Psience Quest

The Pentagon just announced that recently a Reaper drone in the Middle East recorded the image of a flying shiny reflective metallic sphere UFO. According to the article there have been a number of other such observations recorded from drones. There has been no conclusion yet about what these objects really are. It looks as if "somebody" is curious about these goings-on in the Middle East, in addition to a number of US military installations.

It is apparent to me that these objects can't be human technology, since they exhibit no aerodynamic control surfaces or jet or any other known propulsion systems. The example image in the article makes it clear that it isn't some sort of electronic noise artifact, or some other misidentified natural phenomenon. It seems to me that pretty much leaves the ETI hypothesis as the only one left.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kxvdy/p...iddle-east

Interesting! Thanks for sharing that article.

it's just a bullet or other projectile fired at the drone... people shoot at drones... sometimes projectiles get caught on a frame of the recording... when they look spherical it's because they are moving towards the drone... which is what you would expect. The drone is looking at combatants, and the combatants are shooting at the drone. They only show you a single caught frame, not the context of the video.

(2023-04-22, 07:57 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]It is apparent to me that these objects can't be human technology, since they exhibit no aerodynamic control surfaces or jet or any other known propulsion systems. The example image in the article makes it clear that it isn't some sort of electronic noise artifact, or some other misidentified natural phenomenon. It seems to me that pretty much leaves the ETI hypothesis as the only one left.

That feels like a very quick route to a preferred conclusion.  Reality might not be that simple.

A line in the article from the opening post stood out:

Quote:While popular culture has labeled what’s thought to be alien spacecraft as Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs)

That is pure spin. I might rephrase it differently, something like

Quote:Popular culture has reinterpreted the label Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) and thinks it means alien spacecraft.

More practically, I do think we need to take note of the 'U' which means 'unidentified. It does not mean either directly or even by a process of elimination 'alien'.

A low-resolution dot on an image, made larger by software processing tends to look like either a disc or a sphere or a blob for the simple reason that there is insufficient information to say anything else. It doesn't really imply there was something spherical or disc-shaped, it is just another way of expressing the word 'unknown' by visual means.

New footage of a 2022 Middle East UAP released by the Pentagon.

More analysis here.

Max's bullet fired theory makes sense on the surface of things (surface, get it?). But the video released by the Pentagon and Kirkpatrick's explanation of it falsifies that theory.

video of bullets recorded on domestic dji drones with consumer wide angle lenses exist and they look very similar, but add on state of the art military grade electro optical tracking, high speed recording and processing, and absolutely extreme telephoto lenses and optical sensors, and you get what we see here - which generally is missing context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae_GV3aoMRg

But that doesn't look anything like the video posted above, and in the video above the "projectile" is moving slow enough for the camera to track it, find it again, and continue tracking it. I could see a drone or something like that, but not a projectile fired.

(2023-04-23, 09:58 AM)Max_B Wrote: [ -> ]it's just a bullet or other projectile fired at the drone... people shoot at drones... sometimes projectiles get caught on a frame of the recording... when they look spherical it's because they are moving towards the drone... which is what you would expect.  The drone is looking at combatants, and the combatants are shooting at the drone. They only show you a single caught frame, not the context of the video.

It seems to me the video systems in such a drone would be unsuitable for capturing a passing bullet or antiaircraft shell. Freezing a bullet in a photograph is usually done with the help of special triggers that expose the photo at precisely the correct moment, or high-speed cameras that can create ultra-slow-motion footage (requiring a lot of memory). This sort of specialized high-speed camera equipment is unlikely to be installed in a drone, where video photography presumably is specialized for capturing high resolution images of objects moving at a great distance relatively slowly across the field of view. 

Aside from this, in order for the image of the shell or bullet to be an apparent sphere it would have to be quite close and flying directly head-on right at the drone. This is geometrically extremely unlikely, and obviously the drone survived. Secondly, there don't seem to be any images of such projectiles seen from the side, which would be expected if the bullet/shell theory were the case.