Mick West

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea8BCl2yVU0

The above is a summary of the findings of this discussion.

Original First post follows:
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A video of what looks like the same thing as multiple pilots have been reporting, but from ground level.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-WDx7byI0k

This was the most incredible night of strange things in the sky I've ever seen... I shot this video with night vision binoculars and my iPhone 12 Pro Max. Dozens of 'objects' started to appear in the sky, due north of my home. You could not see them with the naked eye. The whole thing lasted about 15 minutes. I was out on my 2nd floor patio looking at the stars with the night vision at 1am on the morning of August 14/15th, 2022 when the first few caught...

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

Today (April 27, 2020) 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 (but not precise identifications) 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...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VmrRGln1XA

This is essentially a summary of the work done, in large part by @flarkey, in the three following threads:

• Retired F-18 Pilot Reports 5 UAPs Pacing His Aircraft Over Channel Islands 8-18-22
• MUFON Report 124374: Commercial airline pilot videos "2 objects circling" [Starlink Flares / Racetrack Illusion]
• Claim: Another Sighting of 'racetrack' UAPs over the Pacific. [Probably Starlink]

...

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Rumsfeld is asking for more money to improve the accounting systems because the DOD is working with very outdated systems.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...

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...

[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...

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...

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...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPGmUF6R3CY

This was a relatively straightforward case. The object looked like a Tic-Tac shaped blob. Initially I thought it was fake, but then it quickly became apparent it was a real object (or at least a really good 3D fake).

The low resolution, sharpening, and digital zoom make bright white shapes turn into blobs. Here on the right there the buildings and the racetrack, with the object overlaid at the same resolution.

Sharpening makes it worse at this scale, as it adds dark pixels which make it look bigger. See the gaps between the buildings.

Tracking down the plane was a simple matter as they gave the flight number, date, location, and view direction...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu0EemWzZpM

Article:

1. The UAP/Light came from above and stopped/hovered near FL37, about the same altitude as the aircraft, shone a light on the 767 and briefly approached the aircraft. Then it instantly matched the speed, and heading of the aircraft and maintained a consistent separation.

a. The light descended vertically, stopped abruptly, and shone a light on the 767 causing the crew to believe that there was another airliner on a collision heading with its landing lights on.

b. It changed direction from vertical descent to a sudden stop/hover, to approaching the aircraft briefly, to taking the same heading and speed of the aircraft at about the same altitude and an estimated distance of 1-2k ft.

c. It matched the altitude, speed, and heading of the aircraft, 575mph and at 37,000ft for over...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHZn29dqy-I

In the "small, or far away" category this video is quite popular. It shows a light close to the horizon. The light hovers, pulsating, then suddenly moves to the left. It hovers for a while more and then ascends vertically. When it moves it leaves a trail of light.

Pretty amazing, if it were actually way out over the ocean. However, a simpler explanation occurred to me when I noticed the people walking on the beach path. If we think the object as being directly above them instead of above the horizon, then it suddenly snaps into something simpler. A drone.



The light trail, first of all, is just a common artifact of webcams like this. In low light, they build up the image using image persistence. This creates trails around anything that's...

[Thread Updated, October 20, 2021]

Robert Salas' claims about UFO deactivating Nuclear weapons are once again bouncing around the media. A lot of the older analysis of these claims is getting lost to Internet decay, so I've gathered here the key resources that help understand the story from a skeptic's perspective.

James Carlson's highly detailed (357 Pages) "American, Credulous - Establishing the Truth Behind the Echo Flight Incident of March 16, 1967"

Article:

The Echo Flight Incident holds a sad place of pride in Robert Hastings’ history of UFO interest in the marching forth of nuclear arms around the world, UFOs and Nukes, but as we shall see, his general disregard for anything approaching a generally accepted standard of proof ensures that his magnum opus will be forever classified as an interesting but...

For discussion of the SCU analysis, see: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/dhs-rubber-duck-footage.12054/post-284302

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5Q82LsMPjQ



A 1080p50 video. Location and time on screen identifies it as taken from "IRONS12"


Which is this plane:

(Note the camera)

video description

My apologies for the bullshit but the footage was removed by YouTube so I am attempting to post again. I am finally proud to present to you guys the very FIRST legitimate footage of a genuine UAP craft tracked for over 40 minutes by the department of Homeland Security using FLIR optics system in black hot mode. The footage...