Mosul "Sphere"

[FatPhil]

The picture wasn't from Ukraine.

I'm fairly sure the logic was probably as follows:
A) [Fact] Some recent wars have involved this tech
B) [Deduction from A] Therefore all recent wars will involve this tech
C) [Fact] The Ukraine war's a recent war
D) [Deduction from B and C] Therefore this tech should have been seen in Ukraine.

Classic Hasty Generalisation Fallacy at B. Some does not imply all. (I know you know this, I'm just spelling it out in case your response didn't make things clear enough.)

 

[Mauro]

Are there any examples of using balloons to distract anyone in ukraine? I feel like the idea that people just let loose balloons to distract people if it were a tactic in military we'd see all over a war where drone attacks are so common.

Would be a great way to hide/freak out the opponent if you filled the sky with balloons, but I've never seen that used as a tactic outside of pictures or suggestions ITT(and the other)

I remember to have read Russians used balloons as decoys in Ukraine. I cannot trace back the original links (probably it was on The War Zone), but a simple google search finds many results:

 

[John J.]

Why is it not a thing I see in practice? With the coverage in ukraine, I think we'd have multiple examples this.

The Ukrainians probably realise it's a useless tactic.
For insurgent groups (or whatever we want to call them) in the Middle East, maybe it helps morale- maybe people believe they're reducing the frequency or effectiveness of air reconnaissance/ air attacks.

Before the Second World War, Britain built concrete acoustic mirrors to detect incoming enemy aircraft. A microphone would be at the focus of the "mirror".

These mirrors are all about 5 m (16' 3") high. (The curved wall-like structure on the left, 2nd pic, is a mirror of different design).
From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror Fortunately for Britain, radar was developed just before the war.

I think it's very unlikely that the acoustic mirrors would have been an effective warning system- but it showed the authorities were doing something to protect the people. Maybe the release of balloons by Mid-East groups has a similar function.

 

[Duke]

The Ukrainians probably realise it's a useless tactic.
For insurgent groups (or whatever we want to call them) in the Middle East, maybe it helps morale- maybe people believe they're reducing the frequency or effectiveness of air reconnaissance/ air attacks.

Before the Second World War, Britain built concrete acoustic mirrors to detect incoming enemy aircraft. A microphone would be at the focus of the "mirror".
View attachment 61039View attachment 61040
These mirrors are all about 5 m (16' 3") high. (The curved wall-like structure on the left, 2nd pic, is a mirror of different design).
From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror Fortunately for Britain, radar was developed just before the war.

I think it's very unlikely that the acoustic mirrors would have been an effective warning system- but it showed the authorities were doing something to protect the people. Maybe the release of balloons by Mid-East groups has a similar function.

I saw one of those out in a field in/around East Anglia when I went to visit my late father-in-law's USAAF base (100th BG/Thorpe Abbotts). It never occurred to me what it was.

 

[Ann K]

I saw one of those out in a field in/around East Anglia when I went to visit my late father-in-law's USAAF base (100th BG/Thorpe Abbotts). It never occurred to me what it was.

My uncle had a dog, given to him by a naval officer who had been stationed in heavily-attacked Portsmouth. Goofy knew the difference in sound between British aircraft and German ones, and was a pretty efficient acoustic detector. When Goofy started to whine, everyone from the upper floors came down to take shelter in my uncle's cellar.

 

[tobigtofool]

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xt11FrOYa0A


I'd be interested to hear more about this from other sources about militant uses https://www.metabunk.org/threads/mosul-sphere.12850/post-286740

As for useless tactic, I wonder if you released 50,000 balloons over a target if that'd make it harder to target actual rocket threats with it?

 

[Bruce M]

Necroposting, sorry. Just didnt read this thread until now.
Was there a conclusion? Given its a screenshot, not the video, it seems likely they posted this one shot because its the most interesting. If you saw the 4 second video and it shows this moving across the screen quickly you'd know it was just a balloon/air object, and not a sphere on the ground or a water puddle. The lack of video seems deliberate.
Its not a water droplet on the outside glass. It cant focus and be sharp like that. If its an internal camera fault(on the focal plane) then its (a) huge, and (b) going to be seen everywhere you look at the same place on the screen.
Highly unlikely this is a photo of a monitor.(and hence a reflection). The screen capture/image is exactly the size of a video output from the camera.

The camera setting is the EON daylight camera, at 1500MM focal length. Common in MX systems.

Terrible focus setting. Set at infinity, with trim at 99% (the maximum) implies there is something wrong with the mechanism/tuning. It is at absolute maximum focus, and it still isnt sharp.

Spatial AND temporal on! Temporal filtering, on a sunny day, in a fast moving aircraft, is a very odd choice. Temporal uses time to calculate an average of the view over multiple frames, and present a final pixel. Very good for cutting through haze, from a sandstorm or falling snow. So, maybe there was blowing dust this day? But to get it to work when you are moving quickly takes some skill, because if you slew the camera too quickly all you get is a smear of images everywhere. Like cheap 80's sci-fi ghosting effect.

The locations and overlay descriptions from post #22 look correct.

From Corbell's instagram on this photo:

DURATION - The video is 4 seconds long. The UAP is seen "moving with purpose" in a lateral direction across the video (south to north). The "orb" UAP is visible for approximately 1 second - as it moves through frame.

So, even the original source knows it isnt a shiny puddle.

My 2c : It is a balloon moving through the frame, from either blowing in the wind, or the aircraft moving relative to it, keeping it in frame for only a brief moment.

 

[beku-mant]

Looks like the 4 second video has been released.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if0enV8VfVw


https://uapregister.substack.com/p/us-air-force-releases-new-uap-video

 

[JMartJr]

Certainly seems compatible with a balloon. Still.

 

[Kyle Ferriter]

This is the video they teased all that time? Filmed from a moving drone, where the object moves through frame in a direction opposite the aircraft's direction of motion? They certainly got a lot of lore and podcasting out of this video of a very balloon-like object.

Edit: changed "drone" to "aircraft" since the story indicates it was a surveillance plane.

 

[Mick West]

https://www.metabunk.org/sitrec/?cu....amazonaws.com/1/Mosul Orb/20250701_221604.js

Very rough, just get a sense of things. This is a 2m diameter sphere at 6,000 feet, roughly where the lines of sight cross.

 

[Bruce M]

. This is a 2m diameter sphere at 6,000 feet, roughly where the lines of sight cross.

I didnt see it in a quick scan of the thread - how did you determine 6000FT?

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

This makes it much clearer, intuitively, that this is a sphere with a specular reflection of the Sun. A highlight on a curved, reflective surface. A metalized polymer balloon.

I don't remember... do we have the time and date? We could compare the solar elevation and azimuth with the placement of the reflection. The convex shape is a complication, but there must be software that could solve that problem. Blender? Someday I'm going to have time to teach myself these new fangled things.

Could we at least compare the illumination geometry of the entire scene? The reflection compared to the shadows on the ground? Intuitively they look right to me.

 

[Bruce M]

I don't remember... do we have the time and date?

Date and location.

 

[Mick West]

I don't remember... do we have the time and date? We could compare the solar elevation and azimuth with the placement of the reflection. The convex shape is a complication, but there must be software that could solve that problem. Blender? Someday I'm going to have time to teach myself these new fangled things.

Already done, in the above sitch. Specular reflection is a perfect match for all the DTLs.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

Does UTC + 0.0 mean that this is UTC? In other words, 12:47 p.m. local time?

Mosul is on Arabia Standard Time (AST). (UTC+03:00). Iraq does not use daylight saving time.

Intuitively the short shadows on the ground look like the Sun is near the meridian. Like it's about local Noon. The placement of the highlight intuitively makes it look as if it's about Noon too.

Maybe that's irrelevant at this point... but still.

 

[Bruce M]

Does UTC + 0.0 mean that this is UTC?

It means they didnt set the offset for their local area. That is zulu time, Greenwich mean time, time in England....... The system doesnt automatically apply the time zone offset, or correct for daylight saving time - the operators have to set that. So yes, local time would be 12:47 is its UTC+03 in their location.

 

[ManInBlack]

Looks similar to a Google WI-FI balloon (size and appearance). They operated the program until 2021 and had various different sizes and shaped balloons.

 

[Kyle Ferriter]

It's interesting that the FOIA office released it with heavy redaction of on-screen elements even though a frame of the video with those elements unredacted was already de facto in the public domain. WeaponizedPodcast stated that the image they released was unclassified. Yet here in the FOIA-released video the on-screen elements are completely redacted.

On May 1st, 2020 a classified briefing was generated about the UFO / UAP presence, via the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). This UAP briefing is a build-on to a previous ONI briefing, generated on October 18th, 2019. Both were distributed across a wide range of intelligence networking platforms (such as SIPRNet, JWICS and various Intelink systems). The UAP intelligence briefing was most recently uploaded and distributed on November 4th, 2021.

This "Mosul Orb" UFO video is included in the above-mentioned UAP educational audio / visual presentation. This briefing was generated and populated across intelligence platforms to educate the United States Armed Forces and the intelligence community on the nature and presentation of the UAP / UFO phenomenon. Those familiar with the creation of the briefing state that the aim is to destigmatize the UAP problem and to promote more intelligence collection regarding UAP incursions and encounters with active military deployments. Although the "Mosul Orb" footage is contained within a classified briefing, the image itself remains unclassified.

The image WeaponizedPodcast released was also significantly brighter than the video released today.

The image file hosted on the weaponizedpodcast website is also a resolution of 2500x1406.

source: https://www.weaponizedpodcast.com/news-1/mosul-orb-ufo
direct image link

While the video released to youtube is 640x360. The WeaponizedPodcast image also appears to match frame 51 from the youtube video.

2500x1406 vs 640x360 is a significant resolution difference. What is the original resolution? Was the leaked image upscaled? Or is this video posted by UAP Register downscaled? Looking at these two frames, the WeaponizedPodcast one looks like it's really a higher resolution, not a simple algorithmic upscaling/interpolation. Could be AI upscaled but a few years ago that technology was not where it is today. I think more likely the video posted to youtube is significantly lower resolution than the original video source of the leaked frame.

For the brightness difference, tweaking with imagemagick, I'm getting pretty close by boosting the brightness of the video frames by 15-20% but it's hard to determine an exact match, I think in part due to the difference in the content. Which one is the original colors? Perhaps WeaponizedPodcast brightened it or the single frame used in those briefings are what they obtained (as in, they didn't obtain that image from the video itself, only from a briefing document about the video), and that was pre-brightened by someone in the DoD. Does Corbell have the original unredacted and full resolution video or did he only get that one frame?

EDIT: after I posted this while comparing those frames more I noticed the they actually do not fully match. The edge of the image is different. The WeaponizedPodcast one is a slight left/top/right crop. Here's the best alignment I could get manually in Google Draw. The yellow border is the WeaponizedPodcast frame.

 

[Bruce M]

2500x1406 vs 640x360 is a significant resolution difference. What is the original resolution? Was the leaked image upscaled?

The most an MX system can put out is 1080p.

 

[Z.W. Wolf]

A 4 foot "tracking sphere." A kind of radar calibration/weather balloon.

https://www.jimsphere.com/index.php

Could this be important?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosonde?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Worldwide, there are about 1,300 radiosonde launch sites.[18] Most countries share data with the rest of the world through international agreements. Nearly all routine radiosonde launches occur one hour before the official observation times of 0000 UTC and 1200 UTC to center the observation times during the roughly two-hour ascent.[19][20] Radiosonde observations are important for weather forecasting, severe weather watches and warnings, and atmospheric research.

 

[jarlrmai]

If it is FOIA released then surely there's an original official US Gov version without the UAPREGISTER text added?

Also is anyone gonna take the Corbell leaks seriously within the US Gov?

He seems to leak versions of things that whilst they may come out officially later on, have unretracted data on them.

 

[TheCholla]

https://www.metabunk.org/sitrec/?custom=https://sitrec.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/1/Mosul Orb/20250701_221604.js

View attachment 82113

Very rough, just get a sense of things. This is a 2m diameter sphere at 6,000 feet, roughly where the lines of sight cross.

Do you find it close to wind speed?

Not sure if this has been discussed before, what's up with the lighter band in the video (visible on the road, trees, roofs), that happens to be on the object's apparent trajectory. Some artifact from the way it's been processed?

 

[jarlrmai]

Do you find it close to wind speed?

Not sure if this has been discussed before, what's up with the lighter band in the video (visible on the road, trees, roofs), that happens to be on the object's apparent trajectory. Some artifact from the way it's been processed?

View attachment 82125

I'm not sure if it's bit of an optical illusion You have these apparently aligned features, they are somewhat aligned but each one seems to fit roughly to the angle of the grid lay out of the buildings/structures, parallel with or at 90 degrees to the road/buildings

 

[FatPhil]

Intuitively the short shadows on the ground look like the Sun is near the meridian. Like it's about local Noon. The placement of the highlight intuitively makes it look as if it's about Noon too.

I'm not getting a "due north" vibe from this shadow:

On the assumption I'm interpretting the OSD correctly, that is - and much of its text is opaque to me, so it's entirely possible I've got the wrong end of the wrong stick.

 

[FatPhil]

2500x1406 vs 640x360 is a significant resolution difference. What is the original resolution? Was the leaked image upscaled? Or is this video posted by UAP Register downscaled?

This (from the direct image link you provide, with my pixel-scaled zoom overlayed) screams "interlaced video source smoothly upscaled (probably bicubic, or equal/better levels of tech) by a factor of between 4 and 5" to me:

 

[Bruce M]

I'm not getting a "due north" vibe from this shadow:

On the assumption I'm interpretting the OSD correctly, that is - and much of its text is opaque to me, so it's entirely possible I've got the wrong end of the wrong stick.

Why do you feel you are looking due north?
Both the compass, and the target heading, indicate we are looking a bit south of east. 102 degrees to be precise.
Using the shadow as a sun compass indicator, its pointing approximately east, or at least, north is to the left.

 

[JMartJr]

EDIT: after I posted this while comparing those frames more I noticed the they actually do not fully match. The edge of the image is different. The WeaponizedPodcast one is a slight left/top/right crop. Here's the best alignment I could get manually in Google Draw. The yellow border is the WeaponizedPodcast frame.

And, for what it is worth, looks very much like what I'd do using the handy "snipping tool" to do a fast-and-dirty screen grab of an image -- I'd try not to grab a white border (usually) and just cut close to the edge of the image -- exact symmetry not required, just try to get the interesting bits and avoid a"background frame" unless I was feeling artsy.

 

[Ann K]

Not sure if this has been discussed before, what's up with the lighter band in the video (visible on the road, trees, roofs), that happens to be on the object's apparent trajectory. Some artifact from the way it's been processed?

I don't see that, but as it travels the object appears to retain a dark edge at the right side (which has the effect of making it look somewhat asymmetrical) and a lighter bloom at the lower right, both of which I think must be artifacts.

 

[Mick West]

Added the wall and refined a bit. Could be a 2m sphere at wind speed (about 10mph). But there's lots of variables.

https://www.metabunk.org/sitrec/?cu....amazonaws.com/1/Mosul Orb/20250702_171848.js

Note that this relies on the object tracking feature, which has some bugs when viewports are resized.

 

[Mick West]

Do you find it close to wind speed?

In the rough setup above, I had the wind as 338° at 11 knots

Looking at historical data I get 300° at 8 knots (1000 mb) to 300 at 19 knots (850mb)
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/...thographic=43.79,36.46,7605/loc=43.116,36.356

Which I think is a fit, given the unknowns.

 

[Bruce M]

Added the wall and refined a bit. Could be a 2m sphere at wind speed (about 10mph). But there's lots of variables.

Your sitrec file has the KLV metadata? Or did you derive/estimated the data and added it in? Is there a link to a video other than the youtube one?

 

[FatPhil]

Why do you feel you are looking due north?

The vibe I'm getting from the shadow is that it is not pointing due north.

 

[Mick West]

Your sitrec file has the KLV metadata? Or did you derive/estimated the data and added it in? Is there a link to a video other than the youtube one?

I'm just using the numbers on the single screenshot, and matching the rotation of the buildings

 

[Mick West]

Looking more at the wind speed. The time is 09:47 UTC, April 16, 2016.
Camera location is about 43.120,36.333, at 19403 feet. That's roughly 475mb So the closest ENN layer is 500mb
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/...thographic=43.79,36.46,7605/loc=43.120,36.333
305° @ 43 knots. Pretty windy! This woudl be the "local" wind in Sitrec physics

just above ground level is about 1000 mb, 260°@1kn, basically zero wind
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2016/...thographic=43.79,36.46,7605/loc=43.120,36.333

There's two other layers:

850mb is about 4,800 feet, 285 @ 8 kn
700mb is about 9,900 feet, 300° @ 28 kn

Interesting when I try these numbers, I get a balloon with zero horizontal airspeed that is rising from 7,800 feet in 13 knot winds from about 300°.
https://www.metabunk.org/sitrec/?cu.../1/Mosul orb _ better wind/20250703_231340.js
There's too many variable to tweak. I need to get a robot to do it for me

 

[Mick West]

A rising balloon suggests a weather balloon. I Google for weather service in Mosul, and the one result was this:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/م...try=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDYzMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw==

It's directly upwind.

Could this be the source of the balloon?

 

[Mick West]

They have an open area out back that could be a weather balloon launch site.

 

[MonkeeSage]

Looks like sondehub doesn't have that location marked as a launch site so unfortunately I don't think we can get historical launch data from sondehub.

https://sondehub.org/#!mt=WorldImagery&mz=17&qm=3h&mc=36.40932,43.11157

The only launch sites they have marked (open gray circles) are pretty far away and none of them appear to have historical data. Not surprising since sondehub is based on volunteers entering the data, but figured it was worth a shot.

 

[Mick West]

Looks like sondehub doesn't have that location marked as a launch site so unfortunately I don't think we can get historical launch data from sondehub.

It seems fairly unlikely anyway, as Mosul was under ISIL control at the time (16 April 2016) , and in a turbulent time. It seems more likely to have been something military-related.

 

[Martinicus1]

It seems fairly unlikely anyway, as Mosul was under ISIL control at the time (16 April 2016) , and in a turbulent time. It seems more likely to have been something military-related.

Weather balloons are typically latex due to elasticity and burst resistance. There may be examples of silver metallic weather balloons but the vast majority are latex, often with a payload. Radar reflectors or decoys are more likely options, although there's little evidence these were used by ISIL, mainly due to expertise, need and access. They would more likely be used disrupt radar based systems such as air defence, not optical or IR surveillance.