Blinking and erratically moving UAP observed with witnesses (2021, Italy)

[fileon]

Hello,

Posting it here as I was hoping to get some information regarding this footage I personally shot in the south of Italy, to be precise in Manfredonia (FG). I was at the 4th floor of my friends apartment, on the balcony that gives view to the touristic port of Manfredonia (not the industrial one). I was with this one friend + his girlfriend.

The object was quite flashy looked at with naked eye, and it was moving around quite a bit, I tried to improve quality with ffmpeg but GPT4 didn't do a good enough job, so I am posting it here in the hope somebody can clarify.

The video was shot around Dec 7 2021, cannot recall if this is the exact date, but it is the date I saved it in my cloud. The exact location where I was observing the thing is here: 41°37'20.5"N 15°54'25.5"E

I was thinking this could be some cosmic rays or some sort? I honestly have no idea.

Thanks in advance for anybody chiming in. Happy to answer any question.

 

[Eburacum]

Unfortunately, I don't think there is enough information in that clip to make any strong conclusions. If there were any fixed data points in the clip we could maybe stabilise it, and see if the erratic movements are real, or just caused by the movement of the camera; but the horizon is only visible for a fraction of a second while the object is visible - not long enough to make a comparison.

I suspect it is a very high, and very distant, conventional aircraft, or perhaps a somewhat closer drone; but it is difficult to be sure.

 

[flarkey]

Hello,

Posting it here as I was hoping to get some information regarding this footage I personally shot in the south of Italy, to be precise in Manfredonia (FG). I was at the 4th floor of my friends apartment, on the balcony that gives view to the touristic port of Manfredonia (not the industrial one). I was with this one friend + his girlfriend.

The object was quite flashy looked at with naked eye, and it was moving around quite a bit, I tried to improve quality with ffmpeg but GPT4 didn't do a good enough job, so I am posting it here in the hope somebody can clarify.

The video was shot around Dec 7 2021, cannot recall if this is the exact date, but it is the date I saved it in my cloud. The exact location where I was observing the thing is here: 41°37'20.5"N 15°54'25.5"E

I was thinking this could be some cosmic rays or some sort? I honestly have no idea.

Thanks in advance for anybody chiming in. Happy to answer any question.

Looks like a plane to me.

From the video we can tell that you were looking south west ...

...which is a common flight track for planes heading north towards Central Europe...

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?ica....372&lon=15.977&zoom=8.5&showTrace=2021-12-07

Can you share the original file? That should have metadata containing the date and time of the video, which would really help to identify it if it is a plane. The ADSB exchange data is still available for Dec 2021, so it should be achievable.

 

[Mendel]

It's really hard to tell from the camera footage how the object is moving. That is because the camera is moving very much itself.

Do you remember if you were thinking it was moving around at the time?

Was it cloudy at the time?

 

[jarlrmai]

The exif from the file uploaded has some metadata from the apparent record date, but it seems to indicate ~13:00 which (unless there's some timezone weirdness happening) would not match the night time footage in Europe. Possibly transcoded at some point. We'd need original file from device.

But it looks like a plane to me as well.

 

[flarkey]

if that's the date & time that the file was uploaded to the cloud then it's likely that the video was taken the night before.

 

[jarlrmai]

F:\UFOs\Exif tool>exiftool.exe -time:all -G1 -a -s 69825-52a0656d31ce2fa566b598e1744eeb06.mp4
[System] FileModifyDate : 2024:07:31 21:24:52+01:00
[System] FileAccessDate : 2024:07:31 21:55:46+01:00
[System] FileCreateDate : 2024:07:31 21:55:45+01:00
[QuickTime] CreateDate : 2021:12:07 13:03:52
[QuickTime] ModifyDate : 2021:12:07 13:03:52
[Track1] TrackCreateDate : 2021:12:07 12:55:47
[Track1] TrackModifyDate : 2021:12:07 13:03:52
[Track1] MediaCreateDate : 2021:12:07 12:55:47
[Track1] MediaModifyDate : 2021:12:07 13:03:52
[Track2] TrackCreateDate : 2021:12:07 12:55:48
[Track2] TrackModifyDate : 2021:12:07 13:03:52
[Track2] MediaCreateDate : 2021:12:07 12:55:48
[Track2] MediaModifyDate : 2021:12:07 13:03:52

 

[jarlrmai]

Possibly shot on iPhone and the cloud storage is lossy and transcodes or something. But it's missing a lot of other metadata so hard to tell what happened.

 

[John J.]

I was thinking this could be some cosmic rays or some sort?

Hi @fileon !

Almost certainly not anything to do with cosmic rays, which are subatomic particles (e.g. protons, electrons) or atomic nuclei (bound protons and neutrons without electrons) travelling at a high percentage of the speed of light.

So, very small and very fast! Also very common, while you're reading this it's likely several will have passed through your body.
Many cosmic rays hit "normal" subatomic particles in our atmosphere, causing a cascade of secondary particles.
The primary cosmic rays and secondary particles are estimated to make up 13% of the average person's exposure to background radiation per year, see Wikipedia, Cosmic ray, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray.

Because of their size and speed, cosmic rays (and their collisions, and secondary particles) aren't visible.

That said, astronauts, particularly Apollo astronauts who travelled to the Moon, have seen flashes of light that might have been caused by cosmic rays:

Several Apollo astronauts reported seeing light flashes, although the precise biological mechanisms responsible are unclear. Likely pathways include heavy ion interactions with retinal photoreceptors and Cherenkov radiation resulting from particle interactions within the vitreous humor.

Wikipedia, Health threat from cosmic rays

-the ions and particles referred to being cosmic rays. If either/ both of the above explanations are right, the flashes are not "out there" to be seen or photographed, they're caused by the energy (not visible light) of a cosmic ray triggering a cell in the visual system causing the astronaut to perceive a flash, or by a cosmic ray causing a tiny flash within the eye in front of the retina.

The Apollo astronauts may have been particularly effected because they travelled beyond the Van Allen radiation belts, areas created by Earth's magnetosphere where high-energy particles from the solar wind and some cosmic rays are captured, which significantly protects the atmosphere and us (and people/ things in low Earth orbit), Wikipedia, Van Allen radiation belt.

I guess in principle it's not impossible that a very high energy cosmic ray might cause someone on Earth's surface to see an isolated flash, but there are many more likely causes- real external light sources or a neuron in the visual pathway firing anomalously for some isolated reason. Based on the Apollo reports, It would be transient- a fraction of a second.

Cosmic rays can also effect microelectronics (particularly ICs),

Studies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically experience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month.

(Wikipedia, Cosmic ray, link above)
but I don't know if they have the energy to trigger a sensor in a digital camera. I guess they could corrupt data causing an apparent flash in an image from a digital source, but I'm speculating (and if such things happen they're probably at the pixel scale and incredibly brief- others here will be better informed about this).

Because you could see a light source for some seconds, and you were able to film it for the same duration, it can't be due to a cosmic ray, or rays: They would not be objectively visible (causing a sustained light at a particular location which could be seen and filmed) and the chances of you and your camera both experiencing an incredibly long sequence of cosmic ray interactions with your photoreceptors, causing both your visual system and the camera to perceive/ record a light in the same place and with the same direction of travel, must be effectively zero even if a cosmic ray can cause the perception of a flash in someone at the Earth's surface.*

*Or on a 4th-floor balcony

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

Hello,

Posting it here as I was hoping to get some information regarding this footage I personally shot in the south of Italy, to be precise in Manfredonia (FG). I was at the 4th floor of my friends apartment, on the balcony that gives view to the touristic port of Manfredonia (not the industrial one). I was with this one friend + his girlfriend.

The object was quite flashy looked at with naked eye, and it was moving around quite a bit, I tried to improve quality with ffmpeg but GPT4 didn't do a good enough job, so I am posting it here in the hope somebody can clarify.

View attachment 70511

The video was shot around Dec 7 2021, cannot recall if this is the exact date, but it is the date I saved it in my cloud. The exact location where I was observing the thing is here: 41°37'20.5"N 15°54'25.5"E

I was thinking this could be some cosmic rays or some sort? I honestly have no idea.

Thanks in advance for anybody chiming in. Happy to answer any question.

Could you tell us what it looked like to you?

The camera shows flashing lights.
Did you see any steady lights?

The camera shows white lights.
Did you see any color?

The camera has a hard time showing these lights.
Did you see more lights than the camera shows?

 

[Easy Muffin]

I got these two frames, 595 and 1471, where you can see the light and some features on the ground. They can be overlaid quite nicely.

~30 seconds between them, seems to be moving right to left and towards the horizon

 

[flarkey]

A flight such as Ryanair8659 (Vilnius to Malta) that flew over the area the night before would produce a similar change in position that we see between Frames595 and Frames1471.

We just need @fileon to tell us what time the original video was recorded at and we can tie it up to an exact flight.

 

[Mendel]

There's no chance of getting a third point to establish a straight line, is there?

 

[Easy Muffin]

There's no chance of getting a third point to establish a straight line, is there?

I was wondering that too but didn't manage to find another one. Then again I didn't look all that hard to be honest.

 

[Scaramanga]

The object was quite flashy looked at with naked eye, and it was moving around quite a bit,

Given the dark background to most of the video, there nothing to differentiate between the object moving and the camera moving. This is common in ' the UFO was darting about ' type videos.

During the recent brilliant auroras we had here in the UK, I did not have a tripod so I tried simply holding the camera completely still for a 30 second exposure. I got one or two good shots, but most had the aurora and stars moving by 5 or even 10 degrees....and had zig-zag trails showing the 'motion' of the stars. Which only goes to show that even when a person thinks they are holding the camera very still, it is actually still moving. Actually lots of little zig-zag motions. Now imagine that effect with zoom !

( incidentally, I also discovered in these pics that my camera...a Lumix TZ80...can pick up infra red, which appears as purple. But that's another story ).

 

[FatPhil]

During the recent brilliant auroras we had here in the UK, I did not have a tripod so I tried simply holding the camera completely still for a 30 second exposure. I got one or two good shots, but most had the aurora and stars moving by 5 or even 10 degrees....and had zig-zag trails showing the 'motion' of the stars. Which only goes to show that even when a person thinks they are holding the camera very still, it is actually still moving. Actually lots of little zig-zag motions. Now imagine that effect with zoom !

Can I recommend a string tripod? Even a single length will reduce one degree of freedom of movement, but if you have twice the string length you can make a triangle, and reduce a second degree of freedom. Small enough to fit into the smallest space in your camera case.

 

[fileon]

First of all, thanks a lot for all your replies, and sorry for the delay in my answer, I did not see the notifications in my email.

Do you remember if you were thinking it was moving around at the time?

Was it cloudy at the time?

It was not cloudy at all from what I remember, very clear sky, this object was definitely moving as both me and my friend were impressed by it, we regularly see planes passing by, this was from what I could determine quite different in terms of brightness and tempo of the flashing

The exif from the file uploaded has some metadata from the apparent record date, but it seems to indicate ~13:00 which (unless there's some timezone weirdness happening) would not match the night time footage in Europe. Possibly transcoded at some point. We'd need original file from device.

But it looks like a plane to me as well.

I uploaded the video to my Telegram saved messages, it might be that Telegram does weird things to the metadata, I will try to get the original file but I am unsure if I still have it, it was recorded on a RealMe 8 pro but I broke the screen, need to see if I still have it laying around somewhere. I think this exif data might come from my youtube upload? I saved it to both Telegram and Youtube, but it could be that I downloaded from youtube and uploaded to Telegram afterwards, it may sound stupid but chinese phones have this annoying ads in the video gallery and I was passing the video around to avoid using that.

Youtube also shows Dec 7, but the original might have been a bit before that. I live in Belgium right now, and my phone could be in Italy still at my parents place, will try to get the original footage.

Thanks also John J. for the explaination and exclusion on the cosmic rays hypothesis.

Could you tell us what it looked like to you?

The camera shows flashing lights.
Did you see any steady lights?

The camera shows white lights.
Did you see any color?

The camera has a hard time showing these lights.
Did you see more lights than the camera shows?

I might sound like a looney so please take it with a pinch of salt.

Could you tell us what it looked like to you?
- To me it looked like some "object" like a sphere/disk not steady on an horizontal axis due to how the lights where moving on each blink, like it had one big blink followed by smaller blinks following the shape of the object (by naked eye, I never seen such brightness and type of effect anywhere else)

Did you see any steady lights?
- I did not see steady lights from the object

Did you see any color?
- Bright white lights, no colors

- Did you see more lights than the camera shows?
From this object? No, only the recorded ones, but previous to this, I saw a "red" orb as well doing weird manouvers, but I understand this is pure hearesay

We just need @fileon to tell us what time the original video was recorded at and we can tie it up to an exact flight.

The original time was around between 8-10PM range, but hard to confirm without the original file, I will try to get that to clear all doubts, I apologize in advance for that, but your image is spot on regarding the position

Thanks again to everybody for the nice comments, lovely forum!

 

[Ann K]

Can I recommend a string tripod?

Ooh, you forced me to look this up! Here's instructions.
https://www.instructables.com/String-Tripod/

 

[JMartJr]

Can I recommend a string tripod?

Nice. I have found that putting my elbows on the car, railing, tree or the like is also effective.

 

[FatPhil]

Nice. I have found that putting my elbows on the car, railing, tree or the like is also effective.

No tripod, stringiform or otherwise:

 

[Mendel]

I might sound like a looney

You don't.
That's because you're describing what you saw, and you're not jumping to conclusions.
We know that people see weird things occasionally, and it can be difficult to figure out what they saw.

Because the night was clear, that opens up some possibilities:
• you might have seen something in space, turning and sending reflections to you (possibly a group of objects)
• it might be possible to detect stars in the original file (pretty much no hope after 2 compressions), and that would help to characterize the apparent motion

The absence of clouds also means it's unlikely to be a spotlight display, or that clouds could have caused the blinking.

It was not cloudy at all from what I remember, very clear sky, this object was definitely moving as both me and my friend were impressed by it, we regularly see planes passing by, this was from what I could determine quite different in terms of brightness and tempo of the flashing

I asked about it "moving around". Mostly that was to get a clearer idea of what the perceived motion was like.

From your recent description, I understand it could have been a group of lights moving together? For example, if you had a group of 4 lights, and they were moving slowly and blinking slowly, then you could perceive this as a single object darting around and blinking 4 times as quickly; and the group could be on a steady path.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

It's my opinion as well that this was not a single object. My prime suspect would be military aircraft flying in formation.

Planes often have red anti-collision lights, but they don't always have red anti-collision lights. Sometimes they just have white anti-collision lights. (The species of red light are just white lights with a red lens.)

Example


Why were no steady lights visible?
Answer: The anti-collision lights are brighter. The planes were far enough away that the dimmer steady lights were no longer visible, but close enough that the brighter strobe lights were still visible. The light pollution from the city would also help wash out the dimmer lights.

These flashing anti-collision lights used to be xenon flash lamps but now are LED strobe lights. Very bright.

The planes were distant and flying steadily at altitude. There were no landing lights, as the planes were not on approach to an airport.

What about the erratic movement?
Answer: This was an example of the Phi Phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_phenomenon

The term phi phenomenon is used in a narrow sense for an apparent motion that is observed if two nearby optical stimuli are presented in alternation with a relatively high frequency.

The flashing lights on more than one plane produced the illusion of one object bouncing around the night sky. I guess you could argue that beta movement was involved because there was an illusion of an object moving around instead of just an illusion of simple motion.

The simplest kind of Phi Phenomenon. Just two lights (or groups of lights) bouncing back and forth. (You could argue that this is beta movement, because the lights form an image or figure of an arm.)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_movement

The term beta movement is used for the optical illusion of apparent motion in which the very short projection of one figure and a subsequent very short projection of a more or less similar figure in a different location are experienced as one figure moving.

It might be best to use the term "apparent motion."

A more elaborate example of apparent motion, on the edges of the Luxor in Las Vegas.

Disregard the spot light on the top of the Luxor. We're interested in the lines of light moving along the edges. Nothing is moving of course. Lights are just turning off and on in a sequence.


These lights are fascinating. If you concentrate, you can see them as dashes of light moving all the way from top to bottom/bottom to top... or you can concentrate and switch to see them as dashes bouncing off each other and getting nowhere.

Expectations matter. If by force of will you change your expectations, your perception changes. The perception is a personal experience and is just as "real" as any other perception.


Light and shadow on this old sign give the illusion of an amorphous something or other moving along.


By presenting these different examples I want to show that this apparent motion stuff is complicated. It's both wired in at a basic level in the eye and brain, and can also be influenced by expectations.

If you see several aircraft fly over, you would continue to see them in the distance as separate planes with strobing anti-collision lights.

But If you first catch sight of the formation of planes at a great distance, there's an ambiguity. Are they separate planes with strobing lights? Or one very mysterious object bouncing around the night sky? Once you "see" the one mysterious object, that perception is kind of locked in.

That's what I suspect is what happened. It's a very human thing to do.

 

[fileon]

Indeed it could be military, "closeby" there is Amendola air military base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendola_Air_Base, did not know about the xenon strobes, but it looks flashy enough to be different from normal planes that I am used to and consistent with the video

I asked about it "moving around". Mostly that was to get a clearer idea of what the perceived motion was like.

It was indeed moving around from my perspective, hence my comment in the video "what is this a fairy? Stay still!" in italian, the only thing that was weird to me is that I couldn't see a formation blinking tempo, meaning, I would expect them to flash in formation at a certain tempo, but the angle and type of planes could have played a big role in my personal interpretation of it

 

[Eburacum]

I'm not sure military planes flying in formation do synchronise their flashing lights. If not, the lights would seem to bounce around almost at random.

 

[John J.]

I'm not sure military planes flying in formation do synchronise their flashing lights.

Looking up details on aircraft lights for another thread here, I was surprised to learn the flashing lights on the same aircraft don't have to be in synch:

8.2 Flash Characteristics. A combination of the number of light sources, beam width, speed of rotation (rotating beacons), and other factors can affect the flash frequency. Certification standards for parts 25, 27, and 29 specify a flash rate of 40 to 100 cycles per minute as viewed from a distance. A flash rate exceeding 100 but no more than 180 cycles per minute are acceptable in cases of overlapping field of coverage

Advisory Circular 43-217, 12/12/2018, Anticollision Light Maintenance from the Federal Aviation Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation
PDF available here Anticollision Light Maintenance FAA 2018