Metabunk

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...

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...

I received a DM from a UFOlogist, @realityseaker on Twitter, who had done some work on the Gimbal video and found something. Everyone focuses on the "flop," where the object/glare (hereafter the "blob") suddenly swivels dramatically — but his analysis suggests that the video's first 24 seconds are actually more telling. With his permission, I am looking for commentary.

He started with a version that's rotation-stabilized to keep the bars of the horizon indicator level onscreen, and also centered and translation-stabilized on the blob. He then wrote a clever little program to track the rotation of the blob's major axis. He found a strong correlation between the rotation of the blob (orange) and the roll of the aircraft (blue):


To make this more visually intuitive, I overlaid a constant angle on his video, and then roughly animated it to show how the blob and aircraft roll more or less at the same times and amounts: once around...

[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...

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...

I spotted this video today - Source: https://youtu.be/u68GBjdLnEA

It claims to be submitted by someone in Panama. Can anyone tell if its recent or has it been around for a while?

Its a good video but I'm thinking it's a fake. The giveaway is the two guys in the cherry picker don't seem to have noticed it. Why are they in the shot? Where they being filmed when the UFO happened to appear? Or, was it a film of them which was then manipulated and the UFO added? How come no one else videoed it?

Thoughts?

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...

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...

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...

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



Just looks like Venus at sunset? But when zoomed in, it takes on all kinds of shapes


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...

Several media sources in the last few days have publicised video footage stated to be filmed from the ISS, showing a 'fleet' of bright lights moving steadily across the field of view. The publicity seems to have started with a Reddit post here, which includes an embedded video:

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/oixo2s/can_someone_please_explain_what_i_just_saw_on_the/

The date of the posting is said to be '7 days ago', and the poster claims to have 'just' seen the footage in a live feed from the ISS on YouTube. The footage is watermarked with the 'SpaceVids' logo. There is indeed a SpaceVids channel on YT, which does stream live footage from the ISS. Tracking down the original footage in the SpaceVids stream, or in NASA's own platforms, would be a major task which I haven't attempted.

The Reddit discussion has...

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...

One of a set of four photos (attached in zip file, original webp, converted to PNGs).
Source: Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/o9a39j/here_ya_go_guys_deleted_pictures_from_the/

What looks fake to me is the grain. It looks like the photoshop "Add Noise" filter, which adds noise at pixel resolution, rather than some actual film grain. So you get lots of random short lines.


Here, I've recreated it on the left, with the "photo" on the right.

By comparison, here's a crop of photo I scanned in at 600dpi


Film grain is there, but fuzzy, not pixel aligned noise.

I came across this one on YouTube today and thought it was quite a good one. ie. not so blurry and some close ups.
It would be great to get Mick's analysis of this one. Maybe goto 2:11 to start the watch,

Source: https://youtu.be/DnILp5TnEuo

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FuVClipbh4

Article:

Puthoff was the brains behind what the intelligence community referred to as the “remote viewing program,” and he worked with an informal group of colleagues on a range of paranormal issues, a team that Vallée termed the “invisible college.” Over the next half-century, Puthoff would help to keep interest in UFOs alive inside the government.

In 1995, Project Stargate ended in failure. Government interest in UFOs and the paranormal might have faded away just as surely if not for the interest of a wealthy hotel magnate, Robert Bigelow, who had spent a lifetime obsessed with the paranormal and became a patron of UFO conspiracy theorists. Bigelow went into business with Area 51 conspiracy nut Bob Lazar, and he funded the research of dubious alien abduction...

In a recent interview with former Navy pilot Alex Dietrich, she encouraged people (specifically civilian pilots) who saw a UFO to report it to the FAA, and referenced a section of the FAA's FAR/AIM set of regulations.

Part of why I agreed to talk to you [...] is to reduce the stigma, so that when folks see something strange, they will come out and report it up the appropriate channels. [...] So FAA, Federal Aviation Administration has a page in their FAR/AIM manual [...] for you know, what to do if you see a UFO [...], and there's a phone number to call. And I would say, you know, if you see something, no prank calls, but if you see something real, call,

The page she is referring to is currently:

Article:

Section 8. Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) Reports
9-8-1 GENERAL
Persons wanting to report UFO/unexplained phenomena...

[Mod: Added Mick's Response video]
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBeqP4z3rXo

And Lehto's response to that
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DTYqMqc3cU

Original post follows
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latest vid from Chris Lehto, this time discussing Gimbal.
Source: https://youtu.be/Tyw4JA00AMc