Metabunk

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...

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...

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...