Sometimes I weep for humanity. No matter how much we progress and advance in knowledge and technology, no matter how much our education system advances, the vast, vast majority of people, even intelligent people, act completely stupid when it comes to things that they can't explain and are presented to them in a convincing-enough way. There seems to be no way of teaching people healthy skepticism.
Lately the United States Army and the Pentagon have released video footage and statements about purported "UFOs" that they claim defy all explanations and laws of physics and that they, allegedly, don't know what they are. Alleged fighter jet pilots of the US Air Force have gone to television stating that they see them almost daily, and that they have no idea what they are.
And the vast, vast majority of the public are just swallowing the story whole, with exactly zero skepticism or scrutiny. What's most worrying, even some scientists and scientifically minded people are swallowing the story whole. People who should know better. They have no explanation for the videos and they are seriously considering it plausible that they are some kind of technology that we don't know about, something that defies all known laws of physics and all known current technology.
You know, from extremely blurry black-and-white thermal images with zero details in them.
Sheesh! Get a grip already! People who should know better and be more educated are falling for it.
What I think is happening with some of the more educated, intelligent, scientifically-minded people is that, perhaps, their own intellectual prowess is working against themselves. It makes them, at a more or less subconscious level, arrogant, with a feeling of intellectual superiority.
What do I mean by this? What I mean is that, perhaps, at least with some of them, they have this (more or less subconscious) attitude like "I don't know what these are, I have no explanation, therefore nobody else can have a good explanation either", and thus they don't even try to find out what other people think about it or, if they do encounter some explanations and refutations, they may reject them with no consideration, perhaps due to a sense of "that must not be a correct explanation because I'm smarter and I don't know the explanation, and therefore if someone comes up with something it must be a stupid explanation and thus can be safely rejected and ignored". They may also have a (once again mostly subconscious) attitude like "I'm an open-minded scientific person who is ready to research new things, anybody who rejects these must be closed-minded and stubborn." They may reject explanations outright, perhaps even without hearing all of it, because they are prejudiced and they assume that the explanations must be stupid and invalid. After all, they are very intelligent and educated, and if they don't have an explanation, how can people stupider than them have one! Impossible! Those handwavy ad-hoc explanations don't need to be even considered, because they are just laughable!
The reality is, however, that the explanations are rather simple once you understand them. Simple and very mundane. The videos are just misdirection. Not deliberate misdirection, but misdirection anyway. Accidental misdirection. They are like a magic trick: When you see it with no explanation, they are inexplicable. But once you understand how the magic trick works, it becomes mundane.
Let's recap the actual explanations of the three famous videos published by the Pentagon and shared around like they were the Holy Grail:
There's a lot of interesting information in this image that 99.99% of people don't understand. From this information we can see that the fighter jet (which is filming the object) is flying at an altitude of 25010 feet (about 7.6 kilometers) and a speed of mach 0.61 (about 750 km/h). The horizontal line near the center of the picture indicates the roll orientation of the fighter yet, and the white dot on the upper-left indicates the direction in which the camera is pointing to relative to the airplane (which in this diagram would be pointing towards the top of the picture). The 50 degree value at the top of the video indicates the orientation of the camera around the vertical axis (in other words, 0 degrees would mean the camera is pointing at the direction of movement). The -30 degree value on the left indicates the vertical orientation of the camera, which means 30 degrees down from the horizon. The 1.0 on the top left indicates the field of view of the camera (ie. how zoomed-in it is).
The white dot is actually quite crucial because it tells us the direction in which the fighter jet is moving. It's actually moving in the same direction as the surface of the ocean is apparently moving (ie. towards the top right of the image.)
As the video progresses these angles change. They indicate that the camera is rotating in order to keep the object in the center. In other words, the camera is tracking the object, rotating as the plane flies forward, to keep the tracked object at the center.
From all the numbers I described above, and from measuring the speed at which the surface of the ocean seems to be moving, if one does all the math, one can conclude that the object being tracked is almost stationary, and at an altitude of about 2.5 km. The diameter of the object can be estimated to be less than 1 meter.
The object is, in fact, a bird. Just a normal bird with a wingspan of about 1 meter, flying at an altitude of about 2.5 km. Could perhaps be a Canadian goose, or a large seagull. The reason why it appears to be moving so fast is just an illusion: As the fighter jet moves at a very high speed (mach 0.61) and the camera rotates to follow the bird, the parallax effect that this causes against the surface of the ocean in the backround makes it look like it's moving at a very high speed. (It's of important note that the surface of the ocean is moving in the same direction as the fighter jet. As the camera rotates from the front of the jet towards the back, tracking the almost-stationary bird, the surface of the ocean seems to move very fast forwards.)
This is just a fighter jet tracking another fighter jet. The blurry shape on the center of the video is the exhaust heat of the other plane. In the video this shape changes suddenly several times. However, this is merely caused by the rotation of the camera around its longitudinal axis.
The shape of the heat signature at the center of the picture is caused mostly by the lenses of the camera. This shape depends on the internal geometry of the camera, most importantly the shape of the shutter. Tracking gimbal cameras, when they are rotating to track a moving target, need to rotate along their longitudinal axis from time to time to accommodate the new camera position (you can find videos of this if you search enough). When the camera suddenly rotates around its longitudinal axis, it causes that exhaust heat blob to change shape.
There's nothing particularly strange or unusual about this video, especially since the target, another fighter jet, is flying at about the same speed as this one. (This video is most likely from a training exercise. It's unlikely that the fighter jet was trailing a foreign aircraft, unless this was, perhaps, filmed over international waters or over some foreign country.)
In this video a camera aboard some kind of naval vessel seems to capture a strange, sometimes pulsating bright triangle. To the uninitiated this may seem extraordinarily strange and unusual.
To a professional photographer, or to anybody who deals extensively with cameras (such as astronomers), this is a completely trivial thing, and they capture such things with their cameras all the time.
What is it? Just an airplane (probably a passenger plane) flying over. The reason why it looks like a bright triangle is that it's heavily out of focus, which causes a bokeh effect that's triangular in shape because the aperture of the camera is triangular (triangular camera apertures are far from unusual).
A bokeh effect, which is caused when something is very out-of-focus, will cause a bright light to expand, become blurry, and take the shape of the aperture of the camera. For example an octagonal camera aperture will make the lights appear as large blurry octagons. The same for a triangular aperture.
The bright triangle in the video pulsates at regular intervals. It matches exactly the blinking lights of a passenger plane on approach, and the visual effect matches exactly what one would expect for such an out-of-focus image of the plane.
If they just asked a professional photographer or camera technician, they would have their explanation, because they get these all the time in their pictures and videos, and know exactly what they are.
So yes, one bird and two planes. There's your explanation.
But no, that must not be right! It's soooo much more likely that they are unknown physics-defying technology from other planets!
It will never cease to amaze me not only how are people fooled so easily, but why they cling to their misconceptions so ferociously even when the actual explanations are given to them.
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