The anti-reflection coating, as you mentionned, show that lens flare is a known issue and is one way of correcting this problem, absorbing more then 90% of light artifact, see
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0925346724015453 and
https://www.materion.com/en/about-m...materials/ir-coating-designs-and-applications for precise data
Um, having (belatedly) read the two links above, they don't say that the optics of the MX-15 absorb "more than 90% of light artefact", or that MX-15 components have
- Anti reflection coating destroying 90% of flares
(1) The Materion (technology manufacturing company) webpage
IR Coating Designs and Applications compares a number of different materials used to coat IR optics.
There is
one use of "90%",
-I won't pretend to understand the article at any technical level, but I don't think this table demonstrates that these materials reduce flair by 90% (either by reducing intensity by 90% in all instances
or by preventing 90% of flares that would otherwise be visible). There are similar figures, and a more comprehensive table of refractive indices at the Newport Corporation webpage
Technical Note: Optical Materials https://www.newport.com/n/optical-materials
(2) The linked-to paper "Design and fabrication of highly efficient antireflective coating in MWIR on germanium using ion-assisted e-beam deposition", Yusuf Dogan, Ilhan Erdogan Ali Altuntepe, 2024,
Optical Materials 157 (2), is a research paper from the Sivas University of Science and Technology, Turkey, published November 2024.
External Quote:
To the best of our knowledge, the newly designed Ge/SiO2 multilayer structure and the results achieved have not been previously documented in the literature, and offer substantial improvements in transmission efficiency and reflectance reduction for Ge-based optical systems.
Its findings cannot be applied to the optics in use on the MX-15, which predate this paper. We do not know if the technique described by the authors can or will be used for any specific application in the near future. The
Science Direct link is not the full text of the paper, and I haven't accessed the full text from Elsevier, but again there doesn't appear to be a direct claim of 90% flare reduction.
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unfortunately, we see "common" things reported as UAP on s regular basis.
I suspect the background is that the report goes up the chain and someone recognizes it, but then that doesn't filter down to the operator, who thinks there's a coverup
However, the scenario your explaining seems speculative to me ( not an ad hominem attack ), do you have some exemple of such case ?
There is a roughly analogous scenario to that suggested by Mendel in one of the founding legends of UFOlogy- the Roswell, NM [well, Corona, NM] find of debris by the rancher W.W. Brazel in late June 1947 (Wikipedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_incident).
On 4th June, a number of Project Mogul balloons had been launched from Alamogordo Army Air Field; contact with at least one balloon was lost when it was approx. 17 miles from Brazel's ranch.
On June 24 1947, Kenneth Arnold made his famous sighting while flying over Washington state, an event that received wide publicity.
Late that month, Brazel found debris on his ranch.
July 5, Brazel's uncle suggested the wreckage might be from a "flying disc", presumably of the type being discussed by the press.
July 6, Brazel informs a Sherriff in Roswell about his find; the Sherriff contacts Roswell Army Air Field.
Intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel went with another officer and Brazel back to the ranch to collect the debris. Photo from Wikipedia:
The debris must have fitted in whatever vehicle the USAAF officers drove. It was later flown to Fort Worth; an AAF flight engineer who helped load it said it was lightweight and would have fitted in the trunk of a car.
In an edition of The Roswell Daily Record published 9 July, Brazel said
External Quote:
the debris consisted of rubber strips, "...tinfoil, paper, tape, and sticks."
(Wikipedia), and this seems consistent with what Jesse Marcel is photographed with.
However, on 8th July Roswell AAF public relations officer Walter Haut had released the statement
External Quote:
The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chavez County.
This, in the context of the reports of sightings in June and early July 1947 understandably caught the media's (and the public's) attention.
Media attention rapidly waned when senior officers, and a meteorological officer, told the press that the debris was from a weather balloon. Jesse Marcel was present.
The debris
was from a balloon, but not a weather balloon; it was from a highly classified Project Mogul balloon (almost certainly one of those released 4th June from Alamogordo AAF). Jesse Marcel was never to learn this.
UFOlogist Stanton Friedman interviewed Marcel in 1978;
External Quote:
In the 1978 interview, Marcel stated that the "weather balloon" explanation from the press conference was a cover story, and that he now believed the debris was extraterrestrial.
(Wikipedia).
As described by
@Mendel, the reports (and evidence) had
External Quote:
[gone] up the chain and someone recognizes it, but then that doesn't filter down to the operator, who thinks there's a coverup...
The GO FAST "UAP" was filmed by F/A-18 crew using an ATFLIR pod; it was almost certainly a small balloon.
(See this thread,
"GO FAST" Footage...)
Even the most highly-trained personnel can experience perceptual error or make misjudgements (and USN aviators are very highly trained).
I think that as this lens flare seems reproducible... it wouldn't fall in the " uncommon " artifact categories for equipped and trained operators...
Party balloons are common, even (it turns out) in Iraq, Syria and maybe Afghanistan. We've all seen party balloons. It seems larger balloons might be used for military purposes (they certainly have been in the past, and there is some evidence that 'militant' groups have tried to use party balloons for various purposes). Military pilots are aware of parallax and other effects that might be misleading. But F/A-18 pilots saw a balloon blown by the wind as something extraordinary.
The Chilean Navy's IR footage of a huge cigar-shaped UFO is covered here, with a self-explanatory title
Explained: Chilean Navy "UFO" video - Aerodynamic Contrails, Flight IB6830
Although not yet a
definite solution, it seems likely the USN GIMBAL video results from IR glare from another aircraft; the "object's" apparently rapid part-rotation is certainly due to the ATFLIR tracking head rotating on at least one axis.
Gimbal UFO - A New Analysis, Mick West:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsEjV8DdSbs
-Further discussion here:
Explained: The Navy UFO Videos;
The Shape and Size of Glare Around Bright Lights or IR Heat Sources;
Mick vs Marik (rotation glare gimbal);
ATFLIR Technician Jeremy Snow discusses Gimbal, FLIR1, and GoFast.
In that last thread, Jeremy Snow briefly raises the possibility that the pilot might have deployed ATFLIR before calibrating the sensor to the ATFLIR's on-board black body.
How Can Highly Trained Military Pilots Possibly Misinterpret Things They See? might also be of interest.
It has an example of CAS (close air support) pilots tentatively identifying vehicles as a
specific type of truck (ZIL-157s) carrying orange rockets, and then attacking friendly tracked armor carrying orange air identification panels, carried precisely to mark them as friendly to CAS.
Even using the most powerful image processing and identification package known- the Mk.1 eyeball and human brain- we make mistakes. The sensors we build are not perfect, and almost by definition high-end military systems are at the edge of attainable performance and are used in challenging environments.
I'm not particularly surprised that we sometimes see apparently anomalous results from military systems, or that highly-trained users might misinterpret them (and as
@JMartJr points out, in this case we don't know if the operator saw the "disc", and if so whether they considered it anything unusual).
