PR051 - Syria UAP 2021- Apparent Instantaneous Acceleration

[Nourali]

I made some videos to help compare the background motion frame by frame before / after the zip off. I used the frames from the 25% slowed down portion as suggested above.

Here I've compared the frames just prior to the zip off to get a baseline for how fast the background was moving. We can see significant horizontal motion right->left, with only a slight vertical top->bottom component.
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Here's the first frame of the zip off. This is the one most people have had trouble with, but if you look closely the left->right motion is about half as fast as before, and the top->down motion is about twice as fast. The background motion starts to change at exactly the same time as the zip off.
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Here's the second frame of the zip off. We already see a very clear, very dramatic change in the background motion. By the second frame the right->left motion of the background has disappeared entirely, leaving only a significant top->down motion.
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Notice that there is a rectangular feature at the top of the motion blur in the first frame of the zip off. The same rectangular feature appears at the same spot in the second frame. The motion blur of a circular object would not be rectangular of course, so this is clearly a compression artifact. I think the artifacts during the first frame make it a bit more difficult to see that the length of the motion blur is significantly longer during the second frame, up to twice as long. The zip off is not instant. It increases in speed gradually over two frames, and there is a corresponding gradual change in the background motion as the "right->left" component grinds to a halt over two frames.

This is all perfectly consistent with parallax due to the change in the camera tracking mode. But suppose someone still thinks the first frame of the zip off is ambiguous, and makes the objection that we should not prefer the parallax explanation simply because it is a priori much more likely than a sudden acceleration. Based on what we have learned above about how the camera tracking works we can make a much stronger case that essentially rules out an instant acceleration, arguing that If the object had suddenly accelerated it almost certainly would not look like the video that we have.

If the object had suddenly accelerated then we would not expect the background motion to change so dramatically within two frames. Some have argued that the object's acceleration causes a loss of lock. But we've seen that for this type of camera a loss of lock does not immediately change the background motion, coasting instead for a couple seconds. And more importantly we know, based on all the evidence discussed above, that the camera had already lost the lock 2 seconds prior to the zip off. The camera was not visually tracking the object at the time of the zip off, so there would be no automatic response whatsoever if the object had really suddenly accelerated at that time.

Some have argued that maybe the operator changed the tracking mode manually in response to the object zipping off. But this is not possible within two frames, up to 60ms. There is some delay in transmitting the image, possibly over long distances, to the operator, then transmitting any command back to the reaper. And more importantly the typical human reaction time is nowhere near that fast.

Article:

Elite athletes have reaction times of about 150 ms, and elite gamers are probably close to that, if perhaps slightly slower. Good gamers have reaction times of about 250 ms, and average gamers about 300 ms. Non-gamers have reaction times of about 350 ms.

Source: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3383668.3419891

I don't think anyone would reasonably argue that either the operator randomly, without prior knowledge, just happened to change the tracking mode within two frames of a never before seen instant acceleration, nor would they argue that the craft somehow knew the camera was about to change tracking modes and chose to zip off at the same time just to trick us.

So if an object's sudden acceleration coupled with a dramatic change in the background motion within two frames cannot be automatic, nor manual and almost certainly not a coincidence, then it is essentially ruled out. Parallax is not merely more likely. It is essentially the only thing that fits the data.

I think there is a possible perceptual trap here. The apparent reduction of the right-to-left background motion around the zip-off may not necessarily reflect a real, sharp change in the camera motion. In a low-quality IR video and a poorly textured background, one motion component can easily dominate or mask another. So I would be cautious about reading a precise change in motion just from the apparent background drift.

But even if we accept that the right-to-left/easting component is reduced around that moment, I don't think this alone explains the zip-off. The important northing change that occurs after the zip-off, despite being significant, does not make the object leave the frame downward, let alone as abruptly as the object disappears to the right. So the explanation would require the easting component to change much more radically, and far more suddenly, than the northing component.

That is the part I don't see demonstrated. If the object's rapid disappearance to the right is supposed to be caused by a change in camera motion, then we should see a corresponding abrupt change in the background or in the MGRS-derived movement. But the background does not seem to show such a dramatic easting shift, and the MGRS data do not clearly show one either (even if, indeed, it seems to slow down slightly).