent media coverage of the "QAnon" conspiracy theory that followed some Q supporters showing up at a Trump rally, one of the pieces of evidence that the Q supporters gave on camera was the idea that Trump said "tip-top" because a Q made him do it.

This actually seems quite compelling as a sound bite on TV. There's the post on 4Chan with an anonymous user asking Q to work "tip-top" into a Trump speech, this is immediately followed with a clip of Trump saying "tip-top". There's even a bonus white rabbit (a reference to the "rabbit hole" in "red-pill" modern mythology).

But it all falls apart when you look at the actual context. Here's a timeline of Trump saying "Tip Top" (or "Tippy-top") and 4Chan/QAnon talking about it. Note the dates...

Twitter has been broken for about 30 minutes.

https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/map/




Normally this would be chalked up to random failure, and quite possibly it is. But it comes at a time where the role of Social Media in the public discourse, and in particular the election, is increasingly contentious. Twitter suspended the Trump Campaign's twitter account for posting a link to a dispute New York Post article regarding Joe and Hunter Bider, and the conservatives have been highly critical. Possibly someone has decided this is the right time for a cyber-attack.

Or maybe just someone messed up. We'll see. But the atmosphere is certainly going to lead to a variety of speculation.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkH5I0lXiFs

Why do you sometimes see unburnt trees next to a burnt down house?


Conspiracy theories would say that this is because the houses were actually vapourize with beams of energy from space. But the actual reason, as many people have pointed out, is simply that the wood in the houses is dry, and the wood in the trees is wet.

If you don't use a wood fire in your house this might be a bit hard to understand, so I set out to do an experiment to demonstrate this.

First stop was my attic, which, like most new houses in California has an internal frame of 2 by 4s.
There was a bit of scrap wood left over from construction. The same wood as the frame of my house, so ideal for testing...

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

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth is a group that promotes the idea that the World Trade Center was destroyed by pre-planted explosives on 9/11 and that the plane impacts and fires were just a cover.

After years of telling people that they should believe them because they are architects and engineers, they have changed tactics. They now promote the idea that it's OBVIOUS that explosives are used, and that anyone can see this. They promoted this idea over the last month with a series of increasingly silly memes.



This prompts a question: if it's so obvious, then what was the point of AE911Truth? What was the point of funding a complicated study of World Trade Center Building Seven for $316,000? What are all those long technical documents on their web site for...

Article:

The Pentagon’s U.F.O. Program has been using unclassified slides like this to brief government officials on threats from Advanced Aerospace Vehicles — “including off-world” — and materials retrieved from crashes of unidentified phenomena.Credit...Leslie Kean

When asked about the words "off-world" in the above slide, writer Ralph Blumenthal said:

Article:

Ralph Blumenthal
Contributor, former Times reporter
July 28
@leadingfrombehind Off-world means not of this earth. We and our sources refrain from speculating on other questions beyond that.

But what does "not of this earth" mean? Regardless of the meaning, where does this definition come from? If we search the .gov and .mil domains for usages of the term "off-world" the most common usage seems to be, essentially "not on this Earth"...

A Hungarian YouTuber by the name of Andras Horvath, who focuses on car and technology reviews, claims to have caught a strange object while filming drone footage.



His analysis of the footage is here: UFO Csobánka egén - his own calculations find that the object is travelling at approximately 1,800 km/h. He has also provided the original 4k footage, it's linked in the description of the YouTube post, direct link here.

This looks very like similar videos that turn out to be a bug flying near to the camera ... except for the fact that it is disappearing and reappearing from the distant clouds. It probably wouldn't be a difficult thing to hoax this aspect, however, for someone familiar with video production tools like After Effects etc.

There is some discussion on a...

In episode 7 of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, an unfortunate cow dies of natural causes. The team of scientists on cast study security camera footage for clues. As the cow is laying there dying small black object whizzes by.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11WVUQ7Lmg8

It's only visible for two frames on the footage, meaning it travels between the two positions in 1/30th of a second. Possible more, as security camera footage is often a low framerate. But let's assume 1/30th.

How fast is it going? That depends on how big it is, or to put it another way, is it small, or far away?

The cast members choose to interpret the object as being at the same distance as the cow is - mysteriously flying over it as it dies, presumably with some intent. I think it's actually much closer to the camera.
[ATTACH type="full" alt="Metabunk 2020-05-22...

In Episode 7 of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, a suspicious helicopter is spotted flying over the ranch. Despite having binoculars they failed to identify it, and said it did not show up on the ADS-B scanner.

[Update] I contacted Corporate Helicopters. Ivor Shier, the director of operations, called me back and confirmed it was their helicopter and that they were just doing a LIDAR powerline survey. This is looking for things like defects in insulators and encroaching vegetation - anything that might be a fire hazard. He said that's all it was. He said they don't turn off the ADS-B, but that area has very poor receiver coverage. They don't rely on only FlightRadar24 style ADS-B, but also have TracPlus monitored from the head office, and also by the powerline company. He sent me some photos:


...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus

Today the Navy officially released three videos of UFOs. They are called FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST. The internet immediately took this as meaning that aliens are real. But the videos are not actually new. They were internally declassified back in 2017, and immediately released by Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy. I started writing about them in December 2017. With the help of others, I quickly arrived at likely explanations for all three videos.

The FLIR video is most likely a distant plane. The video was taken well after the famous encounter with a hypersonic zig-zagging tic-tac by pilots from the NIMITZ. This object doesn't actually move on screen - except when the camera moves...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e0SP53tCqw

There's a false theory that there's some correlation between the location of deployments of 5G networks and outbreaks of the COVID-19 coronavirus, at that location.

To demonstrate that this theory is false, I'm going to use the COVID-19 tracker on bing.com, and the Ookla 5g deployment map on speedtest.net. This will allow us to identify areas of high and low density for both 5G and COVID-19.

Let's start at the starting point, Wuhan, in Hubei province in China. There's a huge difference between Hubei and the rest of China with Coronavirus. Is this reflected in 5G coverage? No, in fact, there's plenty of other provinces and cites with similar or higher deployments of 5G, and hardly any COVID-19. So no correlation there.

Just over the ocean, there's South Korea. They have WAY more 5G deployments than...

There's a lot of concern about the possible health effects of the new 5G technology. Some of this concern is driven by videos of people with "EMF" meters who show what they claim to be harmful amounts of radiation coming from the 5G cells.

But are those reading accurate? What do they mean? What are they actually measuring? It's easy to simply dismiss concerns like this - after all why would they roll out 5G if it were so obviously harmful? But I've been dismissing it without a deep understanding for a while, so I'm going to do a bit more of a deep dive into the issue of measuring 5G radiation.

First of all, let's get a bit of a baseline with some 5G measurements from experts in the field. Dr Richard Findley, an electromagnetic field exposure specialist was asked by the BBC to measure 5G on a rooftop next to a cell.
Source...

Today (Thursday Oct 6th, 2016) marked the first significant contrail morning for several months here in El Dorado County, Northern California. The above photo on the right of criss-crossing contrails was taken at 7:30AM, and planes continued to leave trails for the next few hours. I took photos of the jets, and they were just regular air traffic, mostly Alaska or other regional jets flying north or south, often to or from Los Angeles. They were all in the range 36,000 to 39,000 feet.



But it's Thursday, and the air traffic on Wednesday was pretty much identical. So why were there trails this morning, but not yesterday morning?

The answer is quite straightforward. It's the upper air weather!

Upper air weather is different to the weather on the ground. At 35,000 feet up it's very cold (usually below -40°F/-40°C)...

https://www.flightradar24.com/-9.86,-93.83/3

The new blue planes in FlightRadar24 are flights that are transmitting GPS coordinates via satellite. These give a near-live position for planes over the open ocean (and some remote land areas), with delays of less than ten minutes.

This fills in areas of missing coverage, particularly near Antarctica, that the "Flat Earth" folk thought was evidence that southern hemisphere flights were being faked.

While it shows the (near) live position, it does not seem to show the historical track when you click on the plane. However, you can now see that planes do actually fly close to Antarctica - routes that only work on the globe Earth.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msxp77Plp20

Last week I saw this photo on a Facebook paranormal group. Just an ordinary photo of a cabinet full of dolls in an old prison, right?

Wrong. People noticed that the reflection of the boy doll on the right appeared to be more like an image of a girl, with long hair covering one side of the face, and the black jacket seemed to be missing, maybe replaced by a lace dress?

People in the group immediately figured this must be the ghost of a small girl, and conjured up a variety of backstories. But I wasn't convinced, so I tried to figure it out.

Looking at the full image, we can see the reflection from a flash. "Aha!" I thought, that's just the back of the doll's head, and it's in shadow, so it looks dark. This seemed obviously correct to me, so I posted this explanation, with a helpful diagram. I found a doll and set up a similar scene to...

Yesterday Mike Hughes died when the parachute on his home-made rocket failed, and he crashed into the desert at an unsurvivable speed.

I met Mike in May of last year at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas. We were at his "Exit The Matrix Expo," a badly organized and poorly attended flat earth convention that I had, for some bizarre reason, been invited to speak at.

I saw him standing in line at the Panda Express in the Hotel's food court. He looked over at me and said: "hey, are you Mick West?" We proceeded to have a very nice chat. He was a small wiry man, almost jockey small, a size which was a great help to him in following his dreams of becoming a famous daredevil.

Flat Earth didn't kill Mike. His death is not a cautionary tale of the dangers of weird conspiracy theories. He died following his passion and being blinded by optimism. Flat Earth was just something tacked on that gave him loads of publicity. Perhaps he came to...

In a talk last year by Luis Elizondo, this slide was shown



The one that caught my eye was the second from the right


Which instantly reminded me of a couple of pieces I have on my bookcase:


These are the result of burning some thermite in a flowerpot.


Even the shape is reminiscent of the bottom of a flower-pot, which is a common vessel for burning thermite (relatively heat resistant, at least not melting). After chipping away the cracked piot you get something like this:
[ATTACH type="full" alt="Metabunk 2020-02-21...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6A-Cw8jVBk

I looked up earlier today, and I noticed these really unusual contrails. There were curves, and circles, with trails going horizon to horizon. It was very impressive, and I'm sure the chemtrail folk were thinking the worst.

So, I immediately hopped on FlightRadar24 to try to figure out what was going on. I quickly narrowed it down to Alaskan flight 2862 from Everett in Washington to Los Angeles. For some reason it flew a couple of 360s over Sacramento.



But that wasn't all. I zoomed out a bit to make an animation of this happened, and I was rather surprised to see there were SCORES of planes in holding patterns, all of them heading for LAX, and a lot of them at high altitude.


I contacted an ATC friend, and he told me that LAX had a...

A pilot looking down and to the left from 40,000 feet saw this white cigar-shaped object seemingly following him, and took a video with his phone.

Lucklily the original file was uploaded to the MUFON database, and it had both a timestamp, and GPS location!
With this it was a relatively simple matter to find both the plane, and the white object, which of course turned out to be another plane.


So the photographer's plane was a private jet at 40,000 feet. The white object is United 541, a 737 at 25,800 feet, descending towards Las Vegas.

Source: https://youtu.be/8EbRv2xUinI

Gary Voorhis was a computer technician on the USS Princeton during the 2004 “Tic-Tac” UFO incident (commonly referred to as the “Nimitz Incident” after the aircraft carrier heading the strike group.) Gary first saw “UFOs” as slow-moving radar targets on the ship’s SPY-1B radar, which he helped maintain. He also saw lights in the direction of those targets. Initially, the radar targets were thought to be radar clutter (false targets) but after a couple of days, planes were sent out to take a look. Gary saw some video from that “interrogation” and remembers a longer and more impressive video than the one that was later leaked to the public. He thinks what he saw was some kind of advanced technology, possibly alien technology.

I think a more likely explanation is some kind of series of radar glitch and unrelated visual observations of some sort – all possibly confused in...

(Image source)

Taal is a volcano just 40 miles south of Manilla and is currently spewing large amounts of ash into the air.



The local Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) rapidly raised the alert level to 4, meaning ""a hazardous eruption may happen within hours or days." (Level 5 is reserved for when a hazardous eruption is underway.) There are also warning of a possible Tsunami.
Source: https://twitter.com/phivolcs_dost/status/1216329536536637440

Besides the obvious science and disaster aspect of the eruption, there's the inevitable disinformation. Interestingly, both the PHIVOLCS Twitter account and their web page...