Mendel
Senior Member.
It also depends on the flight profile, i.e. altitude, speed, use of afterburner etc.
With in-air refueling, it can be considerable.
Fravor's Hypersonic UFO observation. Parallax Illusion? Comparing Accounts
With in-air refueling, it can be considerable.
cptreynolds
Active Member
Are there any useful pilot reports from this year's "live UFO shooting exercises" available about how to circle balloons that could be used to cross-examine event descriptions here?
FatPhil
Senior Member.
It's OT for the thread, but it's a very recent personal parallax anecdote - as we were doing the return from our road trip a week or so ago, I saw a small presumably learner plane flying backwards.
We were doing highway speeds, probably comparable to the plane itself, but relative to the road, and with its headwind and slightly different direction we were definitely "overtaking" it. However, because it was relatively high, and I was in a fairly hilly region, I couldn't see its location relative to the nearby ground, only to the hillsides, and it was *definitely* perceived as going backwards. It drove me a bit mad, as I knew all the physics, I can draw all the vectors and work out all the maths, but I couldn't simultaniously see the plane and something that it was going forward relative to. Perception is a wicked mistress.
We were doing highway speeds, probably comparable to the plane itself, but relative to the road, and with its headwind and slightly different direction we were definitely "overtaking" it. However, because it was relatively high, and I was in a fairly hilly region, I couldn't see its location relative to the nearby ground, only to the hillsides, and it was *definitely* perceived as going backwards. It drove me a bit mad, as I knew all the physics, I can draw all the vectors and work out all the maths, but I couldn't simultaniously see the plane and something that it was going forward relative to. Perception is a wicked mistress.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Since we're here...
Recently had a "anti-parallax" experience, the opposite of those cases where people think Venus is pacing them in their car. I was admiring a particularly bright "Venus" as seen driving along, but when I stopped at a stop sign Venus was revealed to be landing lights from a plane, their actual movement perfectly cancelled by parallax as it provided by foreground trees -- now that they were not "moving past," the movement of the plane was now noticeable.
Actual Venus was about 45 degrees away.
Mendel
Senior Member.
We had something similar a while ago, in its own topic, fully explained:
im all in on the parallax camp but today i was wondering if fravor could actually be correct about his size estimation and explanation with experience.
i fully understand how an object can look the same at various sizes and distances if looked at it from the same angle.
thing is though, the tic tac was elongated and fully symmetrical like a golf ball that looks the same from every side.
given that fravor moved around it and its form changed based on viewing angle, given that fravor had its own altitude for reference and hence his own position in 3D space against the limitation of the ocean, would this effect still persist or would it actually diminish the effect (at least to a certain degree) so that he could have actually been able to determine a rough size estimation?
@Mick West
i fully understand how an object can look the same at various sizes and distances if looked at it from the same angle.
thing is though, the tic tac was elongated and fully symmetrical like a golf ball that looks the same from every side.
given that fravor moved around it and its form changed based on viewing angle, given that fravor had its own altitude for reference and hence his own position in 3D space against the limitation of the ocean, would this effect still persist or would it actually diminish the effect (at least to a certain degree) so that he could have actually been able to determine a rough size estimation?
@Mick West
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Mendel
Senior Member.
Think about driving in a car. Think about the difference between passing oncoming traffic or parked cars. There's nothing in the view angles that gives it away. We use clues like the known size (and therefore distance) of cars, and the relative motion of the scenery, to judge whether the car we're passing is parked or moving, but Fravor didn't have these clues when he looked at an unknown object over the ocean.
And the fact that the motion of the tictac surprised him suggests to me that some of his assumptions/expectations about the object's size and motion were wrong.
The GIMBAL video analysis showed that with a moving observer, you can constrain the locatikn and movement of the target somewhat; but the fact that we still have strong proponents for the J-hook manoeuvre shows that it's hard to separate out the parallax effects (the J-hook mimics the motion of the observing aircraft).
Scaramanga
Senior Member
When all you have is a hammer...everything is a nail. I suspect that when the hammer is experience of flying a fighter jet and expecting enemy fighters to be roughly the same size....every 'unknown' is going to be judged to be the same size as an F-18, which is how Fravor describes it as he has no other reference. Which, of course, leaves him very prone to over-estimating the size and speed of the unknown.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
I recall, in the book looking at the US Navy Shark Attack Files, a reference to studies on perception that showed a tendency to over-estimate the size of unfamiliar objects, especially in emotionally charged situations. If I can dig out my copy of the book I'll find and cite it to the extent the book does. But worth holding in the back of the mind, maybe.
Lu Ann Lewellen
Active Member
Kurth was flying a single-seat F/A-18C which was the same size as an F-18 because it is one.
It may be unlikely Fravor misidentified Kurth but the object being "not of this world" as Fravor now says seems much more unlikely.
Candy-O
Member
Has Mick talked directly to Fravor regarding his hypothesis?
A lot of conjecture here might be solved if the two simply talked to each other in person and Mick explained why Fravor is wrong and Fravor explained why that explanation is incorrect, so to speak. An actual back-and-forth discussion.
SO MUCH of this thread, and the topic in general, is speculation and extrapolation that could be immediately dispelled, or confirmed, if key details were exchanged between the two.
A lot of conjecture here might be solved if the two simply talked to each other in person and Mick explained why Fravor is wrong and Fravor explained why that explanation is incorrect, so to speak. An actual back-and-forth discussion.
SO MUCH of this thread, and the topic in general, is speculation and extrapolation that could be immediately dispelled, or confirmed, if key details were exchanged between the two.
I've attempted to reach him, but have been unsuccessful.
You can kind of get an idea of that from this video - when the object is mirroring his movement you can't actually tell if it's moving.
Source: https://youtu.be/PRgoisHRmUE?t=997
Have you made your own recreation using sitrec or 3d modeling like blender, where you can set the object as stationary, to compare how it looks? (Sorry if you mentioned this already - I just skimmed the thread and didn't see it.)
Max Phalange
Senior Member
It's never been clear to me what exactly Dietrich and her WSO saw during this phase of the encounter. A top-down view over the scene ought to be able to rule out the parallax hypothesis. But when Mick proposed it during the impromptu video interview with her, she didn't provide a straight answer, no "I saw the tic tac circling Fravor and then it sped off".
I feel like I've seen or read a fairly detailed account from Dietrich on the "churning whitewater" phase of the encounter, but not of that actual engagement — if I'm wrong, can anybody point me to one?
I feel like I've seen or read a fairly detailed account from Dietrich on the "churning whitewater" phase of the encounter, but not of that actual engagement — if I'm wrong, can anybody point me to one?
iirc dietrich said that she was more concerned keeping track of fravor and her positioning in relation to him as his wing
it would make sense that she initially spotted the tic tac but then wasnt paying attention to what it was doing but more so what fravor was doing
Dietrich also says she only saw about 10 seconds worth of the object, I believe.
Lu Ann Lewellen
Active Member
8-10 seconds.
Yes. That is the point I am still missing. Mick made a wonderful Video regarding the gimbal object and the „observables“. A lot of angles and so on.
People who are used to create this kind of Videos could do something similar with Fravors UFO and the Hypothesis of stationary object and wrong size/distance. Which is, I think, the best available mundane explanation for this case. At least, for a big part of it.
i still believe that this optical illusion works best for a 2D picture and not a 3D live situation
the background was not totally featureless either with the whitewater
the object closer to the observer would have more offset / movement against the background when changing viewing angles
i could see how someone like fravor could create a visual reference / awareness in 3d space along with his altitude information that would help him estimating the distance and size of the object in relation to his position
it was not totally featureless, it was oblong which would create different perspectives compared to lets say a golf ball for example if the observer is moving
im pretty sure this would be true in a setting of several meters (in a room for example), i am unsure though about the effects when we are talking about several hundred / thousand feet
i try to understand why fravor is so sure about his estimate and other pilots too and i try to not totally reject his estimation even though the parallax hypothesis makes a lot of sense. im just questioning if the effect could still be so strong taking these factors into account?
the background was not totally featureless either with the whitewater
the object closer to the observer would have more offset / movement against the background when changing viewing angles
i could see how someone like fravor could create a visual reference / awareness in 3d space along with his altitude information that would help him estimating the distance and size of the object in relation to his position
it was not totally featureless, it was oblong which would create different perspectives compared to lets say a golf ball for example if the observer is moving
im pretty sure this would be true in a setting of several meters (in a room for example), i am unsure though about the effects when we are talking about several hundred / thousand feet
i try to understand why fravor is so sure about his estimate and other pilots too and i try to not totally reject his estimation even though the parallax hypothesis makes a lot of sense. im just questioning if the effect could still be so strong taking these factors into account?
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MonkeeSage
Senior Member
I couldn't find full transcripts so I transcribed the two interviews Dietrich gave on CNN in 2021 on the AC360 show and on 60 minutes. These interviews were about a month before Mick's interview with her. 60 Minutes didn't air the whole interview and they ran a second segment called "Overtime" later that gave more of the interview, so that's why there are two transcripts from 60 Minutes that have some overlap. This is from machine transcription and then edited for formatting, to denote who is speaking and to remove "um" and "uh".
It's interesting that she says no acceleration in both interviews and says it just kind of tumbled around in place and then disappeared with no mention of it accelerating to the spot that they initially observed it or towards Fravor's F/A-18.
AC360 (aired 2021/05/19).
60 Minutes main segment (aired 2021/05/21). Note: The video requires Paramount+ which I don't have, but I found the official audio on something called Art19 which is apparently some Amazon thing. It Just Worked for me, not sure if one needs Prime or w/e to listen.
60 Minutes Overtime (aired 2021/08/29).
It's interesting that she says no acceleration in both interviews and says it just kind of tumbled around in place and then disappeared with no mention of it accelerating to the spot that they initially observed it or towards Fravor's F/A-18.
AC360 (aired 2021/05/19).
Article: AC - Anderson Cooper, AD - Alex Dietrich
AC: So Alex just first of all walk us through what what it is you saw.
AD: I want to be careful because its been 16 years since that event.
AC: This was 2004?
AD: November 14th, 2004 and I just want to be careful because we know, right, that the the science of the mind and the science of the memory is...we shouldn't rely too much on on my technical account at this point. But I will point out that we, the the other air crew and I, made thorough debriefs on that day within minutes of landing, and that I made a written account with as many arrows and details and including coms and variants and altitudes and all of that that I could, within, I would say, hours of landing; and then within a few years gave thorough, almost interrogation style details, to members of the Office of Naval Intelligence and AATIP.
But I'll tell you overall what happened was that we were on a routine training mission off the coast of Southern California, off the USS Nimitz which is an aircraft carrier. I was with VFA-41, which is a strike fighter squadron, as a new pilot. We were heading off to do air intercepts, we were heading off to do like a scrimmage, a practice air-to-air run, and we were redirected. We were given vectors to go and intercept, see if we could intercept and identify a real world contact. So we are scanning where we would expect to see something that we were merging with, and we dont see it, but instead we do see something in the water below us. And so my heart sank, I went from being excited that we might go get those bad guys to, oh no, those bad guys have crashed and are sinking and now we're on-scene commanders for a search-and-rescue effort.
And then almost as soon as that happened, enter stage left, the tictac--and that's what we affectionately refer to it as because that's what it looked like. I get a lot of questions "what did it look like?" and I say "have you ever had a tictac?"--it look looked like a little oblong--little from our perspective at our altitude but about the size of a a normal aircraft fuselage, and it was white it was sort of matte finish, just like a tic tac. And it behaved in a way that we were surprised, unnerved...it accelerated...it almost didn't accelerate, right, it sort of jumped from from spot to spot and tumbled around in a way that was unpredictable. And so again my commanding officer, Dave Fravor, Commander Fravor at the time, he took an aggressive maneuver to engage with it. Me being the wingman and also sort of uncomfortable and inexperienced, I said "Okay, I've got high cover" which basically means "I'm gonna hang out over here, I got your back but I'm not going to get involved too closely". And so he turned with it and then it just disappeared. It zoomed out of the picture so fast that we all then were scrambling on the radio, and the whole time were on the radio with each other just sort of losing our minds.
AC: I'm sure you've certainly given this a a lot of thought, and I'm sure you've been asked a gazillion times, but do you believe...what do you think of it, what do you think it was?
AD: Yeah every time I'm asked about this they say "what was it?" I'm not qualified to make that analysis, and part of the reason I agreed to speak with you and I agreed to speak on 60 Minutes the other night, was that you know I'm trying to reduce the stigma for other air crew, so that if they see something or when they see something they'll say something, and that they will not feel embarrassed or shamed to make the reports, and that they'll know how to make the reports and where to make the reports, and that they'll contribute to this data pool of information that we have, so that those who are professional intelligence analysts and scientists can look at that information that is collected and consolidated, and that they can make some really sound, reasonable, rational conclusions.
Because no matter what side you are of the "UFO wars", which I'm actually just learning about now, and shout out to my new friends on #ufotwitter, that it's fascinated...I am fascinated with their fascination. And so whether they are hardcore enthusiasts, or conspiracy theorists, or hardcore debunkers, or even there's like this tribe of religious fanatics, who are just...I don't quite understand them yet. But there're all these different camps, and at the core, no matter how much they're attacking each other, what I see is that they all want answers, they all want to know what it was. And we cant do that if we're just attacking each other or if we're shaming each other or sensationalizing it. We really have to cooperate and again get more information, get more evidence so that we can come to some sound conclusions.
60 Minutes main segment (aired 2021/05/21). Note: The video requires Paramount+ which I don't have, but I found the official audio on something called Art19 which is apparently some Amazon thing. It Just Worked for me, not sure if one needs Prime or w/e to listen.
Article: BW - Bill Whitaker, AD - Alex Dietrich, DF - David Fravor
BW (narrating): The government has ignored it, at least publicly, since closing its Project Bluebook investigation in 1969. But that began to change after an incident off Southern California in 2004, which was documented by radar, by camera, and four Naval aviators. We spoke to two of them--David Fraver, a graduate of the Top Gun Naval flight school and commander of the F18 squadron on the USS Nimitz, and flying at his wing, Lieutenant Alex Dietrich, who has never spoken publicly about the encounter.
AD: I never wanted to be on national TV, no offense.
BW: So why are you doing this?
AD: Because I was in a government aircraft, because I was on the clock, and so I feel a responsibility to to share what I can, and it is unclassified.
BW (narrating): It was November 2004, and the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was training about 100 miles Southwest of San Diego. For a week, the advanced new radar on a nearby ship, the USS Princeton, had detected what operators called "multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" over the horizon, descending 80,000 feet in less than a second. On November 14th Fravor and Dietrich, each with a weapon system officer in the backseat, were diverted to investigate. They found an area of roiling white water the size of a 737 in an otherwise calm blue sea.
DF: So as we're looking at this, her back seater says "hey skipper, do you...?", and about that got out I said "dude! do you do you see that thing down there?", and we saw this little white tictac looking object, and its just kind of moving above the white water area.
BW (narrating): As Dietrich circled above, Fravor went in for a closer look.
BW: Sort of spiraling down?
DF: Yup. The tictac is still pointing North-South, it goes *brrp* and just turns abruptly and starts mirroring me. So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up.
BW: So it's mimicking your moves?
DF: Yeah, it was aware we were there.
BW (narrating): He said it was about the size of his F18 with no markings, no wings, no exhaust plumes.
DF: I want to see how close I can get. So I go like this, and its climbing still, when it gets right in front of me it just disappears.
BW: Disappears?
DF: Disappears. Like gone.
BW (narrating): It had sped off.
BW: What are you thinking?
AD: So your mind tries to make sense of it. I'm going to categorize this as maybe a helicopter, or maybe a drone, and when it disappeared, I mean it was just...
BW: Did your back seaters see this too?
AD: Yeah.
DF: Oh yeah. There was four of us in the airplanes, literally watching this thing for roughly about five minutes.
BW (narrating): Seconds later, the Princeton reacquired the target, 60 miles away. Another crew managed to briefly lock on to it with a targeting camera before it zipped off again.
AD: You know I think that over beers we've sort of said "hey man, if I saw this solo I don't know that I would have come back and said anything" because it sounds so crazy when I say it.
BW: You understand that reaction?
DF: I do. I've had some people tell me "you know, when you say that you can sound crazy" and I'll be hon--I'm not a UFO guy...
BW: But from what I hear you guys saying, there's something?
AD: Yes.
DF: Oh there's definitely something that I don't who's building it, who's got the technology, who's got the brains, but there's something out that was better than our airplane.
60 Minutes Overtime (aired 2021/08/29).
Article: BW - Bill Whitaker, AD - Alex Dietrich, DF - David Fravor
BW (narrating): This week on 60 minutes we reported on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, UAP, more commonly known as UFOs. The Pentagon says this night vision video was taken by Navy personnel and is being investigated. Unusual sightings like this one continue to occur and be captured on video. Last August, the Pentagon set up the UAP Task Force to collect and analyze evidence gathered by service members who are now being encouraged to report these strange encounters. We met two former Navy pilots, Lieutenant Commander Alex Dietrich and Commander Dave Fravor. In 2004 they witnessed something shocking, inexplicable and seemingly out of this world.
BW: Did the thought of UFO enter your minds?
AD: It was unidentified. And that's why it was so unsettling to us, because we weren't expecting it, because we couldn't classify it. But what I want to be really careful of here is that we don't jump to conclusions, right, that we don't sensationalize this or...
DF: Little green men?
AD: Yeah little green men, or extraterrestrial...
BW: You're seeing something that defies explanation?
AD: Right.
DF: Very much, yes.
BW (narrating): It was November 2004, and the USS Nimitz carrier strike group was training about 100 miles Southwest of San Diego. The advanced new radar on a nearby ship, the USS Princeton, had detected what operators called "multiple anomalous aerial vehicles" over the horizon, descending 80,000 feet in less than a second. Fravor and Dietrich, each with a weapon system officer in the backseat, were ordered to investigate, and found an area of white water in an otherwise calm blue sea. It appeared to them that an object about the size of a 737 was just under the water.
DF: So as we're looking at this, her back seater says "hey skipper, do you...?", and about that got out I said "dude! do you do you see that thing down there?", and we saw this little white tictac looking object, and its just kind of moving above the white water area.
AD: Do you ever drop your phone and it sort of bounces off the countertop, and then bounces off something else, and it's sort of...like no predictable movement, no predictable trajectory. It was just...
DF: Yeah, it was just like a ping pong ball...
AD: No acceleration.
DF: Very, very random.
AD: No acceleration.
BW (narrating): As Dietrich circled above, Fravor went in for a closer look.
BW: Sort of spiraling down?
DF: Yup. The tictac is still pointing North-South, it goes *brrp* and just turns abruptly and starts mirroriing me. So as I'm coming down, it starts coming up.
BW: So it's mimicking your moves?
DF: Yeah, it was aware we were there.
DF: I want to see how close I can get. So I go like this, and its climbing still, when it gets right in front of me it just disappears.
BW: Disappears?
DF: Disappears. Like gone.
BW: And you saw no visible propulsion, no wings, or anything to make it fly in our atmosphere?
DF: No. Actually when it turned and started coming up it was kind of like "okay, hah!" cuz we have nothing that goes that fast. And just starts climbing at will.
BW (narrating): Seconds later, the Princeton reacquired the target, 60 miles away.
DF: So in a matter of...
BW: "Like that"?
DF: Yeah it just appeared there, mm-hmm.
BW: In seconds, it was 60 miles away?
DF: Mm-hmm.
BW (narrating): Later, another flight crew encountered what they believed to be the same object and briefly locked onto it with a targeting camera before it zipped off again.
AD: They didnt get a visual on it but they did get this FLIR footage, the forward-looking infrared.
BW: So you've got the infrared image...
DF: Yes.
BW: And your eyesight...
DF: Yes.
BW: And the princeton...
AD: The radar.
BW: All saying there is something out there?
DF: yes
BW (narrating): The Princeton had been tracking the anomalous objects for days. Dietrich says they were unarmed.
AD: You know, I felt the vulnerability of not having anything to defend ourselves, to not having any rounds, anything on the rails, if this was in fact a hostile threat and we were engaged. I felt vulnerable and then I felt confused when it disappeared.
BW (narrating): Dietrich says she briefed superiors about what they all saw. In no time the story of their encounter spread quickly.
DF: Rumors like that spread within seconds. I would say with less than 30 minutes the entire ship knew this happened.
BW: And what was the reception like?
DF: They actually thought it was kind of funny and started giving us a lot of grief.
AD: Ridicule.
DF: Yeah.
BW: Ridicule?
DF: Yeah.
AD: Yeah, they made cartoons, and on the ships TV they played Men in Black and Independence Day and Signs.
BW: So they they made fun of it?
DF: Oh yeah.
AD: Yeah.
BW: Did anybody take it seriously?
DF: Yeah, I believe the admiral staff made a few phone calls but that was the extent of it.
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Mendel
Senior Member.
You have Dietrich circling above Fravor circling above the whitewater patch on the sea, so you have two sources of parallax confusion, and if the whitewater patch is moving because it's a submarine or a group of whales, then that adds even more confusion about their spatial relationship. It's hard to be definitive about this, and I respect Dietrich for not wanting to be wrong here.
When @Mick West does Situation Recreations, he has existing videos to verify that his recreation checks out. There's nothing like that for the Fravor/Dietrich encounter, it's pretty much unclear what the movements looked like, so any SitRec would be 99% guesswork, and probably wrong. All it takes then is Fravor saying, "it was nothing like that, I was there", and Mick is discredited. I expect that's a big part of why we don't have a SitRec for that yet.
But the tool is public, Mick is supportive of others using it, so somebody else can easily have a go at it if they like.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Snap, is this jerk on speed? They appear not to know what "acceleration" means.
(Explanation of the joke part: snap is the rate of change of jerk, which is the rate of change of acceleration, which is the rate of change of speed (in one dimension), which is the rate of change of position. Explanation of the payload part: if it's bobbling around in an unpredictable fashion, all of those quantities will be varying, and therefore acceleration will not be zero except transiently.)
Edit: In particular, a ping-pong ball will have tremendously high acceleration each time it bounces - it is brought to an abrupt stop (in the direction perpendicular to the surface), and then sent back where it came from at almost the same speed it arrived at. The forces bringing about this acceleration are such that bouncing's not the typical behaviour seen - compare cars hitting walls, or jamjars hitting floors.
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cptreynolds
Active Member
Copying my post from the Kurth F-18 thread here, too - not sure what the minimum speed of an F-18 in comparable situations is, let's say 180 knots which can't be off by orders of magnitude - in 5 minutes you run 15 nautical miles at that speed. That's quite a few circles, or if you're not circling you're quite far off from this thing for considerable amounts of time... or put another way, I can't mentally stretch a descending approach towards the tic tac, three quarters of a circle (or whatever it was) and then a cut-across manoeuvre to five whole minutes.
You can't really set up new situations in Sitrec yet, I still have to add some code for each one individually.
I think really this would be a great candidate for VR recreation - something I'll get around to eventually.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
I've tried recreating it for myself in Microsoft Flight Simulator, which has the F-18. You can't place a tic-tac out at sea, but what you can do is find some 47 foot yacht or boat and see how it looks from 25,000 feet. And the answer is...tiny. A mere 1/10th of a degree in length.....which is 1/5 the diameter of the Moon. In fact a very good comparison is that I have vitamin tablets that are 1/2 inch in length and tic-tac shaped....and to see one as Fravor saw the tic tac UFO requires it to be almost 24 feet away !
Candy-O
Member
He said he never would have noticed it if not for the erratic movement that drew his attention.
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why on speed? maybe he wanted to figure out if it could have been a cruise missile, that was just launched and still accelerating?
i think VR is key, 3D should be expected to be drastically different than 2D when it comes to this situation
you cant really compare what you see on a screen to what you see live though. i fly wingsuits, canopies and cessnas. what i see in real life and what i see on my video footage looks (sometimes drastically) different.
Candy-O
Member
Agreed 100%
I understand the motivation to make something, but as you stated, all it would take for either of them to post on Twitter "Nah, he got it wrong" and refuse to engage any further. At this point I get the impression neither has ANY interest in cooperating on such an undertaking. I think Mick is wise to hold off on recreating something without any tangible evidence to even analize. Conversely, Mick's breakdown of the FLIR footage by Underwood is actually meaningful and relevant, even if Underwood rejects the conclusions.
One unlikely, but feasible, work-around I think would be for Fravor and Deitrich to collaborate on something, get their sign-off as accurate as best they recollect, and then hand it over to be dissected for applicable explanations that fit still exactly what the authorized recreation shows.
Probably no way they would ever do that, but if Fravor and Mick were on more favorable terms, it would clear up a ton of guesses people are making interpreting over loose/imprecise language involved. But if someone who Fravor was on good terms with, like Jeremy Corbell, wanted to make an "authorized" recreation, then I suspect Fravor would actually agree to supervise the details for accuracy.
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Ann K
Senior Member.
I think you're being uncharitable to Fravor when you ascribe "reverence" and "notoriety" motivations like that. I believe it is a lot more simple: he saw something unusual, he chased it in a moment of excitement, and the memory of that brief encounter, revisited only mentally since he cannot go back and watch it a second time, becomes fixed in his mind to the point that he firmly believes it was just the way he described. Years and years later, it is unlikely that any further details can be remembered with any more reliability. The same is true of Dietrich, yet her memories are not the same as his.
Most people have childhood memories. Most people cannot swear that things happened exactly the way it is now remembered, nor how much is remembered, how much is dreamed, and how much is family legend retold by others. It's like the stories grandpa tells you, where the fish that got away is bigger every time. Usually it's not an effort to deceive, just the bald fact that our memories are not infallible.
Candy-O
Member
I simply meant that he (understandably) wants to maintain a good reputation, and now that he is in the spotlight, a lot of eyes are on him. Doing things that might damage that or open him up to further criticism is probably not something he has the motivation to do. While his initial encounter had nothing to do with getting famous, the fact is that now, 19 years later, he IS famous for it. Perhaps 19 years ago he would feel less personally invested in how this plays out, but it's too late now to put the genie back in the bottle.
And given that he has made multiple public interviews and appeared before Congress, he has an invested narrative now. His reputation is one the line. Something that might encourage further doubt and nit-picking (or clearly disproving) that narrative will be avoided. He is human, after all, and now finally saying "Gee, I guess I might made a huge mistake and I could have been wrong all these years" is not going to happen IMO.
Collaborating with people whose motives he doesn't even trust in the first place is low on his list of "To-Dos" I bet. It's not like he's a scientist making a claim and encouraging/challenging people to recreate published findings for themselves.
Again, lots of speculation on my part about personal issues, which I hate to see others do. Thus I deleted that paragraph of the post a while ago because I felt like I was rambling and getting too far into subjective motivations, but I see you snagged it for a response before I got to it. I was hoping to keep the post more on topic.)
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The Video should not show the exact reality, but the effect of being fooled by wrong size/distance while circling a stationary object and then heading directly to that object. At least as alternative explanation for the mass audience.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Include the effect of looking at your instruments occasionally...
When, after that, the object isn't where the pilot expects it, the mind constructs a notion of motion; similar to how the separate pictures of a movie make a smooth motion even though there is none.
The testimony of abrupt motion, with no slowing or speeding up observed, supports this idea.
But a viewer glued with their eyes on the screen won't experience it that way.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
No I reject that. I can get a far better estimate of what it is like to see a 'tic tac' from 25,000 feet via a simulation than I can by just 'imagining' what it would look like. The plain fact is that the tic tac was tiny. My calculation of it being the same angular size as a 1/2 inch pill at 24 feet is totally correct.
Even Fravor's patch of disturbed water is smaller than in any video simulation I have seen of the incident. Even if it was the size of a Jumbo jet, it would still have been a mere half a degree in size.
My point is that people are being beguiled by simulations of the incident that do not show the true scale of things and many that show the tic tac way larger than Fravor could ever have seen it.
i understand where you are coming from and i fully agree that the existing videos paint a wrong picture for sure.
my point is that in a simulation or even on recorded video things can look very different compared to the real life scenario.
especially with increased FOV. if i revisit situations recorded by my go pros (i usually wear multiple cameras at the same time with different FOV) then sometimes i dont even recognize what i am looking at without zooming in. depending on distance and movement i have to use different FOV / zoom to mimic how I experienced it.
For sure the mind filling in gaps or adding details does play a role as well but i would say its a fact that you cant be certain that what a video or simulation shows you is how it actually was perceived.
i am not sure if this is also true for 3D simulations and VR, i only have personal experience with 2D action cameras up to 360 degrees FOV when it comes to compare footage to my actual experience.
I have seen wingsuit flight footage on VR (not from my own flights) and can say that it doesnt look "right" but that might has to do with the used camera systems.
I have no experience with artificial VR simulations and how structures look at various altitude.
my point is that in a simulation or even on recorded video things can look very different compared to the real life scenario.
especially with increased FOV. if i revisit situations recorded by my go pros (i usually wear multiple cameras at the same time with different FOV) then sometimes i dont even recognize what i am looking at without zooming in. depending on distance and movement i have to use different FOV / zoom to mimic how I experienced it.
For sure the mind filling in gaps or adding details does play a role as well but i would say its a fact that you cant be certain that what a video or simulation shows you is how it actually was perceived.
i am not sure if this is also true for 3D simulations and VR, i only have personal experience with 2D action cameras up to 360 degrees FOV when it comes to compare footage to my actual experience.
I have seen wingsuit flight footage on VR (not from my own flights) and can say that it doesnt look "right" but that might has to do with the used camera systems.
I have no experience with artificial VR simulations and how structures look at various altitude.
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