SPHERES IN AIRBORNE UAP IMAGERY
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos1 and Martin Shough2
ABSTRACT
Objects or lights of possibly spherical appearance photographed and filmed from aircraft in the air have been sought from a massive databank on UAP reports recorded on film. Only 7 events have been considered for examination and these have been analyzed to the limit of the available information. The average level of information remains low, in spite of the authors’ attempts to improve it, but 4 events allow reasonable mundane explanations. The remaining 3 are hardly evaluable and lack strangeness. In general, all images are highly ambiguous. The authors recommend that steps need to be taken to increase the professionalism of UAP inquiry.
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SPHÄREN IN BILDERN VON UAP-BILDERN IN DER LUFT
ABSTRAKT
Objekte oder Lichter mit möglicherweise kugelförmigem Aussehen, die von Flugzeugen in der Luft fotografiert und gefilmt wurden, wurden in einer riesigen Datenbank mit auf Film aufgezeichneten UAP-Berichten gesucht. Für die Untersuchung wurden nur 7 Ereignisse berücksichtigt und diese wurden bis zur Grenze der verfügbaren Informationen analysiert. Der durchschnittliche Informationsstand bleibt trotz der Versuche der Autoren, ihn zu verbessern, niedrig, aber vier Ereignisse ermöglichen vernünftige, profane Erklärungen. Die restlichen 3 sind kaum bewertbar und mangelt es an Fremdartigkeit. Generell sind alle Bilder höchst mehrdeutig. Die Autoren empfehlen, dass Schritte unternommen werden müssen, um die Professionalität der UAP-Untersuchung zu erhöhen.
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Fortsetzung:
Case #5
Date: April 27, 1999 Time: not known (daylight) Location: Pennsylvania airspace (United States of America) Cameraperson: James Taylor Mode: Video (digital image from internet)
As is well known today, You Tube is an awesome internet repository for all kind of images and movies. Yet unless you are very discerning, you may be deceived over and over again, as everyone can anytime post any self-made film without any vetting for reliability. It is the ideal territory for hoaxes, fakes and wild claims.
The UAP theme has been subject of many items in You Tube. The film we are currently reviewing comes from this source and there is no other non-online confirmation of the alleged facts, to the best of our knowledge.
A “John Foster” appears to be the editor of the entry on the www network and he is self-appointed “UFO chaser”, a characterization that diminishes his credibility from the very start, as obviously the word chaser in this context suggests obsession. He also says he has managed to see and film UAP phenomena several times, which is a clear indication of (a) terrific luck, (b) outstanding vision, (c) eagerness for misinterpretation, or (d) propensity for faking. We leave the reader to assess the probability ratings for every option in this example.
Initially, we had retrieved this video clip from the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBdUnrz_3zY&NR=1 and in fact all the time estimates below were taken from this. Later on, we found out that the original post to the internet was: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-17512922075215274
Comments and “analysis” (sic) are credited to “Eyepod.org” and “Radiofreemind.org”, filming is credited to a “James Taylor 1999”, and production year was 2005. Eyepod.org, whose director is a Frank Riccardi (Director@Eyepod.org), is a typical web site based on alien beliefs (http://www.eyepod.org/), being the ultimate responsible of posting this video to the net.
The movie is prefaced by a written introduction, as follows: “The Pennsylvania Incident. Sequence one: craft (sic) appears then disappears. Sequence two: craft in the water. Sequence three: craft under the water”. (In reality, there are four different UAP sequences in this film.)
Then a first clip is shown with the following text inserted: “Craft enters into visible spectrum, then exits. The ufos were not visible to the naked eye at this time. What you are seeing is an oscillating disc-shaped object”. The full video clip lasts 3:09 min, from 0:13 to 0:15 the film is presented in its actual speed, then up to 1:00 the film is shown repeatedly slowed down while a new superimposed text says: “its appearance is due to its highly reflective surface”. The background shows an interior country area with a large lake surrounded by forests.
For hardly 2 sec in real time you see a small bright ball moving upwards until it simply vanishes. The “body” deforms from round to flat. The image is then grossly zoomed (4x) and slowed down (3x) to increase the impact on the viewer. In the extreme magnifications, it shows two shades of black color in the upper and lower sides of the “object”. It does not differ from the appearance of a droplet on the exterior of the windowpane.
Then there is a second sequence entitled “In the water...”, where an elliptical while blob emerges over a lake’s coastline scenery. Images in this sequence are viewed from 1:03 to 1:04, 1 second of real-time footage, followed (1:04 to 1:19) by 15 sec of an enlarged, slowed down image where you see a sphere capped in black in the upper and lower sides, displacing apparently linearly for an unknown real time, probably 5 sec maximum. In our view, the phenomenon is again not incompatible with the movement of a droplet on the windowpane.
The third section of this clip is preceded by a text that reads: “And under the water... This negates any ‘plasma’ theory or military craft. It is not a balloon, bird or the planet Venus”. The writer tries to poke fun at the usual conventional explanations for most UAP sightings, convinced that the images have an unexplainable nature. In this new sequence, initially (1:34 to 1:37) you see 3 sec of non-enlarged images where nothing is obviously visible. Only in magnified and repeated slow-motion footage of this time do we detect a vague, whitish body that seems to appear and dissipates in place (1:38 to 1:55). In this sequence we also see a (young?) person with a baseball cap between the recording individual and the windowpane. The very ambiguous appearance of this short-lived and ghostly image allows a number of natural possibilities, including the one applied to the previous sequences.
Now we come to the last segment of a trip that was extremely rewarding in terms of anomalous observations from the airplane window. It is preceded by this inserted message: “The amazing corkscrew effect, one of the three crafts executes an unearthly maneuver”. From time 2:04 to 2:07 we see ground terrain with two large lakes, one in the foreground and another in the background. Nothing out of the ordinary is perceptible. Then, starting from 2:08, the footage is enlarged and slowed down several times to show –in a position coincidental with an end of the lake in the foreground- what appears to be the upward movement of a translucent globe. In still frames like Fig.18, extracted from the video, the “sphere” is extremely difficult to see because it is practically lost in the background pixel noise.
Film for this sequence finishes at 2:36. Again, the droplet hypothesis remains plausible for this last segment of video recording.
The remaining portion of the video clip (to 2:50) is merely a repetition of the first sequence. The rest (up to 3:09) are credit titles. The above was the sole non-visual information included in the video. The assumed date, location, cameraperson and producer are those registered on the clip.
We already commented on the good fortune of “James Taylor” in having filmed UAPs four separate times during one flight. In our opinion, the simplest natural explanation of a tiny drop of water adhering to the window plane would produce the filmed effects. It seems obvious to us that the cameraman is looking for any effects that, taken out of context, could persuade the layman that an unidentifiable aerial phenomenon has been filmed.
As far as the location is concerned, we have consulted a noted UAP researcher who lives in Pennsylvania and his comments were not very supportive to the footage: “I can't prove it, but I doubt this was actually taken over Pennsylvania. The terrain in this state is mostly hilly and not flat. I just spent an hour looking at Google Earth and can't see any place with the exception of the most extreme western parts of the state where it's flat like that, and there are very few areas that have multiple lakes together, as seems to be the case in this video. I have the feeling that it was actually taken somewhere in the Midwest US, where it's flatter, or possibly eastern Texas, someplace like that” (13). Why someone would hoax a video in Texas and risk exposure by claiming that it was made in Pennsylvania must be left to speculation, but if the location is faked the odds are high that the whole video is a crude attempt to deceive UAP students.
We have written (early August 2009) to Eyepod.Org by requesting links to the names cited in the video in order to obtain additional information, with no response whatsoever.
Case #6
Date: April 2004
Time: not known (daylight)
Location: Somewhere between Belize-Puerto Barrios (Guatemala)- San Pedro Sula (Honduras)
Cameraperson: Mónica Monje
Mode: Photograph, analog (scanned picture)
In his regular online news chronicle, the Argentinean ufologist Guillermo Giménez published in 2006 a couple of UAP photographs taken from a small plane. The following caption translated from Spanish- was accompanying the picture: “Two planes were flying from Belize to San Pedro Sula on July 17, 2001 (sic). Pilots (were) Fredy Koppy and Rudy Bermudes. One of the passengers was taking pictures of the colleagues in the second aircraft. One object was following them by a stretch of the flight. In this photograph, it can be seen below the front of the airplane”. (Belize, formerly British Honduras, is a country in the northeast of Central America bordered by Mexico to the north, Guatemala to the south and west, and the Caribbean Sea to the east. San Pedro Sula is the second biggest city in Honduras).
The following information was then added: “During the flight several maneuvers were performed. (In the second photograph) the plane’s propeller can be seen on the far-right side. The object (is) lower than the flight horizon”.
And a final caption reads: “Blow-up of the object of metallic and round features. You can see the sun's reflection on its surface”.
This is the entire dossier reported. When we consulted Giménez, he answered he had copied the information from the Siglo XXX web site, but this was no longer there. In Case #4 we had already found another airborne UAP image (curiously also dated a July 17th of four years before) taken from the same source, managed by Eduardo Mendoza, and we contacted him once more for additional details.
The information Mendoza has kindly provided to us about this episode corrected some mistakes that either the web site or the previous informer had introduced, and he has presented us with a more comprehensive report (9).
From a short note published by Mendoza in a magazine called Enigma he edited for 7 issues in 2009 (number 4, page 16) and from personal correspondence with the first author (9) we found out that the event took place in April 2004 when two planes owned by Transportes de Montaña, a private transportation charter company, carried two groups of executives from Belize to San Pedro Sula (Honduras), through Puerto Barrios (Guatemala). During the flight, Mrs. Mónica Monje, TV employee and then the wife of one of the pilots took 2 analog photographs of the escort ship as there was a spherical object that moved hand in hand with the two planes. “When the photographs were developed the presence of the UAP was evidenced, located below the front fuselage”, the article said.
Thanks to the successful contact established with Mendoza to better document the photographs taken by his daughter (Case #4), we sent him a number of pertinent questions regarding these two pictures in order to collect additional data to work upon. This set of questions was to be submitted to the lady photographer, who luckly is working for a TV program directed by Mendoza himself and is thus closely available. However, communication has ceased since, our questions have not been answered and we are left with a very limited amount of data. For instance, we do not know if these photographs were taken at the same time or in different stages of the flight. We are not even aware if the photographer actually saw anything strange with her own eyes during the flight or if the round objects appeared later in the prints.
We have studied the two photographic stills and Fig.22 shows a comparison of the first and second photographs.
Photograph #1 seems to show some structure around it, the shape appears more elongated. The radius of curvature of the highlight is too large for a sphere. It could be an approximate ellipsoid, but the highlight appears to be significantly less bright than the bright areas of the white-painted plane, so is probably not a specular reflection but a diffuse reflection from a light-colored surface. Could it be motion-blurred wings of a bird? The altitude is probably low enough.
Photograph #1 (Fig.19) is clearly centered on the body of the airplane as if it and only it was the focus for the attention of the photographer, not any anomalous object flying underneath. Absence of further photographs of the same “object” would suggest there was nothing uncommon to be seen.
Photograph #2 is possibly spherical, or else is a nearly end-on projection of an ellipsoid. The brightness and sharp- edged circularity of the highlight looks like a specular reflection of the sun. The surface could be metallic.
The only available print for photograph #2 (Fig.20) is a cropped, enlarged picture, which might indicate –again- that the apparently strange object was not the center of interest when the photo was taken.
Incidentally, we doubt that the object visible in the upper right corner can be "the plane's propeller", as claimed. All indications are that these two aircraft are single-engine light planes of the same or similar type, in which case the only part of the plane's propeller that could possibly intrude into the frame in this way would be a blade tip. But light and shade reveal an intricately shaped structure in reasonably good focus which does not resemble the tip of a propeller. Moreover, it shows no apparent motion blur.
Examination of photograph #1 (Fig.19) shows that the other plane's propeller is considerably blurred by rotation during the exposure. The lighting conditions appear similar, and it seems unlikely that the photographer would have manually selected a much faster shutter speed between the two photos. Indeed, we doubt that the unspecified "analog camera" could have provided the ultra-high shutter speed required to 'stop' a Cessna propeller so perfectly.
The propeller of a light plane such as a Cessna runs typically at about 2,500 rpm and the blade tips trace a circle of diameter approximately 6 ft (1.8 m) whose circumference is ~5.6 m (18 ft). The rate of the blade tip is therefore such that even with a very fast shutter speed of 1/1,000 sec the blade tip would travel 23.5 cm (10") during the exposure, a distance clearly comparable to its own chord (breadth) or more, blurring its image very significantly - much as we see in photo #1 (Fig.19). We therefore conclude that unless the engine has stalled, or unless the photographer was able to switch -between photos- to an extraordinary shutter speed in the order 1/10,000 sec, this unidentified object in photo #2 (Fig.20) is not part of a propeller blade, and indeed is not obviously any part of a light aircraft.
Without an answer to the questions posed to the photographer, the possibility exists that (1) these are two unrelated photos of different objects, and (2) the objects were not visually observed at the time of taking the pictures, only to appear after development, which would leave the door open to a number of non-mysterious explanations.
Case #7
Date: May 9, 2004 Time: not known (daylight) Location: Ireland Cameraperson: not known Mode: Photograph (digital image from internet)
This photograph is included in the catalogue of 5,000 UAP photographs maintained by French ufologist Stéphane Bernard, an IBM employee based in Meudon. Besides the above basic data, all we have been able to collect is that an UK helicopter crew took this photograph over Ireland, showing a “silver sphere”. In the picture, the object can be found near the “twelve o’clock” position (5o) of the frame just on the rim of the mountain, a
cliff by a lake or pond, or even by the sea.
Source was unable to provide added information, and what
we see is a perfect circular structure that seems to be attached to the ground, like what we would expect from a military or ATC radar installation, for example. Nothing indicates, without any report to the contrary, that this object was ever moving while the photo was snapped.
Is this a mere guess? Call it “researcher’s nose” or experience, but the resulting enhanced image (Fig.25) certainly supports the idea because we can see the “UAP” mounted on a base and fixed to the ground.
We have consulted Irish UAP students and organizations about their knowledge of any such UAP picture or any radar complex placed at the top of a mountain, e.g. the single radar domes located at Mount Gabriel (Skull, 110 km SW of Cork, Ireland), one of which is illustrated in the Fig.26, that could match the photographic perspective (14).
At the time of writing we have been able to rule out Mount Gabriel, but no positive information has been gathered to
identify the location.
Having said that, our impression is that the scenery may
not be Irish. What if the person who initially distributed this photograph planted misinformation about the country where it was taken in order to mislead? Considering that we do not even have confirmation that there was any visual sighting, it is possible that this is a photo of a cliff-top radar installation in another country.
Summing-up
The first conclusion one reaches from the examination of UAP incidents is that they are amenable to scientific inquiry. The application of scientific principles and techniques from a number of disciplines (trigonometry, engineering, physics, astronomy, optics, avionics, etc) produces non-subjective data and measurements that assist the analyst in the process of evaluating both the reality of the event and the potential evidential value of the analog film or digital medium.
The second conclusion the researcher has to face is the scarcity of information actually available in most UAP claims. It is frustrating to realize how poorly amateurs perform in the field of data collection, mainly due to mediocre training or misguided motivations.
When this paper was in the data-selection phase, case choice was based on visual examination of the images, often tiny spots (particularly in the slides). In some cases, images which the first author initially thought were round and thus potential spheroids, were revealed as not exactly round or spherical when digitally enlarged. But given the narrow sample finally selected, we decided to leave it as it is.
Photographs of alleged UAPs per se have limited value as evidence. Only when coupled with extensive witness declaration or investigation reports may the importance of the photographic document be upgraded. Without verifiable background information, the value of any photographs or footage is purely anecdotal.
In particular, we have devised Table 3 to summarize our best options for the potential causes (best guess) that created the seemingly anomalous (UAP) images in the photographs and videos reviewed, the information grade we were able to handle (low-medium-high) and the level of response we got from the publishing sources of the data.
4 events might resolve into discreet, conventional stimuli following a parsimonious approach. 3 events show highly ambiguous, low-strangeness phenomena that make the incidents clearly un-evaluable in scientific terms and there is a set of possible mundane explanations for them. The severe lack of information in such cases (partly related to non- cooperativeness from publishing sources or witnesses) does not permit us to choose one for certain.
In conclusion, from a database of 10,000 reports of UAP photographs and within a subset of 254 air events, the authors have not found any evidence of any anomalistic image recorded by an airborne camera that unambiguously indicates a solid- appearing spherical object defying conventional explanations. Work on UAP imagery from airplanes continues by the first author (15) and we hope to be able to follow up any significant events discovered in the near future.
Present-day science continues to discover new phenomena and processes in atmospheric physics, e.g. the new phenomenon of sprites, elves and jets that develop in high altitude regions of the Earth’s atmosphere (16). These are transient luminous events produced by intense lightning discharges over thunderclouds. The physical nature of UAPs remains to be clarified and even the mere existence of a proper phenomenon is heatedly debated today. But the possibility of short-lived energy phenomena -currently unrecognized by mainstream atmospheric physics- presenting a potential risk to air navigation may not be nil. Although in the seven cases we have examined we have not detected any potential for impairing flight safety, there are some well-documented UAP reports suggesting this.
Recommendations
Clearly, the level of rigor and scientific orientation in both the witness inquiry and technical analysis of photographic images must be improved considerably.
At the same time, methods to facilitate the objective capture of image data should be set in place by air companies. The installation of fixed cameras that can be activated at the order of the crew members, or just the routine availability of simple hand-held cameras in the cockpit, could provide a wealth of authentic information amenable to scientific study. This would also help in the analysis of general air incidents where flight safety has been compromised by the presence of any Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, in order to complement pilots’ reports.
Notes and References
(1) Guillermo Roncoroni and Gustavo Alvarez, Los OVNI y la evidencia fotográfica (UAPs and the photographic evidence), Cielosur Editora (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 1978.
(2) CUCO: Catálogo unificado de casuística OVNI (Unified catalogue of UAP casuistry), Fundación Anomalía, Spain, 2009. (3) Felipe Rodríguez Massoni, personal communication to V.J. Ballester Olmos, August 18, 2009.
(4) Aldo R. Paira and Edmundo C. Drago, “Origin, Evolution, and Types of Floodplain Water Bodies”, The Middle Paraná River,
Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg), 2007.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r17164t7642425uk/fulltext.pdf
(5) Ana Faggi, Eduardo Haene and Julio Hurrell, “Riparian Vegetation Rises”, Atlas ambiental de Buenos Aires, http://tinyurl.com/qrnnkc
(6) http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessaria_integrifolia(7)http://www.farecompare.com/flights/New_York-NYC/Orlando-ORL/market.html (8) http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLM
(9) G. Eduardo Mendoza Palacios, correspondence exchanged with V.J. Ballester Olmos during August 2009.
(10) http://www.boeing.com/commercial/747family/technical.html (11) For a 2004 UAP case involving oil flares in this area, see: http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-09/campeche.html
(12) See, for example: http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-61580.html (13) Joel Carpenter, personal communication to V.J. Ballester Olmos, August 9, 2009.
(14) http://www.panoramio.com/photo/18578609
(15) Progress in this field is under way; for example, a previous NARCAP preliminary report identified 172 photographs of objects of all shapes taken from aircraft worldwide between 1940 and 2000. See: Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos and Richard F. Haines, “UAP Imaged from Aircraft”, NARCAP, May 2008,http://www.narcap.org/commentary/photo-catalog/narcap_fotocat_text_5-14-08.pdf
(16) Martin Füllekrug, Eugene A. Mareev and Michael J. Rycroft, Sprites, Elves and Intense Lightning Discharges, Springer (Dordrecht, The Netherlands), 2006.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the assistance received from Alejandro Agostinelli, Luis Balairón Ruiz, Manuel Borraz Aymerich, Joel Carpenter, Juan Pablo González, Claude Maugé, G. Eduardo Mendoza Palacios, Felipe Rodríguez Massoni and Juan Carlos Victorio Uranga.
Valencia (Spain) and Ross-Shire (Scotland), October 2009.
APPENDIX
On June 2011, one of the authors (VJBO) was collecting information on UFO photographs made in Greece. Thanks to Greek ufologist Thanassis Vembos we were aware of this link:
http://www.huforc.gr/GREEK%20UFO%20NEWS/greekufonews%202%20.htm |
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A page from the Hellenic UFO Reporting Center (HUFORC), it included two photographs taken on August 2002 from an airplane in flight from Cyprus to England.
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The brief account that went along with these pictures reported that a pair of British tourists was returning from their summer holidays, when Mrs. Susan Clarke saw a strange phenomenon from the window of the airplane. It looked like a bright ball and it flew alongside the aircraft. The witness continued to stare at the unknown light until it suddenly went out as it was turned off. The site discussed the possibility that it could be an example of ball lightning.
Our attempts to find additional information proved unsuccessful. A contact with Pantazis Doxakis from HUFORC revealed that no more data exist apart from what was originally released in their web site (1). It has been guessed that the pictures were submitted directly to the site (2).
Whether or not this is a rare episode of ball lightning we simply do not know, and it cannot be judged from the poor information available. However, three things are apparent from the published pictures. Firstly, it is not a photograph and its enlargement, as might be thought at first sight. We have blown up the first to approximately the same scale as the second, based on features in the wing. Although it is not exact, looking at the relative positions of wing, cloud and 'UFO', we think we can see that no simple distortion or re-scaling will turn one photo into the other.
Secondly, it looks as if the true angular diameter of the object might be the same in both images, although the position in relation to the wing and cloud has moved. Of course, either the object, or the cloud, or the plane, or all three, might be moving. But we know the plane is, and cloud may well be, so these could be photos of a round bright object whose apparent size/distance and position on the sky does not change. What is the constant angular size? To find this we first took the wing half-spans of a range of typical commercial passenger aircraft (Boeings 737, 767, 707F, Airbus A306, A300, A319 and A320) and found the mean to be in the region of ~20m. Then, estimating an average tip chord of ~2m, this predicts the aspect ratio of length to tip chord in a typical tapered wing to be in the order of 10:1, which sounds realistic. Using this value, then very crudely speaking, the angular width of the wing tip in the photos is about tan 1/10 or say 6o, making the lateral FOV of the least un-cropped (left) image a realistic ~30-35o and the angular diameter of the bright object ~0.8o. Given the uncertainty and approximation involved this back-of-the-envelope calculation is suspiciously close to the size (0.5o) of the full moon.
Thirdly, the first of the two photographs is identical to the one we reviewed in our paper as having been taken in 1996 during a flight from New York City to Orlando.
When we were researching this supposedly 1996 picture, we found out that the internet source did not even reply to our request of additional information. Therefore, we must conclude that an unknown source has provided the same photographs to both sites, giving different information on each occasion. Considering these circumstances, the small credibility this photographic document might have had, in our opinion, now becomes zero.
Revised, November 2011.
References
(1) Email from Thanassis Vembos to V.J. Ballester Olmos, October 31, 2011.
(2) Email from Dimitris Hatzopoulos to M. Shough, September 19, 2011.
Quelle:
FOTOCAT REPORT #5
SPHERES IN AIRBORNE UAP IMAGERY
Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos1 and Martin Shough