Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Pc48yXWyI
I collected a few errors I noticed in Elizondo's book in the above video (transcript below), and thought it might be useful to have a thread to collect any others that happen to be there.
Luis Elizondo's book "Imminent - Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs" contains many extraordinary claims about crashed alien craft, psychic powers, abductions, implants, vast government conspiracies, glowing orbs, and other unusual things.
Unfortunately, Elizondo provided no supporting evidence for the more extreme claims, saying that they are all classified. So how are we to judge the accuracy of claims in the book.
What we can do is fact-check as much as possible, and then extrapolate the results of that out to the rest of the book.
There are some things we can check. In particular He talks about four videos, Gimbal, Gofast, Flir1, and Aguadilla. I'm very familiar with these, having done some fairly complex analysis on them over the years. So if I fact check Elizondo's account of those videos, that should give an indication how accurate the rest of the book is.
What I found was rather surprising. His descriptions of the videos were riddled with basic errors.
The first video is the famous Gimbal video, about which he says on page 146:
the object looks elongated and white. But that color is somewhat misleading. Since the camera is in infrared mode, white merely indicates that the object is "cold"—no heat emanating from the aircraft at all.
This is just not just wrong, it's backwards. The camera is in white hot mode, WHT, which means the object is hot, not cold, and it means there IS a heat signature. He repeats this error again after the camera switches to black hot mode, BHT.
The object is now black, which in this camera mode also indicates that the object is "cold"—no heat signature.
But again, it's the opposite, the object is hot, and there is a heat signature. Much is made of objects that fly without a heat signature, but this is not one of those objects. He got that fundamental fact entirely wrong.
When the camera does that change from White Hot to Black Hot, he describes this as:
Suddenly everything in the image pulls into better resolution. You can practically hear the pilots gasp
But when this happens the resolution remains exactly the same. The image is simply inverted, and there's zero reaction from the pilots at that point
Rather bizarrely, after telling us twice that it's a cold object with no heat signature, he then tells us that it's a hot object, saying on page 150
The object itself was indicated as being very hot; however, the air surrounding it was very cold. It didn't make any sense.
As well as being the opposite of what he said earlier, this comment about "the air surrounding it" refers to another thing that's wrong, the concept of an aura or bubble around the craft. He mentions this several times.
Page 149:
a slight aura can be seen around the GIMBAL object? Was this a protective bubble? Was this an artifact of the propulsion unit?
Page 153:
I remembered that a bubble around an aircraft was exactly what we'd seen in the GIMBAL video
Page 150:
... that weird little bubble. Was it some sort of illusion or effect produced by the camera? According to the CIA, it was not. It was not an artifact of the camera nor a lens flare. Whatever it was, it was real.
And yet it wasn't. We know what it was, an artifact of the camera, something we've seen on many other videos, and something confirmed by people familiar with the camera system. We see it here, using the same camera. The man from the CIA was wrong, but Elizondo accepts the faulty assessment despite, on page 149, mercilessly mocking the CIA rep for "half-assed" exploration, "tortured logic," and "comical" responses.
The reason for his attachment to the idea of an aura or bubble is revealed later when he speculates about anti-gravity drives using some kind of warp bubble. He even says of Gimbal "On the observables scale, it was clearly an antigravity device."
But there's no bubble, and it's not at all clear that it's anti-gravity. Analysis show there are other explanations that are a lot simpler, like thermal glare obscuring a distant jet, roating because the camera rotates, but that's another topic.
Finally on Gimbal, Elizondo says:
Everything the video showed, the pilots backed up with eyewitness testimony.
This is misleading at best. The pilots didn't actually see the object - because it was dark. All they saw were some tracks on the radar, and the same video we see now.
A false claim of eyewitness verification is also made when Elizondo talks about the second video, FLIR1.
FLIR1 is from the famous Tic-Tac Nimitz case, where two planes first had an encounter with something they described as a large flying Tic-Tac, and then a hour or so later, a different plane got video of an object they suspected was the same thing.
Elizondo starts out saying:
Seeing it on radar, and then with the naked eye, the pilot attempted to gain a lock on the Tic Tac
But if we look at the account of the pilot, interviewed in 2019, we see this was not the case. The pilot, Chad Underwood, says:
I didn't see anything with my eyeballs.
and he agreed that he "couldn't make visual contact with [his] own eyes"
Elizondo's next mistake is to say:
the pilot attempted to gain a lock on the Tic Tac. Cycling through various modes on his aircraft radar, he found it difficult to obtain one.
and
the UAP defies the pilot's attempt to get a good lock on it
This is just flat wrong. When we first see the object there's a rock solid passive track. We can see from the heading angle change that the object is moving from right to left, and yet it remains solidly in the center of the screen.
The camera is locked on.
The only time we see a brief degrading of the lock is when Underwood switches camera modes and the camera briefly can't see the object. The cycling through the modes was something Underwood said he was doing to get better video images, not to obtain locks. It's the exact opposite of what Elizondo said.
Elizondo then goes on to makes a bizarre and inexplicable claim, saying that the object:
displays no heat or acoustic signature
The reference to an acoustic signature is weird. The video has only cockpit audio. The ATFLIR does not record audio of distant objects. "acoustic signature" makes no sense.
But even stranger is the claim that there's no heat signature. At the start of the video we are in white hot mode and we see this heat signature. It's a heat source that so hot that we are getting this star-shaped glare. A very distinct heat signature.
The parts of the video that show a black object are in TV mode, which is not showing heat either way, but 40 seconds into the video Underwood switches back into IR mode (causing another brief loss of lock) and again we see the heat signature, this is seen most clearly towards the end of the video when we see what might be the heat signature from the shape of the aircraft, with a hot spot, maybe the engines, on the right side. We can't tell what this is, but it 100% has a heat signature.
Finally, Elizondo claims:
it's flying at hypersonic speeds and able to execute a maneuver almost instantaneously
And that it has an "instant disappearance" going "over the horizon in an instant"
None of this is apparent in the video, nor was it seen by Underwood, who never saw it with his eyeballs. We DO see the object fly off screen at one point due to a change in the optical path (like rotating the lenses on a microscope). At the end of the video we see the object drift off screen. It's moving at the same angular speed that it was being tracked at - the camera has simply lost lock due to all the changes Underwood was making. And then it was simply lost to the camera as Underwood zoomed in instead of out, and failed to slew the camera to follow it. There's nothing in the video that indicates it had hypersonic speed or vanished over the horizon.
The third video is GoFast. Elizondo has a short description of this, saying on page 145:
The object in one of the videos also resembled a Tic Tac, at least in the sense that it was rounded, smooth, and egg-shaped.
This is nonsense. The object in GoFast is a white fuzzy dot that covers about 8 pixels on screen. There's no way of knowing if it's rounded or shaped like a pyramid or a snowflake. You certainly can't tell if it's smooth or egg shaped.
And this 480P is the actual resolution in which the videos are recorded in-cockpit. Elizondo saw the same video you are looking at now.
He then says:
After several years of analysis, however, later researchers would claim that the object was going much slower than previously thought.
Claiming this took "Several Years" is very, very, wrong. The video was released to the public on March 9th, 2018. And on THAT SAME DAY I did the basic math that showed it was going much slower. The next day I was making videos in my backyard demonstrating parallax. Many other people did similar math.
So suggesting that it took several years to figure out is ridiculous, just wrong.
Elizondo then said:
This effect is called a parallax. I still don't agree with this assessment, since the pilots who witnessed the object flying marveled at its speed.
Again here the problem is that the video was shot at night. The pilots could not see the object, they only saw the same video we see here. We don't know what the object is, or even exactly how fast it's going (as we don't know the wind speeds) but we know it's not going particularly fast, and it's probably something like a balloon. And there's definitely parallax.
Finally we come to Aguadilla. This video was again shot at night, and Elizondo's first big mistake is to say:
"A UAP was spotted near the airport and was quickly tracked by a helicopter"
It was not a helicopter, it was a plane, which is a very important distinction as helicopters can hover, but the plane is in constant motion, which means we get a significant parallax effect.
Elizondo says:
The object, small, asymmetrical, and lobed, seemed to detect that it was being monitored by one of our helicopters. When it did, it zipped away.
Nothing like that appears in the video. The motion of the object appears near constant for the entire duration. At no point does it seem to "zip away"
Elizondo continues:
The pilots watched as the object swooped across an airfield and headed straight for the open waters of the Atlantic
What we see in the video is apparent motion - a combination of the the motion of the object itself, and the motion of the plane. Many different people and organizations have anlayzed the video and concluded a good fit for what we see is simply something like a pair of chinese lanterns drifting slowly in the wind. The motion we see is almost all parallax, and the object goes nowhere near the water, and certainly not under water.
Even discounting that, thought, there's no zipping away and no swooping across the airfield. Nor does it go straight for the water. If you take the apparent motion as real motion it's just going in a very lazy circle. Really though the most likely path is a straight line, in the direction of the wind.
Elizondo continues:
As the helicopter pursued it, the object then did the unimaginable. It dove into the ocean (transmedium travel).
First, it's not a helicopter. Second the plane was not pursuing it. In fact, at the time when the objects have the ocean behind them, the plane is flying away from it at 200 mph, parallax or no parallax. Again, it's the exact opposite of what Elizondo described.
There's a lot of that, lots of errors in things that are relatively straightforward, public knowledge. There' other things, like how he puts the wrong pilot in the back seat of David Fravor's plane. Jim Slaight was actually in the back seat of Alex Dietrich's plane. There's a pattern of sloppy inaccuracies and downplaying the simpler explanations.
----
So, I set out here to sample the accuracy of Elizondo's book. I picked the parts that I was familiar with, and that were based on public information that anyone can verify - the videos. You can see there are lots of errors, some wishful thinking, and sometimes claims of things being the exact opposite of how they actually were.
Can we then extrapolate this to the rest of the book? If these four videos are so terribly misreported, does that mean the rest of the books is just as riddled with errors?
Not necessarily. Maybe he just wasn't really that familiar with the videos. However, those videos have been the backbone of the UFO case for the last six years. If he got them wrong, it's fair to ask what else he got wrong
