UAPs Filmed Over Las Vegas Mountain Ranges

[RoundEarth]

Posting here for discussion the work of Steve Baron, who has been capturing aerial phenomena over Las Vegas since 2015. He claims the evidence presented in his videos cannot be seen with the naked eye, but rather with the assistance of night vision binoculars. He lives within 70 miles of Area 51 and believes his sightings are connected with military testing. Any thoughts?

 

[Ann K]

I can only assume Steve really doesn't want an analysis of this, or he would have posted date, time, his position, and the direction in which he filmed, as well as the speed of the video. This looks a lot like a "made for entertainment only" video.

 

[JMartJr]

Only thing I notice is how quickly the stars are drifting in the video. It is substantially undercranked, as they used to say -- it is sped up from real time. That makes the lights in the sky "UFOs" move really, interestingly, quickly. In real time, they'd look a lot like landing lights on planes or similar, I suspect.

 

[Ann K]

Only thing I notice is how quickly the stars are drifting in the video. It is substantially undercranked, as they used to say -- it is sped up from real time. That makes the lights in the sky "UFOs" move really, interestingly, quickly. In real time, they'd look a lot like landing lights on planes or similar, I suspect.

There are a few shots with the trees moving extra fast, but it's hard to tell just how fast. It gives the impression of being an all-night time lapse view, with the mountains showing as dawn approaches.

 

[flarkey]

Posting here for discussion the work of Steve Baron, who has been capturing aerial phenomena over Las Vegas since 2015. He claims the evidence presented in his videos cannot be seen with the naked eye, but rather with the assistance of night vision binoculars. He lives within 70 miles of Area 51 and believes his sightings are connected with military testing. Any thoughts?

Many of his videos appear to show jets from Nellis AFB and other local air traffic. His 'night vision binoculars' seem to amplify the navigation lights on the aircraft which then obscures the shape of the aircraft and thus he is unable to identify them - and hey presto you get a UAP. He seems unable to accept that there are other aircraft in the sky over Las Vegas. From His other videos it is possible to geolocate his house, or at least where the videos are from. I havent pinpointed it exactly but it is in the Summerlin West area of Las Vegas. (edit - I have pinpointed it exactly, but don't want to dox him.)


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYKT6OEpxP0


Take this video for example, entitles "Biggest and Best UFO/UAP I Have Ever Captured on Video" - a slow moving object at low altitude with lights on,. Even the most ardent of UFO fans would initially think that this might be a helicopter.

Time and date are even given

=29 Sept 2023 at 2.10am UTC. - lets check if a helicopter is near his house in Summerlin West ,Las Vegas. Guess what, there is .... <shocked face emoji>

I don't think that such a blatant misidentification adds to the witness's credibility. I shan't spend any more time on his videos.

 

[Mick West]

I don't think that such a blatant misidentification adds to the witness's credibility. I shan't spend any more time on his videos.

I agree. He's one guy in a city of 650,000 (plus millions of visitors per year). He's filming aircraft across the city, not near where he lives, so a vast number of people (including all the downtown hotels) have a much better view than him. He just lives in the LIZ.

There are military flights that don't show up on ADS-B, but the airport is in the right place. That, and the numerous helicopter tours, and maybe some incoming distant flights, is most of what's going on.

 

[Wilts71]

I spent a bit of time looking into a couple of SB's videos last summer. Since then he's dropped the channel name 'UFOs Over Vegas' in favour of 'Anomalous Vegas' and it looks like more than one of the original postings has been edited, re-named and re-uploaded or removed completely.

The montage video RoundEarth has embedded includes a section that from memory, appears to be footage from a video originally called something along the lines of 'Busy Skies Over Vegas Desert' which according to the timestamp on screen, was filmed 17th July 2015. This has either been either cropped out, or I'm guessing is masked by the re-vamped channel's screen overlay. It also appears to me, to be lower quality than that of the original posting. Sadly, I can only find a handful of screenshots from the earlier postings.

Personally, I don't believe that the footage was faked, and that at that time Steve genuinely believed that he had been filming something unusual. Whether he thought that the objects captured were ET or man made I couldn't say, but during one of our exchanges last August, I did get the impression he was leaning towards military.

The area I believe he said he filmed these lights (to the north west of Summerlin), is in the direction of Indian Springs and Creech AFB. Creech has a history of being used a facility for training operators of unmanned ariel vehicles such as the MQ-9 Reaper.

Creech AFB website/News/

At least one commercial enterprise involved in the development of EVTOL vehicles also had a pilot training facility just outside Las Vegas.
Google co-founder Larry Page was reported in 2016 to have invested $100 million, in the technology starting with Zee Aero (founded in 2010), which eventually became Kitty Hawk (reported in September 2022 to being shut down). According to an article on techcrunch.com, Kitty Hawk built and flew 111 aircraft and conducted more than 25,000 successful manned, and unmanned flights.

techcrunch article Sept 21st 2022

Throughout 2018 and into 2019 numerous news outlets reported on Kitty Hawk's test site at Lake Las Vegas. Given that Boing also had a hand in earlier versions of the vehicles development, it's not too much of a leap to the notion that other tests and possibly training might also have been taking place elsewhere in Nevada.

phys,org article June 6th 2018

With this in mind, I think another of Steve Barone's videos is a bit more interesting. In August of 2022 he posted a short video shot in daylight. Initially, I was sure that the object in his 'Shapeshifting UFO' video (recently re-uploaded in the post below). I did spend some time closely inspecting the footage frame by frame, and although admittedly the chances are slim, the possibility did cross my mind, might this have been part of some kind of EVTOL development test flight?

My Favourite Personal UFO/UAP Capture of All Time

 

[flarkey]

With this in mind, I think another of Steve Barone's videos is a bit more interesting. In August of 2022 he posted a short video shot in daylight. Initially, I was sure that the object in his 'Shapeshifting UFO' video (recently re-uploaded in the post below). I did spend some time closely inspecting the footage frame by frame, and although admittedly the chances are slim, the possibility did cross my mind, might this have been part of some kind of EVTOL development test flight?

My Favourite Personal UFO/UAP Capture of All Time

It looks kinda like a mylar balloon to me.

 

[FatPhil]

It looks kinda like a mylar balloon to me.

Yup. And the "glowing white ring around the UAP" (on-screen text from 268s-274s) isn't "intense", it's "ringing", probably caused by an unsharp mask in the encoder pipeline.

 

[Ann K]

Yup. And the "glowing white ring around the UAP" (on-screen text from 268s-274s) isn't "intense", it's "ringing", probably caused by an unsharp mask in the encoder pipeline.

I don't even know what that means, but I assume it's geek-speak for "an artifact".

 

[FatPhil]

I don't even know what that means, but I assume it's geek-speak for "an artifact".

Several related artefacts, typically related to not being able to react immediately and precisely to an abrupt change between light and dark. Instantanious changes require infinite frequency response, so can't be achieved in practice, and assuming you're attempting to get to the new level as quickly as possible, you are going to overshoot. So the balloon->air transition results in over-bright air. Upon overshooting, the level will attempt to correct. However, if it overshoots that correction, then you get a slightly dark halo, and again it will try to correct back upwards again. Some restrict the term "ringing" specifically to that multiple overshoot case, but I've never needed that distinction - if you fix the first overshoot (reduce the artefact to an acceptable level) then you will fix ringing too. If you've seen the sequence of fourier approximations to a square wave with different numbers of terms (thus increasingly higher frequency components), then you've seen ringing. You can often see it on an oscilloscope for many different reasons, it's a very common real world effect.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...enon_10.svg/800px-Gibbs_phenomenon_10.svg.png
via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_artifacts

The unsharp mask is a horribly named filter which makes things more sharp by enhancing these abrupt transitions, and by so doing adding some deliberate overshoot:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...m-unsharp-mask.png/640px-Usm-unsharp-mask.png
via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_enhancement

 

[Easy Muffin]

Re: unsharp masks, here's a short video of it in action. See how I can make these shifty looking lil fellers here give off that 'aura' we sometimes see in IR UAP videos?

This is in black hot mode so it leads to a bright halo. In white hot it leads to a dark halo, like what's happing here around the white reticle bars.

source vid:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1leBFlQSD6w

 

[JMartJr]

these shifty looking lil fellers here

Interestingly also makes them into harder to identify blobs, erasing details and features. Would that also be the case in UFO videos, or is that a side-effect peculiar to the software you are using to illustrate the halo effect? Would be worth knowing, for those of us on the wrong side of the technology-gap! ^_^

 

[Easy Muffin]

If the settings are too high like in my example then it will erase details, yes. As you increase the values you'll usually hit a sweet spot that brings out the maximum detail but if you overdo it - the radius in particular - then the halo will go crazy and wash out everything.
I don't have inside knowledge of FLIR systems but I could imagine they set up an internal unsharp mask with parameters designed to enhance the picture in normal use cases, but if it's applied to a scene that already has a high contrast (like for example a black-hot plane with sharp edges in front of a white-cold sky background) then it might lead to a less detailed dark blob surrounded by a fuzzy bright halo.

 

[Ann K]

If the settings are too high like in my example then it will erase details, yes. As you increase the values you'll usually hit a sweet spot that brings out the maximum detail but if you overdo it - the radius in particular - then the halo will go crazy and wash out everything.
I don't have inside knowledge of FLIR systems but I could imagine they set up an internal unsharp mask with parameters designed to enhance the picture in normal use cases, but if it's applied to a scene that already has a high contrast (like for example a black-hot plane with sharp edges in front of a white-cold sky background) then it might lead to a less detailed dark blob surrounded by a fuzzy bright halo.

My iPad photo software comes with fifteen different tuneable parameters with a hundred levels of each. It just takes a touch on the slider, but NOT any knowledge of what is actually happening. Thanks, you and @FatPhil for explaining a bit about what's going on.