"GO FAST" Footage from Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy. Bird? Balloon?

If you want to dismiss testimony from the program director in charge of the program created to analyze this stuff, that's your prerogative, but in that case we might as well not have any intelligence agencies or public officials at all. We might as well call the videos deepfakes and say the Pentagon merely claims the videos are unknown, and merely claims they came from the Navy, who merely claims they were recordings from their aircraft, spoken about by people who claim to be the pilots of aircraft they claim to be F-18s. In that case there's nothing left to discuss, really. Go-fast can simply be whatever we want it to be. In your case, a radar reflected balloon. If that's good enough for you, have at it. Conversation is done, I guess.
 
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download (1).jpg
Rich Hopkins; served as a meteorologist in the U.S. Navy. He says the Earth is flat. He should know, shouldn't he?

(Well, he claimed to be a meteorologist. He was actually an aerographer’s mate.)
 
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If you want to dismiss testimony from the program director in charge of the program created to analyze this stuff, that's your prerogative, but in that case we might as well not have any intelligence agencies or public officials at all. We might as well call the videos fake and say the Pentagon merely claims the videos are unknown. In that case there's nothing left to discuss, really. Go-fast can simply be whatever we want it to be. If tomorrow an admiral claims a missile is fired at his ship, we can dismiss it as argument from authority.
Do you believe Luis Elizondo is a reliable source with no agenda?
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Elizondo

From 2008 until his resignation in 2017, Elizondo worked with the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in The Pentagon.[6] During this time, he claims he was the director[11][5][12][13] of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, a special access program funded at the initiative of the then Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D-Nevada)[14] to investigate aerial threats including unidentified aerial phenomena.[11] According to the Department of Defense, the AATIP program was ended in 2012 after five years. Elizondo has said he worked with officials from the U.S. Navy and the CIA out of his Pentagon office for this program until October 2017, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as "excessive secrecy and internal opposition".[6] Elizondo asserts that "underestimating or ignoring these potential threats is not in the best interest of the Department no matter the level of political contention."[10] The New Yorker reports that Elizondo was hired to take over the program, which was an outgrowth of a government project awarded to businessman and paranormal enthusiast Robert Bigelow, ostensibly to examine the future of warfare, but reporting almost exclusively about U.F.O.s, including "a photo of a supposed tracking device that supposed aliens had supposedly implanted in a supposed abductee".[4]

His position in the AATIP has been questioned by The Intercept and challenged by Pentagon officials, with spokesperson Christopher Sherwood saying “Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in OUSDI [the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence], up until the time he resigned effective 10/4/2017.”[1] In response, Elizondo filed a complaint with the agency’s inspector general claiming "a coordinated campaign to discredit him for speaking out" including "Pentagon press statements asserting he had no official role in UFO research, even after his role was officially confirmed". Elizondo also claims he is the target of "a personal vendetta from a Pentagon rival".[15][16][17]

To The Stars[edit]​

After resigning from his career with AATIP, Elizondo in October 2017 joined To the Stars company. Elizondo also distributed three videos to the press that were made by pilots from the United States Navy aircraft carriers USS Nimitz and USS Theodore Roosevelt which became known as the Pentagon UFO videos

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Reid#UFOs
In 2007, while he [Harry Reid] was the Senate Majority Leader, he initiated the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to study unidentified flying objects[20][21] at the urging of Reid's friend, Nevada billionaire and governmental contractor Robert Bigelow,[22] and with support from the late senators Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the program began in the DIA in 2007 and was budgeted $22 million over its five years of operation.[23][24][25]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bigelow
Robert Thomas Bigelow[1][2] (born May 12, 1945) is an American businessman. He owns the hotel chain Budget Suites of America and is the founder of Bigelow Aerospace.[3][4] Bigelow has used his wealth to provide financial support for investigations of UFOs and parapsychological topics, including the continuation of consciousness after death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Stars_(company)
To the Stars... Academy of Arts & Sciences (often shorted to just To the Stars or TTSA) is a Las Vegas-based company co-founded by Tom DeLonge, guitarist of Blink-182 and Angels & Airwaves; Harold E. Puthoff;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff
Harold E. Puthoff
(born June 20, 1936) is an American engineer and parapsychologist.

Puthoff took an interest in the Church of Scientology in the late 1960s and reached what was then the top OT VII level by 1971.[3] Puthoff wrote up his "wins" for a Scientology publication, claiming to have achieved "remote viewing" abilities.[4] In 1974, Puthoff also wrote a piece for Scientology's Celebrity magazine, stating that Scientology had given him "a feeling of absolute fearlessness".[5] Puthoff severed all connection with Scientology in the late 1970s.[6]

In the 1970s and '80s Puthoff directed a CIA/DIA-funded program at SRI International to investigate paranormal abilities, collaborating with Russell Targ in a study of the purported psychic abilities of Uri Geller, Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle and others, as part of the Stargate Project. Both Puthoff and Targ became convinced Geller and Swann had genuine psychic powers.[7] However, Geller employed sleight of hand tricks.[8]
 
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That's an ad hominem argument, but I'll entertain it anyway: I don't really care about anyone's agenda. Everyone has one. For all I know this all might be really weird unidentified stuff and his agenda is to simply get it taken seriously. That's what he's claiming, anyway. Even if he had another agenda it wouldn't demonstrate he's lying about that particular claim. If you want to reject every word he says on credibility grounds, fine.

We all have agendas. Yours seems to be to prove it's a balloon. I have an agenda as well: To narrow the solution space down as much as possible in hopes of finding out what this actually is, a prospect that looks increasingly unlikely. Yeah, I get it, others have the agenda to prove it's aliens. I honestly don't care what the thing is, I just want to know one way or another. What I do know is that with radar and winds aloft data it'd be fantastically easy to demonstrate balloon vs not balloon. It's the easiest case of them all because it's just TAS = 0 is balloon and TAS != 0 is not balloon. All you need is a plane in the air and a radar track at a single point. Then pass the two vectors to a 5 year old and ask them if the numbers are the same or not. This doesn't require sophisticated analysis if that data is available.

Whether Luis is full of it or not, the fact remains that the video is out in the public domain as "unknown" regardless of the seemingly very high odds someone (whether it was Luis's team or the Navy ship crew or the Pentagon or anyone else) has radar and winds aloft information to confirm it one way or the other. I have a hard time ignoring that one.
 
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But you cited his opinion as fact not long ago and attributed it to "analysts" in a government agency. At that point you tried to shut down the discussion about balloons.

My agenda is not to prove it's a balloon. I'm discussing whether it may have been. You tried to shut down that discussion.
 
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In DCS I've always understood the dot to be a bearing indicator that's there for a quick "it's at 10 o'clock" type of check. I.e., it's reproducing the bearing info as a quick visual reference. Top of FLIR means 12 o'clock, right means 3 o'clock, bottom is 6 o'clock, etc.. If so I wouldn't think wind speed could be determined from that. Maybe the dot shows more information than I thought I knew. I understood the distance from the origin to represent elevation: Center means "down" or "up" and "far away from center" means horizontal plane. In that case it's simply reproducing the numerical elevation/bearing we already have. Am I mistaken?
SCD1.pngSCD2.png
That the steering cue dot can also give information about the wind is a hypothesis that I have proposed to explain some anomalies on its behavior.
In fact, the dot is the projection on the horizontal plane of the A/C of the intersection of the LOS with a sphere that represents the FOV in 3D. I noticed that during the turn this however tightens faster as if I had to rotate the plane also along the vertical axis. And this makes me suppose that the angle of drift can also enter the context. But it is completely premature for me to give a definitive answer.
 
I wasn't shutting down the discussion, I was pointing out that once we're rejecting all claims by everyone then there's nothing left to discuss because we can't even be sure the videos are real to begin with. That was to prompt you to not reject everyone's claims so that the discussion would not end. It's tricky to figure out exactly how to walk the testimony tight rope. If Luis is totally uncredible, fine, I get your point.

I think I need to learn more about how this stuff gets categorized to begin with. Perhaps I'm missing something there and inferred something I should not have.

I do have a question though: How do "they" categorize something as "unknown?" By "they" I mean whoever it is that analyzes the actual flight and radar data, also keeping in mind that the Navy people might do it themselves too before passing it along as "something weird." I'm wondering how many analysts and departments/whatever are involved along the path from flight to it being released. Do you know how that process works? I don't. I guess I would just be really, really surprised if anyone couldn't have ruled out a balloon very easily somewhere along the way given the ease of doing it with radar and wind data. It's the easiest part of the whole thing. It's literally "if this number is not 0 then it's 100% for sure not a balloon."

Regarding categorization, I see a couple of options here and the difference is quite huge, and I'm wondering how exactly it's done. This isn't UFO specific so let's forget about that for a second here, it's about the logic used in categorization generally. Imagine we have two possible explanations for an observation: A and B.

I see two possible ways to come up with "unknown". First way would be to rule out A and B entirely, as in "it's definitely not A or B." The second way would be to simply not be able to determine whether it was A or B, but it could be either one. These are very different things. Do you have any insight on how that's done?

I think what I'm doing (perhaps in error) is assuming "unknown" means the first one: That the "unknown" classification means A and B are definitively ruled out. In that case whether Luis even exists or not is irrelevant, the fact that the video is "unknown" would prove it's not a balloon because the Navy would have done that analysis before passing it on to ATTIP (surely?). The fact that we're even here talking about it would rule out the balloon then regardless of Luis's testimony. His credibility and testimony wouldn't even matter in that case.

However, if they do it the second way then my inference is invalid. So I might have made a logical error in combining Luis' "we ruled out balloons"(let's assume that's false) with my knowledge that with radar track data it's super easy to rule out the balloon hypothesis, then argued that the balloon explanation is invalid with or without Luis because the status is "unknown," when in the second way "unknown" simply means that whoever did the analysis simply couldn't determine whether it was a balloon or not. Very different pictures there and I could very well be confused by that. Thanks for holding my feet to the fire about it.
 
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SCD1.pngSCD2.png
That the steering cue dot can also give information about the wind is a hypothesis that I have proposed to explain some anomalies on its behavior.
In fact, the dot is the projection on the horizontal plane of the A/C of the intersection of the LOS with a sphere that represents the FOV in 3D. I noticed that during the turn this however tightens faster as if I had to rotate the plane also along the vertical axis. And this makes me suppose that the angle of drift can also enter the context. But it is completely premature for me to give a definitive answer.

Ok, yeah, that's similar to how I thought it worked. I'm not sure how you can get wind speed from that, but it may be useful. See if you can determine if the dot is in airplane reference frame (looks like from the diagram that it probably is). If so, we might actually have direction vectors in two different reference planes rather than one like I thought. It looks from that diagram like it is indeed the case but let's try to be really sure. Not sure if the same directional info in two different frames might be useful, but it could be.... At least it would add something I didn't see before.
 
Florida, not Virginia......
The Roosevelt CSG drills were carried out in restricted areas along the Florida and Virginia coasts in 2014-2015 before leaving for the Persian Gulf. But you keep giving me examples of objects, now "FLOATING" decoys, but nothing that could be traced back to what the pilots saw and that could have existed 7 years ago. Unfortunately I am like that, like St. Thomas. If I don't see I don't believe. I am sorry.
 
Actually a quick way to determine that would be to see if the dot moves at about the same rate as the bank angle while the bank angle is changing. If it's in aircraft reference frame like the picture shows, what you should see is this: In the early part of the video where bank angle is near 0 but the camera is panning, you should see the dot moving around the outside of the circle (full radius or at least "far away from center") very slowly but not moving toward or away from the center. When the bank angle starts increasing (while roll rate is not 0, so while his bank angle is changing) you should see the dot keep moving around the outside but also start creeping toward the middle of the screen a little bit. How quickly it moves towards the center of the circle should reflect the roll rate (how quickly bank angle is changing). When the bank angle stops (hits 15-20 degrees bank angle or whatever it is) the dot should stop moving into the middle, but keep tracing a circle like before but at a smaller radius. I don't have the video in front of me so can't check. Is that what you see?
 
Has anyone pointed out that the NYU analysis gives a higher speed of 40-60knots? Mick has commented on the video and appears to agree.
 
Ok, so was AATIP Elizondo's own little thing rather than the official pentagon channel that I'd expect data to get funneled through, or was it a real government thing that he never even worked for? Would this mean he's never even had access to all this data and is simply looking at the same videos we are? If so, boy was I wrong... I'll have to read some more. Thanks for the heads up.


What I've been assuming is that the three videos are part of the congress report stuff, so were officially unidentified. Is that wrong too? In that case, could these three videos have come from a couple folks leaked off the ships that they thought looked weird, but weren't actually analyzed and passed up to anyone as unidentified? In light of this information, I'm now wondering if the 160 (or whatever it was) UAP references in the congressional report were even referring to these three videos at all. If they weren't, then my assumption that they'd been analyzed by ship crews before being passed on could easily be wrong too.
 
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I do have a question though: How do "they" categorize something as "unknown?"

if they dont know what it is, then it is unidentified.

I guess I would just be really, really surprised if anyone couldn't have ruled out a balloon very easily somewhere along the way given the ease of doing it with radar and wind data.
what makes you think they haven't? Noone official has said any of these videos are still (or ever were) classified as "unidentified".

note: the government is interested in threats, not whether something is a seagull or a balloon or a walmart bag or a pelican.
 
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if they dont know what it is, then it is unidentified.


what makes you think they haven't? Noone official has said any of these videos are still (or ever were) classified as "unidentified".

note: the government is interested in threats, not whether something is a seagull or a balloon or a walmart bag or a pelican.

Thanks, yes. I was writing at the same time you were so see my last post about that.
 
To me none of the people involved in this government project (ATTIP) have any credibility whatsoever. If you want factual information on all the players involved in this please give a listen to a short 2 part podcast on Skeptoid #787 and #788. Brian Dunning gives a fantastic and eye opening timeline breakdown which is 50 years in the making. And you'll be quite surprised to find what happened to that 22 million dollar grant Harry Reid secured for his UFO friends.
 
Ok, so you're calling him liar?
That would be one possibility... it's a thing people do. Or he could be as honest as the day is long, but wrong. Or of course he could be scruplously honest and absolutely right. Or various mixtures and shades of grey amongst all of that.

But because people lie, or misremember, or say more than they know but in a forthright and convincing manner, I personally care a lot less about what folks say, than I do about what the physical evidence can tel us. Your mileage may vary, of course.
 
Ok, so was AATIP Elizondo's own little thing rather than the official pentagon channel that I'd expect data to get funneled through, or was it a real government thing that he never even worked for?

Hi Todd and a belated welcome to MB!

Sorry for the belated response. Bear with me with the following more thorough background story on AATIP and Elizondo which I hope you find enlightening.

Once upon a time...

... more specifically in 2007, three men with a common interest in UFOs -- billionaire Robert Bigelow (from Nevada), his old friend Senator Harry Reid also from Nevada, and James Lacatski from the Defense Intelligence Agency -- met to discuss their shared object of fascination. Later that year Lacatski visited Bigelow's Skinwalker Ranch where he "saw" a ghost from an observation trailer.

With Reid's help they lobbied congressional funding (USD 22 million) for their own brainchild, a contracted entity for UFO investigations, to exist loosely under the DoD, and which came to be later known as the AATIP. The 22 million AATIP contract was awarded to Bigelow's Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), the sole applicant. Initially the entity was much more focused on the esoteric until Luis Elizondo, a DoD insider, was picked by Reid to take Lacatski's place. Elizondo's primary focus was to collect and analyze data on UAP.

There is no evidence indicating that any significant chunks of the defense budget has ever been appropriated to a centralized UAP identification agency. The tiny appropriations disbursed for the AATIP, due to political influence pushed and headed by UFO enthusiasts, tells the opposite story. A separate UAP entity simply hasn't been a high national security priority from purely DoD perspective at the top command level. Otherwise they would have pushed for more appropriations.

The above context is important since it illustrates that the AATIP (and its direct successor the UAPTF) owes its existence to lobbying by UFO enthusiasts rather than DoD’s official national security priorities.

From the perspective of DoD core functions, the creation and operation of the AATIP (and its direct successor the UAPTF) is a fringe exercise in compliance with congressional assignment and prompted by the merging of several political agendas within the Congress.

These agendas include a genuine interest in alien technology (e.g. Reid/Bigelow/Lacatski/Mellon and later Elizondo), concern for rival nation military capabilities (e.g. Rubio), as well as winning over an alien-believing demographic of voters in the name of public interest (congressmen across the aisle).

DoD is unlikely to express objections if such a fringe entity secures funding from outside its core budget, concerns itself with mostly unclassified data, and strengthens Pentagon's public relations with the Congress and the general public.

However, the DoD core organization is characteristically hesitant to share classified information with its contracted entities, especially with the likes of the AATIP/UAPTF which are perceived fringe, political and ideological. After the resignation of Luis Elizondo in 2017, he was replaced by Brennan McKernan to head the current UAPTF. In its current form, the UAPTF has clearly toned down on aliens, and has begun more seriously exploring other more prosaic explanations, as also evidenced by the recent report, without explicitly confirming nor denying any hypothesis. The recent report essentially reads: 'The data is not impressive but a few cases did seem strange, while they can be explained variously. If you want better analysis of these few cases, or more cases to analyze, give us more money and more competent staff.'

A politically motivated and unclassified fringe exercise under the Pentagon poses some information security challenges within the DoD and has produced certain unintended consequences.

All UAP evidence acquired from the DoD by the UAPTF (and its predecessor the AATIP) portrays phenomena that seem to have been initially genuinely unidentified by the immediate military staff directly observing and reporting them to their superiors. The DoD, on one hand, had to provide UAPTF/AATIP with some material to work on. On the other, all such reports were likely carefully pre-analyzed and vetted within the DoD core organization which is characteristically hesitant to share classified information, including internal analysis, with its contracted entities.

Reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence are part and parcel of DoD’s core functions in almost every military discipline. Developing these functions to quicker and better identify potential airborne threats is a core area of constant improvement. These core military functions do not rely on a separate modestly funded, logistically distant, and mostly unclassified fringe entity in the Pentagon that is demonstrably limited in its capacity to identify UAP.

Despite its limited capacity and limited access to classified data, since the AATIP/UAPTF is known to exist under the Pentagon, it has often been the go-to source sought and quoted by senior officials (both legislative and executive) and media outlets in their public communications on UAP. This has resulted in confusing public statements in which footage leaked by Elizondo and Mellon, somewhat convincingly explained as optical illusion by other sources, is presented to the public as 'Pentagon-confirmed evidence of objects behaving in physics-defying ways.'

The DoD does not usually discuss its internal findings publicly nor does it need to fully identify each UAP to have a rough idea of the likeliest explanations. It will therefore continue to officially acknowledge that the bulk of the data acquired by the UAPTF portray unidentified aerial phenomena. Such an acknowledgement, however, does not logically imply that (1) all the UAP footage so defined is actually unidentified by Pentagon, nor point to (2) the Pentagon's deficit of plausible non-alien explanations to any of the footage.

As long as UAPTF/AATIP exists as an entity under the Pentagon, its (former) members' (i.e. Elizondo) interpretations on UAP incidents will continue to be sought and quoted by many senior officials and media outlets as authoritative Pentagon positions. Some of these positions will continue to stand in contradiction to other explanations from other expert sources, including within Pentagon.

Moreover, an official Pentagon denial of classified US military capabilities featuring in UAP footage would make sense in both scenarios; (1) such capabilities actually featuring in the footage or (2) not.

This is, roughly, what the whole UAP ruckus is all about. I hope you find this context helpful.
 
note: the government is interested in threats, not whether something is a seagull or a balloon or a walmart bag or a pelican.
Given what happened during the B-1B development, pelicans are definitely threats to national security.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...-of-b1b/62d03249-691c-44ec-95d6-a7200d2f1159/

The findings that a [pelican] apparently caused such catastrophic damage to the bomber, which was on a high-speed, low-level bombing training mission, raises new questions about the controversial plane's ability to survive its intended missions in combat.
 
AATIP isn't even part of the US intelligence system by the sounds of it and these three videos have nothing to do with the pentagon report,
this bit doesn't sound right to me. The vast media coverage of the NY Times 3 videos, in my opinion, is what initiated the report. Congressmen are people too who read the NY Times hype. and many of their constituents were freaking out.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "intelligence system". are you focusing too much on extraterrestrials? we still need to be watching out for other countries having advanced technology or messing with us.

add:
Article:
6) As the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) involved the Navy, which of the 38 DIA reports produced by the AATIP was the Navy involved in?

A: The contractors who produced the 38 technical reports under AATIP consulted with many experts across DoD, including Navy. As these involve intelligence matters, we’re not to comment on specifics.
end add.



My impression is there doesn't have to be any "ship crew analysis", an individual sailor/pilot sees something THEY think is weird and they are supposed to report it to the UAP reporting collection personnel/agency (who this personnel/agency is has changed over the years, which is why i worded it that way).
 
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this bit doesn't sound right to me. The vast media coverage of the NY Times 3 videos, in my opinion, is what initiated the report. Congressmen are people too who read the NY Times hype. and many of their constituents were freaking out.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "intelligence system". are you focusing too much on extraterrestrials? we still need to be watching out for other countries having advanced technology or messing with us.

add:
Article:
6) As the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) involved the Navy, which of the 38 DIA reports produced by the AATIP was the Navy involved in?

A: The contractors who produced the 38 technical reports under AATIP consulted with many experts across DoD, including Navy. As these involve intelligence matters, we’re not to comment on specifics.
end add.



My impression is there doesn't have to be any "ship crew analysis", an individual sailor/pilot sees something THEY think is weird and they are supposed to report it to the UAP reporting collection personnel/agency (who this personnel/agency is has changed over the years, which is why i worded it that way).
The New York Times article was written by Leslie Kean, a UFO/Paranormal fanatic. She was married to Bud Hopkins, the person that would hypnotize people that thought they were abducted. This article was not written by someone that is objective. Her, and the rest of that group, Christopher Mellon, Tom Delonge, Bigelow etc all believe that UFO's and ghosts are interdimensional beings. They are so fringe. The NYTimes article is nothing but a marketing promotion piece from this group.
 
So to my mind, the fact that a ship crew analysis failed to identify go-fast as a balloon and bothered to send it up the line would seal the "no balloon" deal before it ever even made it to Uncle Sam. Hence I didn't see any reason to care about Luis credibility or whether it was AATIP or someone else who received it. I can see now why that's wrong: AATIP isn't even part of the US intelligence system by the sounds of it and these three videos may have nothing to do with the pentagon report, and for all we know they aren't even something that went through the intel system. Is that basically the picture?

The AATIP/UAPTF was/is technically/administratively part of the DoD intelligence function (which, btw, is not a simple monolith existing in one location under single authority). But 'in actuality' it seems to have been somewhat divorced from the real nuts-and-bolts work of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) within the DoD, including its internal analysis on UAP. ISR is mostly decentralized into every DoD branch, and has always dealt with unidentified threats (flying or not). In most modern military organizations the ISR is never regarded fully ready nor adequate. A military organization must constantly push to gain an advantage over adversaries. Hence, the DoD constantly invests large sums of money to improve intelligence and surveillance technology as well as in human intelligence. This money is separate from the tiny appropriation disbursed for the AATIP.

For a military organization, a reasonable certainty (not requiring full-fledged scientific identification) of a threat-level is enough for most operational decisions. These decisions must be made quickly and without heavy bureaucracy involving too many administrative levels and DoD agencies. File names such as GIMBAL and FLIR suggest the DoD had already, before Mick West, entertained the explanation of a likely optical illusion for the phenomena shown in some of the leaked footage. And yet Elizondo had treated the same evidence as featuring some extraordinary physics-defying technological capabilities.

DoD departments are not legally required to produce material for the UAPTF at the latter's request, unlike other more serious functions within government departments such as inspectors-general, internal audits and internal affairs with whom every government unit is bound to cooperate or else face consequences.

Some of the material (e.g. the USS Omaha footage of UAV fleets) acquired by Elizondo, and leaked by him to the public, may have even been obtained using his own personal DoD contacts and thereby bypassing official chains. Some may even feature classified US tech. Obtaining them outside official chains and leaking them to the public constitute a national security risk.
 
...
DoD departments are not legally required to produce material for the UAPTF at the latter's request, unlike other more serious functions within government departments such as inspectors-general, internal audits and internal affairs with whom every government unit is bound to cooperate or else face consequences.
...
Source?
 
An important factor to get the angle of the ocean to match was the wind speed, although looking at it now I have a separate velocity and add that to the wind, which is fine for the Jet, but not for the object if it's a balloon. Here's the update function for the camera (jet), incorporating the turn and the wind.

Assuming FixedUpdate2() is being called by FixedUpdate(), this code is incorrect and will leave a frame rate dependent mismatch between the simulation and the real video proportional to the difference in graphics update frequency, physics frequency, and project vsynchv settings. On a 60Hz monitor with 30 fps (skipping every second v-blank), the ratio is 30/50. At 60 fps (standard vsynch), the ratio is 60/50, etc.. On a 75Hz or other frequency monitor with vsynch enabled, the results will change accordingly.

Original code:
Code:
 public override void FixedUpdate2()
    {

        float t = Time.deltaTime;

        // rotate the VELOCITY of the camera, as we are turning
        // assuming here the velocity is the same as the forward axis of the jet
        m_v = Quaternion.AngleAxis(m_turnRate * t, Vector3.up) * m_v;
        //  Debug.Log(m_turnRate +", "+ m_v);

        // incorporate wind into absolute velocity
        GameObject windObject = GameObject.Find("Wind");
        Vector3 windVelocity = windObject.GetComponent<Wind>().WindVector();
        Vector3 resultantVelocity = m_v + windVelocity;

        // Translate the camera position in world space
        // (local space would be the orientation of the camera)
        transform.Translate(resultantVelocity * t, Space.World);

        GameObject obj = GameObject.Find("Object");
        transform.LookAt(obj.transform);

    }

The error is here:
Code:
   float t = Time.deltaTime;

That is a frame rate dependent time variable measuring the time between now and the previous graphics frame, but the FixedUpdate() function is called every physics cycle, not every graphics cycle. This Time.deltaTime is never to be used in FixedUpdate() which runs at the physics time step in the "time" section of preferences (default value 0.02 or 50Hz). I.e., Update() is called once per graphics frame, FixedUpdate() is called once per physics cycle. Not the same thing. To observe the difference, keep the original code and change the "physics time" in Unity's preferences/settings to a different value. To correct the error, use this instead:

Code:
   float t = Time.fixedDeltaTime ;

For really smooth animation and high precision (good for video recording), I'd suggest turning off vsynch in Unity's preferences or settings (forget which) for max frame rate, then change the physics time step (in "Time" somewhere there too) to something small. You could do 1000Hz easily here so try 0.001 sec for physics time. More information here:

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Time.html

Some other programming tips follow in case you dig out Unity again and give this another try some day. These are just tips for better performance and useful C# programming practice, they do not affect the simulation results in any way so can be ignored. They're just suggestions.

GameObject.Find() and GetComponent() are slow. Most of these variables can go directly in the inspector by declaring them at the top of the class (but still inside the class body). It's better to do this so they are not reinstantiated every cycle, especially those Find() and GetComponent() function calls. Here's how I'd do it:

Code:
//At top of class but still inside it where m_turnRate is declared:
public GameObject obj; //Drag balloon/UFO onto this slot in the inspector
public Vector3 windVelocity; //If it's here you can set/see value in inspector
public Vector3 resultantVelocity; //Same
 public override void FixedUpdate2()
    {
        float t = Time.fixedDeltaTime; //fixedDeltaTime, not deltaTime
        m_v = Quaternion.AngleAxis(m_turnRate * t, Vector3.up) * m_v;
        resultantVelocity = m_v + windVelocity;
        transform.Translate(resultantVelocity * t, Space.World);
        transform.LookAt(obj.transform);
    }

A nice alternative to this is to use physics rigid bodies so you can set the velocities directly and let PhysX handle the motion kinematics. To do that, drag a RigidBody component onto both of your targets, check the "isKinematic" boxes so you can set the linear/angular velocities directly and uncheck "gravity."

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Rigidbody.html

Then you can use RigidBody functions "angularVelocity" and "velocity" to directly set the velocity vectors and let PhysX handle the kinematics of motion. You can delete all the code above except the transform.LookAt() probably, even add wind velocity separately for the jet and the UFO to the world frame velocities. Unity will take care of the rest. There's no need to manually do all the rotations and translations except for the camera. Just create a "jet" GameObject and drag your camera object under it as a child if you're not already doing that. This way you can control the jet velocity separately from the camera rotation. Good luck!
 
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Article:
Analyzing UAP is a collaborative effort involving many departments and agencies, and the Department thanks the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for leading a collaborative effort to produce this assessment, as well as the other contributing departments and agencies.
Without claiming to know whether anybody is legally required to hand over stuff to UAPT I'm not sure that just acknowledging that there was a collaborative effort is, in and of itself, evidence that they aren't.
 
Without claiming to know whether anybody is legally required to hand over stuff to UAPT I'm not sure that just acknowledging that there was a collaborative effort is, in and of itself, evidence that they aren't.

Not claiming it's absolutely incontrovertible evidence, but it's highly indicative since in military (and general government) parlance other terms than 'collaborative effort' are commonly used when there's a stricter requirement to comply. Especially if it's a legally binding requirement.

Expessions such as 'authority to review internal documents' (Inspector General Act), 'assigned responsibility to investigate' and 'mandate to issue directives' are used instead.

Article:
Neither the head of the establishment nor the officer next in rank below such head shall prevent or prohibit the Inspector General from initiating, carrying out, or completing any audit or investigation, or from issuing any subpoena during the course of any audit or investigation.
 
Article:
Analyzing UAP is a collaborative effort involving many departments and agencies, and the Department thanks the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for leading a collaborative effort to produce this assessment, as well as the other contributing departments and agencies.
"DoD departments are not legally required to produce material for the UAPTF "

Source for this? Is it you, or is there a source.
 
Not claiming it's absolutely incontrovertible evidence, but it's highly indicative

this seems to be coming from Chris Mellon (who i trust about as far as i can throw him) but Politico "reported" what kinda sounds like they dont have to share info

Article:
But those advising the investigations are advocating for significantly more time and resources to retrieve information from agencies that in some cases have shown reluctance, if not outright resistance, to sharing classified information. And they worry that without high-level involvement, it will be difficult to compel agencies to release what they have.
 
The New York Times article was written by Leslie Kean, a UFO/Paranormal fanatic. She was married to Bud Hopkins, the person that would hypnotize people that thought they were abducted. This article was not written by someone that is objective. Her, and the rest of that group, Christopher Mellon, Tom Delonge, Bigelow etc all believe that UFO's and ghosts are interdimensional beings. They are so fringe. The NYTimes article is nothing but a marketing promotion piece from this group.

You'll find no argument from me in regards to Leslie Kean, she's a full woo-believer 100%. That said, the article was co-written by Ralph Blumenthal who is a legitimate journalist with a large body of respected work. I'm hesitant to dismiss their work completely due to his involvement. I still think it was a story worth telling.

I'm not sure the interdimensional ghost stuff is even all that fringe among UFO believers presently. If you read forums made up primarily of believers, it actually seems to be the predominant theory these days. You don't see as much discussion about nuts n' bolts flying saucers compared to the topic in the 1950's-1990's. Funnily enough, the exact same thing has happened in the Bigfoot community. Gone are the days of an egregiously large undiscovered primate stalking the American woods. Nowadays lots of people believe Bigfoot to be some sort of interdimensional entity, ghost, skinwalker, etc.
 
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