NYT: GIMBAL Video of U.S. Navy Jet Encounter with Unknown Object
Here, some may find useful information
It appears as though some over there know about The Paracast ... small world.
Now this is a contribution that I can respect, thank you S.R.I.
There are several people doing excellent work in that thread over at Metabunk.org, and a few posters over there are intimately familiar with these kinds of FLIR systems, so they've posted similar infrared footage that shows how a hot source creates a contrast glare that looks like a cold halo surrounding it (which we see in the GIMBAL footage). And that raises a very important point, for which I have yet to find an answer: how hot is the IR source in the GIMBAL footage? I would think that some expert in FLIR analysis, perhaps a military intelligence analyst, could glean at least a ballpark estimate of the temperature. If it's sufficiently hot, then it's possible that the GIMBAL footage is showing us the rear view of a twin-jet-engine fighter (the heat signature from the two engines can appear to merge, making it look like a single object). And as another poster over there showed, an IR image can appear to rotate due to a slight smudge on a lens combined with a swiveling camera. It's very frustrating that we don't have optical video of the same event so we could compare the two. And the radar recordings to see a bird's eye view of the speeds and trajectories of everything in the area at the time.
There are also interesting issues pertaining to apparent motion versus banking and relative trajectories - its very hard to tell if the USS Nimitz footage is showing us a rapid acceleration at the end, or if that's attributable to the relative motion of the interceptor jets and the target object.
So, frustratingly, the most compelling feature of the USS Nimitz/Princeton case, is the pilot testimony - I have confidence that Cmdrs. Fravor and Slaight did witness anomalous devices executing inexplicable hairpin maneuvers and dramatic velocities (and we have second-hand accounts from the Nimitz group radar operators describing objects dropping from 80,000ft down to the deck on multiple occasions over a span of 2-3 weeks) - but do these tiny little video clips prove it? No, I can't say that they do.
We really need to see the full technical reports and all of the supporting raw data and metadata - the Pentagon has all of that, and all we have at this point is a good story and a couple of very short clips that are very difficult to accurately interpret on their own merits. But on the upside, it sounds like there's more information on its way; I just hope it's enough to conduct a proper scientific analysis.
