Metabunk
Explained: UFO Filmed With Telescope [Loon Balloon]
"UFO filmed with telescope" sounds ideal, as most UFOs are TFAs - Too Far Away to get a clear look. Unfortunately this one was not much better - it was filmed with a telescope, but seemingly with a phone camera held up to the eyepiece. The UFO itself was many miles away.
At first I thought it was lense flare, as it changed shape in the video with the phone focussing. But it was also claimed to be something visible to the naked eye. It also seemed to have and "antenna" coming from the top.
Then I remembered that many telescopes invert the image. So maybe was more like.
Now it looks like a ballon, and the obvious contender is a Loon Balloon, like.
The videos come from MUFON, case 114015. With description
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Debunked: Hovering Ship "Fata Morgana" or "Mirage" [False Horizon]
Tabloid media love to invoke the cool sounding "fata morgana" or "superior mirage" to explain images of things floating in the sky. The problem is that a real fata morgana superior mirage (above the boat) looks like this:
An inferior mirage (under the boat) looks like this:
In both cases there's distortion, and there's inversion.
It does NOT look like this:
Source: Science Channel
Despite the Science Channel's talking heads saying this is a Fata Morgana, it very obviously is not. The giveaway is the total lack of distortion, duplicated...
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Explained: Why Biden is boarding C-32 instead of VC-25
On February 5th, 2021, President Joe Biden made his first flight aboard Air Force One, travelling from Joint Base Andrews to New Castle Air National Guard Base for a weekend trip to his home state of Delaware, the Associated Press reported. Here is the video showing Biden boarding Air Force One from C-SPAN: https://www.c-span.org/video/?508747-101/joint-base-andrews-departure
However, some people took note of the fact that Biden was boarding an airplane that resembled the C-32, a modified Boeing 757, commonly used by the Vice President as Air Force Two, instead of the VC-25A, a modified Boeing 747. Some Trump supporters even went as far as claiming that the reason for this was because Donald Trump was still in control of the presidency so he was still in possesion of the original Air Force One, forcing Biden to use a decoy airplane. This follows a series of allegations that Biden has been using fake props and...
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Three Contrails "Descending" over Denver on Jan 31, 2021 [Military, C-17A Globemasters]
Source: https://twitter.com/skilldrick/status/1356341980922478592
Source: https://twitter.com/MickWest/status/1356348321862877184
They also show up in this video compilation:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg_v-rE0tT8
Info about the planes shows up on Radarbox:
COHO71 and COHO71 show up on FlightAware, TCM to CHS
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/COHO71/history/20210131/1601Z/KTCM/KCHS...
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Debunked: Biden signing "Blank" Executive Orders
In the C-Span footage, the bright lights and the low resolution of the video made it look like Biden was signing blank executive orders. This led some of the more imaginative QAnon holdouts to suggest they were actually blank (and hence part of some kind of fake Presidency). However, a higher resolution photo shows the text.
The text is also briefly visible in the video as he closes the document folder, so the sheet is briefly not being directly lit.
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Debunked: Biden in "Fake" Oval Office
Unwilling to accept that Biden is now President, several people have been sharing memes suggesting that recent photos and video of Biden in the Oval Office are fake. The evidence presented seems large to be things like noticing the wallpaper was different years ago, or that when viewed from a low angle you see more trees, and from a high angle you see people and cars. There's also a claim that German TV released a photo of the "set"
Source:Reddit.
This is indeed a backstage image of a fake oval office from Germany. It's the set used by the German program Bilt, for their election night coverage. Note the four people in the image above, here they are on German TV.
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Explained: 9:33 AM ET Time on NPR Story about Storming the Capitol
A "Live Update" page on NPR keeps the same URL, but the content changes at the day progresses. This allows people to keep tabs on a story by refreshing the page, or by the page auto-refreshing. The original story was posted at 9:33 AM ET, with the headline "Diehard Trump Supporters Gather In The Nation's Capital To Protest Election Results".
Through the day the story was updated, with the last update at 3:08 PM ET, shortly after rioters were photographed on the Senate chamber floor. The headline for the final version of the story was...
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Blue UFO Over Hawaii
A UFO seen in Hawaii looks similar to an LED kite to me, appearing as a curved line of light that changes shape.
The loop above has been stabilized, the apparent jitter comes from a combination of motion blur (from camera motion, not the object moving) and loss of focus.
Here it's compared to another LED kite:
Article: Misitina Sape told Hawaii News Now she captured the image at 8:26 p.m. near Haleakala Avenue in Nanakuli.
Not long after, a woman named Moriah spotted what looked like the same object passing over Princess Kahanu Estates.
Here's some LED kites
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Debunked: 94% of Fulton County Ballots Manually Adjudicated [It's a Process all Batches go Through]
https://www.c-span.org/video/?477819-1/fulton-county-georgia-election-update
The false claim that 94% of Fulton County ballots needed manual review and adjustment comes from a misunderstanding of what Richard Barron, the director of elections in Fulton County, said on Nov 4, 2020 (the day after the election). It's right at the start:
SO FAR WE HAVE SCANNED 113,130 BALLOTS. WE ADJUDICATED OVER 106,000. THOSE HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED ON THE SITE. SO THOSE RESULTS ARE ALREADY POSTED. YOU CAN SEE, LIKE WE HAVE BEEN DOING ALL DAY, WE HAVE BEEN OPENING BALLOTS. WE OPEN THEM AT THESE MACHINES, THEN THEY GO OVER TO WHERE THEY ARE FLATTENED, AND THEN THEY GO OVER TO THE SCANNER. IT IS A TIME-CONSUMING PROCESS. ONCE THEY GET TO THE SCANNER, THERE IS A VOTE REVIEW PANEL OVER THERE, AND WE ARE ADJUDICATING THEM FROM THERE. THE ONLY BALLOTS THAT ARE ADJUDICATED ARE IF WE HAVE A BALLOT IN WHICH THERE IS SOME QUESTION AS TO HOW THE COMPUTER...
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Debunked: "Missile Strike" caused Nashville Explosion
The idea that a city of 700,000 people would somehow fail to notice a missile being fired a an AT&T building, or even the idea that some powerful and secretive cabal would think that nobody would notice, is pretty obviously ridiculous. But missiles are a common target for conspiracy theorists and so it should have been un surprising that some people say that the explosion in Nashville was not only from Anthony Warner's RV, but was augmented, or perhaps caused, by a missile.
The evidence presented for this is tenuous. Firstly there's the idea that the explosion happened across the road from the RV, an idea that took hold because of video showing a the central fireball being obscured by a dust cloud - discussed and debunked in another thread.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/de...sion-was-across-the-street-from-the-rv.11516/
The second piece of evidence is what looks like a trail of smoke that appears very shortly...
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Debunked: Nashville Explosion was "Across the Street" from the RV
The following video is a cropped and slowed version of the official Metro Nashville PD video of the RV explosion. I've also corrected it for the camera motion from the blast, so you can more accurate see where things are before and after.
Some people have claimed that the explosion comes from "across the street". This is an understandable mistake. If you overlay a before and "during" shot, you see a portion where the fireball is visible on the right, but the RV was on the left.
However even in this comparison, it should be obvious what is going on. The fireball is there, but it's blocked in the center by...
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Is Falun Gong Behind Seth Holehouse's "The Plot to Steal America"? It looks like it.
A slickly produced video titled "The Plot to Steal America", which regurgitated many election conspiracy theories and pointed the finger at China, was shared in a tweet by Donald Trump on December 23, 2020.
The video is narrated and ostensibly created by Seth Holehouse and his web site "Man in America." Holehouse is a member of Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa), a "new religious movement" that many people have described as being a cult. Several people have noted this connection and suggested that the video is simply disinformation, propaganda from Falun Gong. Falun Gong has a long history of attacking the communist government of China, and more recently of strongly supporting Trump.
It appears that attempts have been made by Falun...
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Explained: 82nd Airborne: "A Storm Is Coming" - Operation Devil Storm
"'Storm coming" is a joke I use whenever the the weather looks a bit dark. It's an old Yorkshire reference (like "there's trouble at 'mill"), a folksy comment meant to invoke the idea of a gruff old farmer looking out over the field at oncoming clouds.
It's also a very common metaphorical phrase used in movies and books. A search of the movie/TV data base QuoDB returns over a thousand results.
It also represents a foundational belief in the QAnon theory, dating back to a random comment Trump made about "The Calm Before The Storm" in 2017
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'Fast Movers' and 'Transmedium' Vehicles
In an article that was widely anticipated by the UFO community, Tim McMillan of The Debrief provides several nuggets of stories and information that will surely excite many, and provide a welcome distraction for some reporters, but ultimately does not advance the quest for actual physical evidence. The sources were either anonymous, vague, or speculative.
Article: Given the report’s classification and their discussion of a “sensitive intelligence matter,” the officials we spoke with did so only under strict conditions of anonymity.
There are descriptions of two photos (but not the actual photos)
Firstly a silver...
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Tales From The Rabbit Hole
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Episode 58: Peter Bergen – Kirkpatrick, UFOs, and the Pentagon
Fri, 26 Jan 2024 14:15:46 PSTPeter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen.” He...
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Episode 57: Alex Dietrich, Clouds, Critical Thinking, and UFOs
Fri, 25 Aug 2023 16:52:09 PDTAlex Dietrich served a 20-year career as a Naval officer and fighter pilot with two combat deployments. She was also deployed to Afghanistan as an Infrastructure reconstruction engineer. She then transitioned to academia, serving as...
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Episode 56: Robert Bartholomew – Havana Syndrome and Mass Psychogenic Illness
Fri, 22 Oct 2021 14:30:39 PDTRobert Bartholomew has a PhD in Medical Sociology, and is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He’s an expert in Mass Psychogenic Illness...
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Episode 55 – Professor Avi Loeb: The Galileo Project
Tue, 10 Aug 2021 15:22:31 PDTWhat is a University professor doing investigating UFOs? Professor Avi Loeb of Harvard University heads the Galileo Project, which seeks (in part) to identify the nature of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena by establishing a network of...
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Episode 54 – Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko: Pastels and Pedophiles
Wed, 04 Aug 2021 18:00:54 PDTMia Bloom is Professor of Communication at Georgia State University with a PhD in political science from Columbia University. Sophia Moskalenko is a research fellow at Georgia State University and a researcher at the National...