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Pentagon UFO Study - Media Monitoring

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uforadio

Paranormal Adept
Since previous thread has been closed:
From The NY Times: The Pentagon's Secret UFO Program

I am continuing with media reports within this new thread.
For previous reports, check the whole compilation here:
Pentagon UFO Study

Here is the latest batch:


2018-08-03 - WMUR9: New Local Interview with Pilot David Fravor on the USS Nimitz UFO Incident
Thanks to Ken Jason & Stig Agermose for this lead:


One leftover recently discovered:
2017-12-19 - Fox26: Mike Damante Comments the Pentagon UFO Study

Best wishes.
 
Dear colleagues.

Finally, the 3rd video is now released.

You can check the Washington Post article and TTS page devoted to 3rd video on the links below:

Perspective | The military keeps encountering UFOs. Why doesn’t the Pentagon care?

2015 GO FAST FOOTAGE

Fantastic footage. Large, fast moving object, no visible wings, or signs of propulsion. A true unknown. I am sure the usual suspects will come forward and say "its a bug on the camera..." or some other BS, but I don't see that at all. It is an object moving at a very high rate of speed over the ocean.
 
Finally, the 3rd video is now released.

You can check the Washington Post article and TTS page devoted to 3rd video on the links below

Well, that was seriously disappointing. A brief clip of a tiny blob, apparently traveling in a straight line at more or less constant speed. And the only context is "East Coast in 2015", like the Gimbal, according to unconfirmed reports.

I believe Semivan had said in some interview that they had learnt from their mistakes and were at least doing some video analysis this time before the release, or something like that. Was that their best? Couldn't they even guesstimate the speed and size of that thing?

Furthermore, why was that published in the opinions section of Washington Post? Surely this can't be the "game-changer #2" that NYT was supposed to publish according to Leslie Kean? Either that fell apart, or the NYT has something else in the works, hopefully much better.

It's telling that Mellon just mentioned this new clip in one sentence, and wrote a whole lot more about the Nimitz incident again.
 
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Well, that was seriously disappointing. A brief clip of a tiny blob, apparently traveling in a straight line at more or less constant speed. And the only context is "East Coast in 2015", like the Gimbal, according to unconfirmed reports.

I believe Semivan had said in some interview that they had learnt from their mistakes and were at least doing some video analysis this time before the release, or something like that. Was that their best? Couldn't they even guesstimate the speed and size of that thing?

Furthermore, why was that published in the opinions section of Washington Post? Surely this can't be the "game-changer #2" that NYT was supposed to publish according to Leslie Kean? Either that fell apart, or the NYT has something else in the works, hopefully much better.

It's telling that Mellon just mentioned this new clip in one sentence, and wrote a whole lot more about the Nimitz incident again.

The footage is still interesting. Anyone who draws any conclusions other than it is "an unknown" is being too ideological. It is good footage of a strange flying object. I think the reason Mellon would mention the Nimitz case again, isn't because this case isn't worth our consideration, but rather because the Nimitz case is better in that you have the radar returns showing objects behaving strangely, then you have the pilots visual sighting, then you have the FLIR footage. When you then include this new footage, alongside the Nimitz encounter, you start to see a cumulative case for unknown objects which cries out for more research.

That's Mellon's point.

Not aliens, not "flying saucers" not "contacees" not "reframing the debate..." He is basically saying, we can't even have a cogent conversation (or debate) about any of this because we know so little, and few resources have been directed at it, by credible and qualified individuals.
 
Not aliens, not "flying saucers" not "contacees" not "reframing the debate..." He is basically saying, we can't even have a cogent conversation (or debate) about any of this because we know so little, and few resources have been directed at it, by credible and qualified individuals.

Bummer is..., these guys @ Sandia National Laboratories: Exceptional Service in the National Interest have developed military technology, which is a quarter century up to thirty years ahead of anything currently known. For instance, cloaking technology that MIT is currently developing, Sandia could have been working on for decades.

How can anyone possibly get to the core of the truth if various governments are using their citizens as test subjects while developing exotic defense systems?
 
The footage is still interesting. Anyone who draws any conclusions other than it is "an unknown" is being too ideological. It is good footage of a strange flying object. I think the reason Mellon would mention the Nimitz case again, isn't because this case isn't worth our consideration, but rather because the Nimitz case is better in that you have the radar returns showing objects behaving strangely, then you have the pilots visual sighting, then you have the FLIR footage. When you then include this new footage, alongside the Nimitz encounter, you start to see a cumulative case for unknown objects which cries out for more research.

I don't have the time right now to make proper calculations, but if that rangefinder estimate is close to correct, I think that object is closer to missile/drone size (or smaller) than a jet (the Nimitz UFO was jet sized), and the speed also doesn't seem to be that high based on how it moves in the beginning when the camera is more stationary. The blob is so small it would be pretty hard to see any features or exhausts, and I think the TTSA is just disingenuous in their attempt to compare that small blob to a close up shot of a jet. Besides, if that was a missile or a drone, it could be just coasting with minimal exhaust plumes. I would also like to know how it moves relative to the wind, but that's yet another piece of information we don't have. The given numbers also seem to indicate it doesn't actually fly that close to the water as TTSA indicates. Which would mean the object itself might move much slower than it seems because of the movement of the jet.

As I said in another thread, building a cumulative case would require that the cases would be somewhat similar to support each other. I'm not confident that's what we are seeing here.
 
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I don't have the time right now to make proper calculations, but if that rangefinder estimate is close to correct, I think that object is closer to missile/drone size (or smaller) than a jet (the Nimitz UFO was jet sized), and the speed also doesn't seem to be that high based on how it moves in the beginning when the camera is more stationary. The blob is so small it would be pretty hard to see any features or exhausts, and I think the TTSA is just disingenuous in their attempt to compare that small blob to a close up shot of a jet. Besides, if that was a missile or a drone, it could be just coasting with minimal exhaust plumes. I would also like to know how it moves relative to the wind, but that's yet another piece of information we don't have. The given numbers also seem to indicate it doesn't actually fly that close to the water as TTSA indicates. Which would mean the object itself might move much slower than it seems because of the movement of the jet.

As I said in another thread, building a cumulative case would require that the cases would be somewhat similar to support each other. I'm not confident that's what we are seeing here.


I don't really have a problem with anything that you said, my point is that more research needs to be done so we can draw firmer conclusions. Bruce Macabee is working on some calculations, and the filmmaker Jeremy Corbell is currently speaking to someone close to this specific event, so perhaps the two of them will shed some light on this case.
 
I don't really have a problem with anything that you said, my point is that more research needs to be done so we can draw firmer conclusions. Bruce Macabee is working on some calculations, and the filmmaker Jeremy Corbell is currently speaking to someone close to this specific event, so perhaps the two of them will shed some light on this case.

Ok, let's try to crunch some numbers.

The various values of significance seem to develop as follows over the duration of the video with my current understanding what those signify and what units they use (please correct me if you interpret them differently), and converted to SI units to ease calculations:

time: 220-254 seconds
laser rangefinder distance to target: 4.4-3.3 nautical miles (8149-6112 meters)
closing velocity (relative speed to rangefinder target): 220-150 knots (113-77 meters/second)
calibrated airspeed 252-258 knots (130-133 meters/second)
altitude 25000-25010 feet (7620 meters)

sensor aimed 35-58 degrees left of aircraft axis, 43-58 degrees during target locked
sensor aimed 22-35 degrees below aircraft axis, 26-35 degrees during target locked

from 220-237 seconds aircraft close to level (within 5 degrees), then mostly around 15 degree left turn

field of view: NAR, Zoom factor 1.0, apparently 1.5 degree FOV

Vertical distance from aircraft to target at the beginning and end of tracking:
sin(26 degrees)*8149m = 3572m
sin(35 degrees)*6112m = 3506m

Edit: We can probably get a bit better estimates if we assume normal rounding rules and look at those moments when the rangefinder estimates just changed from 4.4->4.3 and 3.5->3.4. In both cases the angles also changed quite soon after, so we can assume something like .4 for them. With those, the estimates would be:
sin(26.4 degrees)*8056m = 3582m
sin(34.4 degrees)*6390m = 3610m
Making it even more probable the object stayed pretty much at constant altitude, at around 7620-3600=4020m.

Which means the altitude is pretty constant and around 4100 meters from sea level. That's definitely not "very low over the water" as the TTSA claims!

With a 1.5 degree FOV, the area the view covers (horizontal and vertical) at those rangefinder distances is:
tan(1.5 degrees)*8149m=213m
tan(1.5 degrees)*6112m=160m

It's tricky to see how many pixels that tiny blob takes on the screen as the video quality isn't that good. The object seems to be somewhere close to 2-3 meters relative to that view size, but it's so blurry it's hard to say. In any case, it doesn't seem to be anywhere close to what the Nimitz tic tac was, just like I initially suspected.

Initially when the camera is pointed 44 degrees left, and the jet is moving at 130m/s, the horizontal speed of the jet towards the target is:
130*cos(44)=93.5 m/s

Since the camera is pointed 26 degrees down, the overall speed towards the target is:
93.5*cos(26)=84 m/s

At the end with camera 58 degrees left, 35 degrees down, the horizontal speed towards the target would be:
133*cos(58)=70.5 m/s

And overall speed towards it:
70.5*cos(35)=58 m/s

Closing velocity should indicate how fast the objects are closing each other:
Calculate closing velocities

So the rangefinder indicates they are closing in each other at 113-77 m/s, and the portion of the jet going towards the target is 84-58 m/s, which means the target speed towards the jet is 29-19 m/s.

The target is on the left side of the jet at 43-58 degrees, and the angle seems to increase and distance decrease even when the jet is turning a bit towards the right at one point. So it seems the jet is about to go past it and starts to turn towards it. Everything seems to indicate it's actually going quite slowly.

Seems like those at Metabunk as well "Dr. Emil Schaffhausen" on the YouTube comments of that video have come to similar conclusions as I above. That is, the object is actually flying high and slowly, and is quite small. I also have to agree with Metabunk that balloons (if only we knew the wind direction) and large birds would be plausible explanations. That means, the TTSA really dropped the ball on this one, claiming it's flying low and fast. And they were supposed to have learned from past mistakes...
 
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So, the bird theory basically means:

- This is a HUGE sea bird that can be spotted and locked on from 4 nautical miles away.
- It does not visibly flap its wings at any point despite the excellent focusing capabilities of the equipment, and even though its wingspan should theoretically account for up to 80% of its width.
- This bird's body temperature is lower than the cold water of the Atlantic Ocean. All known species of bird have body temperatures that match or exceed the average mammalian body temperature of 37°C. Except this one.
 
So, the bird theory basically means:

- This is a HUGE sea bird that can be spotted and locked on from 4 nautical miles away.
- It does not visibly flap its wings at any point despite the excellent focusing capabilities of the equipment, and even though its wingspan should theoretically account for up to 80% of its width.
- This bird's body temperature is lower than the cold water of the Atlantic Ocean. All known species of bird have body temperatures that match or exceed the average mammalian body temperature of 37°C. Except this one.

Actually, it might flap visibly. If you look at the version that is on the Washington Post article, put that on pause, and move the playback position slowly manually near the beginning when the target is not tracked yet, the object seems to change shape and size in a way and rate that could very well fit to a bird flapping its wings. The quality isn't really good enough to make any definite conclusions, and some of the effects might be caused by video artifacts due to fast movement and compression. It also seems to leave some trail behind it, but that might be caused by just the movement of the air or some video artifacts as well.

The size is difficult to estimate as it really is a small blob with few pixels, and the artifacts might make it look bigger or smaller than it actually is. I believe the video compression is more likely to soften the edges so that it looks bigger than it actually is. So might be less than 2 meters, well within the wingspan range of a number of birds. It actually looks very small in some frames, almost disappearing at times, which would also fit well to a bird with relatively small body and larger wings.

As for the temperature, what we see is probably a complex combination of the actual temperature, the effects of airflow, instrument artifacts etc. I don't believe it can really show anything within the accuracy of some tens of degrees.

Edit:
It really looks like wings when looking at the part before the target lock in more detail. After the target is locked, it looks more rounded and featureless. So it seems that tracking mode actually loses some detail. If I had to bet, I would say it's a bird.

After looking at it for a while in slo-mo, it's pretty hard not to see a bird there. There are some frames where it looks just like a bird with wings.
 
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Interest was not so much in posted videos, but in the comments made by the quoted official and the fact that the article appeared in the venerable WP. Taken together with the NYTimes article of a few months back, this level of willingness to report on the subject by well-regarded news sources in a non-mocking way hasn't been seen in decades.
 
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.
 
the fact that the article appeared in the venerable WP.

Mind you, it's not an article by their actual reporters but an opinion piece on their opinions section, under "PostEverything" and "Outlook":

Opinions

From that op-ed:
Defense Department officials who analyze the relevant intelligence confirm more than a dozen such incidents off the East Coast alone since 2015.
That's not too surprising if they are filming birds... And it sure looks awfully lot like that's what they have done here.

But here's another kicker (courtesy of S.R.L.): Jeremy Corbell has already posted this clip online 2 years ago!
vimeo.com/150511001

It seems we waited for several months for them to post an old clip of a bird! Even more significantly, they had months to analyze this, and they apparently got it all wrong with their claims starting with high speed and low altitude. Furthermore, did the AATIP actually analyze this? Does this indicate their quality of work as well?

James Clarkson posted this on January 1st, as I have mentioned earlier:
A recent commentary in an aviation magazine pointed out that the UFO videos do not have time, date, or location. One of the pilots is heard to identify one of the alleged UFOs as a drone aircraft. It appears that 2 of the 3 alleged UFO videos have been on the Internet before. So, Mr. Tom DeLonge – “Where’s the beef?”
2017 – Fleeing Corporate Ufology and Finding My Way

So apparently he knew that the TTSA was about to post an old clip back then. The Gimbal clip is still the only piece of information they have published that is not known to have been online before. And for that, they have already gathered $2.5 million. Pricey blob.

Edit: It seems that Corbell has actually uploaded this new clip in place of some old one:
And the Vimeo page is showing the original timestamp, not when it was last modified.

So this might be a new video after all, maybe. Although that hardly matters too much, if it's just a bird.

The Vimeo metadata is pretty weird:
{"clip":{"id":150511001,"title":"EAST COAST 2015","description":null,"uploaded_on":"2016-01-02 01:14:17","uploaded_on_relative":"2 years ago","uploaded_on_full":"Saturday, January 2, 2016 at 1:14 AM EST"
...
"uploadDate":"2016-01-02T01:14:17-05:00","dateModified":"2018-03-10T14:02:39-05:00"
So it clearly indicates it's uploaded two years ago, and that's what it shows on the page, but then there's a modified timestamp for today.

Edit: Corbell has explained what he did here:
"Go Fast" footage was posted 2 years ago in Jeremy Corbell's Vimeo account • r/UFOs
 
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My understanding is that the original footage is in very, very high resolution. This object was 4-5 miles away, but the Raytheon device is built to track and identify military aircraft like drones and missiles up to 40 miles away. There was a perfectly clear line of sight. The object was being tracked and did not change in shape after the FLIR pod started automatically tracking it with high accuracy.

If it is a bird, it's suspicious that this object would average out to a solid black blob, or that the equipment would have trouble achieving focus on it... We should see feathers!
 
My question is; why are the pilots laughing when a normal human would be extremely concerned, especially in light of national security?

Could it be that alien visitation just so happens to be that humorous?
 
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My understanding is that the original footage is in very, very high resolution. This object was 4-5 miles away, but the Raytheon device is built to track and identify military aircraft like drones and missiles up to 40 miles away. There was a perfectly clear line of sight. The object was being tracked and did not change in shape after the FLIR pod started automatically tracking it with high accuracy.

If it is a bird, it's suspicious that this object would average out to a solid black blob, or that the equipment would have trouble achieving focus on it... We should see feathers!

Your assumptions do not seem to be reasonable. The actual resolution of that thing is probably quite close to what we are seeing. Remember that it's meant to be useful where it's used, and those pilots are not looking at individual pixels there. A higher resolution would just increase cost of image processing and storage and so on, with limited benefits. With those sort of ranges haze is usually always an issue, so that no matter how good the optics and resolution, you wouldn't probably see feathers anyway. I believe poor weather conditions are actually one of the primary usage scenarios for the ATFLIR, which further reduces the usability of high resolution.

If the resolution is close to what the videos show, one pixel corresponds to something like 20-30cm, and in practice the useful resolution is a lot less.

As for that "tracking with high accuracy", it seems that tracking actually loses accuracy, and a lot, which looks to be quite a significant finding. Just look at that WP clip in slo-mo before that tracking, and the object seems to take several bird shapes.

Also, if the original data was significantly higher quality, I would expect the downgraded versions to have more consistent quality, so that the object while tracked would look pretty much the same quality as when it's not tracked. Since that's not what we see here, I believe we are actually seeing how the system is hitting its limits.
 
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I think it's notable that the pilots didn't know what it was. That seems to rule against it being a drone.
The biggest problem that we're up against is the extreme/excessive secrecy of the DoD. They're only declassifying the most tepid and ambiguous lo-rez clips from these cases. Why people are so quick to blame TTSA for this is mystifying to me.

After the stunning revelation about the on-going >10-year AATIP which officially concluded based on their professional intelligence assessments of the evidence that we are in fact being visited by unearthly devices, and the fantastic Nimitz case where two highly reputable pilots went public with their story, my default position is simple. Just as we saw with the Nimitz case, the video itself is nothing more than a glimpse that something extraordinary happened - what makes that case so striking is the pilot testimony and the additional context that's been revealed. So I think it's fair to presume that each of these other clips are from very compelling cases as well, but we haven't gotten the context to provide the whole picture which convinced the AATIP that this was a truly anomalous event. Maybe they're hoping that by releasing these innocuous little clips, the pilots will come forward, or perhaps the radar operators, to tell the whole story.

But I am troubled that the TTSA statement doesn't seem to be an accurate description of the footage. I really want to know who's writing these descriptions for TTSA and who gets to review them before they're published. First the "glowing aura" in the Gimbal footage turned out to be (far more likely) just regular infrared bloom - an artifact of the FLIR system when displaying a very hot signature. And now this third clip has been described as an object close to the ocean, moving very fast, when in reality it appears to be quite high and the visual speed is mostly just a parallax effect from the speed of the jet, and the object itself is probably moving less than 100mph (and possibly as low as 60-70mph, which is within the range of bird flight).

I strongly suspect that the really interesting aspects of the case simply haven't been revealed yet. Because I don't think that the director of a >10-year Pentagon intelligence program looking into this kind of thing would go through the trouble of declassifying official military footage of a bird. But with the very limited data that we have now, that kind of banal explanation can't be ruled out, which is very frustrating.

My understanding is that the original footage is in very, very high resolution. This object was 4-5 miles away, but the Raytheon device is built to track and identify military aircraft like drones and missiles up to 40 miles away. There was a perfectly clear line of sight. The object was being tracked and did not change in shape after the FLIR pod started automatically tracking it with high accuracy.

If it is a bird, it's suspicious that this object would average out to a solid black blob, or that the equipment would have trouble achieving focus on it... We should see feathers!
Well, like you said, it's all but certain that the original resolution has been compressed down to this blurry garbage - the true visual acuity of our currently deployed ATFLIR systems is certainly classified, so they probably over-compressed the video just to be overly cautious about our true resolution capabilities. So if it's even possible to determine the shape of this object, it's going to take an expert analysis to determine if, at this rotten resolution, we should be able to tell if it's a bird or not. I very much doubt that is a bird, given the context above. But, once again, the DoD has only given us a brief blurry glimpse with basically no actual intelligence value, so it's premature to say one way or the other.

What burns me up, is that this alleged "ufology" community is now completely overrun with debunker wannabes. So now both sides of the debate are taking the adversarial position, leaving nobody to take the advocate position. This community is now doing the work of the long-standing official disinformation wing of our military counterintelligence network, for free.

So I guess we should all just spend our time over at MetaBunk, because the prevailing views here at the Paracast forums are now simply second-hand re-tellings of Mick West's posts over at his website. I came here to find the counterpoint to that. Since that's not here, I guess we'll have to find it somewhere else.

My question is; why are the pilots laughing when a normal human would be extremely concerned, especially in light of national security?
Could it be that alien visitation just so happens to be that humorous?
Are you just repeating what you read over at MetaBunk? Because this guy made that exact same point this morning:

"It seems to me the pilots are more engaged in the fun and excitement of target-acquisition training or challenge than freaking out about a UFO. While a couple times I seem to hear, "What is that thing?" in the mix of voices, there's no overall impression that these guys see the object itself as a serious issue. The issue seems to be 'can you get a lock on that target?' Wah hoo, you did it! If there is a "What is that thing?" stated in there, it's an aside at best."
"GO FAST" Footage from Tom DeLonge's To The Stars Academy. Bird?
 
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