Mick West

Ukrainian UAP Study: "Observation of Events"

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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...
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Comparing Petition Signature Rejection Rates to Mail-in Ballot Rejection Rates

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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...
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A Korean Linear "UFO" [Reflection]

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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...
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The Global Cross-Hair Enigma that looks like Hair Dryer Burns

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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...
Content from External Source
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When Conspiracists Psychoanalyze

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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...
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WVNY/ABC22 Transparent "Flying Saucer" on Weather Camera — Dark Bokeh?

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[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/
2021-08-18_08-53-44-1.jpg

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:

2022-07-22_08-13-17.jpg
I put a fleck...
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Reverse Engineering the ATFLIR to find Range and Temp to/of the Gimbal UAP

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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
Content from External Source
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...
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Sitrec - Metabunk's Situation Recreation Tool - Development Discussion

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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...
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Gimbal UFO - A New Analysis

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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...
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The AVRORA Callsign Mystery

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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. 2021-11-10_07-58-54.jpg

The Arizona segment is very different, a steep slope and several tight turns of a 0.5 mile diameter circle at about 26 knots
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(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...
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Explained: Tic-Tac Shaped UFO Near Lake Michigan [Plane]

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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.
Four White Building comparison copy.jpg
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...
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UFO Seen From FedEx Plane over Mexico March 19, 2020. Venus? (NARCAP TR 20)

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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...
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St Ives Bay UFO On Hayle Beach [Probably a Drone]

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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...
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UFOs at Nuclear Weapons Sites (Salas, Malmstrom, Eagle Flight) - Skeptical Resources

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[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 ultimately useless...
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DHS "Rubber Duck" Footage

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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

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A 1080p50 video. Location and time on screen identifies it as taken from "IRONS12"
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Which is this plane:
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(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...
Content from External Source
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Debunked: Pfizer Developing a Twice-Per-Day COVID Pill, Taken Alongside Vaccines

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The clickbait site "National File" posted this false headline (and sub-heading):
Article:
Pfizer Is Now Developing A Twice-Per-Day COVID Pill That Must Be Taken Alongside Vaccines
Pfizer is so confident the pill will be approved and likely mandated that it has started production before the end of clinical trials


This has been shared on social media, usually without any context, making it seem like it's a pill everyone will be mandated to take twice a day forever in addition to the vaccine.

In reality, this is an antiviral drug, a protease inhibitor, currently called PF-07321332, which is designed to treat patients who are ill with COVID-19. Pfizer promotes it as a potential "a novel oral therapy that could be prescribed at the...
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Are 99% of COVID-19 Deaths Among the Unvaccinated?

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I found the above meme on Facebook, and reposted it on Twitter. I should relaly not have been surprised, but I got quite a bit of negative reaction from people saying I was spreading disinformation. But I think it's essentially true, even if the 99.2% figure is a little high although the 99.2% figure is out of date . But let's fact-check with sources. Firstly the first five "Who has been vaccinated" - which might seem uncontroversial, but people were still pushing back at some.

1. Donald Trump and every other living US president.
That's Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton and Carter.

Article:
Published March 1, 2021
Updated April 17, 2021
Former President Donald J. Trump and his wife, Melania, quietly...
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Explained: Birdwatcher's "Amazing UFO", Burwell Fen, UK. [C-130 Landing Lights]

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The above still image from a video was the one chosen by some media outlets a few years ago (2014) to illustrate the story "VIDEO: Birdwatcher spots UFO in skies above Burwell- and has the footage to prove it!." And why not, it looks like a weird diamond shaped craft, almost a flying saucer.

This old story wasn't on my radar until I made a comment on Twitter, wondering why (with their binoculars and long-lens cameras) birdwatchers didn't see UFOs (implying the the question of why there are no god photos of UFOs). Of course people then Googled "birdwatcher UFO" and that's about the only story that pops up, so it was gleefully offered as a counter-example by at least...
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Shape-Changing Light From Plane with Nikon P900 - Polarizing filter + Venus?

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Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF3w0kI53aU

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Just looks like Venus at sunset? But when zoomed in, it takes on all kinds of shapes
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I've got a P900. To me these all look like some kind of optical distortions of a small light source (i.e. Venus). However I've not seen anything this extreme before, and I wonder what's actually going on. The shapes seem relatively stable, so that seems to rule out the normal atmospheric turbulence. Camera shake and zooming don't really seem to change the shape, and we don't see it actually change shape often, that seems to be off-screen.

It's possible someone is deliberately inducing the distortion with something on the...
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Corbell: "Unidentified glowing objects near US Navy ship" [Planes or drones?]

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Article:
So here’s the deal. I did find one, you know, piece interesting, it appears that there is a blinking what appears to be like a plane going overhead. I don’t know, if that was a plane, I’m making the assumption It was a plane. But you know, remember when you go back into history with UFOs, I mean, we’re talking as far back as they’ve ever been recorded, there have always been blinking UFOs, I’m not going to count that out. I’m gonna say I don’t know. But it appears to me that the VIPR team individual, they’re focusing on the UFOs, and then a plane happens to pass above, which was kind of interesting, because it’s different looking. It’s blinking, it’s going. So that was neat. He didn’t focus in on it, as far as I can tell. And I was told that if it was an object of extreme interest, the individual would have focused in on it. So as far as the...
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