I've also added another thing that's quite revelatory. I made the pod roll track the glare angle. So now by default it's not locked onto the "ideal" curve (minus bank angle). The pod pitch angle still comes from there, but the pod roll now is controlled entirely by data from the video.
View attachment 49260
This is very interesting, as you can see the corrections in real time. When the pod roll is not changing and the plane is not banking, then all the pod can do is change pitch, meaning it follows the blue lines (the green dot shows where the pod is physically pointing). So it's natural path is to rise up (look at the blue lines).
Indeed. Another thing that's interesting and very apparent in this view is that the system always allows approximately the same amount of angular excursion away from the ideal track before issuing a correction.
To keep on target it needs a counter-clockwise rotation. For the first 22 seconds, this is largely supplied by the jet banking. The jet is making a CCW bank (ie a bank more to the left) right at the start. This makes the green dot go down, removing the need for the pod itself to roll. The green ball rises, but the jet does two more increases in left bank, and 9 and 19 seconds. All of these do not rotate the glare.
I have a suspicion that the pilot himself accidentally set it up that way. He was conducting an intercept, so he was probably trying to make the glare look stationary in his display to keep a steady trajectory as he formed up on it... until, of course, the thing rotated too far to follow with the type of small corrections that would have been automatic for someone used to formation flying.
Step 1 is all pod roll.
Step 2 overlaps another left bank, which helps, meaning it's a little less
Step 3 at about 28.5 seconds, overlaps a right bank, which means the pod has to rotate even more to the left (CCW) to copensate for the jet rotating the "wrong" way. That's slightly why this rotation is so much larger than the others (but mostly because it's close to the singularity - see how steep the white curve is)
Step 4 is also affected a bit by the CW rotation of the jet, but essentially it's just following the white curve in steps.
The video ends with an error of about 2.2°, almost certainly just before another roll correction which would have taken the glare around 30° past vertical (i.e. it would be upside down).
People in UFO circles have often speculated that what happens after the cut at end of the video is the object takes off at high speed. Since the previous large correction almost resulted in a loss of track, amusingly, that might well have happened!
This is all fascinating confirmation of the rotating glare hypothesis, but the challenge of explaining it remains.
Yeah, explaining much of this will be difficult, with a danger of overwhelming the viewer with
too much stuff. But I think it's getting close, especially with the little inset you seem to be working on now (maybe to make a mockup of the video). Probably one key thing there is to make it very clear that the ideal track comes from the numbers on the screen, that you could be given only those and predict almost exactly the observed amount of rotation. The little pip indicating target position in the ATFLIR should help explain that: it matches exactly the position of the target in the animation, after all.
One possible point of doubt to be anticipated is the issue of the internal mirrors, which are guaranteed to be accused of being a fudge (again). I think that's where highlighting when the glare doesn't rotate with the bank (e.g. 19s) is most important.
I just thought of something and I don't know if it's a good idea, but the relationship between the ATFLIR pod head and its internal mirrors is like that between your head and your eyes. If you're tracking an airplane flying overhead your head will do exactly the same kind of movements we're calculating here, except of course your eyes can swivel a lot more than 5 degrees. But still, the ATFLIR moves almost like a person laying on the wing would. Maybe there's a decent demonstration to be done by looking at an airplane through a kitchen towel paper tube or something.
While this is all complicated, it has a virtue compared with some of the other pieces of evidence that directly support the glare hypothesis. Those are no doubt persuasive when looked at objectively (sure persuaded me), but can be (and have been) ignored by not seeing them, or pretending not to. I don't see any bumps matching the rotation, I don't see any light artifacts rotating together with the object, and so on. This cannot. The main risk is the impression that the viewer is being dazzled with math, so it's great there's interactive visual aids
The thing those might need the most right now is a background to help make the space more tangible as the user drags the pod around. To me it's very clear as is but I've been thinking at the problem for some time.
Come to think of it, the evidence seems to align in a natural story: first you have indications that whatever the thing is, it's something in the camera. Then you notice that it looks just like proven examples of glare, and see that its orientation over time matches just what you would expect from the tracking information. Then you reconstruct the F-18 trajectory and see with the aid of cloud parallax that the object is probably some 30+ Nm away, moving right to left and away from the F-18... just as, beautifully self-consistently, you'd expect from a jet engine. I don't know how much of it can be covered in a video of reasonable length, though. That's probably the hard problem in all of this.