Dear Professor Loeb and Dr Nandal,
I recently read your Medium article regarding your analysis of the UAP video recorded over Djibouti. I noted that the article and associated paper stated that you had geolocated the landscape in the video to a latitude and longitude of 11.388655° 43.139259°, which, to six decimal places, represents a location accurate to approximately 11 cm.
I am a contributor to the Metabunk website (username: Flarkey), and on 13 May I independently geolocated the video to exactly the same latitude and longitude. Here is a link to my original post:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/pr043-africa-djibouti.14885/
The probability of two independent analyses arriving at precisely the same six-decimal coordinates is, to put it mildly, astronomically small. The fact that the coordinates in your paper are identical to those I published on Metabunk raises a very serious concern about the provenance of your analysis and the source of the data.
I can see no acknowledgement or citation of my analysis, nor of the Metabunk post, in either your article or the associated paper. The paper presents the geolocation as an analysis undertaken by you.
I therefore have to ask directly: did you or anyone involved in the preparation of your paper obtain the coordinates, analysis or other data from my Metabunk post?
If so, I would expect this to be acknowledged and appropriately cited, and for the paper to be corrected so that it does not give the impression that the geolocation was independently determined by the authors.
If, on the other hand, you arrived at these coordinates independently, I would be very interested to understand the methodology you used and, in particular, how it resulted in exactly the same six-decimal coordinate that I had published several months earlier. Given the precision involved, and the public interest in the UAP topic, I believe this warrants an explanation.
I am raising this matter because the distinction between an independently derived result and one obtained from an existing analysis is important, particularly in a scientific publication. If material from another person's analysis has been used without attribution, that would raise a significant issue of academic integrity and attribution.
I would therefore appreciate a response explaining how the coordinates in your paper were obtained and whether my Metabunk analysis was consulted or used in any way during your research.
I have retained the original Metabunk post and its publication date, so the chronology of the analysis is readily verifiable.
In addition to this email I have also replied to Prof. Loeb on X but have not seen a reply yet.
Source: https://x.com/flarkey/status/2086718631941939307?s=20
I look forward to your response.
Kind regards,
XXXXXXXXXX (flarkey)