[krferriter]

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.

[krferriter]

I'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

Original video: https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1006088/dow-uap-pr38-unresolv...

[Loquebantur]

That'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]

I 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.

[Loquebantur]

Parachutes don't repeat their motions exactly. This here is a caustic reflection and it does when the object re-assumes the same relative position.

Military aircraft IR systems don't have lenses, so there is no lens flare. The bloom pattern of the "star object" also tells you as much. That's an IR laser aimed at the FLIR pod.

When you concur this is BH, the trail being white means it is below the detection range. That's usually -60°C for the sky. When that trail "cools rapidly", that would mean it had to radiate strongly, which would obviously be visible here. It's also very unusual for such a "smoke trail" to cool below ambient temperatures (that sky, which isn't white).

That trail also obviously tracks the movement of the object. Which should tell you, it cannot possibly be "a flare". The most likely explanation is an infra-red laser aimed at the FLIR pod, screening the actual vehicle responsible.

[keepamovin]

What 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.

[krferriter]

Birds tend to be well insulated so when they fly at altitude in cold weather they don’t lose all their body heat.

The color it appears on infrared footage depends on the other pixels in frame. It uses dynamic ranges to map infrared values to a visible light spectrum. If the rest of the frame was ice, or you were looking up into space, a bird would probably be rendered as very warm.

If the rest of the frame is a warm ocean surface and warm wind turbines, then a flying bird may be rendered as cold relative to those pixels.

Balloons can also show up as a different temperature than the background of the frame depending on what the balloon is made of, altitude differences (ambient temp at high altitude is colder than at the surface), etc.

[keepamovin]

Could you find some videos for those cases? Would be interesting to see this in action.

[krferriter]

Convenient and good infrared video for all these scenarios is hard to come by but would be useful. I think if the DoD was willing to put some money into the budget for practical recreations of UAP scenarios that they then make public, they could do a lot of good. But there'd probably be pushback about wasting money and also risks of leaking information about military sensor capabilities.

But here is a paper showing penguins photographed with a temperature-sensing IR camera, showing the majority of the surface of their body being around -21ºC thanks to the highly insulating plumage.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3645025/

[keepamovin]

Good find, but I suspect that's quite a rare case - penguins have unique plumage and are also -- ahem, "quite flightless". It might seem I'm splitting hairs (or feathers!) but the "cold white dots" were quite uniform, these cuties are clearly hot/cold patterned - still a good example, bar the flightlessness.

https://x.com/The_Astral_/status/2052922220486205496

Please tell me your feelings on the big picture. I feel it's imbalanced if you provide such certainty to some examples but refrain from a larger perspective. It's okay if you don't want to tho, I just want to know where you're coming from I guess.

[sandworm101]

>> What kind of birds are cold in black-hot imagery? What sort of missiles don't have an exhaust but a "ghost shell" trailing behind?

IR imagery can be flipped between black=hot or white=hot. These systems are about creating contrast to aid visualization, not recording scientific data.

>> What sort of balloons show up as contrast instead of neutral?

A hot air balloon? Any balloon that has recently changed altitude? Any reflective balloon reflecting sunlight (Mylar is common). Or, in thin air, a non-reflective balloon absorbing sunlight and warming faster than it can dissipate that heat.

[keepamovin]

Right - but the white dots I was referring to were shown on black hot imagery calibrated by "streetlights are black hot", "car engine are black hot".

[Morromist]

This is one of those things where an objective person shouldn't start out with a completely neutral attitude. Have you ever heard that phrase "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?

For example, If I take a blurry photo of something I see outside on a full moon that's probably a raccoon and proclaim its a photo of the elder god Nug, spawn of Azathoth, the Lord of All Things, and someone points out that its probably a raccoon but the photo is so bad there's really no way to ever tell the right attitude isn't to say:

"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."

[discreteevent]

This is even more true when there are so many blurry photos. It's as if Nugs acolytes keep putting up photos and making claims but not a single photo clearly shows his three heads or single pogo stick leg. The more photos there are, the more likely it is that at least one of them should clearly display Nug.

[Morromist]

Huh. You're right, I never thought about it that way. I had to look it up and apperently there are multiple theories that the reason ufo photos are always terrible quality is that there's some kind of terrible-photo-force-field around them. Great stuff!

The truth is that when we see photos of Nug the mind-bending eldrich horror of the sight disturbs the vision part of our brain. The photos are all perfectly clear, but simply too terrible for our tiny minds to ever percieve.

[james_marks]

Douglas Adams coined this effect as SEP: Someone Else’s Problem

[api]

Great Old Ones and beings from the ultimate void can be blurry in photos from the ionization of air around their bodies as they attempt to synchronize their quantum spin states with our normal universe. But it’s not just like a blurry photo. Usually you see some ionization glow of the right color for nitrogen and oxygen emission lines.

[quickthrowman]

> Your comment is all certainty, and the thread has rewarded that.

If I am presented with two options, I am going to defer to the more likely option, particularly when aliens are involved.

Is it more likely that you don’t understand artifacts in digital imaging of visible light or the infrared spectrum; or that it’s aliens?

When “aliens did it” is one of the possible options, skeptical people will never assume it’s aliens, given there is no evidence of aliens visiting Earth. If we had evidence of aliens visiting Earth, I would maybe consider that option.

[keepamovin]

The pattern you show is worth discussing so I give it time. You don't want to consider the possibilities, that's okay, so you pretend it's a binary choice between something you feel reasonable, and something you feel ridiculous. I say this gently: if you were so certain of your reason would you need ridicule to keep you in line?

About the 8-pointed - I reject the idea that my approach, by being in disagreement with yours, somehow indicates that I am deficient in understanding - this insult is the refuge of the orthodox and uncurious. You probably responded to me because I challenged the certainty of the other. Indeed, it leads your comment as a quote.

If you bring a conclusion, you find a binary: one reasonable choice (which you already took), and one ridiculous one. If you bring questions, you find something else.

You want your belief, and I want the truth. It makes me more courageous and more curious. You can also choose that. Or not: there's no shame in your opinion and no badness in it as long as you don't expect others participation nor impose against them.

I will explain the mechanism of how stigma is operating in your case, and how it's designed to stymie thinking and investigation.

Your focus on "aliens as the only alternative" is mostly ideological inflexibility, and blinds you to exploring by mis-associating exploration with an ideologically forbidden outcome: "aliens". You are supposed to be scared of it being aliens, and scared of sounding stupid by suggesting that, and to mislabel any deviation from orthodox "it's nothing" explanations as that, to disable thinking. You are supposed to try to propagate the stigma by shaming others with it, via suggesting they are nuts for violating its constraints, just as you try to insinuate here. Of course, I reject that insult, it has nothing to do with me. Yet, the stigma is working in your case. There's no shame in that. You can free yourself when you want. The stigma was used and has worked on millions for decades.

It does not work on me, I am already out of it. "If we had evidence I would investigate" - is not scientific, it's finality implying certainty, when in reality there's mystery and science is the way. Saying there's nothing worth looking at, so I won't look is safety masquerading as rationality, but is neither really. But it's perfectly okay for you to personally adopt that. All have their own timing. No need to rush or change. To avoid badness just don't impose it on others nor expect them to participate. Hopefully that is clarifying. It's not meant as insult or insinuation and there's no shame in it.

[andsoitis]

What do you think are more likely to explanations?

[keepamovin]

I 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 :)

[tootie]

Of 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]

If 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]

Or just manipulate our senses.

[cookiengineer]

I 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

[chmod775]

Shush! Explaining them away is boring.

[pyinstallwoes]

The star one kind of reminds me of the kill vehicle: https://youtu.be/KBMU6l6GsdM?si=O1jl4aQfaX_POY4T

[krferriter]

That'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.

[sandworm101]

At 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.)

[keepamovin]

It doesn't look like artifacts look: 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]

Don’t cite the deep lore to me

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/the-chandelier-ufo.13307/

[keepamovin]

Lol "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]

It 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

[f33d5173]

The full quote is "don't cite the deep lore to me, I was there when it was written". The intention is to imply that he was there when the thread was created.

[ricksunny]

For 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]

Could it just be the comment is too old? IIRC, comments that are over ~24h old can no longer be downvoted.

[ricksunny]

That’s probably it, thank you!

[esbranson]

> 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.

[krferriter]

This 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.

[esbranson]

No, these releases are UFOs as of now, after extensive cross-agency review. Your premise of "one person didn’t know what it was" is demonstrably false. This is not a release of identified anomalous phenomena or IAP or IFOs.

[krferriter]

You are vastly overestimating how much analytical work gets put into investigating the original context and flight modeling for videos like these before they are released.

The UAP Task Force did a presentation to Congress in which the head of the office showed a frame of the now-viral “green triangles” UFO video filmed with night vision camera on the deck of a US Navy vessel. The UAP Task Force was staffed with UFO believers and they believed the green triangles shown in the sky were pyramid shaped aircraft. They failed to realize the triangles were merely an artifact of the focus and the triangle shaped camera aperture and that in that frame of video, all of the triangles were known bright stars in that region of sky at that time of year. They could have figured all this out. People on the ship that day would of course know that those points of light in the sky were stars, and that the triangles in the video were just camera artifacts, not in the real world. But years later, the UAP Task Force looked at the video, and didn’t know that.

AARO has been doing a better analytical job than the UAP Task Force did. They fired everyone and hired people who weren’t predisposed to paranormal beliefs. (Jay Stratton staffed the UAP Task Force with people he knew would help bolster his preexisting paranormal beliefs). But this latest data dump was not done because AARO had finished evaluating these cases and done extensive work to narrow down possibilities. This data dump (and the ones coming next) was forced on an accelerated timeline by a handful of paranormal activists in Congress who just like the media attention and want to promote all kinds of fringe religious and paranormal ideas.

[adastra22]

> The UAP Task Force was staffed with UFO believers

This here is the source of the problem. Also, the Congress critters that fund this are UFO believers too. That's the only reason this is still going on.

[esbranson]

You are discussing IAP/IFOs. That's good they were able to identify light and released videos of it. And yeah I get why conspiracy theories of military parabnormal cabals is exciting, but also beside the point. This is about UFOs/UAP and not about whether AARO can identify light but whether the US combatant commands, the alphabet agencies, and the White House together can.

[krferriter]

You are not getting the point here. Cases get talked about as UAP cases merely because they were initially catalogued as unidentified and have not yet had a conclusive resolution attached to them. It doesn't mean they are not resolvable. It just means it hasn't happened yet. It also doesn't mean that a ton of qualified people with access to all the appropriate information have put in deep investigative work into trying to figure out what it is. You are just assuming that anything released that is not resolved has to have gone through intense rigorous investigation, such that it means there is no known explanation for it, therefore it must be something truly anomalous. This is not how it works.

The UAP Task Force in the example I described above actually did so some analysis on the "green triangle" Navy UFO video but they still failed to identify the fact that their screengrab they presented to Congress was literally just stars with a bokeh artifact making them appear as triangles.

[glenstein]

Unique 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]

The 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.