Claim: Navy FLIR1 video seems to show Tic Tac antennas

[johne1618]

Twitter user MarikvR, who claims to be "Fmr federal gov't (DoD, et al.)", has produced a magnified image from the Navy "FLIR1" video. It comes from the TV mode section of the video and he claims "Edits: Minor contrast change/line added where sun washes out top edge".

It seems to show a Tic Tac shaped object, roughly side-on, with antenna-like appendages on the bottom.

According to MarikvR "In the original, higher-resolution footage, CDR Fravor and LCDR Dietrich recall seeing two antenna-like protrusions along the bottom of the object."


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB8zcAttP1E&t=6280s


Source: https://twitter.com/MvonRen/status/1518606077339717633?s=20&t=yHcUF56UaxJ5WNEQu2d8og

 

[JMartJr]

This looks like carefully selecting a frame that where you can see what you want to see. If it were genuine, seems they could show a stretch of video -- successive frames continuously and consistently showing the same thing. That would be at least evidence that the features might be structural rather than random artifacts of the video. After THAT was established would be the time to try and figure out what they are.

 

[RTM]

No wings, no control surfaces, no propulsion. But they have antennae. Definitely couldn't travel from Serpo without those.

 

[johne1618]

This looks like carefully selecting a frame that where you can see what you want to see. If it were genuine, seems they could show a stretch of video -- successive frames continuously and consistently showing the same thing. That would be at least evidence that the features might be structural rather than random artifacts of the video. After THAT was established would be the time to try and figure out what they are.

True - I looked at several frames of the video but I couldn't make out any antenna-like protuberances.

 

[deirdre]

It seems to show a Tic Tac shaped object, roughly side-on, with antenna-like appendages on the bottom.

why are "you" ignoring the exact same streaks on the top?

 

[jackfrostvc]

Look at the source video, here's a frame, Sky's the limit on what you want to make out of it

 

[Mendel]

View attachment 51088

Look at the source video, here's a frame, Sky's the limit on what you want to make out of it

Google thinks it's similar to this:

which is actually

Spoiler: better resolution

 

[Edward Current]

I know a cast iron bathtub when I see one - those taps are a dead giveaway.

Is Earth about to be attacked by flying bathtubs? (I don't know; I'm just asking questions.)

The amazing thing is, if you drew the obvious analogy between this and Jesus-on-burnt-toast, Marik's eyes would glaze over and call it a ridiculous comparison.

 

[Mick West]

View attachment 51088

Look at the source video, here's a frame, Sky's the limit on what you want to make out of it

Here's the actual pixels in the source video.

 

[Solaris0121]

Clearly they're "time ticklers" from an advanced species

 

[skrzitek]

Apologies if this is a naive question but am I right that some of the video is in some kind of 'TV mode'? If so, is what's shown there consistent with the thing being a distant, completely white object?

 

[Mick West]

Apologies if this is a naive question but am I right that some of the video is in some kind of 'TV mode'? If so, is what's shown there consistent with the thing being a distant, completely white object?

The explanation there is that it's backlit. Although some have suggested the image is inverted (negative)

 

[DavidB66]

Apologies if this is a naive question but am I right that some of the video is in some kind of 'TV mode'? If so, is what's shown there consistent with the thing being a distant, completely white object?

It could be a white object, as Mick West points out, but equally it could be any other color. There is no reason to think it actually is white, other than the assumption that it is the same object as the 'Tic Tac', which eye-witnesses described as white. The only attribute of the FLIR1 object which roughly matches descriptions of the Tic Tac is that its shape appears more-or-less like an elongated oval. The claim that it shows 'antennae' or projections of some kind, even if the claim is correct and they are not just a video artifact, does not bring it any closer to the original eye-witness descriptions. The original description in the so-called 'Executive Summary' is that

it was solid white, smooth, with no edges. It was uniformly colored with no nacelles, pylons or wings.

As far as I recall, the 'eye-witnesses' have never claimed that they saw projections of any kind on the Tic Tac. Some confusion may have arisen from the fact that David Fravor, the main eye-witness, claims to have seen projections in a better-quality version of the FLIR1 video itself, but if anything this makes it less likely that the two objects are the same.

 

[jackfrostvc]

Just was watching the Fravor interview on Lex Fridman.

I didn't realise he did not see the appendages on the Tic Tac when he saw the Tic Tac in his encounter

He only saw the appendages when he watched Underwoods Tic Tac video, which he claims was much clearer than what we see in the publicly released video.

50 second clip of him saying this below:

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxrbKJQ529l1APOAB6yG29TI4emekjrsO1

 

[KilliK]

As far as I recall, the 'eye-witnesses' have never claimed that they saw projections of any kind on the Tic Tac. Some confusion may have arisen from the fact that David Fravor, the main eye-witness, claims to have seen projections in a better-quality version of the FLIR1 video itself, but if anything this makes it less likely that the two objects are the same.

Alex Dietrich saw them too in the FLIR1 video aboard the Nimitz, after Underwood brought the tape.
it's not an F18.

 

[JMartJr]

Was Dietrich seeing what we're seeing... indistinct bumps and blobs on a Too Far Away... and interpreting that, in memory at least, as seeing pitot tubes?

 

[Mendel]

as seeing pitot tubes

she didn't say she was seeing pitot tubes, these are obviously much smaller; but they have the L-shape that she thinks she recognized, so these would be big appendages shaped like pitot tubes that could serve some other function.

 

[JMartJr]

so these would be big appendages shaped like pitot tubes that could serve some other function.

Or blobs a few pixels across that might not be shaped like pitot tubes at all, if what she saw was something like:

Looking for something familiar in a "Rorschach Video," plus the passage of time for memory to adapt to what the person hears elsewhere or what they come to believe, might make "L shaped pitot-tube-like projections" outta that. My brain fills in gaps and makes a 3-D shape from that 2-D set of pixels and sees a plane flying up and to the left.* Somebody else might see the ghost of the Hindenburg, with the big tail fins to the right and the gondola just forward of amidship. In any case, it's making too much stew out of not enough oysters; creating details that are not there.

And we have a witness who claims to have seen a video that is claimed to have been higher resolution, but that we cannot see and analyze -- not really any different than claims made by eyewitnesses in general. "I saw a video that showed..." is not much different from "I saw the thing directly and I saw..." Witnesses make mistakes in observation, brains fill in gaps, memories change and sometimes people make things up.
-----
*The temptation to jump up and down and demand "Why can't everybody else see the plane? It's so obvious!" is very strong -- but of course once my brain decides that's what is in the image, it is, to my brain very obvious. My pareidolia is not any better than that of somebody who sees pitot tubeoids on a tic tac, or a dirigible, or anything else, though. Hence, I am very glad those of you who are good at this stuff ananlyze the videos and find out what information is really there!

 

[KilliK]

Was Dietrich seeing what we're seeing... indistinct bumps and blobs on a Too Far Away... and interpreting that, in memory at least, as seeing pitot tubes?

she saw a better quality version of what we have. and both pilots only saw the two "legs" at a specific time during the video. and two little spikes do appear in the FLIR1 where they say they appear. I doubt they confused the visual noise for something else, otherwise they would have claimed the legs were there in the entirety of the tv mode's length.

 

[JMartJr]

she saw a better quality version of what we have. and both pilots only saw the two "legs" at a specific time during the video. and two little spikes do appear in the FLIR1 where they say they appear. I doubt they confused the visual noise for something else, otherwise they would have claimed the legs were there in the entirety of the tv mode's length.

She says that, yes. But we don't have the video, we have her testimony that she saw it. For a variety of reasons, I'm not particularly excited about what people say they saw -- they make mistakes in observation, memory changes over time, some people say things that are not true, etc. To me, "she says she saw a video that showed X feature" is not much different from "she says she saw an object that showed X feature." Maybe she did, maybe she didn't, there is no way to know and so the evidentiary value is low.

 

[KilliK]

I doubt all the experienced pilots could not tell apart basic shapes of an airframe and an oblong, while looking on a tv screen. or they somehow forgot that distinction during the passage of time. besides other crew members who saw the same higher quality footage in the Nimitz room, describe the same thing, that of a tic tac shaped object.

it is not an F18. it never was.

 

[jackfrostvc]

It's interesting that when Fravor drew the Tic Tac on a piece of paper in the James fox doco called "The Phenomenon", he drew it with the appendages. That's odd to me because Fravor said he never saw the appendages in his visual on the object, just a smooth tic tac / propane tank shape. He only saw the appendages when he later looked at Underwoods FLIR footage

 

[Mick West]

I think the elephant in the room with the "spikes" is the presence of compression artifacts on 8-pixel boundaries.

They are at fixed positions in the video frame (indicated vertically with the green lines), so move around on the object.

Video is compressed into individual 8x8 blocks, so there are always issues around the edges when the compression is strong. The above is the actual pixels in the best quality f1.mpg file from archive.org