I had decided a couple days ago not to respond to this thread, but for those who are interested specifically in the big hype on the Navy video, let me add a bit of info. I ask Floyd's indulgence, because he doesn't like some of my "long" answers, and Tom's forbearance. I am not trying to deride anyone's firmly held belief in phenomena. Let's just stick to the popular Navy video.
I’m fairly familiar with the design, construction and testing of the F/A-18 electro-optical sensor that allegedly took some of the imagery currently being shown on the internet. It was produced by my company and I worked on a lot of different types of these systems, among other things. The video appears consistent with operation of the system with known characteristics. For example, if you follow a jet with a large exhaust plume and image in MWIR, you get diffused thermal bloom. The camera is not out of focus. It is looking through heated air which refracts the infrared light. Then add any defocus of the system to that. If the system has a range-based autofocus, you need to get it to lock onto the target at the range it is at, not onto the other 99% of the object(s)/background in the frame. An edge sharpening focus system won’t work on a scene like this. There is no sharp edge to work with. This is nothing like your sophisticated handheld photograph camera.
There are a lot of other physics involved, such as operating in black hot mode. This makes more sense if you are familiar with a lot of the false color images taken of astronomical objects. JPL creates some super nice images doing this. Go look at Hubble data. The human brain can handle more data when it is in the form of color than black and white (such as 8 BIT/256 grayscale), so they process it to assign each grayscale number a color—hence, a false color image. So, for an IR detector operating in black hot mode, it is like looking at a negative of a picture. It is harder to read and understand. People have to learn to recognize things. Beyond that, an infrared image is not like looking at a visible image. It has certain huge advantages and some disadvantages that you have to work around.
I’d love to see the raw video data off the system…along with the tracking and gimbal data. Saying that the object mysteriously rotates may be one of the artifacts of the system. The detectors rotate within the system to derotate the image caused by gimbal angle changes. In one of the videos, you can see what appears to be ringing in the roll stabilization.
If you listen and believe much of the commentary on the news, you are simply wasting your time. On one news station, they showed this infrared imagery and the anchor called it radar. The “technical expert” they brought in didn’t blink an eye. Then by extension, that allowed them to talk about radar upgrades being a possible cause of the supposedly higher rate of UFO reports—even though what they were reporting on was old MWIR video. Radar imagery is entirely different. I had a question I heard once somewhere that I’d ask newbie engineers who were learning systems like these and were attributing image artifacts to totally bogus sources: “Did you bring your lunch, or cross the bridge?” Of course, the question made no sense, and had no good answer. But it was a useful way to remind us all that we needed to start with the data we had, and to work towards logical conclusions. Things we could test. That way, it took the least effort to fix what was wrong with the hardware, so we could ship it back to the customer. Otherwise it is kind of like taking your car to a mechanic and telling him the engine is overheating—so he starts work on the air conditioner.
So, what was the Navy looking at? I’d really like to know. I’d also like to know when the aliens get here so we should definitely keep an eye out. If they do show up, my bet is that humans won’t survive that encounter. Meantime, when things can be properly investigated and attributed, we nearly always find human sources. I accept the fact that investigations like these are never going to change some people’s minds. I don’t mean to upset anyone, or lose any friends over this. But if engineers can test a thing and identify exactly what the image artifacts are—and trust me, some of them are unexpected and bizarre to non-sensor designers--then any further discussion of more mysterious causes is wrong, it misleads people who are not familiar with how the technology works, and quite honestly is wasting some of the precious hours I hope I have left on this earth. I have spent many, many hours being paid to routinely isolate and fix issues just like this. No UFOs yet, but definitely some Iraqi missile launchers that they could not find in the first Gulf war....
Without the raw video data and the telemetry data, and access to the actual pod the Navy took this with, it is not conclusive to say exactly what imagery contains.
Dave
Topic: Navy vs. UFOs.... (Read 5968 times)