NYT: Video of U.S. Navy Jet Encounter with Unknown Object

So now she's got Luis Elizondo, who worked with her on the NYT article:
https://www.facebook.com/lesliekean...205036603909/1627582427299488/?type=3&theater


He's basically the US version of General Bermúdez, except he just did it part time, and his funding was cut off in 2012.

Also involved is billionaire Robert Bigelow who singles out Chile's UFO work as being better than the US:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/us/politics/pentagon-program-ufo-harry-reid.html?referer=https://outlook.live.com/

So they people said Chile had such a great program, they thought they had a genuine "Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon" due to the "the number of highly researched reasons that it was unanimously agreed could not explain it." - and yet that was wrong. The Chilean UFO identification program failed to identify a plane.

So now we've got this video, much more limited than the Chilean video and so harder to identify. We are told it's a mystery, a genuine UFO. But it's a mystery to a program that since 2012 Elizondo has had to run in his spare time, while "carrying out [his] other Defense Department duties", a program in a country described by his billionaire co-worker as "the most backward country in the world on this issue".

I do not doubt Mr Elizondo's belief in UFOs. But the authority of his past position carries far less weight than that of General Bermúdez, and General Bermúdez, and his committee at their best, were flat wrong.

 

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Don't forget that in 2012 Chile's UFO program, and Leslie Kean, promoted a video showing a fly buzzing around as a genuine UFO. All their "experts" were fooled by a bug.
http://badufos.blogspot.com/2012/03/flying-saucer-or-fly-is-this-case-ufo.html

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sunday at 11:51 PM

Robert Sheaffer, Sunday at 11:37 PM

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Some additional data points:

1) Entering the speed (240 kts = 274 mph) and bank angle (about 23 degrees) into this calculator: http://www.pilotfriend.com/calcs/calculators/bankangle_calculator.htm gives you an aircraft turn radius of 11,876' and a time to complete a full turn in 185 seconds. Obviously, these are very rough calculations, but gives us a turn rate of about 1.95 degrees / second. You can use a circle of this radius to plot lines of bearing

2) The small dot which moves from left to right in a circular motion is almost certainly a "North Indicator". This is also consistent with the above (and with the video, the symbology is always white regardless of the IR Polarity (White Hot/Black Hot) mode); the camera would initially need to be turned about 54 degrees to the right in order to be looking north, towards the end of the video segment, when the camera is looking due north, the aircraft is also almost flying true north. The object is therefore always within a few degrees of true North of the aircraft. James believes this indicates orientation of the gimbal relative to the aircraft, and conceivably it could be, but I doubt it: A) While I have no experience with this particular gimbal, the Northrop Grumman Litening Pod displays a similar dot which *is* a North Indicator, and B) When the numeric azimuth indicator reads "0" (gimbal pointed in the same direction the aircraft is flying), the indicator is a few degrees off. Conversely, when the indicator is directly in the center of the screen, the numeric azimuth indicator reads 3 degrees to the right. It doesn't seem likely that, both being digital and generated by the computer, they would disagree.

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Missile test?

Also, the link between the two videos is unclear. The NY Times specifically linked the two under a same DOD's endorsement, but I'm not really sure that they really come from the same event.

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First of all props on the excellent technical analysis by West of the recent video. Something about this incident keeps bugging me. I'd like to refer you to an article posted by another ex Navy pilot and apparent personal friend of Cmdr. Dave Fravor...Paco Chierici from fightersweep.com (a military aviation blog, not a UFO site as far as I can see). Keep it mind this was posted in 2015, years before this recent disclosure by the Pentagon.
https://fightersweep.com/1460/x-files-edition/

My summary of the story as supposedly relayed to him by Fravor:

-The Missile Crusier USS Princeton was tracking activity by "Anomalous Aerial Vehicles (AAVs)" focusing around a point about 30 nautical miles off the Baja peninsula for 'several days'

-'Radar contacts would drop from above 80K to hover roughly 50 feet off the water in a matter of seconds' along with the flight patterns inconsistent with any known aircraft that we always hear in UFO stories

-Princeton takes advantage of the presence of nearby aircraft doing exercises out of the carrier USS Nimitz on 14 Nov 2004 and vectors several towards the position to confirm

-An E-2C gets a faint radar signature but it's apparently not good enough to pass the target on to interceptors so it gets called off

-A Marine Hornet piloted by a Lt. Col. Kurth was also vectored to the area, got nothing on radar, heads back to the Nimitz, but not before he got a visual of a 'round section of turbulent water about 50-100 meters in diameter'

-At this point the two 2-seater F-18 Navy Super Hornets (FASTEAGLE 1 and FASTEAGLE 2, the former piloted by the now famous Cmdr. Favor with his weapons officer Lt. Cmdr. Slaight sitting behind him) arrive. 

-Fravor (and all of this is presumably confirmed by the other 3 airmen in the area) also sees the "whitewater" disturbance in the water and initially thinks it might have been an airliner that had crashed (thus the reason for Princeton's vectoring and asking if he was armed - he wasn't as we know)

-Then they see a white, capsule-shaped, "fighter sized" object hovering ABOVE the disturbance in the water, BELOW the FASTEAGLE flight.

-Fravor tries intercept the AAV but is unable to lock on and it suddenly accelerates away, behind his F-18 and he loses visual contact. The Princeton then informs him that it has now reappearred at FASTEAGLE's previously assigned Combat Air Patrol waypoint, some 60 miles away

-FASTEAGLE turns around and heads back towards the CAP, loses contact with the AAV and doesn't see the water disturbance any more. Back on the Nimitz they pass on what they saw to the next 4 airmen getting ready to head out, who launch several hours later (this time their F-18s were equipped with FLIR)

-As we know they spotted the AAV 'hovering' below them at the same CAP, filmed it on the FLIR (helped by a radar lock), before it takes off again. The video that "appeared" on YT and is referenced by Chierici in his 2015 article is the "tick-tack" video mentioned by West ITT - they appear to be from the same incident. It has no dialogue unlike the 2017 one. The older video shows the AAV appear to rapidly accelerate away to the left of the camera.

Source: https://youtu.be/z7xnLZ9FAvU


Tldr:
Multiple airmen (including both flights of F-18s) reported (according to Cmdr. Fravor) seeing a white, capsular or cylindrical shaped unidentified aircraft, with no wings or visible propulsion system, easily outperforming the F-18s. All of this was at coordinates where the Princeton tracked these bogies with it's more advanced radar systems. These reports aren't consistent with a distant planes simply being coincidentally picked up by the FLIR by the second flight of F-18s. The rapid lateral (in relation to the viewfinder) movement of the object also doesn't fit a distant plane unless this was also another camera artifact.

The way I see it theres 2 options:

1) The videos and Fravor's (and presumably the other airmen's) statements are completely unrelated. And if the implication is that he's lying, and since he's been involved in this since the beginning, and it's clear he's been given permission to talk to the media, it would have to be some kind of government psy-op, many years in the making, with a lot of confounding stuff mixed in (like the original video getting censored). The motivation is unclear, maybe they really did steal/redirect 22 million bucks for some bullshit program and want to justify it with this but I don't see how they think they could get away with it. Either way, if this was the case, they could have just doctored the videos or done them with CGI entirely, so trying to analyze them in terms of real physics might be a waste of time.

2) the government really doesn't know what happened, which means there really is more to the story besides confusing far off planes with an AAV which presumably some smart folk would have figured out before giving it to the press and making fools of themselves. Man made, ours or OpFor? Possible connection to a submersible craft? Or actual aliens? Why they would go public with this in any scenario is also beyond me.

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That's not at all unprecedented though. The Chilean Navy case had many smart people look at it before giving it to the press. It was just a plane.

 

Mick West, Yesterday at 

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1. This isn't the Nimitz case, it's an case of unknown location and time. People have linked it to the Nimitz case, but there's no official verification. 
   
   And there's no confirmation that what is seen on radar matches what is seen in the F/A-18's FLIR. Consider they said there's a whole fleet of them, but we only see one.

   Mick West, Yesterday at 8:16 AM

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2. 

   Mick WestAdministratorStaff Member

   The oddest thing about this video seems to be the "rotation".
   
   
   If this is simply flare, I wonder if it might be a function of the way the Raytheon ATFLIR works. Here's a video from Raytheon:
   
   Source: https://youtu.be/KGEuNTzmYJQ
   
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The housing rotates in two ways, axially (around the long axis of the "cigar"), and in the ball shaped gimbal mount at the end.



With it rotating all over the place you'd think the image would be tilting as you track objects, but the horizon remains the same.

I suspect that what we see on the screen has an additional level of post-processing rotation to present to the pilot a view that makes sense, but does not reflect the actual position of the optics. This suggests the optical system could make moves that are not seen so much as movements, but change the angle of the camera, and hence change the orientation of the flare.

That would particularly be the case when the system is jolted by turbulence, and has to maintain or re-acquire tracking.

Hence I suggest the "rotation" of the object is the result of a rotation of the ATFLIR system which is not visible in the video as it is adjusted out for the pilot view. However the optics are rotating, even if the image is not. This creates the rotation of the flare.

here's a very preliminary duplication of the flare rotation. I've mounted a camera with and identical axes configuration pointing at a light. Notice here there's no way of directly panning left and right from this position.





The light is a point source, but is flared in the image due to very slight smearing on the cover glass.

Now move the light to the right, and adjust the gimbal so it stays in the same position - i.e. tracking it. (as close as I could get, this mount has a limited range of motion.


Then level the horizon to keep the same visual orientation for the pilot:



Compare the two images:


We've got a saucer shaped infrared flare that rotates based on the camera optics.

More evidence for this is in this rotating flare on a similar camera. The image is not rotating, but the optics are. 

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If the aircraft did anything OTHER than bank at a consistent angle, then yes, you would see the image tilting. Gimbals are described by the number of axes -- something like this is almost positively a 4 axis stabilized imaging system -- 2 course outer axes followed by 2 fine inner axes. Cinematic gimbals like the Cineflex and GSS usually have a 5th axis to roll stabilize them so that the horizon is always level. This clearly doesn't. Some gimbals (such as the Litening Pod) will electronically roll stabilize the horizon -- maybe even newer versions of this, but the video we are seeing is showing what the image looks like at the focal plane array.

There is however, something worth noting with regards to it's configuration: All gimbals of this design suffer from a problem known as "keyhole" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_problem ), or sometimes referred to as "gimbal lock" ( see the 2 dimensional description of it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock ). For gimbals such as the Wescam MX series and most FLIR, keyhole occurs at a point directly beneath the aircraft -- pilots and sensor operators coordinate to avoid getting into this geometry. (Our company produces a free "pilot display" app for iOS that assists in this effort: https://churchillnavigation.com/pilot-display/ ) The AN/ASQ-228 is essentially a similar design of gimbal, but turned 90 degrees -- meaning they have a keyhole problem when looking directly ahead. I would guess the "stutter" in the video is related to this issue -- the gimbal not having enough control authority to follow the rate commands from the AVT (automatic video tracker). The issue would be much worse if they were looking directly ahead, rather than 2 degrees down. (The inner stages usually provide +/- a few degrees of stabilization, which might account for the stutter not being seen at exactly 0 degrees relative azimuth)

By the way, this is something you can easily replicate with your pan/tilt camera, Mick: Observe that when the camera is pointed "straight ahead", you can easily look at something along one axis, but not the other, but when pointed "45 degrees down", you can easily make the camera look in any direction. The same thing is happening here.

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If the shape is due to flare, then I suspect it would come from streaks on the outer surface. Maybe from cleaning, or maybe from precipitation+airspeed. 


So could it be that occasion movement of the coarse outer axes is responsible for the rotation of the shape of the IR flare? It's tracked from 54°L to 6°R, meaning it goes over 0° - which might mean some outer gimbal action was required. There's also a significant change in angle when lock is briefly lost.

+++If the shape is due to flare, then I suspect it would come from streaks on the outer surface. Maybe from cleaning, or maybe from precipitation+airspeed.