This seems to show where the RV was parked and where the camera was.
My read on this:
-They assumed the mystery object was 0.42 miles away during the sighting. A how big/how far error.
-They didn't take a compass reading while they were standing next to the camera.
-After the mystery object was gone, they then jumped over to the RV and took a compass reading.
Here's the point. The compass heading indicates the direction toward the point on the ground directly under where the mystery object had been. Where they assumed it had been.
Whatever instrument they used indicated 236 (or 237). But if they had taken the compass reading while standing where the camera was placed and while the object was visible in the sky... I'll bet it would have read ~273 degrees.
Another issue is if you assume the object is close the impact of being a few degrees out might seem trivial, but if the object is 50 odd miles away all of a sudden a few degrees is a big discrepancy.
In the video with Coultart they state
"And the object never really did come down from the cloud layer"
So how can it have been so close and yet in the clouds how low did they think the clouds were?
I don't know why but your quote with the transcript won't post fully
Woman: So where that car's parked [unintelligible] furthest you can go uh west on this island without going to like the volleyball area or Democrat Point?
They ought to sue whoever published their paper. If an entity you're affiliated with distances themselves from you, that's a clear sign your reputation just tanked.
External Quote:
To clarify, the authors of the study are affiliates of the GP but they are not members of the Research Team. Their research was not performed with GP equipment/processes, it was not formally reviewed and approved by the GP Research Team, nor was it sanctioned by our Project Head.
That was truly bizarre and reeks of deliberate deception.
In fact, this entire fiasco is starting to look more and more like deliberate deception to me. JFK is the 6th busiest airport in the United States (21st in the
world), and they're videoing directly toward it. I'm willing to bet that this wasn't even the first time they saw a plane ascend into the clouds that night.
They ought to sue whoever published their paper. If an entity you're affiliated with distances themselves from you, that's a clear sign your reputation just tanked.
They aren't even using affiliations correctly. The affiliations should list only the institution for which or at which the research is being conducted. They've thrown together a list of their memberships of everything apart from local hungry hippos club.
That looks incredibly close to what we're seeing in the video.
Of course, the assumption is that they meant the night of November 18, and the video was actually recorded in the early hours of the 19th. Not a gigantic leap to make considering they got so many other things wrong, like the heading and the correct timezone.
That said, if they are deliberately giving incorrect time details, the departure corridor seen here is frequently used. There's at least dozens, if not a hundred or more examples of planes taking a route similar to this on any given night.
maybe their lawyer want to be sure there was no plane in the area since in one of the videos they are aiming a laser-type-thing at the things to "measure the distance". (although maybe the beam seen in the video is only seen because of the IR camera? and the pilots wouldnt report it?)
Article:
12:29
coulthart: you've hit it with a lidar, which is a laser that can detect and range it's a remote
actually they would be limited public figures (since appearing on Coulthart) so the criteria is even more strict.
not to mention California has anti-slapp laws. One SH debunker got a pretty sweet financial settlement after being sued for defamation and what he posted was the half naked hoaxer in a diaper (photoshopped obviously) ..that's way worse then the Scooby Doo comment.
I believe it uses a SiOnyx XQE-1351 sensor - Sensor Specs
Judging from the fact that the camera operator complains about not being able to get closer to the object, I would suggest the camera is set to maximum digital zoom (3x) so the focal length is about 48mm. That seems about right from eyeballing the video, because 16mm is ultrawide.
The camera also has GPS functionality which can be used to set the camera data and time. So if this is turned on the GPS coordinates as well as accurate date and time should be embedded in the metadata.
The camera also has a compass function which requires calibration through a simple process.
The manual says the video output options are 360p and 720p. The video John provided previously is 1080p. It's possible that a 1080p output option was added in a firmware update. Alternatively the video may have simply been upscaled from 720p to 1080p.
EDIT: Then again, the specs say the sensor is 5:4 format 1280x1024, so any 1080p output function added via a firmware update is definitely using upscaling.
Judging from the fact that the camera operator complains about not being able to get closer to the object, I would suggest the camera is set to maximum digital zoom (3x) so the focal length is about 48mm. That seems about right from eyeballing the video, because 16mm is ultrawide.
The focal length relationship to the field of view depends on the sensor size. The specs say the FOV is 44°, probably horizontal, which is not ultrawide.
The focal length relationship to the field of view depends on the sensor size. The specs say the FOV is 44°, probably horizontal, which is not ultrawide.
Yes, that's what I see. More ambiguity. Democrat point was to their west and the volleyball area was to their east. So... I can't make heads or tails of this.
Yes, that's what I see. More ambiguity. Democrat point was to their west and the volleyball area was to their east. So... I can't make heads or tails of this.
A camera with a 16mm lens and a 1 inch sensor is equivalent to a 35mm camera with a 43mm lens. A 50mm lens is considered a "normal" lens for a 35mm still camera.
The 3x digital zoom was probably in use as that agrees with my intuitive feeling that this was a lens with a modest magnification factor. I'm not going to try to do the math, but considering the focal length of the lens and sensor size, it would be the equivalent of 2 point something power.
Digital zoom isn't great as it just degrades the resolution.
Edit: Changed optical to digital. And clarified other points.
I believe it uses a SiOnyx XQE-1351 sensor - Sensor Specs
Judging from the fact that the camera operator complains about not being able to get closer to the object, I would suggest the camera is set to maximum digital zoom (3x) so the focal length is about 48mm. That seems about right from eyeballing the video, because 16mm is ultrawide.
The camera also has GPS functionality which can be used to set the camera data and time. So if this is turned on the GPS coordinates as well as accurate date and time should be embedded in the metadata.
The camera also has a compass function which requires calibration through a simple process.
The manual says the video output options are 360p and 720p. The video John provided previously is 1080p. It's possible that a 1080p output option was added in a firmware update. Alternatively the video may have simply been upscaled from 720p to 1080p.
EDIT: Then again, the specs say the sensor is 5:4 format 1280x1024, so any 1080p output function added via a firmware update is definitely using upscaling.
From the manual:
The SIONYX XQE-1350 / 1351 image sensor features unmatched ultra low light imaging technology and breakthrough sensitivity in the 800nm - 1,100nm range. This sensor enables digital fusion capability, high QE detection for instrument-industrial vision, and all use cases of traditional I2 tube-based night vision.
Yes, I speculated back in post #38 that this is a color night vision camera. This type of camera mixes visible and near IR light.
In low-light conditions, there is often some ambient light from sources like streetlights, moonlight, or any artificial lighting. Color night vision cameras take advantage of this visible light and amplify it to produce color images.
These cameras also use NIR light, which is just beyond the visible spectrum and is commonly used in traditional black-and-white night vision. Near-infrared light is not visible to the human eye, but the camera's sensor can detect it and use it to brighten the image.
By combining both visible light and NIR light, color night vision cameras can produce images with color even when it is too dark for human eyes to see in color.
I don't have time to fully go into this right now, but trust me, Bro...
I'm getting more confident that these guys have often been looking at bright, scintillating stars and mistaking them for small and close objects.
All the old chestnuts that were well understood back in the '70's when Allan Hendry wrote The UFO Handbook are in evidence.
The witnesses don't recognize the brightest stars as being stars. "It's too bright to be a star."
Scintillation is misperceived as rotation.
The star "moves" due to the autokinetic effect. And possibly because of refraction effects due to turbulence and/or inversion layers.
The star is under intelligent control and reacts to the witness.
They've been shining powerful flashlights at the mysterious objects and the objects move. This is another old chestnut.
What happens: The flashlight beam reflecting off of dust and so on in the air makes your pupils contract. You lose night vision too. So the star disappears. Which equals "moves."
Or: You swing the flashlight back and forth and involuntarily your eyes move in anticipation of the star moving. So you "see" the star move. It's a seductive feedback loop. The more you do it the more your eyes move... the more the star moves with your hand movements. Pretty soon you're playing around with this thing that's under intelligent control, and it's reacting to you! The star can move in reaction to your hand movements even if you're using an IR flashlight... which they have also been using.
This exchange is revealing.
john tedesco
Oct 4
What makes you think that is a star? Please verify the background information.
Mick West
My example? I recorded it myself, and confirmed with Stellarium that it was the star Sirius.
John tedesco
Oct 5
Very strange that there are no other stars present while one object is so well-defined. I would like to see the raw video, Metadata, and parametric data.
Re: MW's example video
JT doesn't recognize this as a light polluted environment, and only the brightest stars will be visible.
He doesn't see the other stars visible in the video. Can't see them? Hasn't looked hard enough? Doesn't want to see them? Sees them but pretends they're not there?
He doesn't instantly recognize this as Sirius. He should, because you can also see part of Orion. In my judgement he doesn't know his way around the sky. He doesn't recognize constellations and stars intuitively. It's a matter of lack of practice.
In their "paper" the T. Bros report an instance of using Stellarium to identify a bright light as Venus. To me this is like someone carrying around a birding textbook and identifying a starling and a pigeon. That's fine for an absolute beginner. Anyone who needs a reference guide to "identify" Venus is an absolute beginner when it comes to star gazing. And that's fine. But don't think of yourself, or present yourself, as an expert.
In my judgement, JT doesn't understand that the brightest stars are many times brighter than other visible stars. A common problem with witnesses who mistake the brightest stars as something apart from other stars and as something mysterious.
If they don't recognize the brightest stars as stars, then using Stellarium won't help. They'll just look at another nearby star in sky and wrongly identify that as Rigel or Sirius. Never recognizing that they are looking at Rigel or Sirius. This wouldn't have happened if they had joined a local astronomy club and gone to star parties. Instead they self-educated and have the misplaced self-confidence of beginners. Dunning-Kruger effect.
I think JT doesn't know anything about scintillation. What causes it and what happens to the light rays. Has he even heard of it?
I also have reason to believe that these guys often have a problem focusing their camera(s) properly, which makes stars look more mysterious.
In short they are naïve witnesses making the same mistakes naïve witnesses have been making for many decades. If they had bought a copy of The UFO Handbook or sought expert mentors to teach them about the sky, this wouldn't have happened. Buying a truckload of expensive equipment is not education. It's just buying instant credibility with the credulous public.
Hendry, A. (1980). The Ufo handbook: A guide to investigating, evaluating and reporting Ufo sightings. Sphere.
I've been taking a closer look at this segment, which is a description of the OP video.
Transcript
There's one particularly interesting video—I think it's first shown in video five—called "Merging Sky Objects with Cohesion." You see a large glowing object that seems to be flickering, and then it moves up, perhaps into another object that seems to be hidden inside the cloud. Can you talk me through that one?
Yes, that one caught us by surprise. We were nearing an area called Democrat Point, and I had been videotaping an object up there. The object seemed to have rotation to it, giving off a kaleidoscope of colors as it was rotating. As I was tracking the object, I realized that there was another source of light coming down from the cloud layers. It was getting sharper and sharper, and it seemed to form the same shape as the object I had been visualizing up to that point. The object never really did come down from the cloud layer, but you could see the brightness and intensity of it. Then, the object I had been tracking seemed to cohere or fuse with the other object, and they synchronized rotation together. You could see it was twice its size, and they were rotating in the same direction. Both objects then moved up into the cloud layers, and that was it—we didn't see anything further.
We went frame by frame and analyzed the video. I'm dating myself, I keep saying "tape," you know, the digital recording. You could see that within these frames, the objects, even if they didn't quite cohere, were extremely close together when they synchronized rotation.
Although his descriptions are typically imprecise and ambiguous, I think I'm going back to my original intuitive feeling about what happened.
He was looking at a scintillating bright star, and then an aircraft came into his awareness. From his perspective the aircraft and the star came into close proximity.
Confusingly he says, "I realized that there was another source of light coming down from the cloud layers." Of course what we see in the video is the aircraft moving up into the cloud layers.
This video might not show the star observation because I think he was observing the star naked eye and then hurriedly began to video this mysterious light show. I think that he started to record the video after the star and aircraft "merged." By the time he started the video, the star had been left behind. So seeing the longer version might not help.
As for which star it was... take your pick of these bright stars in the sky at the time...
Jupiter was only 4 degrees above the horizon so probably hidden by ground clutter.
But maybe Jupiter? Yes, under favorable conditions Jupiter can scintillate when it's that close to the horizon. And perhaps the aircraft light was scintillating as well? Maybe there were unusual conditions that night: Strong inversions, turbulence...
Rigel or Sirius would be better candidates. I favor Rigel because it's in the right part of the sky.
Yes, the ambiguity makes my head hurt, but this is what I think this is meant to indicate. View attachment 72108
Purple arrow - Camera was here.
Red arrow - They think the object was directly above this spot on the ground.
Green arrow - Just a label. Indicating that the distance between the camera and the object was 0.42 miles - 676 meters - during the sighting. They think it was a small and close object. This is why T. expresses outrage on "X" at one point at the thought that it could have been a huge plane at 18,000 feet.
The bright star was 566 meters away, and this aircraft was 676 meters away... in their mind.
I have to reassess this. It seems that this is more like it.
Purple arrow - Camera was here.
Green arrow- They think the object was initially directly above this spot on the surface of the sea.
Red arrow- It then moved 0.42 miles so that it was directly over this spot. (But 0.42 is not quite right, because it's an early estimate.)
I think! I'm still learning how to speak Tedesco.
How would you interpret this?
The vector pointing south and away from the object, indicating 0.42 mi, is an error. The direction of travel was not complete when posted.
Support that they think this was a small and close object.
john tedesco
Taking a rough estimation of physical size based on cloud height data, which we had also calculated from Dew Point and temperature, and for/sensor size on the Sionyx optics puts its size as between 3 to 6 meters.
8:52 AM · Oct 6, 2024
So now that we know John's camera was pointed to the west and not SSW as he originally claimed, it's time to revisit a tweet of his from a few days ago...
I would interpret it the exact same way I did when I originally looked at his diagram. The line marked "0.42 mi" was supposed to represent the movement of the object they saw.
The problem is that John keeps contradicting himself, because only a few days ago he was saying the object was moving "almost dead west before disappearing."
The fact that he said that the line in the diagram is an error as "the direction of travel was not complete when posted" raises an eyebrow or two.
First off, it looks like the diagram was hastily put together in mspaint in response to @jarlrmai figuring out his location, and he forgot to crop the canvas size down to the screen snip he took of Google Maps before saving it. Here's the original version he posted:
Second, these guys published a book about their [...] adventures which, according to the hard-sell from John, contains all the critical data about this spooky encounter, and this is the best diagram they have? Supposedly "incomplete" after being put together hastily, and with lines of sight that are contradicted by their own video?
I don't understand what's supposed to be "incomplete" about it. The north most point of the vector is obviously an attempt to demonstrate where the object was at the point it entered the cloud. How can it be interpreted in any other way?
That's three different answers he's given with regard to the direction the object was moving. Due west, north west, and (according to the diagram) north.
The video which is the subject of this thread starts at 0:55 and is slightly longer than the one provided by John. Right at the very end the camera pans to the right and we see these two poles:
These appear to be two of the four poles that are part of a retractable/removable awning attached to the concession stand building.
He doesn't see the other stars visible in the video. Can't see them? Hasn't looked hard enough? Doesn't want to see them? Sees them but pretends they're not there?
He doesn't instantly recognize this as Sirius. He should, because you can also see part of Orion. In my judgement he doesn't know his way around the sky. He doesn't recognize constellations and stars intuitively. It's a matter of lack of practice.
Being a part of the "UFO community" also means that there is a lot of feedback, of people telling the original witness (or persuading, or insisting) that it's this particular star, or it is definitely not a plane/drone/bird. If the person saying this is considered an experienced leader, there's a strong tendency for a newbie witness to say "Oh, OK" if shouted down by someone who poses as knowledgable.
I think the first impulse would be to show your picture or video to that like-minded group, with the result that very few of the videos are presented by people who are free of that group-think judgement. That judgement may have been initiated by someone who doesn't read the sky well, someone who really WANTS to gain prestige by finding an important anomaly, someone with a book to sell or a channel to monetize, or someone who is merely a troll who likes to agitate. The result's the same: we are seldom approached by a person who has an honest enquiry about his sighting without already having a preconception about what it is.
Out of focus bright, scintillating stars. One after another.
The low quality of the photography is surprising. It's gawd-awful. The poor focus I expected. I thought that at least they'd be able to hold a camera steady. They make Yalcin look like a real pro.
As they said in that Coulthart interview, they have a habit of waving visible light and IR flashlights at the stars. They're trying to interact with them. They're trying to have a Close Encounter of the Something Or Other Kind.
A good example here. Appears to be an IR flashlight captured by an IR camera. You can see the beam of the flashlight reflecting off the fog, or whatever, in the air.
For a change there's an ordinary airliner here. I'm pretty sure it's a 737.
Some rough calculations using the sensor specs and focal lengths of the SiOnyx Aurora Pro to determine where the video was taken from.
Using this image as a reference:
The horizontal field of view at the bench location appears to be about 8.55 meters.
Using the Omni FOV Calculator with the known sensor size (12.3 (H) x 9.9 (V)) and focal lengths: 16mm optical, 32mm (2x digital zoom), 48mm (3x digital zoom) to calculate a distance for the horizontal field of view of 8.55 meters I get:
48mm (3x digital zoom) seems to be focal length used as the angle from 32mm would surely have resulted in the concession stand building being visible behind the poles to some extent. In addition, the camera operator complained about not being able to get a closer view of the object, and the SiOnyx Aurora Pro maxes out at 3x digital zoom.
So the native FOV at 48mm would seem to be:
Horizontal: 14.602 deg
Vertical: 11.776 deg
However the native aspect ratio is 5:4 and the video has been cropped to 16.9, so the vertical FOV would be less.
I was extraordinarily bored this evening and there was a patchy cloud layer around 1700-1800ft above Boston Logan airport, with the main takeoff trajectory being to the south and then east out over the Boston Harbor, so I went over to shore at Hull, MA, which is directly in front of that flight path and took some videos of the front bright lights on planes illuminating clouds from below as they fly up to the cloud layer. Also demonstrates planes rapidly becoming invisible in clouds, even thin patchy clouds as there were tonight, and even at night with all their lights on. I took 32 videos, some of which are uninteresting but many of which show planes flying up into a cloud layer. Camera is Samsung Galaxy s23 Ultra.
Here's a clip from one that looks similar the OP video. This is flight ICE630. These planes are pretty close to me and in parts flying dead on towards me. The end of the runway is 5.5 miles away and the planes can get within a mile of Hull. My best guess for when this plane hits the clouds is around 3 miles away. The altitude+location reported by flightradar24 would corroborate that assuming a cloud base around 1800ft. The angles and zoom level and cloud situation will affect how visible the front light beam is, and whether the side safety lights on the plane are visible. In some of my videos a beam is more visible than in others. Different planes also have slightly different color front lights and different brightnesses. There were a couple planes that had significantly brighter front lights. I also have some night videos of planes landing at Boston Logan airport, with their front lights on, where the light is visible but where a beam is not visible. I'll try to go out again in similar cloud conditions but where the planes are going away from me.
there was a patchy cloud layer around 1700-1800ft above Boston Logan airport, with the main takeoff trajectory being to the south and then east out over the Boston Harbor
METAR from ogimet is METAR KBOS 070054Z 16008KT 10SM BKN030 BKN250 13/09 A3001 RMK AO2 SLP161 T01330094=
broken cloud at 3000 ft at 0:54 UTC (note the UTC date has rolled over to the 7th)
Thanks, I'm not familiar with that tool. The "Windy" app on android was making me think the cloud base was somewhere in the 1700s ft range.
Here's another one, DL 321. At 23s you kind of get an illusion of the plane flying toward an object in the clouds, if you were inclined to think the illuminated clouds in front of it was a different object inside the clouds. This could all look different if I was viewing from a different angle. For example the shape of the illuminated area can change with perspective, and the beam can be more/less visible.
METAR stands for Meteorological Aerodrome Report. It is prepared by airports to help pilots judge whether it is safe for them to land, among other things. It reflects the current conditions at that airport (in this case KBOS = Boston) at the time the METAR is prepared, as determined by a metereologist and/or automated measuring equipment.
Article:
Most Cloud Base Recorders - which have historically also been called Ceilometers - employ LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) technology. A pulsed diode laser is used to transmit continuously in a vertical or near vertical direction. The backscatter which will result from reflection at a discrete cloud surface and from precipitation or other particles is sensed and used in aggregate to determine the height of the lowest cloud base and, in the case of the latest instruments, up to two more.
With a reported cloud base at 3000 ft., pilots would expect to be able to see the ground once the aircraft has descended below that altitude.
Using the Omni FOV Calculator with the known sensor size (12.3 (H) x 9.9 (V)) and focal lengths: 16mm optical, 32mm (2x digital zoom), 48mm (3x digital zoom) to calculate a distance for the horizontal field of view of 8.55 meters I get:
48mm (3x digital zoom) seems to be focal length used as the angle from 32mm would surely have resulted in the concession stand building being visible behind the poles to some extent. In addition, the camera operator complained about not being able to get a closer view of the object, and the SiOnyx Aurora Pro maxes out at 3x digital zoom.
So the native FOV at 48mm would seem to be:
Horizontal: 14.602 deg
Vertical: 11.776 deg
However the native aspect ratio is 5:4 and the video has been cropped to 16.9, so the vertical FOV would be less.
Eyeballing the geometry (car appears 3× smaller than bench, but is actually 2.5× longer, so observer-car is ~8× observer-bench) puts it at the far end of the car park, but well inside. It's where the sat pictures show that people tend to park, since it's close to Democrat Point.
