Kyle McDonald
Member
Link to original video
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I want to discuss one specific moment in this video. At 3:02 a few bright spots at the top left are moving in different directions. One seems to disappear and reappear, zipping off in a new direction.
At the beginning of the video, the slowly floating spot made me think "balloon", potentially with some parallax effects. But having multiple spots floating in different directions, and potentially changing directions, reduces the likelihood of balloons and makes parallax a non-explanation.
My next hypothesis was birds. But the speed of the movement at 3:04 makes me question whether any pelagic birds move this fast. I am assuming they would be pelagic rather than migratory because they are moving independently rather than in a group. If we assume this is one object that changes directions and not two different objects, there is a separate question about acceleration, but let's just focus on speed.
To put an upper bound on the speed, we can estimate speed over the surface of the water. The zoom of the camera at 3:04 looks similar to the zoom around 3:18-4:25 when the sub is in the frame. Submarines are similar in size to each other, but let's guess this is a Delta IV class sub and we are looking at about half of its 166m length. I would guess the spot at 3:04 moves about that same length in around 30 frames (1 second). So a maximum speed of around 83 meters per second, or about 185 mph, or 298 kph.
If the bird was much closer to the camera, it could appear to be going faster. But drones like this only fly as low as 25,000 ft, and unlike migratory birds, pelagic birds stay within 50m of the water surface.
ChatGPT reports that the fastest a pelagic bird will dive is around 100 mph for "some large gull, skua, or gannet under exceptional wind conditions". So unless my estimate of the submarine size is very wrong, and there are "exceptional wind conditions" as well, this is almost certainly not a bird.
Here is a diagram, showing an accumulation of the bright spots during the 3:04-3:05 fast section, plus a separate shot of the submarine at 3:17 composited on top and flipped left-right.
Link to War.gov page
Link to Reddit discussion
I want to discuss one specific moment in this video. At 3:02 a few bright spots at the top left are moving in different directions. One seems to disappear and reappear, zipping off in a new direction.
At the beginning of the video, the slowly floating spot made me think "balloon", potentially with some parallax effects. But having multiple spots floating in different directions, and potentially changing directions, reduces the likelihood of balloons and makes parallax a non-explanation.
My next hypothesis was birds. But the speed of the movement at 3:04 makes me question whether any pelagic birds move this fast. I am assuming they would be pelagic rather than migratory because they are moving independently rather than in a group. If we assume this is one object that changes directions and not two different objects, there is a separate question about acceleration, but let's just focus on speed.
To put an upper bound on the speed, we can estimate speed over the surface of the water. The zoom of the camera at 3:04 looks similar to the zoom around 3:18-4:25 when the sub is in the frame. Submarines are similar in size to each other, but let's guess this is a Delta IV class sub and we are looking at about half of its 166m length. I would guess the spot at 3:04 moves about that same length in around 30 frames (1 second). So a maximum speed of around 83 meters per second, or about 185 mph, or 298 kph.
If the bird was much closer to the camera, it could appear to be going faster. But drones like this only fly as low as 25,000 ft, and unlike migratory birds, pelagic birds stay within 50m of the water surface.
ChatGPT reports that the fastest a pelagic bird will dive is around 100 mph for "some large gull, skua, or gannet under exceptional wind conditions". So unless my estimate of the submarine size is very wrong, and there are "exceptional wind conditions" as well, this is almost certainly not a bird.
Here is a diagram, showing an accumulation of the bright spots during the 3:04-3:05 fast section, plus a separate shot of the submarine at 3:17 composited on top and flipped left-right.
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