NYT: GIMBAL Video of U.S. Navy Jet Encounter with Unknown Object

Nathaniel said:
This is a simple question, and my first post here, so apologies if it isn't up to form.
But why would it be a problem, or particularly surprising, if the object was an airplane and did actually rotate? Jets can do barrel rolls etc, no?
Click to expand...

When a jet rotates it changes the way it moves. You can't just rotate a jet, stop rotating near 90° and keep moving exactly the same as before. For a start the amount of vertical lift generated by the wings decreases. Even with a relatively rapid aileron roll the altitude changes. Note they go up first to offset the loss in lift.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy7sUfeWzXw
Metabunk 2018-03-22 21-41-48.jpg


You can't do that and stop the roll in the middle.


This (the GIMBAL video) looks more like it's almost hovering, and just rotating in place. It's difficult to see how that could be accomplished with existing technology. But the rotating glare is a very simple explanation.
 
Mick West said:
When a jet rotates it changes the way it moves. You can't just rotate a jet, stop rotating near 90° and keep moving exactly the same as before. For a start the amount of vertical lift generated by the wings decreases. Even with a relatively rapid aileron roll the altitude changes. Note they go up first to offset the loss in lift.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy7sUfeWzXw
View attachment 32339

You can't do that and stop the roll in the middle.


This (the GIMBAL video) looks more like it's almost hovering, and just rotating in place. It's difficult to see how that could be accomplished with existing technology. But the rotating glare is a very simple explanation.
Click to expand...


As others have alluded to, the ENTIRE context of this video is created by the audio of the pilots.

If the audio underneath the video was, 2 pilots calmly discussing a commercial aircraft that they are monitoring because the aircraft is nearing a "no fly zone", none of this video would even need to be debunked.
We would assume that the pilots know what they are looking at and how aircraft that they are tracking, appear on their flir system, correct.

Two questions,
1. Is the audio authentic? Military Pilots flying some of our most advanced aircraft, saying "dude", seems out of place to me?
I would like to ask a military pilot if they would ever use the word "dude" from his cockpit radio? Any type of "slang" seems like it would be completely frowned under those circumstances.
2. If the audio is authentic, shouldn't pilots flying multi-million dollar aircraft with weapon systems, know exactly how other aircraft should look on all their systems? That is scary, that they could possibly mistake a known aircraft for something anomalous.
 
New details from the May 26 NY Times story.
'Wow, What Is That?' Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html

The story showed the Gimbal video followed by the Go Fast video with the following caption:
External Quote:
Videos filmed by Navy pilots show two encounters with flying objects. One was captured by a plane's camera off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 20, 2015. That footage, published previously but with little context, shows an object tilting like a spinning top moving against the wind. A pilot refers to a fleet of objects, but no imagery of a fleet was released. The second video was taken a few weeks later.
But as I recall, the timestamp suggested that the two videos were taken about 15 minutes apart. Or was it just a coincidence?

The story talks about objects that are visible only on radar, which is the opposite of the Nimitz tic tac that was seen by the pilot but not by his radar.

External Quote:
The pilots began noticing the objects after their 1980s-era radar was upgraded to a more advanced system. As one fighter jet after another got the new radar, pilots began picking up the objects, but ignoring what they thought were false radar tracks...
Lieutenant Accoin said he interacted twice with the objects. The first time, after picking up the object on his radar, he set his plane to merge with it, flying 1,000 feet below it. He said he should have been able to see it with his helmet camera, but could not, even though his radar told him it was there.
A few days later, Lieutenant Accoin said a training missile on his jet locked on the object and his infrared camera picked it up as well. "I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit," he said. But still, "I could not pick it up visually."
At this point the pilots said they speculated that the objects were part of some classified and extremely advanced drone program.
Wonder if the new radar was picking up birds and stuff, or if it was just noise.
 
Agent K said:
which is the opposite of the Nimitz tic tac that was seen by the pilot but not by his radar.
Click to expand...

The Nimitz objects were initially seen by the USS Princeton's radar, which is phased array but apparently the mechanically scanned Hornet radars had trouble seeing them. It seems that in all cases these types of objects are much more likely to be seen by phased-array radars than by the older technology.
 
Gerard said:
The Nimitz objects were initially seen by the USS Princeton's radar, which is phased array but apparently the mechanically scanned Hornet radars had trouble seeing them. It seems that in all cases these types of objects are much more likely to be seen by phased-array radars than by the older technology.
Click to expand...
Or possibly that those new phased-array radar had a different type of false detections
 
Mick West said:
Or possibly that those new phased-array radar had a different type of false detections
Click to expand...

The NY Times story ends with, "The incidents tapered off after they left the United States, the pilots said."
External Quote:
In March 2015 the Roosevelt left the coast of Florida and headed to the Persian Gulf as part of the American-led mission fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The same pilots who were interacting with the strange objects off the East Coast were soon doing bombing missions over Iraq and Syria.
The incidents tapered off after they left the United States, the pilots said.
So either they recalibrated their radars or they were picking up something off the East Coast but not in the Persian Gulf, although I'm not sure what's meant by "the incidents tapered off." Were there similar incidents in the Persian Gulf but less frequently, or not?
 
deirdre said:
who is they? I don't have access to the NYT now. Did multiple pilots give interviews/quotes or just Lt. Accoin?
Click to expand...

External Quote:
Lieutenants Graves and Accoin spoke on the record to The Times about the objects. Three other pilots in the squadron also spoke to The Times about the objects but declined to be named.
 
Given the limited data info to fully understand the Gimbal video, we are either left with sleuthing the incident, or speculating...or a combo of both.
I would not find it unusual, for pilots during training, to be handed the task of testing their gear - as well as testing their human reaction - to chasing and evaluating an unknown craft or object without any prior knowledge of what was to be encountered.
We don't know if these were simply exercises for pilots in training, or hardware/software detection abilities.
We don't know what might have been discussed in any post-flight evaluation or incident debriefing.
 
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Just watched Unidentified episode 4: It included interviews with 2 pilots from the East Coast 2014 encounters. As per the show:

According to Lt. Graves, the gofast and gimball videos are from the same series of incidents. The gofast is NOT part of the Nimitz sightings. Lt. Acoin says he is friends with the WISO officer who's voice can be heard on both videos.

Graves also states that at least 50-60 pilots all encountered the objects during 2014/15 and that one of them saw the sphere-cube object passed between two planes. Pilots and crew started sharing footage amongst themselves.

Graves further states they encountered 3 craft shapes - the large gimbal saucer, the small go fast orbs (which he identified were very small, and not large like the saucer), and finally the sphere-cube. Perhaps there were more, but that's all he spoke of.

I think this part of the story is pertinent because some of the theories being put forth would be in direct contrast to the interviews (ie the clips are from training footage etc.) If the radar hits (from this and the Nimitz) are from software bugs, how does that explain the visual sightings? and If the visual sightings are misidentifications of mundane planes/drones, then why do BOTH the radar and visual sighting report impossible performance characteristics and speeds?

If this was just radar only reports, or just eyewitnesses reports, or just one or two events, it would all be much easier to explain way. But it seems like we have multiple first person eye-witnesses, radar tracks and footage from the same incidents. What are the chances that 5+ pilots (so far) would lie about this? For what purpose?
 
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Candy-O said:
What are the chances that 5+ pilots (so far) would lie about this? For what purpose?
Click to expand...
I don't think most are lying. I don't think most bigfoot sighters are lying either. People see something -thousands of people-, or think they see something.. but no scat, no hair, no bigfoot bodies.
 
Candy-O said:
Graves further states they encountered 3 craft shapes - the large gimbal saucer, the small go fast orbs (which he identified were very small, and not large like the saucer), and finally the sphere-cube. Perhaps there were more, but that's all he spoke of. I think this part of the story is pertinent because some of the theories being put forth would be in direct contrast to the interviews (ie the clips are from training footage etc.) If the radar hits (from this and the Nimitz) are from software bugs, how does that explain the visual sightings? and If the visual sightings are misidentifications of mundane planes/drones, then why do BOTH the radar and visual sighting report impossible performance characteristics and speeds?
Click to expand...

Tyler Rogoway's source said that all the UFOs looked the same:
External Quote:
Another burning question surrounding these events pertains to whether or not additional visual encounters occurred beyond the one near miss with the Super Hornet and the 'cube inside an orb' object. Our source tells us that there were many more, and yes, they all resulted in the exact same description of the object. So, we are talking about a uniform set of very strange looking objects here that were spotted on radar, by infrared targeting pods, and by the naked eye, frequently over 2014 and the first part of 2015 above the waters off America's southeastern coastline.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...occurred-constantly-across-multiple-squadrons
But the Gimbal video shows hot exhaust, and the Go Fast video shows a small, slow, cold object like a balloon.
 
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Agent K said:
But the Gimbal video shows hot exhaust, and the Go Fast video shows a slow cold object like a balloon.
Click to expand...

In Episode 4 Graves claims to have seen an extended version of the gimbal video and said that the Gimbal object was much larger than the "little guys" which flew ahead of it in a V formation, then flew off before the video that we see.
350babc6f580eae305bcd75a3bafde60._.jpg

His sketch seems to be based on a video though, and not on direct visual observation.
 
Mick West said:
In Episode 4 Graves claims to have seen an extended version of the gimbal video and said that the Gimbal object was much larger than the "little guys" which flew ahead of it in a V formation, then flew off before the video that we see.
His sketch seems to be based on a video though, and not on direct visual observation.
Click to expand...

Wonder if the "little guys" were colder than the Gimbal object.
And did the sensor operator ever switch to TV mode?
 
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Mick West said:
In Episode 4 Graves claims to have seen an extended version of the gimbal video and said that the Gimbal object was much larger than the "little guys" which flew ahead of it in a V formation, then flew off before the video that we see.
350babc6f580eae305bcd75a3bafde60._.jpg

His sketch seems to be based on a video though, and not on direct visual observation.
Click to expand...
So by every indication (never having been part of any release request) that's classified information the History Channel is reporting by way of Graves. Even a verbal description of classified information would surely constitute illicit leaking. So are we going to see arrests of the leakers or just more paychecks for them?
 
igoddard said:
So by every indication (never having been part of any release request) that's classified information the History Channel is reporting by way of Graves. Even a verbal description of classified information would surely constitute illicit leaking. So are we going to see arrests of the leakers or just more paychecks for them?
Click to expand...

Commander Fravor spoke out about his Nimitz tic tac UFO encounter, and said it was never classified, although the video recording probably was.

Edit: I'd ask Bob Lazar why he hasn't been arrested for describing and sketching top secret flying saucers from Area 51.
 
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Here's an interesting line of questioning: Why were the Gimbal, Go Fast and Nimitz videos approved for open publication archived by the DoD only in the short segments published? Or were they? Did Elizondo receive more footage that TTSA published? That the Nimitiz footage he released happens to be the exact snippet of footage posted in 2007 supports the likelihood that the videos are archived by the DoD as snippets.

Being archived as snippets supports the likelihood that they are actually entries in a collection of screen artifacts used to train pilots about odd screen signals they might see. It would make little sense to archive evidence of ET aircraft in snippets that exclude pertinent evidence, as we're now being led to believe exist in the extended footage. In short, the scope of the snippets likely reflects the scope of their use.
 
igoddard said:
Here's an interesting line of questioning: Why were the Gimbal, Go Fast and Nimitz videos approved for open publication archived by the DoD only in the short segments published? Or were they? Did Elizondo receive more footage that TTSA published? That the Nimitiz footage he released happens to be the exact snippet of footage posted in 2007 supports the likelihood that the videos are archived by the DoD as snippets.
Click to expand...

Cmdr. Fravor said that there was no other Nimitz video footage, only radar tapes that got lost. Which is weird, because the object seemed so trivial to reacquire after it drifted off screen. But apparently there's a longer version of the Gimbal video. Remember we thought that Gimbal and Go Fast were part of the same video based on their timestamps, but the NY Times article said they were taken weeks apart.
 
deirdre said:
I don't think most are lying. I don't think most bigfoot sighters are lying either. People see something -thousands of people-, or think they see something.. but no scat, no hair, no bigfoot bodies.
Click to expand...

"Thousands of people" who claim Bigfoot sightings and the alleged UFO encounters of a select group of Navy pilots covered in this thread are not analogous (see reasons below). Their use together only clouds subjects which should be debunked on their own terms.

- "Bigfoot sighters" are ostensibly a large subset without consideration to state of mind, intoxication, experience etc. We can reasonably assume the Navy pilots were of sound mind, sober and are highly experienced.

- Bigfoot sightings are just that- visual sightings. There has been no credible physical evidence collected i.e. "scat, hair, bodies." The sightings by the Navy pilots are corroborated visually as well as with state of the art radar and captured on video.

- Bigfoot sightings areas are not predictive while the 2015 UFO encounters involving the pilots of the USS Roosevelt occurred continuously for two weeks in relatively the same area.
 
Agent K said:
The NY Times story ends with, "The incidents tapered off after they left the United States, the pilots said."
External Quote:
In March 2015 the Roosevelt left the coast of Florida and headed to the Persian Gulf as part of the American-led mission fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The same pilots who were interacting with the strange objects off the East Coast were soon doing bombing missions over Iraq and Syria.
The incidents tapered off after they left the United States, the pilots said.
So either they recalibrated their radars or they were picking up something off the East Coast but not in the Persian Gulf, although I'm not sure what's meant by "the incidents tapered off." Were there similar incidents in the Persian Gulf but less frequently, or not?
Click to expand...

Lt. Graves in episode 4 of the History Channel series "Unidentified..." says that the incidents appeared again once the USS Roosevelt redeployed in the Persian gulf in March of 2015. They didn't "follow" the carrier to the gulf but instead reappeared.
 
Hello everyone,

The work done here has been incredible for many years. I've followed Mr. West and the forums for awhile. I've been a skeptic my whole life and nothing has ever convinced me of "alien life". Since the NYT paper I've come to believe these pilots both military and private have seen what they described in these events. I've come to the point that it will ultimately be the public announcement of either craft/being not from earth to prove I'm wrong. That or ET having a dinner with Trump lol. I only say this because having spent sometime now on trying to sift through both sides of nonsense I've realized we will need extraordinary proof to unwind the 80 year web of information on the topic. Until that time maybe these Senate hearings, military procedural updates, leaks, etc. could be a way to prepare us for major information or a way to continue selling X to an easily convinced and gullible population. Either way it's fascinating how much has happened in 2 years on the subject. back to lurking
 
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/19/warner-classified-briefing-ufos-1544273

Article added for context.

External Quote:
"If naval pilots are running into unexplained interference in the air, that's a safety concern Senator Warner believes we need to get to the bottom of," his spokesperson, Rachel Cohen, said in a statement.
Hopefully more information that was relayed to these Senators eventually becomes public, which could add some key facts to these 3 incidents.
 
Mick West said:
I thought I'd heard it explained somewhere. Is there a reference for that being used in the ATFLIR or similar?

Easy to demonstrate though. Just knocked this up.
View attachment 37501
Click to expand...

It's standard image enhancement, especially for FLIR which tends to be blurry otherwise.
For example
"Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) Image Enhancement For The Automatic Target Cuer System"
https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/0238/1/Forward-Looking-Infrared-FLIR-Image-Enhancement-For-The-Automatic-Target/10.1117/12.959136.short
External Quote:
The goal of FLIR image enhancement is to obtain a good quality display by compressing the global scene dynamic range while enhancing the local area contrast. This paper presents the investigation and the implementation of six candidates for FLIR image enhancement and shows some experimental results. The six enhancement candidates are: (1) variable threshold zonal filtering, (2) statistical differencing operator, (3) unsharp masking, (4) prototype automatic target screener technique, (5) constant variance, and (6) histogram equalization. All the enhancement techniques make use of the local nonstationary mean, the local variance, or both, to achieve edge enhancement or contrast stretching in local regions. The local nonstationary mean and the local variance, in each case, are computed by a two-dimension rolling window averaging processor. Finally, an experiment based on subjective criteria to judge the enhanced image quality was conducted. The results showed that the variable threshold zonal filter, prototype automatic target screener, and unsharp masking methods were the superior techniques.
 
Agent K said:
New details from the May 26 NY Times story.
'Wow, What Is That?' Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots.html
Click to expand...

The version of the video that goes along with the story is quite a bit higher quality than the previously released one. It does have the bottom half darkened for captions, but the glare and the sky have a bit more detail than before.

Here's a direct download link.
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2019/05/24/80888_1_24vid-UFO_wg_hd_synd.mov
 
Gerard said:
That raises the question of how they got a different version of the video.
Click to expand...
The NY Times article originally (Dec 16, 2017) had this caption statement below the Gimbal video (bold added to the part in question that has since gone missing):

External Quote:
A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. By Courtesy of U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE on December 16, 2017.
At that time I was arguing for the authenticity of the footage based on that statement in bold, becasue it seems to imply the NYT authors received a copy of the footage themselves from the DoD, which I raised to refute claims that the footage is a CGI fake.

But that bold portion is now not seen on the NY Times report, and the change makes it seem less likely that they did receive a copy themselves.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: qed
Gerard said:
That raises the question of how they got a different version of the video.
Click to expand...
It's the same video, just higher quality. This means that there's a high quality original version that TTSA had, and gave to the t NYT. TTSA and NYT both released a lower quality version, but now the NYT did a new story, and just used the original to make a new video with captions, and used a higher compression rate, which kept it closer to the original.
 
igoddard said:
The NY Times article originally (Dec 16, 2017) had this caption statement below the Gimbal video (bold added to the part in question that has since gone missing):

A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. By Courtesy of U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE on December 16, 2017.
Content from external source​
At that time I was arguing for the authenticity of the footage based on that statement in bold, becasue it seems to imply the NYT authors received a copy of the footage themselves from the DoD, which I raised to refute claims that the footage is a CGI fake.
Click to expand...

The newer video says:
Metabunk 2019-06-30 21-26-09.jpg
 
Mick West said:
This means that there's a high quality original version that TTSA had, and gave to the t NYT.
Click to expand...

If TTSA has a higher quality version why would they be presenting a lower quality version to the public ?

Another possibility is that the NYT obtained a higher quality version directly from the DoD (as the vanished caption mentioned above once implied).

This second possibility is interesting because if true there should be no obstacles to obtaining that version through FOIA, which would resolve any lingering doubts about the origin of the video.
 
Mick West said:
The newer video says:
View attachment 37601
Click to expand...
That, I believe, would be the date the footage was taken. The older caption implies that date, the same as the date of the article (Dec 16, 2017), was the date they received a source-confirmation copy from the DoD.

My impression: the NYT had the story ready to roll but wanted to confirm the video themselves. Then, on Dec 16, 2017, they received a confirmation copy from the DoD (the higher-res copy) and only then did they confidently publish the story. You'd expect a premiere news source like the NYT to want to corroborate evidence handed to them.

Such a sequence could explain why they didn't run the higher quality video with the initial story... they already had the (low-res) copy they received from Elizondo ready to roll. So when they received their confirmation copy of the video, they just shelved that copy and unleashed the ready-to-roll story with the copy from TTSA. Then with this more-recent Go Fast update, they used their confirmation copy for the first time.
 
Speaking of differences between video copies, I previously posted this...

igoddard said:
It ought to be pointed out how TTSA damaged the Nimitz evidence by squeezing it horizontally versus the original file posted in 2007. Here I've normed their heights, revealing that their copy of the Nimitz footage was narrowed. These are not the exact same frames.

7f43b06a38c338839c7237e7aa460b57.jpg


The original is square, just as the ATFLIR FOV is supposed to be. Fixing TTSA's footage requires a width correction of exactly 110%. Youtube (at least in the past) would sometimes squeeze videos horizontally. To test for that possible cause I tested the TTSA logo placed over the footage for circularity, as it too should be squeezed if the cause originates with youtube. Their logo is a perfect circle. So it seems they somehow managed to damage the evidence they "released." People have paid them $2.5 million for having provided damaged evidence, probably of jets.
Click to expand...
 
I think it's a bit more mundane than that. I downloaded the video from the NYT on Dec 16 2017 and attached it to the first post in this thread. I picked the highest quality file that was available. Which at that time was the 1080p 5 Mbps version with a filename ending in _1080p

But now when I go back to that page there is also a version ending in _hd_synd, which is 12 Mbps.
Metabunk 2019-07-01 14-06-53.jpg


That version is longer, but the addition is just some notes about corrections to the captions:
Metabunk 2019-07-01 14-12-11.jpg

Those captions have been changed, as the note suggests.
Metabunk 2019-07-01 14-13-47.jpg


A version with corrected captions us dated the very next day, Dec 17 2017. However I don't know when the HD version was made available on the server.

I don't think there's anything particularly nefarious going on with this file.
 
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