About 1AM on August the 14th, 2022, Jimmy Church was on the second floor balcony of his house in Palmdale, California, using a night vision device to look for UFOs. He spotted some to the north, and started filming them.
On November 3rd, he shared the video on Twitter and someone (sorry I can't find who) suggested to me that it might be the same Starlink flares that pilots had been seeing and mistaking for planes flying in racetrack patterns.
A starlink flare happens when sunlight reflects off a flat surface on a starlink satellite. These particular flares are reflecting off the bottom of the satellite, which is parallel to the curve of the earth, and so the reflection mostly misses the ground - which is why, up until now, only pilots at high altitudes had reported them. But Jimmy's night vision device was able to see the much dimmer flares that were visible from the ground.
Over on Metabunk we'd noticed that these flares were mostly observed when looking north, towards the big dipper, with the sun directly below the satellites. Due to the tilt of the earth, there's always some satellites that are in sunlight in the summer, when viewed from Palmdale and similar latitudes.
Jimmy gave me the approximate time of the video, and Flarkey used the in-the-sky.org site to get an exact match of two flaring satellites at the start of the video. Flarkey also found the correct historical Starlink position data using space-track.org, and I loaded that into Stellarium
I identified the stars in the video, the bright one on the left is Doo-bee, part of the big dipper, and I used the stars to overlay a screenshot of the video onto Stellarium, set the time, and pressed play.
Result - All of the flaring lights line up with starlink satellites, in the exact same spot, and at the exact same speed.
Interestingly, neither in-the-sky.org nor Stellarium thought that all these satellites would be visible. This is because they are right on the edge of sunlight, so any small variation in the calculated shape of the Earth or errors in accounting for atmospheric refraction, could put a satellite in or out of shadow. But since we see they match perfectly, we know that the sun is actually hitting them. These are all Starlink satellites.
These starlink flares are only dimly visible from the ground, but are a lot brighter seen from 40,000 feet, from a plane. So we are going to continue to get reports of these moving lights from pilots for the next few years until everyone is aware of the issue. So I suggest that the FAA and the airlines issue advisories to air traffic control and to pilots to minimize distractions and disruption. The frequency will lessen over the winter, due to the tilt of the Earth being away from the sun, but if nothing is done then this exact same flurry of reports will flare up again next summer.
About 1AM on August the 14th, 2022, Jimmy Church was on the second floor balcony of his house in Palmdale, California, using a night vision device to look for UFOs. He spotted some to the north, and started filming them.
On November 3rd, he shared the video on Twitter and someone (sorry I can't find who) suggested to me that it might be the same Starlink flares that pilots had been seeing and mistaking for planes flying in racetrack patterns.
A starlink flare happens when sunlight reflects off a flat surface on a starlink satellite. These particular flares are reflecting off the bottom of the satellite, which is parallel to the curve of the earth, and so the reflection mostly misses the ground - which is why, up until now, only pilots at high altitudes had reported them. But Jimmy's night vision device was able to see the much dimmer flares that were visible from the ground.
Over on Metabunk we'd noticed that these flares were mostly observed when looking north, towards the big dipper, with the sun directly below the satellites. Due to the tilt of the earth, there's always some satellites that are in sunlight in the summer, when viewed from Palmdale and similar latitudes.
Jimmy gave me the approximate time of the video, and Flarkey used the in-the-sky.org site to get an exact match of two flaring satellites at the start of the video. Flarkey also found the correct historical Starlink position data using space-track.org, and I loaded that into Stellarium
I identified the stars in the video, the bright one on the left is Doo-bee, part of the big dipper, and I used the stars to overlay a screenshot of the video onto Stellarium, set the time, and pressed play.
Result - All of the flaring lights line up with starlink satellites, in the exact same spot, and at the exact same speed.
Interestingly, neither in-the-sky.org nor Stellarium thought that all these satellites would be visible. This is because they are right on the edge of sunlight, so any small variation in the calculated shape of the Earth or errors in accounting for atmospheric refraction, could put a satellite in or out of shadow. But since we see they match perfectly, we know that the sun is actually hitting them. These are all Starlink satellites.
These starlink flares are only dimly visible from the ground, but are a lot brighter seen from 40,000 feet, from a plane. So we are going to continue to get reports of these moving lights from pilots for the next few years until everyone is aware of the issue. So I suggest that the FAA and the airlines issue advisories to air traffic control and to pilots to minimize distractions and disruption. The frequency will lessen over the winter, due to the tilt of the Earth being away from the sun, but if nothing is done then this exact same flurry of reports will flare up again next summer.
Metabunk Thread: metabunk.org/threads/jimmy-churchs-starlink-ufos-in-palmdale.12751 Full Synced video: youtube.com/watch?v=cT7UeZI-6OYInvestigation Alien - A Preview AnalysisMick West2024-10-11 | My first impression of George Knapp's upcoming docuseries "Investigation Alien" - with particular attention on the UFO videos shown, which are mostly things we're all familiar with.Videogame Science and UFO AnalysisMick West2024-08-24 | What’s a videogame programmer doing analyzing UFO videos? And why should people trust what a programmer has to say when people with PhDs in physics disagree with him? In many ways, videogame programmers make ideal UFO investigators: the simple math used to make 3D objects move in a virtual setting and the code used to display them can be reversed, used to break down UFO videos and figure out where the object is, how far away it is, and what it’s doing.
This was a talk I originally gave for the Center for Inquiry's "Skeptical Inquirer Presents" on April 27, 2023 centerforinquiry.org/video/videogame-science-and-ufos-mick-westWhat Luis Elizondo got very wrong about the UFO videos.Mick West2024-08-21 | What Luis Elizondo got very wrong about the UFO videos in his book "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs"
On April 27, the US Navy released official versions of these three UFO videos. All videos are the same length as older versions. FLIR1 is slightly higher bitrate than the TTSA version, but worse quality than the 2007 F4 version, even though F4 is lower resolution. GOFAST and GIMBAL videos are the same resolution at double the bitrate, which is significantly better. These versions of GIMBAL and GOFAST should be used for all future analyses, however, for FLIR, the 2007 leaked F4.MPG version via archive.org appears to be better quality.
A slightly better crop of converted to MP4 video, no blank frames at the start (Used in Sitrec) metabunk.org/sitrec-videos/public/2 - Gimbal-WMV2PRORES-CROP-428x428.mp4
4PM - Mick and Marik have a friendly discussion about their differences.
5PM - Jeremy Snow (ATFLIR technician) joins us to try to resolve some technical details.TFTRH #58: Peter Bergen - Kirkpatrick, UFOs and the PentagonMick West2024-01-26 | Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen.”
He recently interviewed Sean Kirkpatrick, the former head of the Pentagon UFO investigation office, AARO.
We chat about UFOs, National Security, Self-licking ice cream cones, and aliens.Chandelier UFO AnalysisMick West2024-01-16 | The "Chandelier" UFO looks pretty weird for a flying craft - probably because it's not a flying craft - it looks suspiciously like a diffraction artifact. It even matches the expected diffraction artifact for the camera used.
Metabunk Discussion: metabunk.org/threads/the-chandelier-ufo.13307Jellyfish UFO AnalysisMick West2024-01-14 | The Jellyfish UFO videos look bizarre. But they contain enough information to do a range of 3D reconstructions. Analysis shows that, while it might possibly be a non-human-intelligence-related object, it's consistent with two different bunches of balloons, miles apart, drifting in the wind.
Source for North video: youtube.com/watch?v=7bns_WhNAQMHow to Solve Starlink UFOs with SitrecMick West2023-12-31 | Pilots have been seeing Starlink flares and sometimes mistaking them of UFOs.
Here, I demonstrate a tool I've been working on that lets you see what Starlink flares (reflection of sunlight from over the horizon) are happening from a particular location or a particular plane's route.
metabunk.org/sitrec/?sitch=nightskyUAP Investigation with Public Data (ScienceWriters2023)Mick West2023-10-07 | This is a short video I made for a panel discussion at the ScienceWriters2023 conference in Boulder, Colorado, on October 7th. I briefly discuss the challenges of interpreting videos with limited data availability and describe the process of getting a definitive identification of Starlink satellites on an anonymous video with no date or location.
sciencewriters2023.orgDebunked: Maui Directed Energy Weapons Destroying Cars (They Just Burn)Mick West2023-08-29 | People unfamiliar with car fires are sometimes puzzled by how well they burn. Some resort to wild conspiracy theories about "directed energy weapons" (DEWs). But cars are actually surprisingly flammable — just google "Car Fire" or "Burnt Out Cars" The wildfire ignites the car, and then the car burns itself. It's as simple as that.TFTRH #57 - Alex Dietrich: Clouds, Critical Thinking, and UFOsMick West2023-08-26 | Alex Dietrich served a 20-year career as a Naval officer and fighter pilot with two combat deployments. She was also deployed to Afghanistan as an Infrastructure reconstruction engineer.
She then transitioned to academia, serving as a Naval Science Instructor and then a Military professor, teaching, among other things, Critical Thinking, Leadership, and Ethics.
Alex is best known to the public as one of the pilots who witnessed the famous Tic-Tac UFO when flying off the USS Nimitz in 2004. She’s appeared on 60-Minutes, CNN, and other shows to discuss her experience and its implication for flight safety and national security.
00:00:00 - Start 00:01:44 - Cloud Appreciation 00:04:02 - Learning To Fly 00:08:00 - Critical Thinking 00:16:49 - What is Critical Thinking 00:20:51 - The Nimitz Incident 00:21:24 - Why do we care about UFOs? 00:24:56 - Crashed Craft vs. Flying Objects 00:31:09 - Funding Shenanigans 00:33:23 - Grusch’s more extraordinary claims 00:39:17 - Italian UFO 1944 00:43:27 - Why Mick cares about Alien Craft 00:47:17 - Other things are more important 00:49:36 - Why does the government have a monopoly on crashed craft? 00:52:43 - 5 Minutes vs. 10 seconds 01:02:07 - How did the Tic-Tac depart? 01:13:14 - Improving the process of reporting UFOs 01:22:03 - Starlink flares reported by airline pilots 01:28:12 - Escaping the Rabbit Hole (Mick’s Book) 01:29:39 - 9/11Debunks of the Aliens Abducting a PlaneMick West2023-08-21 | I didn't debunk this one, as I thought it was a bit too silly to waste much time on. But other people found proof that the videos were fake - specifically because they used stock footage from the 1990s.
Stock footage for Satellite match reddit.com/user/happygrammies/comments/15wsxeu/graphic4/?share_id=bhF_koTotqcVU472A1w1xThe Problem with StarlinkMick West2023-08-20 | Some pilots are reporting Starlink horizon flares as UFOs. There's a real issue in that any report of UFOs carries some stigma and risk of mockery, and we should take pilot reports seriously. The problem is that by ignoring the obvious and easily testable explanations, like Starlink, we dilute the pool of genuinely anomalous reports and risk perpetuating the very stigma we are trying to avoid.
Starlink horizon flares (not the familiar trains of bright dots, but rather individual satellites that fade in and out, giving an illusion of maneuvering) are unfamiliar to many pilots, so these reports will continue. Agencies that take pilots' reports need to be aware of the technical aspects and nuances of how these things end up being perceived as dogfights on the edge of space.
Because if there actually ARE dogfights on the edge of space, we don't want to miss them.Jet Engine Glare - Angles and SizesMick West2023-08-15 | In this slightly technical video, I explore the relationship between the tail angle of a jet engine and how big a glare it can make in a camera.
Some objections to the "glare hiding a distant plane" hypotheses for the Gimbal and Tic-Tac videos say that the angle is too big for large glares to form, and that there should be more variation in size. I demonstrate that is not the case - using a flashlight.
Flashlights (and this video), of course, use visible light, not thermal radiation. But both are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and both can create glare in their respective cameras. But that's probably a topic for another video.F-18 Pilot Brian Burke discussing the Navy UFOsMick West2023-08-12 | Brian has a BS in Aerospace Engineering and was a Naval Aviator for 15 years, flying an F/A-18. He flew with David Fravor (Tic-Tac UFO witness)
We discuss the Navy UFO videos and the current UFO situation from a pilot's perspective. We also discuss the recent "whistleblower" UAP hearing, and David Grusch.
Interview recorded August 11 2023
00:00:00 - Start 00:00:38 - Brian's Background 00:03:27 - Sensor anomalies 00:08:22 - Did anyone see UFOs? 00:10:19 - Was there a UFO reporting procedure 00:12:38 - Hearing about the Tic-Tac 00:15:02 - Would the ATFLIR track Smoothly 00:18:47 - What does the Gimbal Shape look Like? 00:21:47 - Range data in ATFLIR 00:26:16 - What’s happening in Gimbal? 00:35:24 - What Brian thinks is going on with Gimbal 00:36:13 - Why wouldn’t the Navy know if it was another fighter? 00:42:56 - Safety of flight 00:48:22 - East Coast vs. West Coast UAP 00:51:08 - Balloons 00:54:27 - Accounting for things moving fast 00:55:47 - Sudden movements of object on FLIR 00:57:49 - The Nimitz FLIR 1 video 01:04:14 - The UAP Task Force, Recommendations 01:10:11 - Green Triangles 01:12:54 - The Navy is Stretched Thin 01:20:11 - Pilot Illusions 01:28:04 - Judging the Distance to the Tic Tac 01:34:01 - Tic-Tac Five minutes vs. Ten Seconds 01:45:45 - Fravor Faking a UFO 01:50:27 - The Whistleblower hearings 01:51:14 - Top Secret Clearances 01:52:25 - Opinions of David Grusch 01:54:18 - Grusch’s Time in Combat 01:57:52 - PTSD 02:01:57 - Ryan Graves 02:03:32 - The Tic-Tac - Radar Correlation? 02:09:30 - Tic-Tac - Why did they look down? 02:11:51 - Mick’s VideosSolved: Mile-Long Mothership UFO (Starlink)Mick West2023-08-02 | A "mile-long" UFO was spotted by five pilots over the North Pacific in 2022. A presentation was made at the SCU conference, speculating this might be an amazing spaceship.
But it was just Starlink.
Discussion: metabunk.org/threads/solved-mufon-case-124190-mothership-uap-crosses-the-north-pacific-starlink-stack.13071Recreating the Skinwalker LIDAR WormholeMick West2023-07-16 | A strange void appeared on a LIDAR scan at Skinwalker Ranch. It's not the result of a wormhole UFO portal bending space and time. It's just what happens when you don't move the drone around while scanning.Twentynine Palms - The Two Photo LocationsMick West2023-07-08 | Here's a quick video explaining where the two sets of photos of flares in the Twentynine Palms "triangle" case were taken from.Can we see the Bottle Drop Data? Please?Mick West2023-06-19 | For a few months now, I've been asking Brandon Fugal (the owner of Skinwalker Ranch) if I could work with a very small amount of data generated by one experiment - the helicopter bottle drop. Recently this was asked of both him and lead SWR scientist Erik Bard, and they suggested I might not fully understand it, or what to do with it.
But I very much would, and this video is an attempt to demonstrate that, to help move the process along.
I know that one bottle collected an NMEA track. I know how to convert that into an interactive 3D recreation with animation. I know how to analyze the data to demonstrate if the bottle did actually bounce off something in mid-air
And I'm not asking for the data for just me. I'm asking for a public release, so I can't manipulate the data without anyone noticing.
Poll on if the data should be released: twitter.com/MickWest/status/1649860293928030213Some Thoughts on David Grusch - Alien WhistleblowerMick West2023-06-12 | I was invited on NewsNation to be the skeptical respondent to Dave Grusch's one-hour interview. Unfortunately, I only had a few minutes, and the questions were along the lines of "why do you think Grusch is lying". I'd made a lot of notes in advance, so I thought I'd take advantage of this prep and record my thoughts in a big brain dump! Turns out I would have needed 45 minutes to cover everything.
00:00 Background, Dave Grusch 01:25 Lack of Evidence 01:47 The Extraordinary claims 02:09 Aliens have murdered humans 02:33 Football Field sized Tardis? 03:12 Italy 1933/1944 Vatican 03:32 Vast Conspiracy 04:00 Agreement with the Aliens 04:27 Problem: This was all Cleared by DOPSR 06:55 Maybe it's not true? 08:00 The cover-up problem 10:19 Do the math on crashes 13:59 AARO don't see UFOS 15:00 Congress should investigate 15:53 "The Program" might be a crash retrieval program 17:53 The Art Bell "Metamaterial" 18:32 A systemic and cultural failing in the IC 19:24 UFO Mythology 20:36 ARRO, Kirkpatrick, Title 50 Clearance 21:58 Dimensions, Quantum Physics, Travel 23:15 Gimbal, pixel saturation, Travis Taylor 29:29 The Omaha Sphere video 31:10 The usual suspects - Kean and Blumenthal 35:00 Ross Coulthart 35:51 Garry Nolan 37:01 Lue Elizondo 37:20 Eric Davis 38:00 Hal Puthoff 39:44 The Woo (Paranormal) 43:40 It would be great if true! 44:58 We may never fully knowDiscussing the David Grusch UFO Whistleblower Saga with Pete DominickMick West2023-06-08 | This discussion is from episode #860 of Stand Up With Pete Dominick: standupwithpete.libsyn.com/860-mick-west-on-ufo-conspiracy-theories We discuss the current saga of the UFO Reverse Engineering "whistleblower" David Grusch, and what I really think about what's going on.
Pete's Channel: youtube.com/@PetesBigMouthTVAguadilla - UFO Analysis with Lines of SightMick West2023-05-24 | This is a presentation I gave at the Inaugural Limina Symposium, Feb 5, 2023.
Analysis of 2D video presents the challenge that if the size of an object is unknown, then it can be at any distance. It is, however, constrained to a series of lines of sight. In this video, I discuss how lines of sight are extracted from video data, and how this can be used to determine various possible trajectories.
With the Aguadilla UFO video, I demonstrate that there exists a traversal of the lines of sight that is an approximate straight line, and matches exactly the wind that day. This lends significant weight to the hypothesis that the object was something like a pair of wedding lanterns.
00:00 Introduction 01:26 Start of talk 01:37 What is a "Line of Sight"? 02:54 Why use LOS in UAP investigations? 04:54 Specifying Lines of Sight 13:22 Example #1 Hayle Beach 17:03 Example #2 Aguadilla 24:11 Other footage of wedding lanterns by the airport 24:35 Objections to the lantern hypothesis 25:40 Flame obscured by thin paper in IR. 26:03 SCU's analysis and mistakes 27:36 Review of Aguadilla UAP literature 29:12 Summary 31:56 Q&A
And on their YouTube Channel youtube.com/@societyforuapstudies/videosTwenty-Nine Palms UFO - Flares IdentifiedMick West2023-05-23 | A video of five lights over Twentynine Palms, California, videoed by military personnel, gives the illusion of a triangular craft. The illusion breaks down as the lights shift position.
A discovery by John Greenwald leads to video of what looks exactly like the lights from another angle. It seems like this mysterious UFO is just five flares.
Metabunk discussion: metabunk.org/threads/claim-the-mojave-triangle-uap.12967 Reddit discussion: reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/13q4kcz/twentynine_palms_ufo_flares_identifiedmick_westUFO Football - A Friendly Back and ForthMick West2023-05-12 | People often send me UFO videos that puzzle them. I'll usually take at least a quick look and give my initial impression. In this case, Mark sent me a video of a bright UFO arcing over a (British) football match as the final whistle blew. I quickly identified what it might be, but Mark disagreed, so I had to dig deeper. Quite a bit deeper! Eventually, after some friendly back and forth, it was resolved and a few lessons were learned.
But it wasn't following the helicopter, it wasn't even close to it. More significantly, it wasn't even a shiny sphere - that was just an artifact of the filter they used - the emboss filter. It was just a bit of random airborne clutter that just happened to drift into the frame for a few seconds.
The scientists on the team should have known better.
Original clip from Season 4, Episode 4: youtu.be/bLr97CzfTLY?t=374A Hunters Close Encounter with a UFO - Spider Silk Lateral HighlightsMick West2023-05-06 | This UFO video looked amazing. It was a flying saucer, invisible to the naked eye, hovering by some trees, with bizarre cycling bands of light.
But I quickly recognized it as something I'd only recently discovered - highlights on spider silk that form shapes just like this and are unexpectedly perpendicular to the thread.
Original Video: youtube.com/watch?v=218n5y9WwWcSkinwalker Ranch Blob - Just a Reflection?Mick West2023-05-04 | In Season 4, Episode 3 of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, a mysterious blob appears on one camera when filming a rocket launch.
Described as something anomalous, the "blob" looks like an internal camera reflection of the rocket's bright exhaust. You can see the same reflection descend as the rocket rises; there are other examples with the same camera. Unfortunately, the full video is not shown, possibly because it would be pretty obvious that it was just a reflection.
You can see most of the "Blob" segment here: youtube.com/watch?v=Vw6oXQcu0ZkUnidentified Submerged Object - Small, or Far Away?Mick West2023-03-24 | This looks like a large object moving under its own power, but I think it's actually small, close to the camera, and just drifting in the water. I identify other objects in the video doing the same thing. This was just the largest.
Original video and discussion from @TahoeDeep youtube.com/watch?v=O_Lg595f8IIUAPTF Briefing Slide Shows Only StarsMick West2023-03-16 | A slide in a presentation prepared by Jay Stratton to brief congress about UFOs contains only two stars. Yet it's labeled as UNK UAS (Unknown Unmanned Aerial Systems)
Quote from that article: " The new images were gathered by the Task Force and obtained by investigative filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who confirmed their authenticity. Mystery Wire has independently confirmed that the visual materials are included in the briefing presentation prepared by the UAP Task Force.
“This (video) was taken on deployment from the USS Russell,” Corbell said. “It shows what they described as vehicles. And they made a great distinction. They made sure in this classified briefing, they made a great distinction that this is not something that we own either a black project, this is not something of a foreign military, that these were behaving in ways that we did not expect. And that they were you know shaped non aerodynamically. Like pyramids, these are flying pyramids!” "
Minor Correction: At 3:34 I say "seven feet above the deck", which should obviously be seven hundred feet, as on the slide caption.Sutter Buttes UFO Solved & Balloon IdentifiedMick West2023-01-29 | This was pretty obviously a balloon. But people were confused by the weird shape and the dark regions. Making it brighter and stabilizing it made it a lot clearer and eventually let us track down what the balloon was. Crowdsourcing works again!
And no, it's not the most serious UFO case. But it was a fun little puzzle and a great showcase of how crowdsourcing is often the best way of figuring out little mysteries like this.Las Vegas Light Pillar MapMick West2022-12-27 | Rare atmospheric conditions over Las Vegas created a map of the city out out light pillars in an ice cloud layer. But only above uplights.
It's not a UFO, but it is actually quite extraordinary. A once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon called a Light Pillar Map
Flanders Family Christmas Light Show: facebook.com/FlandersChristmasLightShowHigh Speed Fly-By UFO — Solved!Mick West2022-11-11 | This UFO video is very unusual looking. They are filming out the plane window when suddenly a huge streak of light flies past at incredible speed. What the heck is it?
People quickly noticed that the ground was moving way too fast. It's actually a time-lapse movie, running about 8 times as fast as normal. So the streak of light is probably the motion blurred lights of another plane, flying in the opposite direction.
But which plane? Flarkey contacted the video owner and they gave him a flight number (Air France 179) and time, about 5:20 UTC on October 8th. This allowed him to track down a good candidate for the other plane: Fed EX 1273. The two planes cross at a shallow angle, and the FexEx plane is just 1000 feet above the Air France plane, which is perfectly legal, but looks odd when the planes are so close.
I downloaded the ADS-B GPS tracks of both planes and dropped them into Sirec, my Situation Recreation software. I adjusted the video to play at 1/8th speed, and adjusted the view to match the lights from the cities seen in the video. Then, bingo, we got a match, it's the Fed Ex plane.
So what are the lights? There's four visible, we can tell how long they flash for based on the motion blur, the length of the streak. This white one was a short flash of a bright white strobe. It's so bright it makes these reflections in the triple paned aircraft window.
The thin red light is the port side wingtip nav light, then the thicker red light is the red anti-collision light on the belly of the plane. Then in the last frame we see the white wingtip nav lights on the backs of the wings
So that was fun, looked amazing at first, and quite confusing, but turned out to be something fairly straightforward.
Sitrec is an interactive tool, and you play with this scenario yourself, I'll put a link in the description. There's a whole bunch more in there too, so have a poke around.
Original Video and Flarkey's Twitter discussion: twitter.com/AlineCvt/status/1590355510406287360 Siterc: metabunk.org/sitrec/?sitch=afr179 (Use the "Sitch" menu to try other scenarios)Brazil UFO Flap Solved! (Starlink Again)Mick West2022-11-10 | For several days now Pilots in Brazil have been reporting UFOs, which have also been caught on this Web Cam. It's looking South, and the objects are moving mostly from right to left.
This is the same thing as in my last video, Starlink satellites. Not the bright Starlink launch trains, that's a different thing. These are deployed Starlink satellites, and you only see them when you look towards the poles (north or south) and where the satellites are low on the horizon and can just reflect the sun at a shallow angle.
Like last time, I teamed up with Flarkey to synchronize the video with actual Starlink data. We can identify three stars at the start of the video, and use that as an overlay in Stellarium. Since it was just yesterday I used the current Starlink data, and recorded several minutes in real time.
This was then synced with the video, and like last time we see a perfect correlation, where every flaring light matches a satellite. Time, position, speed, and direction. It's 100% Starlink.
So once again we're getting a lot of media attention, and a lot of distracted pilots, for something that's 100% explainable. Hopefully with all this attention, pilots will become familiar with phenomena. But I expect reports to continue, probably for several years. Airlines and aviation authorities really need to educate pilots on what they might be seeing in the sky.
The pilots describe distant lights that seem to be orbiting in circles or a racetrack, a common type of holding pattern. These sightings are generally in the North, by the big dipper, and generally seem to go from left to right.
Multiple people have determined that the most likely explanation for these is Starlink satellites, simply because the lights don't go in circles, or a racetrack, they go in a perfectly straight line. They are also in the same place in the sky as some matching Starlink satellites, flying in the same direction, and at the same speed.
00:00 Introduction 00:13 A "racetrack" is a type of holding pattern 00:22 Multiple people say it's Starlink 00:42 Pilots disagree 01:04 Normal Starlink "trains" are different 01:30 How we can tell it's not circling 01:57 What's happening is the sun reflecting off the satellite 02:18 The flickering color looks like a star, or something in space 02:28 Why Starlink and not other satellites? 02:46 Using in-the-sky.org to find Starlink satellites 03:28 The sun is directly under the satellites 04:02 Eyewitness accounts that don't match the Starlink explanation 04:27 Reframing as just a flight safety issue and UFO-reporting stigma
Mark Handley's Starlink animation: youtube.com/watch?v=bKj4GDNhH0QHow Metabunk Tracked Down the Kansas Tic TacMick West2022-09-08 | A video cropped up of a white Tic-Tac UFO seen from a plane. Like most of these videos, the culprit was just another plane - too far away for the camera to make out the wings.
But which plane?
Metabunk's "Skydentify" forum was up to the task, identifying the planes involved with limited and sometimes conflicting information.
I also demonstrate how the Sitrec tool can take the ADS-B tracks from the plane, and show exactly what one plane looks like from the other. Proving 100% that these were the planes in question.
Metabunk Thread: metabunk.org/threads/explained-kansas-tic-tac-shaped-ufo-plane.12630The US Navy Thinks These Stars are Drones.Mick West2022-06-18 | A recently released video shows a Navy team leader videoing four lights, he describes them as possible drones. However, they were actually easily identifiable stars. Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, Scott Bray, seems to repeat this in testimony to a congressional committee. Did the Navy, and the UAP task force never actually figure it out?
Discussion thread, with links to original videos. metabunk.org/threads/pyramid-ufos-in-night-vision-footage-are-bokeh.11695Gimbal UFO - A New AnalysisMick West2022-03-14 | The "Gimbal" UFO is the poster child of modern UFO videos. Leaked in 2017, and officially released in 2019, it's considered by many to show a genuine anomalous craft, exhibiting flight characteristics beyond current human technology.
But is it? There are four observables in the video, four things you can check yourself, that demonstrate that the most likely thing we are looking at is actually a camera artifact. It's probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.
This does not mean it's not a "UAP", or that it's not unidentified, or that it's not an amazing craft - it just means it's not actually exhibiting any incredible behavior, and so this opens the door to more mundane possibilities, like a distant small jet, just flying away, the heat of the engines (viewed up the exhaust) creating a large glare in the thermal camera.
00:00 Introduction 00:22 The Four Observables 01:18 What's going on 01:59 What I'm not Addressing 02:27 A full 3D recreation 03:01 The ATFLIR camera 03:25 Field of View less than the Moon. 03:55 External Gimbal Axes 05:05 Tracking left to right 05:45 Why the rotation? 06:45 Incorporating Bank in the sim 08:15 Rotating the camera rotates the image 08:47 Derotation 09:07 Real world derotation 09:22 Glare examples 10:21 Glare does not rotate 10:43 Glare derotated "rotates" 11:06 Dero does not rotate it alone 11:27 Differences between sim and video 12:05 ATFLIR's inner mirrors 12:51 Minimizing roll 13:23 Incorporating the glare angle in the sim 13:46 Observable #1 - No rotation while banking 15:23 Observable #2 - Bumps before rotation 16:01 Observable #3 - Rotating patterns 16:24 Observable #4 - Derotation match 17:12 TL/TW? Implications if it's not a glare.... 17:58 Background information 19:23 Patent limitations 20:06 Credits
Markus Pitch, Graphs, Data, etc Edward Current 3D Path analysis Chris Lehto Early Feedback Mendel Analysis Robert Hildebrandt ATFLIR Model jplaza Analysis jarlrmai Analysis dimebag2 Analysis Multiple Anonymous A variety of help
And many more, thank you all for the helpful analysis, valuable feedback and criticism, and useful discussions.
If you want to edit/run the code, and look at the data, then there's a full zip of the project directory. It needs to be run on a server (which can be a local server) due to the local file loading. metabunk.org/f/gimbal-source-code-and-data.zip
There's one additional external dependency, the Three.js library, and a variety of utilities from the examples/jsm folder. Here's the version I'm using. This should be in a folder three.js in the root of the server (which you can obviously change in the code). metabunk.org/attachments/three-js-zip.50218Quick Debunk: Arizona Light Streak UFOMick West2022-03-05 | While these images might look like a giant streak of light in the sky above some mountains, they actually show something on the ground - the Solana solar power station in Arizona. It's hazy, so you can't see the ground, but the super-bright reflected sunlight shines through.
Similar "flares from invisible plane" video: youtube.com/watch?v=8A7MW5q5KgQCésar Escolas UFO is a FlyMick West2021-11-30 | Small, or Far Away? Flies are often mistaken for something further away, and hence a big and fast UFO . But they are just flies. Here's a great example from César Escola.
Escola's Instagram Post: instagram.com/reel/CWzEPNEA8oeExplained: Black Triangle Near The SunMick West2021-11-28 | This video supposedly shows some alien spaceship orbiting the sun. The video was taken with the STEREO-A satellite's Extreme Ultraviolet camera, and shows a triangle shape that has been there for years. You can go to Helioviewer.org, select STEREO-A, and EUVI, and you can see this for yourself, and make timelapse videos of it moving.
It's actually a camera flaw, probably a speck of dirt on the sensor. We can tell this because there's other similar black dots that move in sync with the "triangle". Here's one. Here's another. This is simply the biggest one.
But why does it move?
We see that the speck moves with a regular pattern.
Over the course of a year it moves back and forth along this short arc. It repeats this every year.
This is because the sun's rotational axis, like the earth's, is tilted a bit, about 7 degrees.
The images from Stereo A are corrected to keep the axis vertical - otherwise it would swing left and right.
At the most the sun is tilted 7 degrees to the left, then six months later (since Stereo A has a one year orbit just like the Earth) it's 7 degrees to the right, because we are now viewing the sun from the other direction.
If we measure the amount of rotation of the specks, we see a total of 14 degrees, 7 left, plus 7 right equals 14.
If we remove the rotation of the specks, then we see the actual plus or minus seven degree tilt of the sun as we view it from different points in the one year orbit.
That's all there is to it. Not an alien spaceship, just some specks on a camera orbiting the sun, which is still pretty darn cool!
Here I look at the various analyses and how they eventually converged on the most likely explanation - that the UFO was something very small, like a bug or a seed, just meandering along in the in air, with most of the apparent speed coming from the drone itself.
Good example of Venus out of focus: youtube.com/watch?v=ydvsLzLYZM0Zac Cichy and Mick West discuss The DNIs Statements on UAPsMick West2021-11-12 | What's the significance of the Director of National Intelligence mentioning things coming "Extraterrestrially" while talking about UAPs? Is "UAP" a loaded term now? How should the government better talk about the UAP issue?
Yesterday Zac Cichy and I both watched the "Our Future in Space" talk at the Ignatius Forum. After a brief exchange on Twitter, we decided to have a recorded chat so we could explore out differences with a bit more nuance than tweeting allowed.
Zac is host of the Project Human podcast, currently on Hiatus, but lots of great guests and thoughtful conversation in previous episodes https://www.projecthuman.fm/
Avril Haines' Comment on UAPs, 32 minutes into the above.
Yeah, I mean, I think the bottom line is that we don't understand everything that we're seeing. And that's probably not surprising to anybody in many respects. But it is, it was a report that really, Congress asked us to produce a report that assessed what we saw as the threat, essentially, from unidentified aerial phenomenon. And what our sort of best understanding was of the different reports that we had identified and it stretched over from, I think, 2004, through to 2021, the different reports that you identify, that you indicated 144 of them, and we had different categories, as you said, so one of them was airborne clutter and other was natural, you know, phenomenon. Another was foreign adversaries. A fourth one was related to sort of US government or industry developmental programs. And then the fifth one was "other". And that basically indicated that we were pretty sure we weren't going to be able to characterize every single one of these reports in the various categories that we've identified, because, frankly, we were not able to understand everything about it. And a large portion of that is based on the fact that we don't have a consistent way of reporting this information, we need to integrate, frankly, a lot of data that we get, we need to get better at collecting information that's useful to us from different sensors that are available to us. And we have to deepen our analysis in these areas. And that's something that, you know, frankly, probably also doesn't surprise you in the sense that that's how we typically approach our intelligence work. And the main issues that Congress and others have been concerned about are basically safety of flight concerns and counterintelligence issues. But of course, there's always the question of, is there something else that we simply do not understand that might come extra terrestrial? Extra terrestrially?How To Identify Stars in a Photo With Astrometry.net or StellariumMick West2021-11-09 | I got a few requests for more detail on how I tracked down the stars in the "Hyperspectral Mothership" video (youtube.com/watch?v=_JSPTYZuNf4) . So here's all the details. Warning: a bit technical.
The version of Stellarium I used: stellarium.org There's also a web version, which does the same thing, but with a different user interface. stellarium-web.org Astrometery: http://nova.astrometry.netHyperspectral Mothership - A Quick DebunkMick West2021-11-07 | Just because an expert tells you something is hyperspectral video of an alien mothership dropping off cargo, it does not mean that's probably what it is.Investigating a UFO that (seems to) Zip Past a Plane WindowMick West2021-11-05 | This looks at first glance like a motion-blurred object streaking past a plane. But closer examination shows that this cannot be the case as it does not trace a contiguous line. So it's probably fake.
Of course there really isn't any great mystery here. You can google "glass moves by itself" and you'll find scores of examples and explanations. It's a glass table, so very smooth. Condensation drips down the glass forming a thin layer of water on the table, reducing friction - and a bubble of air can be trapped, which warms and expands, loosening the seal. Then any slight vibration and a very slight slope to the table does the rest.
But giving the explanation is one thing, can we duplicate it? I give it a go in my bathroom, with mixed success.