Pentagon UFO Study - Media Monitoring

[Realm]

I copy for you below Garry Nolan’s response to my goading on the TTSA FB group and my cheerily snarky response to him.

You gave him a killer response, with your connections and all!

I never calculated anything

Obviously he didn't, and nobody at TTSA did, as otherwise they would have noticed they are spreading disinformation.

I reported a claim from the pilots and radar. Period.

Was that first, second or third hand information? Has he actually talked to the pilots, or seen their written statements, or the radar data or what?

We provide chain of evidence information.

Great! Please ask him to provide one copy of that.

Original unmodified clip and CoC documents would be nice.

The data is sadly classified.

And yet he knows that, and he is just an adviser of a private company. So who revealed classified information to him?

No wonder Jacques warned me the UFO community is full of whiners and I should stay away.

Guess that's whiners like him.

 

[Getoffthisplanet]

What was your estimate of the size, and what FOV was that based on? I'm now almost certain the correct FOV is 0.7º, not 1.5º as most seem to believe at Metabunk.

Metabunk users encouraged an attempt at both 0.7º & 1.5º FOV. Either way my simple results are basically the same as most folks who are doing the actual hard math....the object is certainly not more than a few to several feet in diameter.

 

[withoutlimits09]

Fabulous post!

Thanks. For the record, I am not a ALIEN BELIEVER, I don't know what UFOs are, but think the phenomea is real. Thus far, that has been the same position as Elizondo and Mellon (unless some talking head pushes them for a sound byte). I don't understand why they are being mocked and attacked. They are not out there like Steven Greer talking about the entities visiting them at Joshua Tree. They are just career intel guys that had some experience with data and want to see more done with it. Don't we all? Not everything has to be boiled down to, "UFO = FLYING SAUCER = GRAYS" or "INTEL OFFICER = DISINFO = LIES" or my favorite, "UFOs = PROFIT," that never happens!

 

[Randall]

Thanks. For the record, I am not a ALIEN BELIEVER, I don't know what UFOs are, but think the phenomea is real. Thus far, that has been the same position as Elizondo and Mellon (unless some talking head pushes them for a sound byte). I don't understand why they are being mocked and attacked. They are not out there like Steven Greer talking about the entities visiting them at Joshua Tree. They are just career intel guys that had some experience with data and want to see more done with it. Don't we all? Not everything has to be boiled down to, "UFO = FLYING SAUCER = GRAYS" or "INTEL OFFICER = DISINFO = LIES" or my favorite, "UFOs = PROFIT," that never happens!

It's fine if you don't believe in alien visitation. Everyone needs to have sufficient evidence to be confident for themselves. I think there's enough info out there that any reasonable person who does enough sifting will eventually come to the same conclusion. With me, I have the added benefit of seeing a UFO for myself. I also agree that the phenomena isn't always reducible to one explanation or another. In other words not all reports of strange things in the sky are reports of UFOs. They're just reports of strange things in the sky.

 

[Realm]

Here's some additional research how I believe the ATFLIR system is functioning.

I think it's easier to understand it by comparing it to something more familiar, at least for me, so I'm comparing that to my Nikon P900 superzoom camera. It has 83x zoom, 35mm eq focal lengths of 24-2000mm (longest currently available), 16 megapixels. It doesn't quite reach To The Stars, but to the moon anyway:

That P900 has a FOV of around 1º, so very close to that 0.7º of the ATFLIR. So we should get a pretty good idea what sort of reach the ATFLIR has from P900 videos hitting that optical zoom limit. Basically I can identify you from miles away with it, and you won't even see I'm there looking at you. Note though that some videos of it utilize additional digital zoom (which maxes out at insane 8000mm), so the moon for example is somewhat smaller than the full screen at the optical limit, beyond that it's digital zooming. But since it has a 4608x3456 sensor, as compared to the 640x480 on the ATFLIR, it can actually provide much more detail from the same distances in good conditions, and even with that digital zoom maxed out, the resulting images still utilize more pixels.

So why does a $700 handheld camera beat a 2m long pod that costs a few millions and weights some 200kg? The most significant reason is visible light vs infrared. IR radiation has a much longer wavelength, meaning the sensor needs to have much larger pixels to avoid diffraction limits:

The fundamental limit to pixel size is determined by diffraction. ... For typical f/2.0 optics at 5μm wavelength, the spot size is 25μm. Because system users prefer some degree of oversampling, the pixel size may be reduced for MWIR applications to dimensions on the order of 12μm.

Infrared Detectors, Second Edition

ATFLIR is operating at that MWIR range, and according to the information I quoted before, the sensor has centerline spacing (I suppose that's close to the pixel size?) of 25μm. Straightforward multiplying that with the resolution would result in a sensor size of 16x12mm. P900 sensor total size is 6.17mm x 4.55mm and the pixels are 1.34μm. Fullframe DSLR cameras have a sensor size of 36x24mm.

So those P900 pixel sizes wouldn't work with infrared. Bigger pixels can also gather much more light, so the individual pixels are much more accurate and have less noise, especially in low light conditions. So why didn't they use a bigger sensor on the P900, or on the ATFLIR for that matter? Here's why, this is an example of a dSLR lens with 1600mm focal length and 1.5º FOV, so still not quite up to the P900 in terms of reach, but it costs about the same as the ATFLIR and it's not that far from it size and weight-wise either:
World's Most Expensive Camera Lens

That's the crux of the matter. Making those tiny sensors just a little bit larger (either by increasing pixel sizes or adding more of them with the same size) increases the size and weight of the required optics a whole lot with long zoom systems. It's always a compromise, even for something as pricey, big and heavy as the ATFLIR, and that low resolution seems to be close to the sweet spot for such IR system.

But if most of that compromise is caused by the IR wavelengths, and the ATFLIR can also image in visual wavelengths, couldn't it use better resolution for that, especially in good lighting conditions? I believe it could, and it could explain this quote:

An infrared targeting system his planes used magnified an image in the night by 30 times. In daylight a television camera can magnify it by 60 times.

Several sources explicitly state the FOV figures are for MWIR operation (and that is the main function), and Raytheon mentions it has "Common optical path", which means the optics are (at least for the most part) common for IR and visible light/electro-optical (EO). But the sensors have to be different in any case, and that Indium antimonide (InSb) sensor they are touting seems to be commonly used in thermal imaging, not with visible light. So, I believe they haven't actually told us what the sensor is for the visible spectrum, and based on the quote above, and similar information elsewhere, it seems plausible that it might have double the resolution, and hence possibility to use only the center part of that sensor to achieve further 2x (optical) zoom with the same pixel count as IR.

Another possibility would be that it actually had something akin to DSLR teleconverters, so basically some sort of additional lens that could be added to the imaging path at some point. That seems also plausible. While the P900 can freely adjust the zoom to any position by extending the lens barrel and moving lenses with motors, the ATFLIR works with switch in mirrors, meaning it can't do a continuous zoom but just switches from one fixed zoom level to another. Maybe there's one extra for the visible light.

I haven't found any information if one of these is the case, but I think it very well could be. In my opinion, those are better explanations for that 30/60x difference than the FOV being 1.5 for the IR, as it just wouldn't make sense to have the medium FOV having a digital zoom that would create the same result with worse resolution. So all in all, it seems almost certain the IR NAR FOV is that 0.7º.

And as I mentioned before, those 30/60x zoom figures are probably relative to the "optional navigation FLIR", for which 21x21º would be a typical FOV, and that 30x is the ratio between that and the narrowest optical FOV of 0.7ºx0.7º.

Edit: I just found a report made in association with Raytheon, that seems to confirm some of the things I just wrote:

Strapped to manned aircraft or aerial drones, these multispectral sensors operate in multiple modes – usually with both day (electro-optical camera) and night (infrared camera) capability – to provide ground forces critical, time-sensitive information about the insurgent hiding around the corner or entering a town by vehicle. Both sensor types are typically equipped with high-magnification optical lenses that may provide zoom capability. They may also have laser rangefinders or designator/rangefinders to help identify targets.
...
Overtime, as sensors have decreased in size and increased in resolution, more and more can be packed into one turret. Wide Area Airborne Surveillance (WAAS) systems, which are now being developed by both the US Air Force and US Army, can have as many as nine sensors packaged on the turret. Sierra Nevada Corporations’ Gorgon Stare payload, for example, houses five EO cameras and four IR cameras.
...
In addition, image resolution improved with the advent of high-definition (HD) TV. Both electro-optical (Charged Coupled Device TV) and infrared (thermal imaging) cameras have benefitted from HD technology, which increases the number of pixels in a sensor’s array to improve image resolution. In particular, focal plane arrays have evolved from a 320 x 240 format to 640 x 480 pixels, and now, HD array formats of 1,920 × 1,080 pixels
...
Thermal sensors in particular have undergone some signifi- cant improvements in recent years, both in terms of the materials from which they are made and the process by which they operate. Most sensor turrets incorporate staring focal plane array (FPA) thermal imagers, which often operate in either the mid-wave infrared (MWIR 3-5 μm) or long-wave infrared (LWIR - 8-12 μm) spectral ranges, depending on the mission set.

https://www.pilotopolicial.com.br/Documentos/Artigos/Airborne-Imaging-in-2011.pdf

There are also further examples of other products with different FOV setups for IR and visible, and also separate data for high def color (so ATFLIR can even have a separate sensor for that):

CCD television camera: 2° NFoV; 8° WFoV
Thermal Imaging Sensor: 2.8° NFoV; 10° WFoV
...
Thermal Imager: 30° to 0.45°
Daylight camera: matched to thermal imager field of views
...
Colour high definition: 29º to 0.25º
Colour low light high definition: 55º to 1.5º
Short wave infrared: 28º to 0.25º
Thermal imager: 30º to 0.25º
...
Field of view High Magnification Thermal Imager:
NTSC: 31.7 to 0.43° (in four stages)
PAL (large format): 31.8°, 6.51°, 1.30°, 0.52°
PAL (small format): PAL 19.4°, 3.91°, 0.78°, 0.52°
Color daylight TV with zoom lens: 27.4 to 1.4° FoV with optional ×19 lens with ×2 extender: 30.3 to 0.86°
TV Camera with spotter lens (optional): 0.29° or 0.39°

That last one is particularly interesting, as it apparently actually has something akin to 2x tele-converter/extender. Those also confirm the best ones have considerably smaller FOVs than 0.7°, so it isn't anything exceptional.

Edit: Some further information and confirmation how it works:

The ATFLIR system consists of 25 different Weapons Replaceable Assemblies (WRAs). The WRAs are listed below and described in the following paragraphs:
• Electro-optical sensor unit (EOSU)
...
• Advanced Navigation Forward Looking Infrared (ANFLIR) sensor
...
Housed within the EOSU are the ATFLIR midwave IR receiver, gimbal-mounted telescope, laser spot tracker, and visible electro-optical (EO) camera. All optical components are mounted on a one-piece, beryllium aluminum optical bench. The bench was designed to eliminate alignment errors when individual optical components are removed for maintenance. The outer structure of the EOSU is designed to withstand the wind loads of mach plus velocities associated with high-speed aircraft. The outer structure includes the windscreen, multispectral, and laser spot tracker windows. The optical bench is suspended in the outer structure on four vibration isolators and gimbals.
...
Advanced Navigation Sensor
The ANFLIR sensor is a self-contained FLIR imaging system that provides IR imagery (Figure 6-9) used by the operator to maneuver and navigate safely at low altitudes and high air speeds. The imagery delivered by the ANFLIR sensor is comparable to flying during daylight operations while operating at night.
...
Infrared Video
This subsystem provides the IR video (Figure 6-12) for the tactical aircrew display. IR, visible, and laser energy enters the telescope and is relayed off the pitch gimbal to beam splitters on the optical bench. The separated IR energy passes through the relay, the derotation mechanism, and then through the imager to the 640 X 480 element array. Nonuniformities in the raw image are corrected by the digital nonuniformity and scene-based digital nonuniformity modules before reticules are added by the video processor (VP). The VP also provides manual and automatic gain, level, and polarity control and then converts the digital video to standard RS-170 analog video for display in the cockpit
...
Electro-Optical Video
This subsystem provides visible imagery for use by the operator. The EO camera is boresighted to the FLIR and laser optical path to ensure accuracy. Visible energy is separated from the laser and IR spectrums by beamsplitters and routed to a charge coupling device (CCD) camera. The CCD camera contains a mechanism to ensure the image being displayed maintains the correct horizon orientation. Video for the CCD camera is digitally corrected before being routed to the VP, where reticules are Figure 6-12 — IR video. 6-11 added and control functions implemented before being converted to RS-170 analog video. The EO output utilizes the same video lines to the cockpit displays as the IR video subsystem.
...
Field of View and Zoom
There are three levels of optical FOV available for the operator using the ATFLIR system. They are the wide, medium, and narrow FOVs. The wide FOV is optically fixed at 1X magnification. The medium and narrow FOVs are optically fixed at 1X with a 2X magnification zoom capability. All three FOVs are implemented in the reflective telescope of the EOSU with switch in mirrors.
...
Advanced Navigation
The ANFLIR subsystem (Figure 6- 14) is a separable WRA that mounts inside the pod adaptor unit. The ANFLIR WRA provides the operator with the navigation capabilities that were described earlier. When installed, the WRA receives power and cooling air from the pod adaptor unit. This subsystem uses a dedicated RS-170 connection to provide navigational video.

http://navybmr.com/study material/NAVEDTRA 14030A.pdf

Advanced Navigation Sensor The ANFLIR (Figure 7-22) sensor unit is a single WRA mounted at the forward end of the PAU. The IR targeting sensor presents real-time passive thermal imagery that can be placed on the HUD to provide a 1:1 overlay with the real world view. The imagery provides video for day or night detection, tracking, and designation of land or sea targets while maneuvering and navigating safely at low altitudes and high air speeds. The imagery delivered by the ANFLIR sensor is comparable to flying during daylight operations while operating at night.

http://navybmr.com/study material/NAVEDTRA 14029A.pdf

So the navigation flir (ANFLIR) is a separate component, and has the same FOV as the HUD. Now I only need to find if the HUD FOV is 21°...

 

[Realm]

Someone at Metabunk has done another calculation:

This is the location I got once the 5 degree aircraft turn was put into Mick's Geobra graph. It has only travelled 345 meters in the 19 seconds which is 35 knots.

"GO FAST" Footage from Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy. Bird? Balloon?

That 5 degrees seems to be based on visual inspection of the video, which probably isn't that accurate, and it seems to consider the end points of the movement only instead of details of the intermediate steps. But in any case, those numbers are close to mine.

I traced the route for the 21 whole seconds the rangefinder gave values, and my calculations give the plane a total turn angle of 11.4 degrees, travel distance of 355 meters, and average speed of 33 knots. So the calculations seem to converge, even with somewhat different methods. Great!

 

[Realm]

Metabunk users encouraged an attempt at both 0.7º & 1.5º FOV. Either way my simple results are basically the same as most folks who are doing the actual hard math....the object is certainly not more than a few to several feet in diameter.

As I have made the case, the FOV is almost certainly 0.7º, and the frame rate of sensor is probably 60, as that seems to be typical for such instruments. It certainly looks that way in the beginning of that video, as the target speeds through the screen and is extended to the direction of the movement, disappears at times, is split into multiple parts and so on. With that understanding, it is difficult to get proper size estimates of it at that stage, and some of the apparent bird shapes could be just a result of that movement, although they could also reflect reality but just be stretched in that direction.

When it starts to track the target, the background becomes much more blurred because of the movement, and the object appears to be roundish. But given that distance, small size, rather slow framerate, and all the vibrations of both the jet and the target, and the need to constantly track the position and adjust the view, we can hardly expect it to show the object with pixel perfect accuracy. I think it's more likely it moves a bit to different directions within each frame, which would make it look roundish and rather featureless as it softens the edges as they collect less fotons than those imaging the center of the object. Video compression results in additional softening.

So the question is, should we try to measure how many pixels the object takes by looking just at the more or less fully white (or black in that other mode) pixels, all the way to the softer edges, or something in between? I believe those really soft parts are basically just artifacts of the aforementioned reasons, and the answer is somewhere closer to the more evenly lit areas. That seems to result something close to 9 pixels out of the 640 of the video in horizontal direction, and the object looks longer in that direction. From those distances, with 0.7º FOV, 9 pixels would mean something like 1-1.4 meters. But as I explained before, due to the viewing angle, the wingspan of a bird that was flying level could still be about double what it seems. If it was a more or less round balloon instead, that would be close to the actual size.

Note also that the resolutions and aspect ratios for the vertical direction do not seem quite correct, so that might be less accurate in any case, and hence also complicate my earlier comparisons regarding possible wing angles assuming it is a bird.

In any case, it's already clear it's small, slow and at an altitude of 4km, and it does nothing special.

 

[MrBeliever]

Are the metabunk users sharing a breakdown of their calculations elsewhere that I'm not seeing, or are you just taking their results at face value?

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Initially, did everyone “crap” all over Jaime Maussan and that dream team? Not on your life, as the faithful flocked down to Mexico for the beWitness event. It was not until a small group of individuals, from the skeptical to the open-minded, decided to decipher the placard in revealing the mummified child.

Understandably, you feel as though a few of the unclean, unruly, and irreverent are spoiling your disclosure fantasy, however, I strongly suggest this isn’t the case. It’s just that a few of us around here actually want to know what your otherworldly UFOs truly are, and the individuals making these fantastic claims.

Lol.., you’d think so, right?... wrong. Just look @ the Roswell Slide threads, and the amount of individuals who thought that particular form of disclosure was the real deal. Pages, and pages, on, and on it went.

This is exactly how mental conditioning works. First you see one hoax exposed, perhaps the Billy Meier case. Then another one comes along, like the "Alien Autopsy" hoax. Then another, and another, like the "Roswell Slides" (which actually most reasonably discerning people looked at and thought "why is this thumbnail super blurry and apparently depicting a mummy in some kind of museum-like display case?" and yawned until it all blew over), and then sooner or later your mind becomes conditioned to believe "all cases are hoaxes" and you're no longer capable of independent rational thought. Your mind is made up about every new story before you even know the first thing about it. So you can no longer see any new development as new, but simply as an extension of the old - even when a wide variety of the past indicators of a hoax aren't apparent or applicable with the new development, as we're seeing with this dramatic AATIP story.

Here we have a highly credible and straight-talking former intelligence analyst who worked at the Pentagon analyzing this stuff, telling us what many if not most of us have been saying for decades: these exotic aerial devices are physically real and they're not ours. And in fact their key performance characteristics remain consistent with at least 70 years of observations. We also have a pair of our top fighter pilots describing exactly what happened near the Nimitz carrier group, and why their incident clearly falls outside of any conventional human-technology explanation.

But you and many others are mentally conditioned to believe that every new development is like the previous ones; either a hoax, or a mistake, or an opportunistic money-grab. You're psychologically incapable of sifting the wheat from the chaff at this point. Which is why the rest of us who are still capable of evaluating each new development on its own merits or lack thereof, are so sick of hearing you play the same tired old record over and over again. Just because A and B and C equaled X, does not mean that D equals X. Its a logical fallacy to believe that all cases are false, just because many other cases have been false. New things do happen. It takes an agile mind, not a conditioned one, to see a thing for what it is with clarity and objectivity.

The revelations of the AATIP and the Nimitz case are new - not an extension of the old pattern of hoaxes and frauds. But you can only see all of this through your incredibly jaded, mentally conditioned old lens. And you're convinced that this makes you smarter than everyone else, but in reality you're exhibiting the opposite of intelligence: a completely calcified and immutable mind. You're starting with your conclusion ("it's all BS, like the stuff before"), and then looking for ways to prove your foregone conclusion correct. That's the opposite of true skepticism. And in fact it's identical to cult-like thinking - both are examples of mental conditioning.

I can't fathom how anyone could hear Cmdrs. Fravor and Slaight describe their experiences, and see their exemplary history as Black Aces fighter pilots, and dismiss their accounts as anything other than a legitimate encounter with non-human technology. That Tic-Tac ufo either hacked their on-board computers or intercepted their encrypted transmissions, then darted ahead of them to their CAP point and stopped there. Yeah - they were definitely dealing with a vastly superior piece of technology that made their F-18s seem about as sophisticated as a biplane.

But instead of actually recognizing the incredible significance of that incident, and the jaw-dropping revelation of the AATIP with its 36+ technical reports generated over the last 10 years which are probably game-changing documents that we all know exist now, all we hear from you and your cynical kind are wild and baseless conspiracy theories, personal attacks against everyone who helped to break these stories, and silly wicked allegations of deceitful profiteering.

Enough already. We all know what you have to say about this. So stop filling pages and pages of this thread with your unwavering cynicism retold in a billion different ways, before you turn this thread into a sewer like the last one and somebody has to lock it down, again.

 

[SRL+]

Noticing that you’ve practically written more in your one posting here than I have in this entire thread, you are of course, entitled to your own opinion.

 

[Hollywood Tomfortas]

See Paracast boys (and maybe 1 or 2 girls? Hi @Constance and @Nina Garfinkel). Sometimes rabble rousing pays off especially on FB groups.)

I copy for you below Garry Nolan’s response to my goading on the TTSA FB group and my cheerily snarky response to him.

========

Garry Nolan Tom Mellett -- I never calculated anything, so please retract the claim that I calculated something. Disinformation doesn't help your cause of rabble rousing. I reported a claim from the pilots and radar. Period. In addition-- sorry to say this-- no one said we'd land a saucer on the White House lawn. We provide chain of evidence information. And sorry if everything isn't laid out for you like a sunday picnic. The data is sadly classified. And there are good security reasons for that. Do you want to know how paranoid CIA and DoD people are about giving out classified information? They lose their jobs and their pensions-- or they end up in prison. All you lose is you Facebook reputation, such as it is. No wonder Jacques warned me the UFO community is full of whiners and I should stay away.


Tom Mellett Hello Garry, so nice to hear from you. If you like, I will copy your message here in full and post it on both Paracast and Metabunk, including your scolding of me. “It takes a village” you know.

For the record, I am not a member of the UFO Community. I am neither believer nor disbeliever. Now that helps both my rabble rousing and disinforming, but I digress.

Say hello to Jacques for me. Last time I saw him, we ate lunch together (with Hal Puthoff and Christopher Bird) at the SSE Conference in Austin in 1994.

And also, for the record, my reputation was in the tank long before Facebook, so I can’t even blame Mark Zuckerberg for that.

Am I missing a gene for disclosure? You’re the guy to ask, but I’m afraid there are a hundred or so ahead of me in the line outside your office.

In the immortals words of Oat Willie:
”Onward through the fog!”

Wow, am I becoming a diplomat or what? Gary Nolan demands an apology from me. I give him the apology and then look what he writes. Actually makes me realize that I don’t have to be an asshole on the Internet anymore. What an idea!

=========

Garry Nolan Please go ahead and do what you want. But just to be clear-- you are "threatening me" with "metabunk", LOL? I don't write anything here I don't expect to be read. People on metabunk have already copied my commentary to there. But you missed the main point. I never calculated anything, and you said I did, but I suppose being wrong and apologizing is not in your list of talents. Real scientists own up to their mistakes. Still waiting for you to finish your deflections and own up to the mistake. Show me where I made calculations and posted such calculations.

·

Tom Mellett Garry Nolan , I apologize to you for publishing the erroneous information that you did the calculations from the radar data. I was wrong to do so.

But please tell me, why are you so self-absorbed that you would actually believe that I could theaten you with Metabunk?



Garry Nolan Tom Mellett I accept your apology. We can be friends again haha... I hold no grudges.

I was referring to this quote " If you like, I will copy your message here in full and post it on both Paracast and Metabunk, including your scolding of me. “It takes a village” you know. "

That appeared to be a threat to rally those groups against me-- which <shrug> I don't see them as a threat because they are honest people trying to suss out understanding from minimal data. Look-- I will be the first to state (and I have publicly as well as within TTS) that more information needs to be shared to garner trust. Personally, I would have approached the release like writing a science paper and have all the answers and prepared information to counter the potential critiques. I would have rounded up reasonable skeptics to pressure test things. That would have elevated the discussion considerably. But... I am not in charge of those video releases.

I have been provided information I cannot share publicly that give me 'faith' that the underlying data is correct. Yes, I keep in the back of my mind that someone might be using me or lying to me, or they are simply misinformed. I don’t blindly trust. But I know people behind the scenes who were involved in the detailed followup to some of these cases "as they occurred" (the 2015 case, for instance)—and that gives me some element of trust-- because I was speaking to these people as the reports were coming in in 2015.

There's a ton of questions I have and I get back the answer "That would reveal operational capabilities". As a scientist that frustrates the hell out of me. I don't like asking people to "trust" me. I have stated in other forums I respect absolutely what people such as Mike West are doing. They point out key inconsistencies. That's good science. I just happen have been made aware of information (which could be wrong) that APPEAR to question West's calculations. I am trying to get information on the positioning of the raytheon device and the numbers reported on the visual to see if they comport with Mike's assumptions. If they DO comport with Mike's assumptions... then I even have a problem with the video. But one issue I have raised are the waves in the background as the craft is followed. That alone—independent of hidden information—seems at odds with Mike’s conclusion the craft is 12,500 feet in altitude.

So—let’s all take it down a notch (me included) and work on facts, try to keep motivations and hidden agendas for the conspiracy theory websites, and just focus on the science. It’s frankly the only reason I am interested in this area.

Per your other aside. I don’t think there’s a gene for disclosure.

I do think there are genes for a form of intuition we don’t fully understand.

 

[Hollywood Tomfortas]

Then Paul Scott Anderson tells me that Bruce Macabee never had access to radar but made his calculations from the same FLIR video everyone else did. Then he copies Bruce’s revised speed calculations, which triggers Gary Nolan to start rethinking the speed calculations followed by a great comment about a former marine F-18 pilot’s assessment of the video.

============

Paul Scott Anderson Tom Mellett I never said he had access to the radar data. He did his calculations from the video. But he is an expert in this field of image/video analysis so his input has merit and I noted his analysis agreed with what Nolan said he was told. This is his actual statement from a few days ago (works out to about 380 mph):

REVISION OF SPEED CALCULATION MARCH 12

I have re-evaluated the speed of crossing the FOV (1.5 deg is assumed) during the short time that the image of the water was nearly stationary and pointing at a fixed area about 10 nm from the plane. In my TENTATIVE CALCULATION I estimated "4 to 3 seconds" of crossing time. However, when I subsequently counted the number of video frames I found that it took about 55 frames at 30 frames/ sec which corresponds to 55/30 = 1.8 sec. The exact distance to the object at that time is not known because the system had not yet locked on. However when it did lock on a short time later the range was about 4.1 nm and decreasing. I therefore "guesstimate" the range at 4.5 nm. The width of the FOV is 1.5 deg x 0.0174 rad/deg = 0.026 rad which corresponds to 0.117 nm at 4.5 nm distance, The object crossed the FOV area at an angle of about 45 deg so the distance traveled as it crossed the FOV was about (0.026 rad) x 1.41(to account for the 45 degree crossing) x 4.5 nm = 0.165 nm. It traveled this distance in about 1.8 sec for a speed of 0.092 nm/sec which is about 330 kt....about twice the larger speed previously calculated but certainly not an earth shaking speed.



Garry Nolan Paul Scott Anderson -- Some of the things I have been wondering is this. First... we all know the actual video from which this is derived is MUCH longer. What was cut out was likely removed for "operational capabilities" reasons-- revealed information the DoD felt would be useful to enemies of the US. The vehicle (or albatross...

) might have been moving at different speeds during this time frame. They image the thing from 4 miles away... so someone else had to vector them to nearby the thing AND they had to be told where to look. Try to visually find something in a 4 mile spread from 25,000 feet up. You can assume that someone else had electronic eyes on the object (uhmmm... radar) that allowed the pilots to know where to look. That's where the speed estimates came from. The number I was given (for all I know) might have been from BEFORE or AFTER the video was taken. So-- Mike West and others might be right per the speed estimate for the 22 seconds the video provides (except they still don't explain why the object is in the same focal plane as the waves-- which would not happen if imaged from 25000 feet and the object claimed by metabunk to be at 12,500 foot altitude). And the speed I was told was in the multi hundred of mph could be right. They could be from different times. Just being honest and trying to trace the source of discrepancies.



Dave Harries A former Marine Corps F-18 pilot posted her opinion of this 'Go Fast' vid a few days back. A bird, not unusually large, nor unusually fast.



Paul Scott Anderson Garry Nolan Good points. I wish we could get more of the background info which of course would really help. And more pilots like Fravor willing to talk. I have no idea who is closer to the truth about the speed, West or Maccabee, I'm just watching all this unfold with rapt curiosity. And thank you for all the input you have been willing to share here, it is much appreciated.

 

[MrBeliever]

I do think there are genes for a form of intuition we don’t fully understand.

As in, remote viewing?

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

I do think there are genes for a form of intuition we don’t fully understand.

As in, remote viewing?

I don't think that's what he meant. Remote viewing - setting aside the whole issue of whether it works or not - is a specific procedural technique developed by Ingo Swann and others that's very distinct from the commonplace notion of intuition.

Probably everyone I know has suddenly experienced, at one point in their lives or another, an inexplicable certainty about something without any evident causal explanation. Perhaps it's simply hearing the phone ring and knowing that it's some old friend calling before you even look at the phone. Or it can be even stranger, like knowing that something has happened or will happen, for which you have no discernible reason to expect, and then finding out that you were right. That's what he seems to mean, to me anyway. I think it's a legitimate phenomenon, but the brain and human psychology are very complex systems so perhaps there's a prosaic explanation for it. I doubt it though - it seems like a sensing capability of some kind that we don't understand at all. And if Rupert Sheldrake's experiments with dogs and their owners are legit, then apparently it's been proven to exist with animals as well, because he ran some studies with dog owners being sent home at random times of the day, and apparently the dogs at home ran to the door as if they knew that the owner was on the way home.

 

[Realm]

REVISION OF SPEED CALCULATION MARCH 12

I have re-evaluated the speed of crossing the FOV (1.5 deg is assumed) during the short time that the image of the water was nearly stationary and pointing at a fixed area about 10 nm from the plane. In my TENTATIVE CALCULATION I estimated "4 to 3 seconds" of crossing time. However, when I subsequently counted the number of video frames I found that it took about 55 frames at 30 frames/ sec which corresponds to 55/30 = 1.8 sec. The exact distance to the object at that time is not known because the system had not yet locked on. However when it did lock on a short time later the range was about 4.1 nm and decreasing. I therefore "guesstimate" the range at 4.5 nm. The width of the FOV is 1.5 deg x 0.0174 rad/deg = 0.026 rad which corresponds to 0.117 nm at 4.5 nm distance, The object crossed the FOV area at an angle of about 45 deg so the distance traveled as it crossed the FOV was about (0.026 rad) x 1.41(to account for the 45 degree crossing) x 4.5 nm = 0.165 nm. It traveled this distance in about 1.8 sec for a speed of 0.092 nm/sec which is about 330 kt....about twice the larger speed previously calculated but certainly not an earth shaking speed.

He is trying to calculate the speed from the video frames from a few seconds, with inaccurate values based on his assumptions! It's evident he is not up to this task. He is basically just calculating the effects of the inaccuracies of his own values. He should have realized by now how inaccurate those are, if his earlier calculation gave 100 kn and now it's 330 kn. His results are all over the place, because his initial values are all over the place.

Garry Nolan Paul Scott Anderson -- Some of the things I have been wondering is this. First... we all know the actual video from which this is derived is MUCH longer. What was cut out was likely removed for "operational capabilities" reasons-- revealed information the DoD felt would be useful to enemies of the US. The vehicle (or albatross...

) might have been moving at different speeds during this time frame.

So now he is appealing to hidden information what it could have done outside the evidence. Getting pretty ridiculous again...

They image the thing from 4 miles away... so someone else had to vector them to nearby the thing AND they had to be told where to look. Try to visually find something in a 4 mile spread from 25,000 feet up. You can assume that someone else had electronic eyes on the object (uhmmm... radar) that allowed the pilots to know where to look.

First he said he was a scientist, and then he makes assumptions like that. They could have as well have just tested their instruments to random locations and then a bird just happened to hit the scene. For all we know, that actual long video may show just tons of views where nothing of interesting happened, and this bird was the "money shot".

That's where the speed estimates came from. The number I was given (for all I know) might have been from BEFORE or AFTER the video was taken.

So who gave him that number? And especially if it happened before this video, so before the target was actually locked, how would they even know what was picked by the radar was the same object? And if radar picked that up, why didn't they just track it with radar then, instead of doing that contrast lock? My understanding is that the ATFLIR could track targets from the data given by the radar.

So-- Mike West and others might be right per the speed estimate for the 22 seconds the video provides (except they still don't explain why the object is in the same focal plane as the waves-- which would not happen if imaged from 25000 feet and the object claimed by metabunk to be at 12,500 foot altitude).

On what basis it is in the same focal plane? The object is blurred while the water is not and vice versa.

And the speed I was told was in the multi hundred of mph could be right. They could be from different times. Just being honest and trying to trace the source of discrepancies.

So let's see what those sources could possibly be. Here are the alternative "interpretations":

Object at high altitude, low speed: Based on what we actually see in the video, the actual values given by the instruments, basic trigonometry that shows it could not have been flying low with that data.
Object at low altitude, high speed: Based on claims made by Garry Nolan, that are based on assumptions and alleged information that is not displayed in the video, is in conflict with the information that is actually displayed.

Gee, I wonder what could possibly be the source of those discrepancies.

 

[Realm]

Probably everyone I know has suddenly experienced, at one point in their lives or another, an inexplicable certainty about something without any evident causal explanation. Perhaps it's simply hearing the phone ring and knowing that it's some old friend calling before you even look at the phone. Or it can be even stranger, like knowing that something has happened or will happen, for which you have no discernible reason to expect, and then finding out that you were right. That's what he seems to mean, to me anyway. I think it's a legitimate phenomenon, but the brain and human psychology are very complex systems so perhaps there's a prosaic explanation for it.

Yes, it's a legitimate phenomenon known as confirmation bias. Here's another highly relevant example:

One study showed how selective memory can maintain belief in extrasensory perception (ESP).[39] Believers and disbelievers were each shown descriptions of ESP experiments. Half of each group were told that the experimental results supported the existence of ESP, while the others were told they did not. In a subsequent test, participants recalled the material accurately, apart from believers who had read the non-supportive evidence. This group remembered significantly less information and some of them incorrectly remembered the results as supporting ESP.[39]

Confirmation bias - Wikipedia

Since your superstitious/pseudo-scientific beliefs have nothing to do with this thread, and your contributions here have been just highly illogical and inaccurate complaints anyway, why don't you take your beliefs to some other thread, such as one dedicated for pseudo-scientific beliefs of Scientologist scammers like Ingo Swann.

 

[Nina Garfinkel]

Hi Nina,

Thanks for putting up this link to Mellon’s OpEd piece. I checked on the Comment section which now has 1300 comments, and the very first one I read answers Mellon’s question for him. I quote the comment:

Go to this organization's website, and you quickly see that along with the UFO division, they have one on telepathy and another one called "Entertainment," promoting their sci-fi properties.

Credibility begins to slide about then.

Maybe the Pentagon doesn’t care because To the Stars has no real credibility, or maybe it’s the very lack of credibility of TTSA that the Pentagon wants to keep them in the business on non-disclosure. Either way, TTSA remains funny and entertaining, though it’s starting to get real boring now.

 

[Nina Garfinkel]

Hi Nina,

Thanks for putting up this link to Mellon’s OpEd piece. I checked on the Comment section which now has 1300 comments, and the very first one I read answers Mellon’s question for him. I quote the comment:

Go to this organization's website, and you quickly see that along with the UFO division, they have one on telepathy and another one called "Entertainment," promoting their sci-fi properties.

Credibility begins to slide about then.

Maybe the Pentagon doesn’t care because To the Stars has no real credibility, or maybe it’s the very lack of credibility of TTSA that the Pentagon wants to keep them in the business on non-disclosure. Either way, TTSA remains funny and entertaining, though it’s starting to get real boring now.

Declassified Military Video Shows 'UFO' Off East Coast
Here is an additional link, one amongst several to mainstream media reporting that popped up today. What is most interesting to me again is the largely non-mocking taken in these articles. In my mind, this is a real change from what has gone on in the past. Setting aside judgements about the TTSA as well as armchair speculations about what is actually caught on these associated military videos, the last quote of the above article says it all really: "What we lack above all," he [Mellon] wrote, "is recognition that this issue warrants a serious collection and analysis effort."

 

[MrBeliever]

I don't think that's what he meant. Remote viewing - setting aside the whole issue of whether it works or not - is a specific procedural technique developed by Ingo Swann and others that's very distinct from the commonplace notion of intuition.

Probably everyone I know has suddenly experienced, at one point in their lives or another, an inexplicable certainty about something without any evident causal explanation. Perhaps it's simply hearing the phone ring and knowing that it's some old friend calling before you even look at the phone. Or it can be even stranger, like knowing that something has happened or will happen, for which you have no discernible reason to expect, and then finding out that you were right. That's what he seems to mean, to me anyway. I think it's a legitimate phenomenon, but the brain and human psychology are very complex systems so perhaps there's a prosaic explanation for it. I doubt it though - it seems like a sensing capability of some kind that we don't understand at all. And if Rupert Sheldrake's experiments with dogs and their owners are legit, then apparently it's been proven to exist with animals as well, because he ran some studies with dog owners being sent home at random times of the day, and apparently the dogs at home ran to the door as if they knew that the owner was on the way home.

But so... TTSA's geneticist guy is talking to us about ESP?

All right... Put your tinfoil hats on...

I'll be honest, I'm a bit spooked by the Bigelow connection, Hal Puthoff's presence in all this, and the way Elizondo talked about beliefs in "demonic forces" coming from higher up in the DoD. A lot of people took it to mean dumb superstitions were holding back disclosure, but if you've read anything on Skinwalker Ranch, you know "demonic forces" is not that unreasonable a description. It was a serious investigation by the DIA, but it all reads like a campfire ghost story.

I was reading this the other day: NIDS - TSE and cattle mutilations full article

Of note is the wording at the end of the first paragraph of the Introduction. "there is considerable evidence that the phenomenon is real." Hmmmmm. An interesting choice of words.

It's suggested that the tic-tacs can pre-empt pilots' movements, and the descriptions of nuclear missile silo incidents suggest remote manipulation; not just an EM pulse that destroyed all electronics, but some kind of remote action that specifically disabled the weapons, if you will.

I wonder how far they'll take this, but it feels like the potential space aliens are nothing compared to this "truth" that's coming out. We're entering a new world where humans may have innate extra-sensory powers and every unexplained phenomenon can now be related to UFO activity.

Elizondo did mention something about AATIP being created in the wake of 9/11; basically, that the extra defense funding that resulted allowed the program to see the light of day. Who was enemy number one on 9/11? Not Afghanistan, not Iraq... It was religious fundamentalism!

I propose this new conspiracy theory: the DoD is trying to protect America by erasing religion off the face of the Earth. Jesus doesn't exist, but aliens do, and they can hear your thoughts, so you can still pray away. Oh yeah, and the government's psychic spies can hear your thoughts too, so behave. If we eventually find out that it was all a big lie, it'll have been generations since anyone took religion seriously. Mission accomplished?

 

[Realm]

Here's one recent article from CNET:
UFO caught on video? Skeptics weigh in on weird footage

To The Stars says the video, caught with an infrared camera system, comes from a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet flight in 2015. It appears to show a fast-moving UFO flying over water. One of the voices on the video seems to be a pilot saying, "Wow! What is that, man?"

The video is only a few seconds long. "The Department of Defense did not release those videos. I cannot confirm their authenticity. I don't have any additional info to provide," said Tom Crosson, a spokesman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Does that mean they asked for a statement for this new article, in regard to this new video? It certainly sounds like so, instead of it being some earlier more generic statement dropped to this context. That would be yet another denial that the DoD has released anything.