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Sunday, December 17, 2017

Shocking UFO Evidence -- NOT!

According to numerous reports, the Pentagon has spent more than $20 million researching "advanced aviation threats," or as most people call them, UFOs.
Called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, it was run out of the Pentagon by former Department of Defense intelligence officer Luis Elizondo. It began in some form in 2007, according to The Washington Post and The New York Times,and officially ended in 2012, though may still be in existence in some capacity, the Times says.
Color me skeptical. I checked out the video, and it seems fishy to me. Take a look for yourself:


The relevant section starts at 1:11. After you watch that, watch a video of someone flying in a real fighter jet, like this one:


Watch how the bogey in the purported UFO video is perfectly centered in the image. It doesn't flicker or waver until the very end, which is highly unlikely if you are tracking a high-speed UFO in a jet making a 20-degree bank. The bogey looks stuck in place, more like an artifact of the recording device. The bank lasts throughout the video is also totally steady, with no jitter and no variation.

Also, the altitude readout is rock steady at 25,010, never varying by a single foot. I'm not a pilot, so I don't know if that's typical for avionics instruments, but it's not typical for automobile speedometers. If you're fighting a 120-knot headwind like the pilots on the video are talking about, it seems highly unlikely that the altitude and airspeed of the pursuit craft would be rock steady. Looking at this video of a commercial aircraft cockpit, the altitude readout when flying a straight-on course -- without banking -- changes constantly, exactly the way the digital speedometer on a car oscillates between 65 and 66, no matter how steady your foot is on the accelerator, due to friction, wind and other factors.

Now, perfect centering of a high-speed UFO on a screen without any jitter is possible, but highly unlikely. And why didn't they film the scene with a regular light camera? IR and UV are great, but you always want to capture images in the visible spectrum for a complete picture of what happened.

To be honest, this video looks like it was cobbled together by someone using an off-the-shelf 3D graphics program, like Maya or Blender. It looks like a fake.

Every time there's shocking UFO footage, there's always some bogus reason why we just can't see the UFO on the screen, behaving in a realistic fashion, the way real objects with real mass behave.

UFO enthusiasts will counter that this is because UFOs are special and don't obey the laws of physics. But it's much more likely that this is because they're not real physical objects. Most of the time they are instrument artifacts or frauds. The rest of the time they're just Terran aircraft in unexpected places doing unexpected things.

If you read the articles closely, you'll also note that the company doing the research is run by a Robert Bigelow, a Nevadan who knows former Nevada senator Harry Reid personally. This smacks of a senator getting a pal a lucrative no-bid $22 million contract. (Bigelow Aerospace isn't totally worthless -- they're flying an inflatable habitat on the International Space Station, an idea certainly worth investigating.)

It's possible that aliens have visited earth and have flown UFOs around. But if so, we clearly have never got a good look at one. Which is basically impossible if they're as common as UFO enthusiasts would have us believe -- because there have been hundreds of thousands to millions of UFO "sightings." Which means the whole UFO narrative is totally off base.

I'm a space enthusiast. I like science fiction. I'd love it if there really were UFOs from other planets buzzing around Earth. It would prove all those conservative religious nut jobs wrong: mankind isn't special and we're not alone in the universe. We'd better start acting like grownups, take care of our planet and stop killing each other senselessly, or the galactic police will come and shut us down like they did in both versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

But so far there is still zero credible evidence that there are non-terrestrial UFOs.

4 comments:

Mark Ward said...

These pilots are seeing some sort of tangible objects. It’s not a mass hallucination. This report proved at least that. They may not be aliens but they are something real.

Nikto said...

It's not clear that they saw the object with their eyes. It seems that they only saw it on the screen of whatever system they were looking at. It's not clear what that system is, but it's obviously processed by software (which you can see when they flip the image from negative to positive at one point).

I'm still not sure that the video isn't an outright fraud. But let's for a moment presume that it's real and the events happened as depicted.

There are (at least) two ways that this can be a non-existent phenomenon.

First: since the image is generated in software, if there is a bug that causes some kind of weird artifact in the image, it would look exactly like that: the bogey is initially completely static in the image, which is just not realistic. It then rotates in a weird way when the bank slows, which is also consistent with some kind of software glitch.

Also, since this is in software, a malicious programmer or hacker could intentionally program in some weird stuff like this. This UFO "easter egg" could be some programmer's way of getting his jollies.

Second: this system doesn't seem to be radar, but if it's something like radar there's another possibility. Radar works by transmitting microwaves and then receiving microwaves that reflect from the surface of the tracked object. If there's a microwave dish transmitting at the same frequency in the direction you're looking, it will look like an object is out there. It won't look like a plane or other object because it isn't one, so pilots won't know how to interpret it. Ditto for infrared: if there's some odd source of IR out there, it will just look weird on the screen.

Now, if they could actually see the microwave source they would immediately know it was nothing. But because it's just a blip on a screen, they can't tell how big it really is, or how far away it really is, or really anything at all.

Image processing systems are like Fox News: just because you saw it on the screen doesn't really mean it happened.

Every "legitimate" case of a UFO sighting has some gigantic shortcoming like this. It's the same story with the yeti and bigfoot: they're just bears.

When there are real pictures of alien spacecraft with rivets and landing gear, I'll believe it. But as long as they look like blobs of computer-generated noise, I will remain skeptical.

Mark Ward said...

None of the dozens of trained pilots that have seen this both on radar and with their own eyes would agree with you. I think you are being skeptical to a fault.

Nikto said...

I am skeptical to a fault? Look at who published that video: To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science.

On their website they list their mission as (in part):

"We will create: Three synergistic divisions of Science (research), Aerospace (application) and Entertainment (storytelling).

"We will build: An accelerated path to transformative discoveries and technology applications and inspire global citizens through informative entertainment."

This is not the US Air Force or the National Science Foundation. They have no track record with me or any reservoir of trust or competence. I have never heard of any of the people on their "who are we" page.

Moreover, these guys are trying to raise money: this video is a fund-raising tool. So far they've raised two million bucks (with a minimum $200 "investment").

Is the video "Aerospace/Research" or "Entertainment/Storytelling"? It looks to me like Entertainment/Storytelling/Fund Raising.

At best this group is a bunch of naive Trek fans who have more money than they know what to do with. At worst it's a scam.

I would love for UFOs to be real. But when you let con men and crooks fool you, you discredit yourself and the serious people who are doing the real work.

Remember when Dan Rather was taken in by some phonied-up documents about George Bush's National Guard service that were supposedly written during the Vietnam War, but were printed out with Microsoft Word? It totally discredited the reporting, even though Bush was AWOL and was likely strung out on drugs. Meanwhile, John Kerry was on a boat off the coast of Vietnam getting shot at, but his candidacy was torpedoed because he wasn't in exactly the place he thought he was thirty years earlier. Those incidents played a large part in Bush's 2004 victory.

In essence, the UFO video looks to me like it was created with the video equivalent of Microsoft Word.