It looks to show that, but it shows this instead:
It's not seen rising due to perspective effects caused by the Atlas both rising up and speeding away fast, and by the maneuver done by the pilot. Maybe the best thing is this picture from my old Blender model:
This is a strong claim. Can you show any example of a cumuliform cloud that looks like this, with a broad, generally flat face, but sloping uniformly upward?
I generally agree with this, except that I can't see the green sight line piercing the cloud layer in the actual video. The clouds must either be lower, or they must end (but from the satellite images, looking East, they didn't end).Here is a model that shows the vertical profile of the situation here :
- the earth surface is the blue line (circle equals to Earth radius at 30N, Jacksonville latitude
- the clouds are shown as the dashed grey line, their height (in m) can be adjusted (on this example, this is ~5000m)
- the dotted line is the horizon (horizontal, I've seen it's very debated what the 2° angle means, but that what I understood it was)
- the fighter is the F18 point
- Gimbal is the red point, it's position along the vertical line of sight can be adjusted, and the distance to the fighter is given (in nautical miles)
There is nothing very uncertain here, and because we don't know the cloud height I leave it as a free variable, as I leave the distance to Gimbal variable too.
I feel certain that the Navy/the UAPTF know the exact time and place of the recording; and knowing that, it would have been easy and obvious to identify the rocket launch with certainty; but they didn't. (All the UAPTF ever identified was 1 balloon. And Elizondo seems to not know what it is, either.)
I'm not sure I understand your point here. The model you show above (ihmo) is wrong. Horizons and horizontal clouds layers have nothing to do with Gimbal (ihmo): realizing this makes everything understandable. Assuming horizontal layers makes it inexplicable instead, on that I very much agree.
For the sake of precision the lunar cycle was 1 day old (just a sliver of a crescent, I checked that some time ago): I agree with you, it did not illuminate the clouds (or barely). This does not imply the ATFLIR could not see them in IR by night. In fact, the Gimbal video is a solid proof it can. How the 'shadows' could behave, I really cannot say. But I can just look to the Gimbal video and check (imho).
It wasn't. The pilot saw the target when in ~level flight, then he pitched up the nose (the only way to bring the ATFLIR to bear on the Gimbal, and yeah, maybe 50° up, that's possible, then the picth lowered, but this is another matter) and started the stern conversion maneuver (he did an U-turn, in practice) which, in the pilot's mind, was meant to allow him to get behind the target and chase its tail. 30ish seconds later everything ends, the gimbal having misteriously vanished from sight (or the F-18 went into the clouds bank, or a cloud got into the LoS, this I cannot say, anyway, the supposedly near target was nowhere to be seen) and consigned to history. He is a damn good pilot, just unable to realize the light in the sky was far far away, as is expected for any and each human being on Earth. Nothing weird is going on here.
tl:dr: it was the Atlas
I very much agree with you with your altitude data. But being pitched up (*), even 50°, does not imply at all that the altitude also changes. It's an airplane. Check the videoclips of a 'Cobra (or Pugachev's) maneuver': the plane pitches up and even trespasses 90° (yeah, the airplane 'tumbles') without it changing altitude. I'm not implying the F-18 did anything like that of course, nor that an F-18 can do the Cobra (even if it seem it actually can, opinions diverge on the web, but there are clips supposedly showing it), it just proves an airplane can pitch up a lot and not lose altitude (just pump on the engines, should you have a high thrust/weight ratio, say 1:1, you could even climb up while pitched 50°. The F-18 obviously couldn't).
I'm actually pretty sure the Navy knows Gimbal was the Atlas. It did not escape the attention of my ironymeter that the launch was their own. I also think they just don't care, they're even happy about this: disinformation is the foodstuff of militaries (*) since Sun Tzu's time at least. And if they can then secure some million $ more to study mysterious inexplicable IR lights that they themselves put to the sky, even better.
The date cannot be ascertained, we cannot know in which timezone the Navy personnel reporting 'Jan 21' was thinking. It's very much compatible with the Atlas launch. I never even ever talked about the date since I begun the 'geometrical' work.
Yeah, indeed so it seemed to the pilot. Just a few kilometers away. And then it doesn't take much to be thought inside a military training range East of Jacksonville, they cover the whole upper half of Florida from the shore to some hundreds kilometers away (*)
That would be good if you could directly link somehow the radar return to the Gimbal. I told you already, the world is full of radar returns. There are not that many strong IR emitters moving fast in the sky, though.
'which shows a horizontal cloud deck' is an uwarranted assumption, get rid of it and you'll understand Gimbal. Clouds can slope any way they please to.
Are you sure? Navy pilots are the cream of the best of the best. And he thought the Gimbal was just beside him. Gotta get that bogey! [I have omitted the probable expletive].
I really have no clue about how much the engine noise will be attenuated inside the cockpit and how much noise the microphone will pick up. Maybe you can make a convincing argument from your idea, try doing it.
He also said (not sure if he really said that, but you get the idea) the object was near him. There have been pilots who shot Venus, thinking it was close to them. And then a reversal is just a geometrical (call it 'perspective' if you like) thing. A little less turn ratio here, a little more there, and I bet you get any reversals one may wish. I'd just rather not do the necessary data-mining and calculations myself.
I'd rather say I fitted the available data to a realistic situation, and it all fits seamlessly. Just my opinion.
And I'm sorry to hear that. You were one of those who gave me ideas (ie. the stern conversion maneuver iirc). Without you all (and, I have to say, expecially without my harshest critics, whom I therefore thank) I would have gone nowhere. When I'll 'publish' my final 'report' elsewhere here on Metabunk you will all get the merits you deserve. Unless you don't want of course, just let me know.
The moon was not visible because it set at 18:20 ET at Cape Canaveral, and the launch was at 20:04 ET.
That's circular reasoning.
They classified this video. The only people they'd have been "disinforming" was AATIP. I don't think passing bad information to other parts of your organization is "the foodstuff of militaries".
The ephemeris I didn't check, just knowing the Moon was just one day old was enough for me, but thanks for the information.
You are very right, I should have been more careful in my writing without sloppingly cutting corners. I amend my sentence this way:
Well, when you have a group of annoying (say) UFO believers you can't get rid of (political connections I guess, in this case, but I really don't know), it's a common tactics in organizations to create a new office where you put them, so they can play with their toys at leisure without annoying and hampering too much the people who're doing real work (there's even a name for this tactics, 'lateral flyout' (**) I think, but I backtranslated it from Italian 'svolazzo laterale' so I'm not sure). If it's US taxpayers who are paying and not the organization itself, even better.
https://theblogbyjavier.com/tag/lateral-arabesque/
The article never actually says that Spanapoulos witnessed that specific incident; he could have been referring to another sighting.
I very much agree with you, the reliability of that article is not that great. But it's also (for what I know) the only reference to the Gimbal being filmed 'near Jacksonville'. So the choice is: we can consider the source reliable, therefore it happened near Jacksonville at night, or we can consider it unreliable, therefore we have no idea where it happened nor at which time of the day. Both cases are perfectly consistent with my theory. That said, I yet have to check who exactly said what, but I'm not that worried.
Maybe he was referring to another sighting, but did the article ever mention two UFOs? And confusing the sightings would be a pretty extraordinary mistake to make, he was talking about a thing 'he will never forget' after all. Maybe the sentence means he saw the Gimbal by day, then he believed it was an UFO when night came: it could even be read that way, not much probable though.
I very much agree, but if you're willing to be patient for a little more time before moving anything, I already planned to open a separate thread. I think I already responded to enough objections up to now to be relatively certain that there are no more serious ones lurking around. Just I want to do it when I have written some decent documents, so it'll take some days. But don't worry, here I'll only answer posts directed (or referencing) to me from now on, the preliminary work is done and I don't need to post any other 'preprint' anymore I think.
I thank you very much for this
No thanks for this though, but I never hold grudges, no worries
I'll just state better and in an ordered, readable way what my case is (in the upcoming new thread), then the jury will be out I guess. Waiting for your competing explanations.
I'm going to move this entire thread into Rambles. @Mauro's hypothesis seems impossible and nonsensical for a variety of reasons already mentioned - but specifically the Atlas being too high, and rising, unlike what we see here. The plane is in level flight, and looking down 2°, and this does not change.
[Answering here because I was specifically referenced by @Mick West in the previous post.]
External Quote:
Ryan Graves gives a good summary of the Gimbal events. He shows that the incident took place near Jacksonville (in fact that is even the title of his slide).
Thank you for providing me with this information that I did not know about. If the fighters were 300NM from the coast, they were evidently further east of the carrier group. According to Graves, they observed GIMBAL when they decided to turn around to return to the USS ROOSEVELT. This would suggest that the direction in which they were looking at the object was towards the coast.
Graves stated they saw interesting radar returns upon returning, and decided to go and take a look. So we can't be sure in which direction the jet was flying when the ATFLIR was locked on the object.
He said he just published everything he was told.
THE ENCOUNTER STARTS
The F-18 is flying west, with a bank of clouds on his left, the upper rim of the clouds is higher than the F-18. The pilot sees on his left, up above the rim of the clouds, a fast-moving light. This is the situation:
The pilot thinks the Gimbal is nearby, just above the clouds near him.
There's no reason actually. That drawing is just an example to show what my reconstruction of Gimbal looks like, it does not pretend to identify a specific position. In this post I then added this drawing:
So the F-18 can very well be in a more northern position (even significantly), but I cannot really say how much. On the upside, the more north the F-18 is, the less it needs to pitch up it needs to catch the Atlas in the ATFLIR (and the illusion the Gimbal keeps the same height in the sky will be stronger too).
Ah I really don't know! That's the name in the article from the Jacksonville newspaper, whom I already considered not that reliable. I'd really like to know with certainty the name of the pilot (and its military ranking too, so I know how to refer to him properly). If you know anything about it I'd be glad to hear.
I'd say it's quite compatible. Don't quote me on this (I haven't checked) but I guess an F-18 has a range of some hundred kilometers (expecially if it was in an air superiority configuration). With air refuelling (as someone suggested, sorry if I don't dig out the reference now) the range becomes effectively unlimited, but I don't really need to resort to that I think.
I noticed that news4jax never explicitly connected Spanopoulos to the incident, good to see it confirmed. That cancels the last bit of evidence for the video having been taken at night.
Not that this makes it any evidence it was instead taken by day. At most it's evidence we have no idea (from published informations) at which time it was taken. I'm perfectly comfortable with that too. Point already made in post #259, if I may notice:
