V shape UFO on thermal camera [Probably Birds]

Davd

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I agree, but I can't explain what causes the difference in appearance against the dark (cloudless/cold?) background and the white (cloudy/less cold?) ?
 
I agree, but I can't explain what causes the difference in appearance against the dark (cloudless/cold?) background and the white (cloudy/less cold?) ?

Two possibilities I can think of:

1) The focus is off, so the birds are appearing as semi-transparent orbs, which are then additive to the clouds. When you get blurry cloud + blurry bird you get a brighter blurry spot. Blurry bird + black = indistinct spot. Then throw video compression in.

2) The image inverted, the black areas are actually cloud. The bird's feathers are reading colder than the cloud, so the flare from the warmer cloud obscures them. Here it's flipped so white is cloud.
20170803-222057-pzo5c.jpg

#1 seems more likely
 
Mihai Dragu who published this video originally has also commented the footage on a different YouTube channel:

Hello, i am the one who shot that thermal video. All you can see in the image is heat. Visible light doesn't show on a FIR camera (FIR= Far Infra Red) The quality of the image is low because the camera has only 320x240 pixels with a 9 Hz refresh. The most exciting part is that heat is revealed only on the clouds which makes me think that:
1- it is not our tech, our planes are glowing, emitting heat all the time.
2- Something is heating the clouds at high altitude, water molecules are good absorbents of microwave radiation, converting the E-M wave into heat (you have one in your kitchen called microwave oven).
I think the propulsion technology of the UFO was heating the clouds as it passed through. Original file in .asf format here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hfkwztrtq925aov/AAAEJwd0-nicNy6UiPy0T1zca?dl=0
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Link to the video comment
 
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Mihai Dragu who published this video originally has also commented the footage on a different YouTube channel:
@HoaxEye - point 1 and 2 are pure speculations, we can consider the specifical specifications regarding the camera offered by Daniel ( who seem to have good enough engineering knowledge) :)
 
I agree with the hypothesis of a flock of birds flying in V-shaped formation.
I made a short video comparing Dragu's video to a night vision video of a flock of birds.

 

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Hello, i am Dragu Mihai Daniel, the guy who filmed the clip presented above.
Three objective reasons why the L shape is not a flock of birds:
Firstly we have to agree that the altitude of the object is equal or higher to the altitude of the clouds.


1- The shape is visible only when enter the clouds. Birds are hot compared to -50 Celsius of the clear sky, the birds would have glowed bright on the dark patch of sky and glow lower when entering the clouds.
In the first frames you may see only small spots of the craft but when completely enters in clouds, you may see the full shape.

2- Enormous speed: Look how fast is moving compared with the clouds. Birds rarely exceed 100 km/h while
cruising, especially against wind! The calculated speed is 62Km/h for clouds and 725km/h for the object in Earth frame reference. The object fly in opposite direction to wind so it actually have 725+62 km/h =787 Km/h relative air speed.

3- Enormous size of over 100 meters with thick profile, not lines: The clouds were alto-cumulus type, between 4 to 6 Km above sea level. Bucharest is 70m ASL (above sea level). Supposing 5 Km altitude ASL (more or less), and using trigonometric tangent function in a right triangle, knowing field of view of SR35 FLIR camera 15 x 20 degrees, you calculate that :

TAN(fov/2)=Xpixels_halved/altitude
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Knowing that camera has 240 pixels with a fov of 15 degrees you can calculate that one pixel is about 5.5m

Then measuring time it takes for the clouds/ object to cross a known distance, you may calculate the speed.


Conclusion:

The bright L shape is heated water vapors in clouds. The vapours are not produced by a bird or something hot or else would have been visible before entering the clouds. The clouds are heated by energy radiation of the unknown craft propulsion.
 
You do a lot of speculation and make a lot of unsubstantiated claims.

1- The shape is visible only when enter the clouds. Birds are hot compared to -50 Celsius of the clear sky, the birds would have glowed bright on the dark patch of sky and glow lower when entering the clouds.
In the first frames you may see only small spots of the craft but when completely enters in clouds, you may see the full shape.

Actually, you can see the shape perfectly well when the clouds are not in the background. The contrast is not as obvious, but the degree of contrast is the only thing that changes.

Regarding the expected heat signature, how do you know this? Before you can say this with certainty, you need to take pictures of flying birds (preferably the same kind of bird, assuming that's what they are). Birds are extremely well insulated, and to say that they would have had a strong heat signature makes no sense to me, but even putting that opinion aside, you need to provide evidence that a bird will produce the kind of heat signature that you claim. Your assumption regarding this is not evidence. It's just an idea you came up with which must be substantiated before it has any value. Remember also that most of the cross-sectional area you see when looking up at flying birds is the wings, which have only very skinny strips of living tissue within them. The rest is all feathers, which do not emit heat of their own.

2- Enormous speed: Look how fast is moving compared with the clouds. Birds rarely exceed 100 km/h while
cruising, especially against wind! The calculated speed is 62Km/h for clouds and 725km/h for the object in Earth frame reference. The object fly in opposite direction to wind so it actually have 725+62 km/h =787 Km/h relative air speed.
You cannot determine the speed of an object based on the change in viewing angle over time unless you know the distance that the object is away from you. Also, you cannot even know the change in viewing angle without a reference since that angle will appear different when viewed through lenses of different focal lengths. I see no indication that you took any of this into account. Those birds were certainly much closer to you than the clouds, and that by itself would make their angular speed much greater than that of the clouds. Actually, if you spent any time watching birds fly overhead you would see this problem immediately. A typical neighborhood songbird flying overhead at rather slow speed but at a height of only 100 feet would cross the field of view in much less time, and thus appear much faster in any two-dimensional representation of the view. Your conclusion regarding speed remains unsubstantiated at this time.

3- Enormous size of over 100 meters with thick profile, not lines: The clouds were alto-cumulus type, between 4 to 6 Km above sea level. Bucharest is 70m ASL (above sea level). Supposing 5 Km altitude ASL (more or less), and using trigonometric tangent function in a right triangle, knowing field of view of SR35 FLIR camera 15 x 20 degrees, you calculate that :

Content from external source TAN(fov/2)=Xpixels_halved/altitude

Knowing that camera has 240 pixels with a fov of 15 degrees you can calculate that one pixel is about 5.5m.

Here, you finally get around to mentioning altitude. I'm not the best person to check your math, but the problem is that you assume a value for the altitude of the clouds (actually, you don't make it clear whether this is the altitude of the clouds or the "object"), and then compare the angular spread of the object, but as noted above regarding travel speed, that is invalid until you also know the altitude (distance) of the object. Perhaps you can make a reasonable guess as to the altitude of the clouds, but you can't do this regarding the object. The object could easily be much lower and you would have no way of even knowing.

You are assuming the object is very high because you think it's a plane or some such thing. I think it looks like a flock of birds, so naturally I assume it must be much lower, given the apparent size. Which of us is right? We don't know yet, but since you made the claim, you are the one who needs to supply evidence that actually stands up to reason, and thus far, you haven't.

It's worth pointing out the tendency of the "object" to look like individual spots lined up in rows. That suggests it's birds, rather than a solid object. Also, one side of the "V" is longer than the other, which also suggests that it is birds. I've seen thousands of V-shaped flocks of birds in my life and one side of the "V" is always longer than the other. I can't think of a reason why a manmade flying object would be so obviously asymmetrical.
 
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1) The focus is off, so the birds are appearing as semi-transparent orbs, which are then additive to the clouds. When you get blurry cloud + blurry bird you get a brighter blurry spot. Blurry bird + black = indistinct spot. Then throw video compression in.

We can simulate this in photoshop with the "Add" blend mode. This is NOT the video, it's a single frame of the video with a partial V of blurry white dots overlaid with 10% transparency (as they would be out of focus) and additive transparency (as they are not blocking any light)
20170804-085207-w8ab5.jpg


Notice how even in the raw uncompressed and unaltered simulation it seems to go in and out of the dark area - kind of like behind it.

In-camera contrast adjustments and compression would magnify this effect.
 
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Here's a simulation with the clouds moving, in-camera contrast adjustment, and some compression.



Reminder: This is simulating birds flying BELOW the clouds, but out of focus.
The curve inset is the only adjustment I did.
 

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Mick West you are not showing the dark region of clear sky but a less cloudy one.
I've been stacking 19 frames by timeshifting them and repositioning and here is what i got. I didn't use any image modifiers, only translations and time shift plus some levels at the end.
Screenshot 2017-08-04 20.12.21.png

It doesn't look to me like a flock of birds. It has a very regular shape with thickness.
Image10.jpg
 
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Mick West you are not showing the dark region of clear sky but a less cloudy one.
It's the same result. The dark region is a colder region.

A craft projecting spots of heat all the way through the clouds makes zero sense from a physics point of view. Blurry birds makes perfect sense.
 
.... Birds are hot compared to -50 Celsius of the clear sky Enormous size of over 100 meters with thick profile, not lines: The clouds were alto-cumulus type, between 4 to 6 Km above sea level. Bucharest is 70m ASL (above sea level). Supposing 5 Km altitude ASL (more or less), .

If we suppose that the "UFO" is at ~5 km altitude, than you can't suppose that the "clear sky has -50 Celsius ..

According to this: https://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/science_projects/measuring-the-temperature-of-the-sky-and-clouds/ and to U.S. Standard Atmosphere Air Properties (http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/standard-atmosphere-d_604.html) at ~5000m we have a medium temperature of -17 Celsius (+/-)

And at max. 6000 m (-23.96 Celsius), this is the approximate altitude of Mallard (wild duck), and as you know they are in Romania in this period, also they fly in a V (Vic) formation

Don't know if this is relevant or not, but just wanted to point it out

 
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If we suppose that the "UFO" is at ~5 km altitude, than you can't suppose that the "clear sky has -50 Celsius ..

According to this: https://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/science_projects/measuring-the-temperature-of-the-sky-and-clouds/ and to U.S. Standard Atmosphere Air Properties (http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/standard-atmosphere-d_604.html) at ~5000m we have a medium temperature of -17 Celsius (+/-)

And at 6000 m (-23.96 Celsius), this is the approximate altitude of Mallard (wild duck), and as you know they are in Romania in this period, also they fly in a V (Vic) formation

Don't know if this is relevant or not, but just wanted to point it out

Hi Davd, if you take a thermal camera and point it to a clear patch of sky in the night, it will show -50 Celsius.So any object warmer than -50 will glow. I could see bugs flying over the flir camera and birds or airliners at 11000m. But all objects i described can be seen as a bright point (warm).

The point is that you can see very well the thermal signature of a bird(s) on clear sky but if it enters in clouds, the heat emitted will be obstructed. I hope Mick West reads that.

And take into account that the V shape was flying against the wind ten times faster.
 
Hi Davd, if you take a thermal camera and point it to a clear patch of sky in the night, it will show -50 Celsius.So any object warmer than -50 will glow. I could see bugs flying over the flir camera and birds or airliners at 11000m. But all objects i described can be seen as a bright point (warm).
Can you show a comparable video with some birds flying below the clouds?
 
Really the shape is MOST visible when cloud are behind it. It's there even when over the dark regions.
00000029-2.gif
I can clearly see that the object is getting brighter (warmer) as it deepens in the clouds. If there were birds, exact opposite would happen, entering the clouds will dim the heat emitted.

And the fact that clouds influence the object means that the object is very high that makes the birds very large.
One pixel is 5.5m

If it's birds flying below the clouds then the apparent speed is not surprising.
If that is the case, why the clouds influence the brightness in a reverse way it should be? see post above.

Whatever was captured is way too uniform to be a flock of birds. There would be slight variation of form if it were birds.
 
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If that is the case, why the clouds influence the brightness in a reverse way it should be? see post above.

This is explained in the posts and video above. Since it's out of focus it's transparent so the brightness is added to the brightness of what is behind it. So it seems darker over dark regions and lighter over light regions.
 
This is explained in the posts and video above. Since it's out of focus it's transparent so the brightness is added to the brightness of what is behind it. So it seems darker over dark regions and lighter over light regions.
The camera is perfectly focused to infinity, check te last part of the original video, you can see Jupiter and details on buildings. The blured image comes from the software player who interpolates a low res 240x320pix to be displayed on a higher resolution display. If you scale down your software display to 240x320 the image is crisp.
 
The camera is perfectly focused to infinity, check te last part of the original video, you can see Jupiter and details on buildings. The blured image comes from the software player who interpolates a low res 240x320pix to be displayed on a higher resolution display. If you scale down your software display to 240x320 the image is crisp.

Right but things that are closer to the camera are not going to be in as good a focus as things that are far away. The image of the V is clearly not "crisp".
 
Right but things that are closer to the camera are not going to be in as good a focus as things that are far away. The image of the V is clearly not "crisp".
This is true only for a distance to the subject smaller than 3 m. Everything else over 3m is in focus, i have numerous videos demonstrating this. So the camera is focused. Search for "Hiperfocal", is the distance from were everthing is in focus and has a magnitude of meters.
 
Here's an extreme example of the "out of focus additive transparency" I posit above. I point my camera at some shelves with some brighter and darker objects on them. I then hold a small piece of white paper near the camera. The camera is focussed at infinity.
20170804-150237-fd2qz.jpg

Here it is crossing a shelf. The brightness of the shelf adds to the brightness of the paper, so it's looks brighter where the shelf is.
20170804-150451-fb4pd.jpg

And with the full dot over a dark and a light area:
20170804-150847-wg73w.jpg

Point A is over darkness, so it's dark. Point B is over lightness, so it's light.
These are actual photos with no digital manipulation.
 
This is true only for a distance to the subject smaller than 3 m. Everything else over 3m is in focus, i have numerous videos demonstrating this. So the camera is focused. Search for "Hiperfocal", is the distance from were everthing is in focus and has a magnitude of meters.

That's not what I see. I see edges of the clouds being highly out-of-focus, and to my eye, the blurriness of the clouds is much like that of the object that several of us believe is a flock of birds. In short, the photographic quality looks poor. This judgement might seem kind of subjective, but to me, those clouds are not crisply in-focus, and that brings up a question: What was your method for correcting the focus for infra-red light? If you made no such correction, naturally the image would be out of focus. You say that what's in this video is in-focus, but you say so based on other videos you have, and the logic in that seems backward as well as contrary to the kind of image quality that we actually see when we look at the video in question.

As to the subject of focusing, correcting for infra-red light is important, and failure to do so often results in fuzzy images, and some lenses simply won't provide a sharp image with infra-red light no matter what you do.

Because lenses are designed to be used in normal, visible light all of the coatings, glass elements and configuration are all optimized for visible light. When used in infrared light all bets are off. A lens that might be a top performer in visible light might fair very poorly in IR, the opposite it (is) quite common as well
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(the minor spelling correction in the above quote is mine)

Near IR light has longer waves than visible light, so it focuses at a different point. Infrared photography requires a shift to achieve good focus, so it’s necessary to use IR focus marks or have the focus calibrated
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The above quotes are from here:

https://www.lifepixel.com/infrared-photography-primer/ch4-lenses-slr-lenses-ir-focusing

Perhaps you have this variable covered, but it's a question that bears asking. Please let us know the details about this.
 
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Whatever was captured is way too uniform to be a flock of birds. There would be slight variation of form if it were birds.
This is an argument from incredulity, not an argument based on evidence. Bird species which fly in formation like this maintain that formation with remarkable precision, and though very close observation will reveal slight variation in the birds' positions over relatively longer time periods, such wandering is usually very minor and usually is impossible to see at great distance, and certainly impossible to see when the flock is only in view for less than two seconds as is the case here. Perhaps you live in a big city and don't have the opportunity to see such things, so I wish I knew a good way to find a straight-up-looking video of geese flying at high speed in such formation. If someone else can help with this, I believe that you will see the point that I am trying to make here, and that your assumption about obvious wanderings of birds in formation is not valid.
 
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@EricL Please if you never used a FIR camera just listen. N
ear infrared (700-1200 nm) is not the same as far infrared 7000- 15000nm.

FLIR dosen't use standard lenses but Fresnel as standard lens does not work at longer wavelengths (7-15 um).

I want to post some bird footage from my original footage to end this pointless comment wit more and more manufactured arguments with no relevance. Birds are dots, the shape of the craft is thicker at the front and thinner on the end . Stay tuned.

19 photos stacked_burn.jpg

At the same scale here is the full moon on thermal SR35 cam

full moon thermal.jpg
 
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As pointed out by @EricL and others, some of the key issues have not been resolved. The distance/altitude is crucial.
I think @Mick West and others have provided great visual clues that the "object" is most likely a flock of birds and not a solid object.

I found yet another video of migrating birds flying in V-formation:

They used Bresser 5x50 digital night vision scope. The "object" looks very similar.
20170805-061232-unfrx.jpg
 
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Before giving your opinion, please watch the thermal videos presented in raw format, taken with the same SR35 FLIR cam, to better understand what you see and how focused/ large you see it.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hfkwztrtq925aov/AAAEJwd0-nicNy6UiPy0T1zca?dl=0

Raw footage with birds, planes, nearby bugs and different objects in thermal spectrum with SR35 cam in .asf file format.
smoking man with landscape.jpg
bugs thermal sr35.jpg
bird flying thermal.jpg

airliner 11000m alt thermal.jpg
See file name for reference


Dropbox link with raw .asf files from where i took snapshots, you may see bird flapping wings.
Check the "raw footage of birds, bugs, airliners moon, in thermal" folder.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hfkwztrtq925aov/AAAEJwd0-nicNy6UiPy0T1zca?dl=0

And finally, with a clear technological shape, thicker in front and thinner on the edges, the UFO
19 photos stacked_burn.jpg
 
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At the same scale here is the full moon on thermal SR35 cam
20170805-061720-5h1dw.jpg
Notice you have blur around everything there, including the moon.

That would explain why the birds are blurred transparent dots.

Put some blurred transparent dots in a line and you get a blurred transparent irregular line.
 
This is an argument from incredulity, not an argument based on evidence. Bird species which fly in formation like this maintain that formation with remarkable precision, and though very close observation will reveal slight variation in the birds' positions over relatively longer time periods, such wandering is usually very minor and usually is impossible to see at great distance, and certainly impossible to see when the flock is only in view for less than two seconds as is the case here.

Indeed, and this is especially so for larger, high altitude migrating birds, like cranes.

Once could take this image:
20170805-073835-bl64w.jpg

Make a pseudo infrared version (cloud and sky relative colors are wrong, but we are looking at the birds here)
20170805-074045-pw0bc.jpg

Blur it similarly to the sample images above:

20170805-074225-daovn.jpg

Increase contrast, reduce to 320x240, export with high compression to simulate video:
20170805-074648-54399.jpg
 
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Please if you never used a FIR camera just listen. N
ear infrared (700-1200 nm) is not the same as far infrared 7000- 15000nm.
I must ask in return, please stop responding to criticism without even considering the merits of what's been said to you. If you were to read the information in the short article I quoted, you would know that it specifically referred to near infra-red, not far. According to that article (and I can supply others that say the same, if necessary), the focus setting of a standard-light lens must be offset or calibrated in some way for near infra-red photography.

Perhaps you are using a dedicated infra-red camera, but your failure to address the question about focus doesn't convince me that you understand the question, and your continued referral to "FLIR", an acronym that's not applicable to hand-operated cameras, makes me wonder the same.

I can't add this quote in the proper way in "edit" format, but you also said:

"Before giving your opinion, please watch the thermal videos presented in raw format, taken with the same SR35 FLIR cam, to better understand what you see and how focused/ large you see it."

All I can say to that is that your examples of "clear images" are in fact very out-of-focus and blurry, as Mick has already pointed out. Maybe that's the best that this camera can do, but using the vague shape of a blurry image while not even recognizing the limits on the information provided by such an image is not the way to support an extraordinary claim (and I won't go into all the other flaws in your reasoning, already addressed above, which you continue to ignore). This is a case where the simplest explanation makes the most sense. Alternatively, we can just say "there is no way to know what is there based on this information."
 
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"FLIR", an acronym that's not applicable to hand-operated equipment

FLIR as an acronym is Forward Looking Infrared, and really refers to cameras that physically look in the forward direction, generally mounted on a vehicle.

However, while the camera used here is not really a FLIR in that sense, it is actually a FLIR SR-35. "FLIR" is the trademark of the manufacturer. I have a FLIR camera myself, mounted to my iPhone.

A better acronym might be FIR (Far Infrared) or LWIR (Long-wave Infrared). But I think the clearest description is simply "thermal camera". It's a camera that detects heat radiation.

However FLIR is increasingly being used as a general term for a thermal camera - while technically incorrect, it's probably going to become common usage.
 
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