Dave Falch's Claims about IR visibility in the Chilean Navy UFO [IB6830]

DavidB66

DavidB66

Senior Member.
Dave Falch has a new video up on YouTube headed 'Chilean UAP FLIR video'. In fact it says hardly anything about that video until the last few seconds, when he flatly asserts that the object cannot be a jet plane at 30-90 nautical miles away, because IR sensors cannot detect a plane at that distance. His video is here:


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlI8E_3bmXA


In comments under his video I pointed at that an AARO 'resolved' case report claims that commercial jet flights had been detected by an IR sensor platform (type not stated, but evidently US military) at up to 300 nautical miles away. I asked for his comments on that, but instead he seems to have deleted my comment. I then posted a similar comment and screencapped it for future reference, also pointing out the apparent censorship. Since I posted that comment it has also been deleted, but my original comment has been reinstated. So maybe I was uncharitable in accusing him of censorship. Incidentally, his video contains some good examples of IR glare obscuring an entire aircraft.

Anyway, the point about AARO's case report remains to be considered. Unfortunately the report just credits the assessment to AARO's 'Science and Technology Partners', but one would hope they are at least as authoritative as an individual self-appointed FLIR technician.

The AARO case report is here.

https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/case_resolution_reports/Case_Resolution_of _Western_United_States_Uap_508-02262024.pdf?ver=PmgbGHhJPljZmB-n_qioow==
 
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DavidB66 said:
I'm not sure if this is the best place for the following comments, but it is the thread which came up as the first search result for 'Chilean'.

Dave Falch has a new video up on YouTube headed 'Chilean UAP FLIR video'. In fact it says hardly anything about that video until the last few seconds, when he flatly asserts that the object cannot be a jet plane at 30-90 nautical miles away, because IR sensors cannot detect a plane at that distance. His video is here:


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlI8E_3bmXA


In comments under his video I pointed at that an AARO 'resolved' case report claims that commercial jet flights had been detected by an IR sensor platform (type not stated, but evidently US military) at up to 300 nautical miles away. I asked for his comments on that, but instead he seems to have deleted my comment. I then posted a similar comment and screencapped it for future reference, also pointing out the apparent censorship. Since I posted that comment it has also been deleted, but my original comment has been reinstated. So maybe I was uncharitable in accusing him of censorship. Incidentally, his video contains some good examples of IR glare obscuring an entire aircraft.

Anyway, the point about AARO's case report remains to be considered. Unfortunately the report just credits the assessment to AARO's 'Science and Technology Partners', but one would hope they are at least as authoritative as an individual self-appointed FLIR technician.

The AARO case report is here.

https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/case_resolution_reports/Case_Resolution_of _Western_United_States_Uap_508-02262024.pdf?ver=PmgbGHhJPljZmB-n_qioow==
Click to expand...

Maybe he should argue it out on twitter with Marik Von Rennenkampff.
 
As if we needed another example of how old solved cases never die, they just fade half way away for a minute until some new folks get interested in UFOs who were not there for the original solution, then are re-presented as amazing mysterious cases.
 
There's a more interesting triangle here for those not aware.

Mick (and wider community) has done a debunk on this video (Chile) and GIMBAL, both are military FLIR camera videos.
Marik is very vocal about how wrong Mick is about GIMBAL being a rotating glare, however for whatever reason (presumably the overwhelming evidence) he concedes that Mick is correct about Chile being an aircraft.

However some of the background reasoning as to why Mick is "wrong" about GIMBAL being a glare on the FLIR camera is because FLIR 'expert ' Dave Falch has weighed in about how it can't be often with examples and expertise (examples that are all from much closer videos than GIMBAL in Mick's theory)

So you have a position (overly simplified) where Mick is wrong about GIMBAL because Dave Falch says so but also Mick is right about Chile but Dave Falch says he is not right and that it is impossible it is a plane.

So is Falch wrong about Chile where he is stating a fundamental impossibility for a plane to be viewed from that far away, not just minor technicality and thus how reliable is his similar dismissal of the rotating glare GIMBAL debunk?

The simple fact seems to me to be that no matter the camera type as long as enough photons reach the sensor something will be seen.
 
DavidB66 said:
Dave Falch has a new video up on YouTube headed 'Chilean UAP FLIR video'. In fact it says hardly anything about that video until the last few seconds, when he flatly asserts that the object cannot be a jet plane at 30-90 nautical miles away, because IR sensors cannot detect a plane at that distance. His video is here:


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlI8E_3bmXA


In comments under his video I pointed at that an AARO 'resolved' case report claims that commercial jet flights had been detected by an IR sensor platform (type not stated, but evidently US military) at up to 300 nautical miles away. I asked for his comments on that, but instead he seems to have deleted my comment. I then posted a similar comment and screencapped it for future reference, also pointing out the apparent censorship. Since I posted that comment it has also been deleted, but my original comment has been reinstated. So maybe I was uncharitable in accusing him of censorship. Incidentally, his video contains some good examples of IR glare obscuring an entire aircraft.

Anyway, the point about AARO's case report remains to be considered. Unfortunately the report just credits the assessment to AARO's 'Science and Technology Partners', but one would hope they are at least as authoritative as an individual self-appointed FLIR technician.

The AARO case report is here.

https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/case_resolution_reports/Case_Resolution_of _Western_United_States_Uap_508-02262024.pdf?ver=PmgbGHhJPljZmB-n_qioow==
Click to expand...

Is your comment missing again? I don't see any comments referring to AARO
 
yoshy said:
Is your comment missing again? I don't see any comments referring to AARO
Click to expand...
Change "Sort By" to "newest"
2024-09-22_09-31-49.jpg
 
jarlrmai said:
So you have a position (overly simplified) where Mick is wrong about GIMBAL because Dave Falch says so but also Mick is right about Chile but Dave Falch says he is not right and that it is impossible it is a plane.
Click to expand...

Having followed this debate closely, this is more than overly simplified, it's simply untrue. There is much more to the arguments than "Mick is wrong about GIMBAL because Dave Falch says so".
 
TheCholla said:
Having followed this debate closely, this is more than overly simplified, it's simply untrue. There is much more to the arguments than "Mick is wrong about GIMBAL because Dave Falch says so".
Click to expand...
I don't think anyone implied otherwise. Obviosluy there are a variety of people who think I've got a variety of things wrong. Falch is largely irrelevant.

Also, this is about the Chilean case. I included my rebuttal of his Gimbal arguments as context for his argument from authority.

It's a shame, as he has access to the cameras, and could do some good experiments.
 
Getting back to the original point. Falch has no credentials, no level of expertise, on which to base unsupported assertions such as:

The object was not 30 to 90 nautical miles away because it would not be shown that far. It's beyond the capabilities of the infrared detector.
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(That doesn't even pass the common sense test.)

I looked into his background and also looked at what he says about optics.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/david-falch-blue-angel.11815/#post-310600

He was a repair technician. Nothing about that job gives him a relevant education. Let alone an expert education. It does not preclude the possibility that he got an education somewhere else. But there's no evidence of that.

It's also clear that he knows nothing about even basic optics. I caught him in a number of mistakes. Which I reported in that thread. He presents this stuff with the air of an expert, lecturing.

Some personal judgement: The guy's writing style is muddled, unclear and ungrammatical. In my judgement that reflects unclear thinking. (Grammar Nazi? Jawhol.)


What's the difference between expertise and argument from authority? It's a judgement call.

I have to trust everything Andrew Young says about atmospheric physics. Around the year 2000, when I was looking for the answer to questions about mirages, I wrote emails to several atmospheric physicists. Several of them independently recommended that I get in contact with Young, because he was the eminent expert. I accept everything he says about atmospheric physics at face value, even when I don't understand it. I have no hesitation in citing his material.

Falch is not an expert, but he presents himself as one. I consider what he says as not argument from authority but appeal to false authority. People who cite him are also guilty of appeal to false authority.

Lamentably, several media stories have cited him as an expert; but of course... as is usual with stories about flying saucers... these were not hard news stories, but fluff pieces. Reporters who write fluff pieces don't check credentials, they just report what people say. Because that's what it's all about. A human interest story. Light entertainment.
 
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Just piling on to the obvious. Back in the mid 1980s, I personally worked on numerous military and non military IR platforms including one of the early USAF IR scanning platforms. We routinely detected and tracked aircraft at 90 plus nautical miles distance. While it is true that water vapor can absorb a lot of the IR spectrum, military aircraft typically are flying above the vast majority of the water. With the proper optics, range is not limited to any specific distance. I would readily accept that 300nm is possible, so long as sensor and target are at altitude. As distance increases, the curvature of the earth tends to cause water vapor to get between sensor and target, so there is a practical limit for aircraft distance detection simply because they can't fly high enough to have line of sight above the heavier water vapor at low altitudes.
 
Z.W. Wolf said:
Some personal judgement: The guy's writing style is muddled, unclear and ungrammatical. In my judgement that reflects unclear thinking.
Click to expand...
I know we shouldn't be going here, but technically, I will try to stick to the words that came out his mouth rather than the mentality of the person expressing those words, but as I (re?)watched Mick's response to the Lehto/Falch video, one of the things that jumped out at me was when Chris asked a clear and clarifying question, and you can just see Dave instantaneously lock up, something which told me "there's going to be a stream of meaningless babble now", and sure enough, there was - some sentences definitely didn't even parse - it came over as rushed extemporising rather than falling back onto a solid position of knowledge.

Mick's point (and the two-phone demonstration) was so beautifully clear and lucid, I found it hard to believe anyone could have any remaining questions about rotation of glare. The problem was that it was too clever - it was a cheat. Anyone with a scientific background knows that, as long as the rectification of the horizon does not introduce any new significant artefacts, then it doesn't matter how you perform the rectification. Even printing it out on an ink-jet printer, and rotating the piece of paper would achieve the same effect, but alas that doesn't satisfy the same real-time contstraints. It seems that Dave considers "rectify it by using a second phone" to do something fundamentally different to the captured image than what "rectify it using a pair of mirrors" does (and probably ditto "rectify it by rotating your head" and "rectify it by printing it out and turning the paper"). He doesn't explain what it does that's different, or how/why, it's just magically different, trust me bro. And when pressed on that, he eventually resorts to a straw man about some piece of germanium, or something. Worst of all, he thought that his wibbling should trump the actual demonstration.

It's easy to roll out Dunning-Kruger, but with the I'm-an-expert schtick, he's kinda forcing our hand on that one.
 
Stryder said:
Just piling on to the obvious. Back in the mid 1980s, I personally worked on numerous military and non military IR platforms including one of the early USAF IR scanning platforms. We routinely detected and tracked aircraft at 90 plus nautical miles distance. While it is true that water vapor can absorb a lot of the IR spectrum, military aircraft typically are flying above the vast majority of the water. With the proper optics, range is not limited to any specific distance. I would readily accept that 300nm is possible, so long as sensor and target are at altitude. As distance increases, the curvature of the earth tends to cause water vapor to get between sensor and target, so there is a practical limit for aircraft distance detection simply because they can't fly high enough to have line of sight above the heavier water vapor at low altitudes.
Click to expand...
When I first saw the 'up to 300 nm' claim, in an earlier version of the AARO case report, I was somewhat skeptical, as I thought the curve of the earth would get in the way at that distance. I also got the impression, from the wording of the description and the appearance of the accompanying video, that the sensor in this case was located on or near the ground, probably at an air base, rather than on a plane in flight. (The final public version of the case result does not link to a video, but perhaps it is still available somewhere.) Of course, the curve is more likely to get in the way for a sensor at low altitudes, and as Stryder points out, water vapor in the atmosphere is more likely to be a problem than it would be for a sensor on a high-flying plane.

I therefore looked up Mick West's Metabunk earth curve calculator. This was somewhat reassuring. I take it that the best measure of what is visible would be the 'refracted hidden' figure given by the calculator. For example, if 'refracted hidden' is 50,000 feet, then a distant plane flying at an altitude above sea level any lower than this would be below the horizon for an observer for whom this is the 'refractive hidden' figure. For an observer near sea level, this would imply a distance limit of about 300 standard miles or 260 nm. Commercial airline flights (other than Concorde in its day) seldom if ever fly this high, though business jets may. (I think Wolfie6020's Bombardier often flies at 45,000 feet.) But an observer on the ground is not necessarily near sea level. For an observer at 500 feet above sea level, the refracted hidden would be about 42,000 feet. At 1000 feet the refracted hidden would be about 38,000 feet, and at 2000 feet it would be 33,000 feet, which is quite feasible for regular commercial flights. At 5000 feet the 'hidden' at a distance of 300 miles would be less than 25,000 feet, and at 300 nm about 35,000 feet.

Others will know more about USAF bases than I do, but there do seem to be several candidates in the Western United States, e.g. Homey Airport in Nevada with an elevation of about 4,500 feet.
 
DavidB66 said:
Others will know more about USAF bases than I do, but there do seem to be several candidates in the Western United States, e.g. Homey Airport in Nevada with an elevation of about 4,500 feet.
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You get even more elevation if you consider airborne sensor systems.
 
DavidB66 said:
When I first saw the 'up to 300 nm' claim, in an earlier version of the AARO case report, I was somewhat skeptical, as I thought the curve of the earth would get in the way at that distance. I also got the impression, from the wording of the description and the appearance of the accompanying video, that the sensor in this case was located on or near the ground, probably at an air base, rather than on a plane in flight. (The final public version of the case result does not link to a video, but perhaps it is still available somewhere.)
Click to expand...

The video is here. https://www.dvidshub.net/video/885193/western-us-objects


It's taken from a moving, high-altitude platform, a drone, or a plane. So, there's no issue with curvature. At 3:22 we are looking down at mountains.

2024-09-23_11-28-01.jpg


Nevada seems plausible, but the mountains there are pretty generic.

AARO said:
https://www.aaro.mil/Portals/136/PDFs/case_resolution_reports/Case_Resolution_of _Western_United_States_Uap_508-02262024.pdf?ver=PmgbGHhJPljZmB-n_qioow==
External Quote:

AARO assesses that the UAP in this case were
almost certainly commercial aircraft travelling on
well-established air corridors as far as 300
nautical miles from the platform
So it sounds like they did not identify the exact planes. and the 300NM might be a upper limit.
 
It's taken from a moving, high altitude platform...
Click to expand...
Ah well, never mind. The way the camera in the video wobbles and moves around suggested to me that it was hand held, which might imply a ground-based position. The more familiar FLIR videos are not wobbly. But Sean Kirkpatrick couldn't be wrong :)
 
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