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Several of these look like balloons and birds. Two of them have already leaked before. Both of those are missiles being viewed with an infrared camera. One of
by krferriter 4mo ago
Several of these look like balloons and birds.
Two of them have already leaked before. Both of those are missiles being viewed with an infrared camera. One of them shows a missile passing through the field of view rapidly with a motion blur streak behind it. The other shows a missile performing maneuvers and a camera artifact showing a star-like diffraction+aperture artifact around the bright IR light source.
None of these pieces of imagery look like something doing something particularly interesting. What happens is a military personnel records a video. They don't know what it is in the moment. It gets labeled "unknown" and put on a DoD file server, and then either they or someone else who stumbles across it clips out part of it and starts to spread rumors about this amazing video of a UAP they saw. There are people who work for the DoD who appear to spend a great deal of their free time scrolling around internal DoD file servers looking for anything they can portray as proof of aliens, and sometimes they leak their stories and even clips to public UFO influencers like Jeremy Corbell.
- pyinstallwoes 4mo agoThe star one kind of reminds me of the kill vehicle: https://youtu.be/KBMU6l6GsdM?si=O1jl4aQfaX_POY4T https://youtu.be/KBMU6l6GsdM?si=O1jl4aQfaX_POY4T
- krferriter 4mo agoThat's interesting but that's not what this video is. The star shape in the DoD video is a camera artifact. Just a really bright source of infrared light.
- keepamovin 4mo agoIt doesn't look like artifacts look: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/a-gimbal-glare-explainer.12230/ https://www.metabunk.org/threads/a-gimbal-glare-explainer.12... tho it still might be. This theory is the one of yours least easily dismissed, but requires further evidence to be more convincing, I believe.
- krferriter 4mo agoDon’t cite the deep lore to me https://www.metabunk.org/threads/the-chandelier-ufo.13307/ https://www.metabunk.org/threads/the-chandelier-ufo.13307/
- keepamovin 4mo agoLol "deep lore" - what are you really some sort of priest on this topic? Ok, priest, what is your read of the bigger picture - not the narrow DoW released videos, but the larger context. Re the counterpost - i admit it's a good effort to match the graphics - but it still looks markedly different. Thermal overexposure seems less likely given paucity of other examples - what about active jamming? IR laser pointing? Hunch just now: sth about polarized light? Idk.
- krferriter 4mo agoIt was just a joke. You linked a thread about one particular camera artifact but missed the fact that there was another thread about this specific case. I've read all of those threads. There's not really much ambiguity here regarding these factors now: - it's a small bright infrared light source attached to a parachute - the star shape is a camera artifact
- keepamovin 4mo agolol, it was funny. Tho dishonest to pretend a consensus has been reached after your "high confidence" comments. More like "you hope" 'there's not much ambiguity'. My hope was you'd be actually interested to discuss in depth - but seems like you want to end the conversation here. That's okay, no worries. Just a little disappointing and surprising (or maybe not - 100% certainty is not exactly compatible with "willing to update beliefs" ;)). If you are another is open tho - take a look at this: https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/2052769793321975945 https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/2052769793321975945 How that 8-pointed thing moves around and the cold trail it leaves. What could it be? I don't see the intense source artifact angle because the pattern is distinct from examples of the class. I'm unconvinced here but curious :)
- sandworm101 4mo agoAt this point, I would dismiss every image of anything that shared symmetry with any part of the camera taking the photo. In the 90s there was a wave of diamond-shaped craft in Europe. All were taken by cheap disposable cameras with four-bladed aperture. The current trend now is fuzzy moving images. They are fixed points like stars and the "motion" and color changes comes from the digital camera's algorithm trying to make sense of a one-pixel signal from the ccd. (See flat earth videos claiming that stars/planets are actually spotlights.)
- tootie 4mo agoOf course, everything is just something boring. The chances of us espying extraterrestrials in our atmosphere by chance are essentially nil. People looking for secret photos and buried evidence will absolutely positively never find it. People inside the DoD are just as crazy and irrational as the general public if not moreso. If a flying saucer lands in your front yard and little green men come out and say "take me to your leader" it's still infinitesimally likely that it's actually aliens. Meeting aliens will be nothing like any movie or book ever written (except maybe Contact).
- api 4mo agoIf we are being visited we would never see them unless they decided to show themselves, and if they did it would be absolutely unambiguous. Someone with the tech to travel the stars (or something weirder like between dimensions) could make probes the size of bugs, sand, or dust. They could also image us at incredible resolution from afar, receive all our signals, and so on. They might be able to do even weirder and crazier forms of surveillance we don’t even understand yet, like high resolution imaging with neutrinos or gravity waves. They could study us all they wanted and we’d never know. Look into how advanced some of our spy tech is, and we have barely left our planet.
- tootie 4mo agoOr just manipulate our senses.
- cookiengineer 4mo agoI mean, there is still people who think that a UFO was sighted in Roswell at the radar testing site of Area 51. Imagine that, 70ish years later there is people that cannot grasp how modern the A-12 prototype was. [1] In my opinion the US has a real scientific education problem. So much so that people still think that alien life that built machines so advanced that they can bridge distances over lightyears travel time... just the belief that they will remotely resemble our appearance anyhow is statistically so close to 0 that I have no words to express how unlikely it is to happen. You have a greater chance getting hit every millisecond of your life by a lightning strike than this being the case. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12
- krferriter 4mo agoI'll add that I had the impression that the star-shaped one resembles a distant missile but could even be something even less interesting than a missile, given that at a few points later in the video, a parachute is visible and the heat source appears to be attached to it, suggesting that it could be a parachute flare. Couple frames: https://imgur.com/a/MyGZj3x https://imgur.com/a/MyGZj3x Original video: https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1006088/dow-uap-pr38-unresolved-uap-report-middle-east-2013 https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1006088/dow-uap-pr38-unresolv...
- Loquebantur 4mo agoThat's very obviously not a parachute? The "star shaped" object moves relative to it akin to a reflection actually. The interesting question here is, whether that is "white hot" or "black hot" imagery. The trail the object leaves is white. If it was a flare, that would mean white is hot. Then the object would be cold. You cannot have a "camera artefact" from a cold spot in the sky.
- krferriter 4mo agoI think it is very likely a parachute. It moves in a swinging relation to the heat source because the heat source is hanging from it. It doesn’t exhibit reflection across the center of frame like you’d expect from a lens flare, and you can see frames in the video when the partially IR-translucent parachute overlaps itself showing that it’s a physical material moving around and which IR light can partially pass through. It is black hot. We know this for sure because someone in the DoD previously leaked a single screenshot of the video, which did not have the on-screen data elements redacted, and you can see the BLK indicator. That person believed the star shape was the physical shape of the object, not a lens artifact, and told this to the UFO influencer they leaked it to. That’s how this particular video eventually ended up included in this data dump. The smoke trail must cool rapidly and be colder in temperature than the flare itself and the parachute above it. The ambient air temp and time of day may be relevant to this (direct sun could contribute to warming the parachute). Since it is infrared footage, the colors are all based on a dynamic range, so the smoke only needs to be slightly colder than the parachute in order to appear lighter in color.
- esbranson 4mo ago> balloons and birds > missiles > diffraction+aperture artifact Uh if the US military cannot identify birds, balloons, light, and more importantly missiles after thorough cross-agency review, I think you're not seeing the forest for the trees.
- glenstein 4mo agoUnique observation conditions definitely can and do make those difficult to identify in some cases. Omniscience in all cases does not follow from success in routine cases.
- esbranson 4mo agoThe Pentagon, White House, &c are not unusual or unique observation conditions. These are not just UFOs at the time, they are UFOs now after going through extensive review regimes.
- krferriter 4mo agoThis is not about “the US military cannot identify”. These case reports happen often because one person filmed something and perhaps that one person didn’t know what it was. The video then gets saved and catalogued as unidentified. The video is then so lacking in information and context that it is literally impossible for people to later figure out exactly what object it was. AARO (and before them the UAP Task Force) has been investigating a lot of these case reports and many of them get resolved as “balloon-like objects” or “objects consistent with a balloon”, because the video is consistent with it being a balloon but they want to avoid stating definitively that they know the object was a balloon. If I recall correctly something half of the imagery that gets reported as UAP in the US military ends up falling into the “likely/definitely birds and balloons” bucket. It is foolish to dismiss this, it’s simply a fact that balloons and birds are a common underlying cause for sightings which are reported to AARO as UAP. There have also been other cases where videos recorded of airplanes have been reported to AARO and they were able to figure out that it was airplanes. It’s not that “the US military doesn’t know what airplanes look like”, it’s that one person operating an IR camera in the military recorded a video and didn’t know what it was, so they reported it as being an unidentified aerial sighting. And then it gets put in this bucket of reports called “UAP sightings”. And maybe never gets resolved because there’s not enough information there to do anything with it.
- keepamovin 4mo agoWhat kind of birds are cold in black-hot imagery? What sort of missiles don't have an exhaust but a "ghost shell" trailing behind? What sort of balloons show up as contrast instead of neutral? Your comment is all certainty, and the thread has rewarded that. People are seeking definite answers - seems proportional to the uncertainty they sense. Do you really feel qualified to provide that? Seems a big responsibility to take on, sort of like a public Explaining influencer lol. Your idea that gossip enriches mundane with magic is unnecessary here, because the media themselves are 'unexplained' (if we remove your certainty). It can be compelling and attractive to fill the silence or the unknown with an invention of certainty - sort of like a prophet or shepheard - but the edge of known demands more curiosity and wonder for an honest approach.
- andsoitis 4mo agoWhat do you think are more likely to explanations?
- keepamovin 4mo agoI feel it premature on the data to offer any at all. Also inappropriate for me to explain because I don't want the role, nor to bias any. I am content with the mystery and will see what shows up. Re this latest "drop" - I am in the absorb and observe phase, analysis is only passive background, if at all, I think. I'm grateful for the entertainment and the sense of "gov't doing something people want/revealing something they lied about" tho. Restores confidence in the big system. I'm really curious to see what comes next :)
- SilentM68 4mo ago[flagged]
- rmunn 4mo agoThe only reasons I can think of why your comment would have gotten downvoted is for ideological reasons, e.g. people dislike the president so they downvoted you for saying something even slightly positive about him. Since HN is not supposed to be used for ideological battle, that seems unfair. So have a counterbalancing upvote.
- chmod775 4mo agoShush! Explaining them away is boring.
- ricksunny 4mo agoFor some reason, unlike most other commenters, yours doesn’t present the downvote button. I thought this might be a privilege of very high karma like other downvote-missing commenters i see sparsely lower down, but your karma is lower than mine and I get downvoted frequently enough. I’d like to understand HN’s community management functions better.
- rkomorn 4mo agoCould it just be the comment is too old? IIRC, comments that are over ~24h old can no longer be downvoted.
- ricksunny 4mo agoThat’s probably it, thank you!
- sieabahlpark 4mo ago[dead]