Debating and Analyzing the UFO Videos and Claims

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There is a paper published on open access MDPI where there are people supporting the case that the Pentagon UAP videos are incredible and not mundane.

Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles in the 2004 Nimitz Encounter †
Kevin H. Knuth 1,2,∗, Robert M. Powell 2, and Peter A. Reali 2
1 Department of Physics, University at Albany (SUNY), Albany, NY 12206, USA
2 Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), Fort Myers, FL 33913, USA;
† Presented at the 39th International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy Methods in Science and Engineering, Garching, Germany, 30 June–5 July 2019.

Metabunk site and retired video game programmer, Mike West, did the work of analyzing the Pentagon UFO videos.

The previous debunking articles in the Thunderfoot Youtube did not attribute Metabunk or Mike West. They both have analyzed flight information, flight speed and altitudes.

Mike West shows more of the math and how to read the altitude, viewing angles and speeds of the plane.

The Pentagon videos are called FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST. The internet immediately took this as meaning that aliens are real. But the videos are not actually new. They were internally declassified back in 2017, and immediately released by Tom DeLonge’s To The Stars Academy. I started writing about them in December 2017. With the help of others, I quickly arrived at likely explanations for all three videos.

The FLIR video is most likely a distant plane. The video was taken well after the famous encounter with a hypersonic zig-zagging tic-tac by pilots from the NIMITZ. This object doesn’t actually move on screen – except when the camera moves, and it resembles an out of focus low-resolution backlit plane. I don’t know what the pilots saw, but this video does not show anything really interesting.

The GIMBAL video is also probably of a plane. …. It’s not rotating. What you see is the infrared glare of the engines, larger than the plane. It looks like it is rotating because of an artifact of the gimbal-mounted camera system. This is all a bit confusing, so I made several videos explaining it. Oh, and the “AURA” around the plane, that’s just image sharpening. It happens all the time in thermal camera footage. It’s not an alien warp drive, it’s just the unsharp mask filter.

The GO-FAST video probably shows a balloon. It’s not moving fast, it’s not skimming the water, and you can verify this yourself because all the information you need is in the numbers on screen. It’s just an effect caused by parallax. Over the last few years, I’ve [Mike West] made a variety of videos explaining all this.

Mike West explains the parallax effect that gives the illusion of speed.

SOURCES- Metabunk, Mike West, Universe Today
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

23 thoughts on “Debating and Analyzing the UFO Videos and Claims”

  2. I'm on the skeptical side for 99.99999% of "ufo" videos. They have a worldly explanation.
    But it is ironic that in the setting of an apparent UFO, the skeptics' explanations are what is starting to strain credulity.
    By way of example: The "splash" video of the FLIR footage is now backed by released RADAR footage that shows a swarm of up to several dozen objects around the Omaha(and apparently other ships). Objects that go from virtually stationary to 160mph in a few seconds, swarm a naval ship with loiter times of several hours, appear and disappear out of nowhere, are about 6 ft in diameter and then drop into the ocean(not disappear into the horizon as some skeptics have claimed).
    That mixed with the actual night vision footage we saw of the things(in this case, they were triangular in shape) is hard to explain away as birds and balloons. And the DoD and Senate intelligence committee and former heads of intelligence wouldn't be getting in a tizzy over birds and balloons.

    Like I said, they are starting to strain credulity on this one.

  3. He can't know the speed because in order to determine the angular velocity you need a radius (range in this case) which is not known.
    Mick is talking through his hat.

  5. For many people, belief in UFOs (the one's made by intelligent aliens) is akin to a religious belief. You will never change their minds, no matter how much logic you use, because they can generate spurious logic at a staggering rate.

    Also, you probably have better things to do than to uselessly debate with them all day whereas, for them, that's their top priority.

  6. "these sightings have all been near american military bases and no similar phenomenon have been seen/recorded in other countries or by civilians"
    No, most of them have been out in the ocean. The Nimitz encounter was like 200 miles off the coast of San Diego.
    Several central American nations (Mexico, Chile and a few others) as well as Puerto Rico and apparently Russia and China(among others) have reported similar phenomena, though I've seen no footage from the later two.
    "many of the 'leaks' were made by high up military intelligence officers themselves"
    Again, this is erroneous. Elizondo was not a high ranking military official, and wasn't even in the service when he leaked his footage. Jeremy Corbell leaked others and he is non military.
    "you have people like Marco Rubio going on 60 minutes and trying to use this as PR for military funding increases"
    One of the dumbest things I have ever heard. Seriously? The UFO program in the Pentagon had a whopping $20 million dollars. With a budget of $740 billion or so a year, that is chump change. There are probably couches at the Pentagon with more loose change in them than that.
    You don't ramp up military expenditures by pulling an "it's aliens" story.

  7. More seriously, I have wondered if( supposing otherwise incredible accounts do exist) if we are not looking at some actor/actors unknown already in possession of some new trick( people find new tricks to do amazing things equipment that shouldn't be able to do it all the time) for advanced holography then coming into possession of a quantum leap in cybercracking – say, an equation for filtering prime numbers, or,just as disturbing, a massive trove of backdoors into supposedly secure government equipment and facilities. What better way than to test the latter out in the open while using the former to direct attention far away from what is actually happening than latching on to the UFO phenomenon?

    Spotlights projected at night could easily be explained by real equipment inside of the projected image that quietly slips away while the object 'speeds off' in the other direction.

  8. This. The funny thing is, most of this doesn't debunk anything. The "Go Fast" footage was "debunked" because it apparently doesn't display the sorts of velocities claimed that these thinks can apparently pull off. The funny thing is, no one that I know of (and I have seen most of the interviews related to this stuff) has claimed it was pulling off absurd velocities. So at best, you have a strawman on their part because the pilots and personnel say these things also loiter for long periods of time as well. The only one that I think might have claimed otherwise is Fravor during his Joe Rogan interview and he said it was pulling high speeds even though it didn't immediately look like it.
    Thunderf00t was claiming it was just a bird. The footage was taken in one of the blocked off sectors of the Atlantic. If it was taken a few hundred miles off the coast then it probably isn't a bird as they don't usually fly out that far like that.
    What you said is on the money. We have former heads of the CIA and DoD stating there is stuff in the records that simply cannot be explained. I recall a SETI researcher saying "well, if these things were going so fast, one of our satellites woulda seen it. As if we have dedicated satellites looking at all parts of the ocean 24/7. The funny thing about that is Ratcliffe actually SAID there IS satellite data on the things.
    We will see what the report says.

  9. I must first admit I do not have all the info here, I do think it's telling what has/hasn't leaked. What has been made public (to my knowledge) are the blurry videos and first hand visual accounts. What hasn't is any of the detailed sensor data alluded to here. It really reads like a classic "limited hangout" where you release a small piece of a bigger story that lets you control the narrative. To my knowledge:
    -these sightings have all been near american military bases and no similar phenomenon have been seen/recorded in other countries or by civilians
    -many of the 'leaks' were made by high up military intelligence officers themselves
    -you have people like Marco Rubio going on 60 minutes and trying to use this as PR for military funding increases

    I think the most generous / least conspiratorial take is that US intelligence really doesn't know what these are and are just opportunistically leaking for PR. However, I think it is more likely that they know exactly what it is (and probably even engineered whatever it is) and are dribbling out scraps to keep this story going as long as possible before the full data reveals that it is an internal program

  10. I guess no one has actually listened to the pilots account of the incident. All of the stuff you are posting might or might not (not) disprove the videos. But none of this disproves the pilots account. You doubters are looking at one piece of evidence that you can make a case on and ignoring everything else. And there is a lot of evidence. Very unscientific. Either all the pilots are liars or there are UFOs. When some "scientific" people make up their minds on things they become just as closed minded as the religious folks that they like to mock.

  11. It's interesting that both the paper and Mick's Nimitz UFO video take into account the change in zoom of the camera and yet come to opposite conclusions regarding the speed at which the object moves off. I must admit that the way that Mick presented it, by adjusting to compensate for the change in zoom, the object does not appear to move incredibly fast and the speed seems constant. The apparent speed though depends on the movement of the camera and the extent of that is not clear.

  12. Per someone else here:
    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-intelligence-chief-quite-a-few-more-ufos-detected-than-public-knows
    ""There are a lot more sightings than have been made public," Ratcliffe said. "Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom."
    After saying that there have been sightings all around the world, Ratcliffe insisted that reports of "unidentified aerial phenomena" already in the public eye are only part of the bigger picture."
    "When we talk about sightings, the other thing I will tell you is, it's not just a pilot or just a satellite, or some intelligence collection," Ratcliffe said. "Usually we have multiple sensors that are picking up these things, and … some of these are unexplained phenomenon, and there is actually quite a few more than have been made public."

  13. Posted by someone else, below:
    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-intelligence-chief-quite-a-few-more-ufos-detected-than-public-knows
    ""There are a lot more sightings than have been made public," Ratcliffe said. "Some of those have been declassified. And when we talk about sightings, we are talking about objects that have seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain. Movements that are hard to replicate that we don’t have the technology for. Or traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.""

  14. And this is the issue. That and the video that HAS been leaked is not the most compelling, apparently.

  15. I would love to know what is really going on here. This UFO stuff is so hyped up this point, the military better have some genuinely compelling information or they're really damaging their credibility.

    So far we've seen nothing that can't be debunked by Mick West in a short YouTube video.

  16. There is allot more to be explained than just the few seconds of footage showed on the 60 minutes show; he (John Ratcliffe) director of National Intelligence under Trump made reference to radar, satellite imagery, seen by pilots & recorded by infra-red cameras.

  19. One of the guys interviewed on 60 Minutes etc said sure, you can come up with an explanation for a single video, but what they've got in some cases is multiple angles with visual, IR, and radar all showing the same thing.

    Guess we'll find out more when the full report releases.

  20. Hi Brian, please note that although "Proceedings" is an old and established magazine with a good reputation the articles submitted are not peer reviewed in the canonical sense accepted by the scientific community (the editors of the journal send the manuscript to expert reviewers considered respected authority in the field).
    As per proceedings submission giuidelines on their website;

    "Submissions are reviewed by the editorial staff of Proceedings and by the Editorial Board, which meets once a month. This peer review process can take up to ten weeks, depending on when in the monthly review cycle an article is received"

    They can define it peer review as the editorial board convenes and reviews the manuscript, but there is not external revision so it does not meet the standard criteria for what is considered peer revision in the scientific community.

    While in the text the authors refer to "reviewers" initially in the text it is not clear anywhere if there was a regular revision process (for example it is indicated the publication date, but there is no reference to the submission date, nor the beginning of the revision process).

  21. " It’s not rotating. What you see is the infrared glare of the engines, larger than the plane. It looks like it is rotating because of an artifact of the gimbal-mounted camera system."
    Except this was apparently discounted by one of the guys at Raytheon I believe that worked on the system that said that is unlikely a source of artifact of the FLIR.

    But right. You probably know more about this specific system than the guys that were trained to use them on a daily basis and probably know what aircraft look like on them since that is part of their job. Thanks for the peanut gallery opinion.

    I'm sorry but who is Mick West and why is it that we should take his opinion over multiple trained personnel that, as described above, use this stuff every day?

  22. I love how you bolded the 2nd citation, as if it is a sneaky ad hominem. Is their math correct or is not? If not, then why not?

    Also, the "Go Fast" argument is a strawman. Who in the military or anyone analyzing the footage has stated that it was supposed to be a demonstration of incredible maneuvers or something? The pilots and personnel themselves said they've seen these things loitering for long periods of time.

  23. Apologies if this has been discussed here before and I missed it, but I'd throw out one possible explanation that doesn't require super advanced tech: projectable holograms. The theory would be that the military has been testing projectable hologram tech at the (exclusively military) sites where the sightings/videos have happened and using the pilots as guinea pigs.

    This theory has several things going for it:
    -it neatly explains the insane flight characteristics as holograms would not be subject to physics of a massive physical object
    -the technology is in the realm of current abilities
    -the military has been actively trying to do stuff like this for a while: https://www.wired.com/2010/12/military-one-step-closer-to-battlefield-holograms/
    -and there is a clear motivation for the US government to leak the videos in ginning up support/funds to investigate/combat this tech if it is assumed to be malicious and/or intimidate our enemies if they presume the tech is ours

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