Question about tic tac ufo video and object’s change in size.

If the object was traveling at a high rate of speed from the camera, shouldn’t there be a corresponding change in the area the object takes up in the video? Or the number of pixels it occupies? Same for traveling towards the camera?

If the object was not acting within the normal bounds of known aircraft physics, how was the camera able to stay trained on the object? Was the zoom struggling to keep the object in view/focus?

You may want to check out my thread on the series Unidentified. There is a lot of talk on the tic tac UFO’s in this thread.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: neutronflux
People conflate two or three of the three+ events that happened on the same day:

Event 1: Radar Returns Kevin Day sees UFOs on radar, some have drastic change in altitude. He has been seeing them for days and they had a recent systems upgrade, so they don't take them too seriously at first, thinking they might be glitches in the recently upgraded systems, since they are so erratic. But they check out the systems, and find no glitches, so they decide to investigate with pilots.

Event 2: Visual sighting Back in 2004, when the story first leaked on ATS, the person telling the story "The Final Theory aka TFT" first said The UFO was floating extremely still in mid air, this was 30,000 ft above ground level. It looked literally and i mean LITERALLY just like a disk. Then the next day, he changed his story The jet then spotted an air contact, it appeared to be a capsule shaped (wingless, mobile, white, oblong pill shaped, 25-30 feet in length, no visible markings and no glass) . So why did the story change? They then posted the FLIR video, over a decade before TTSA "released it".

Much later, we hear from David Fravor and the three other pilots in the two Hornets that were sent to investigate to find out what in the heck was causing those radar blips Kevin Day was seeing. So you would think Fravor would flick the switch on his helmet to turn on his guncam and get some footage, right? Fravor says he saw something he couldn't identify that had incredible performance beyond any aircraft he knows about, but his camera was a potato. Doesn't it seems strange that Fravor's mission is to ID this radar blip, and he doesn't turn his camera on to get some imagery to aid in the identification? That object disappeared so the pilots left the area.



Event 3: FLIR video: Another pilot, Chad Underwood, later went to the same general area, and he didn't see anything visually like Fravor did. However his FLIR system picked up a very distant object he couldn't see with his eyes. The strange part is he said his video shows the "tic tac" he captured on video ‘Wasn’t Behaving by the Normal Laws of Physics’, but it didn't even stretch the laws of physics a little bit, so it's very strange he would say that. So either he's lying, or he doesn't understand what the video shows, because the UFO follows the laws of physics so perfectly, it's actually a quite boring video except at the end when he loses target lock and changes the zoom, which some have misinterpreted as "fast acceleration", but it really doesn't accelerate at all.

Navy Pilot Who Filmed the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO Speaks: ‘It Wasn’t Behaving by the Normal Laws of Physics’

Moreover, seeing a tic-tac shape on FLIR doesn't mean the object is Tic-Tac shaped. I don't know what the object is on his FLIR, but I do know what these tic-tac-shaped objects are on FLIR, they are F-15s:

www.youtube.com...

2 "Tic-Tacs" which are actually F-15s, just before they increase the zoom, where it's still very difficult if not impossible to see any control surfaces showing they normal airplanes.


The same two "ticTacs" just after they increase the zoom, now you can see the control surfaces and tell they are airplanes:


I hear people conflating 2 or 3 of the above 3 events as if they are all the same event but there's no reason to make that assumption, even if they happened at different times on the same day. As the F-15 images on FLIR show, you can't assume an object is "tic-tac" shaped just because you see something tic-tac shaped on FLIR. TTSA is actually promoting the lie that you would always be able to see control surfaces on the FLIR if it's a plane. The above images PROVE that's a lie.

Was the zoom struggling to keep the object in view/focus?

People have said the target lock with that FLIR system works pretty well and in general the video bears that out with the exception that when the FLIR settings are changed, it can lose target lock. We see that happen more than once in the FLIR video. At the end of the video the target is not re-acquired after target lock is lost, but earlier in the video we can see a change in settings, then the target lock is perhaps very briefly lost but quickly re-acquired.

If the pilots had not fiddled with the FLIR settings, it looks like the FLIR system would have been able to keep target lock.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Ok?

Can you please quote where you answered:


If the object was traveling at a high rate of speed from the camera, shouldn’t there be a corresponding change in the area the object takes up in the video? Or the number of pixels it occupies? Same for traveling towards the camera?

a reply to: neutronflux

There was only one point in the FLIR video where any remarkable velocity was claimed. That "velocity" was perpendicular to the camera, across the frame. So no change in angular size would be expected. However, zooming in on the object can create the illusion of a rapid change in velocity, and did so. As has been amply demonstrated. The FLIR video displays nothing remarkable at all.

The "Gimble" video displays no remarkable flight characteristics other than what looks like strange rotation of the target. It is that which is of interest, not great velocity. But isn't really a mystery. It's an effect caused by rotation of the ... gimble.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

Wow!

Terrific analysis and succint presentation of the events.

Thanks! I learned a ton!

originally posted by: neutronflux
a reply to: Arbitrageur
Ok?
Can you please quote where you answered:
If the object was traveling at a high rate of speed from the camera, shouldn’t there be a corresponding change in the area the object takes up in the video? Or the number of pixels it occupies? Same for traveling towards the camera?

I thought that was addressed by " the UFO follows the laws of physics so perfectly, it's actually a quite boring video except at the end when he loses target lock and changes the zoom, which some have misinterpreted as "fast acceleration", but it really doesn't accelerate at all. "

So there was no high rate of speed observed in the video, except as pointed out by me and Phage the apparent "acceleration" at the end, which is not high speed, and it's not acceleration.

As I tried to explain, the "high rate of speed" claim I believe is merely a conflation between event 2 of Fravor's visual sighting, and event 3 of the FLIR video which shows no verifiable evidence of high speed.

Now if you are asking hypothetically that even though the video doesn't demonstrate any high rate of speed, what would happen if it did, it's more or less a math calculation. You can't do math with undefined terms like "high rate of speed", you need to define a speed, so let's say it was going the same speed as Chad Underwood's plane traveling away from him. The size wouldn't change at all.

Now let's say it was going twice as fast as Underwood's plane away from him, and assume it was 40 miles away, then the distance would increase by about 10% in a 1 minute video, meaning it would take up 10% less size in the display all else being equal. However, the problem I see with that is the image is so fuzzy I would have a very difficult time trying to make such a calculation because the edges are not well defined. So I really wouldn't have any confidence in taking such a fuzzy object and trying to calculate exactly what it was doing from unclear imagery. By the way Underwood's plane was traveling at mach 0.55 so if the UFO was going twice that it would be supersonic at mach 1.1, but I don't know if you consider that a "high rate of speed" or not, that expression is undefined.

When they change the zoom, then we see significant changes in the size on screen, but obviously that's only a zoom effect.

a reply to: Riffrafter
Thanks for the feedback.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

You

then the distance would increase by about 10% in a 1 minute video, meaning it would take up 10% less size in the display

Is that a true statement? In the cotext of: “ As a result, the object’s size increases in the same proportion as the square of distance, i.e., ”

Please read cited source below.

The object’s size (S) is the total area of an object in two dimensions, i.e., vertical and horizontal dimensions. If both dimensions of an object are doubled, the total area of the object will increase by fourfold. When the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the object are tripled, the total area of the object grows by nine times. As a result, the object’s size increases in the same proportion as the square of distance, i.e., . I

oceanswebsite.com...

People theorize that some of the UFOs surrounds itself with a quantum field vacuum, which more or less "disconnects" the UFO from this physical reality - allowing it to travel faster than our physics allows for (ie. Einsteins laws and all that) since our gravity has less of an effect on it due to its quantum vacuum. One could imagine that something that "disconnects" itself from this reality would also appear very different - perhaps a UFO would appear to shape shift like a jelly since light photons are interacting with differently that objects that are 100% in this reality? Perhaps that´s what we´re seeing here?

-MM

originally posted by: neutronflux
a reply to: Arbitrageur

You

then the distance would increase by about 10% in a 1 minute video, meaning it would take up 10% less size in the display

Is that a true statement? In the cotext of: “ As a result, the object’s size increases in the same proportion as the square of distance, i.e., ”

Please read cited source below.

The object’s size (S) is the total area of an object in two dimensions, i.e., vertical and horizontal dimensions. If both dimensions of an object are doubled, the total area of the object will increase by fourfold. When the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the object are tripled, the total area of the object grows by nine times. As a result, the object’s size increases in the same proportion as the square of distance, i.e., . I

oceanswebsite.com...

Are we still talking about the tic tac video you asked about in the OP, or in general? In general, if the distance increases by 10%, that reduces the horizontal size by 10% and the vertical size by 10%. In general, the number of pixels after the 10% reduction would be .9 x.9 = .81 or 81% of the original pixels.

But, does that apply to the Tic Tac video or what the pentagon released as "FLIR.mp4"?

Here's a capture from the pentagon FLIR.mp4 video at 65 seconds in the video, with the UFO enlarged so we can see the pixels.


As I said it's fuzzy so where are the edges? I'm not sure, but just to do some math, let's make some guesses.
Let's say it's 9 pixels wide and 3 pixels high.
Now let's do the math for a 10% reduction in horizontal size and a 10% reduction in vertical size.

Horizontal:
9 pixels x .9 = 8.1 pixels, rounded to the nearest whole number of pixels = 8 pixels

Vertical
3 pixels x .9 = 2.7 pixels, rounded to the nearest whole number of pixels = 3 pixels

So, if we start with 27 pixels and end up with 24 pixels, is that a 10% reduction, or a 19% reduction as the math would suggest if you assumed that we can have fractional pixels?

Maybe you could develop a scheme to use fractional pixels using some kind of gray scale guesswork but I've seen enough garbage in, garbage out calculations on this not even very interesting video to make me wonder if it would be another one of those.

So I think a 3 pixel height is not sufficient to guarantee there will be a 10% change in vertical pixel count resulting from a 10% change in vertical height of the UFO due to 10% distance change. This is if we try to work with the low quality video the pentagon released. I've heard claims of higher quality videos from some, and I've heard others say that's not true. Earlier this year, the New York Times released a higher quality video which had a higher bitrate which provided improved gray scale definitions, but there was no change in the pixel count or resolution from the video the pentagon officially released.

originally posted by: MerkabaMeditation
People theorize that some of the UFOs surrounds itself with a quantum field vacuum, which more or less "disconnects" the UFO from this physical reality - allowing it to travel faster than our physics allows for (ie. Einsteins laws and all that) since our gravity has less of an effect on it due to its quantum vacuum. One could imagine that something that "disconnects" itself from this reality would also appear very different - perhaps a UFO would appear to shape shift like a jelly since light photons are interacting with differently that objects that are 100% in this reality? Perhaps that´s what we´re seeing here?

We can speculate virtually anything about alien technology that we don't know anything about, but to me it makes more sense to look at occam's razor for the more likely explanations.

The "shape change" in infrared might be the result of a change in the orientation of the UFO with respect to the FLIR system. For example, the exhaust from a plane will look different on infrared depending on the orientation of the plane with respect to the FLIR. If it's flying away from the FLIR you get an unobstructed view of the IR signature of the engine exhaust, but at other orientations the view of the exhaust may be partially blocked by the plane, if for example the plane is flying toward the FLIR. Some have suggested the UFO might be a plane, but it's too fuzzy and too far away to tell, I don't know what it is.

Regarding a vacuum affecting gravity, there's a bit of a vacuum outside the ISS (international space station) which doesn't seem to affect gravity.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

So I think a 3 pixel height is not sufficient to guarantee there will be a 10% change in vertical pixel count resulting from a 10% change in vertical height of the UFO due to 10% distance change.

In any case, the level of zoom shows in the upper left corner of the display. It cannot really be disputed. There is no great velocity or acceleration demonstrated. The point is moot.

how can you tell what speed it is going in what direction or any changes to them based on the video?

on the one hand we got the guys on tv saying they were behaving in ways that far exceeded anything possible with known technology, and on the other hand we have users here saying that based on the video its totally doable by f15s.

originally posted by: neutronflux


If the object was traveling at a high rate of speed from the camera, shouldn’t there be a corresponding change in the area the object takes up in the video? Or the number of pixels it occupies? Same for traveling towards the camera?

If the object was not acting within the normal bounds of known aircraft physics, how was the camera able to stay trained on the object? Was the zoom struggling to keep the object in view/focus?

The object does change a little bit in size, these changes over time are just enough to make a rough estimation of the closure speed and distance. This has been done already (link to the calculations).

To estimate the closure speed, however, an assumption must be made about the actual size of the object.

If the object is assumed to be about 40 feet (the size reported by Fravor), it would be at an average distance of about 10 nautical miles (11,5 miles), and have a closure speed of about 400 kts (460 mph).

Now, the jet was flying towards the object, with a Calibrated Air Speed (CAS) that can be read from the ATFLIR display: 250 kts. The Calibrated Air Speed can be converted to the True Air Speed (TAS) of the jet, which is close to 400 kts. This means that most (if not all) of the closure speed is due to the jet flying towards the object.

Apart from the closure, there is also a sudden movement from right to left at the end of the video.

During most of the video, the ATFLIR is locked on the object and follows it. You can see in the ATFLIR display that the object is slowly moving from right to left by the ATFLIR viewing angles that are changing while the ATFLIR stays locked on the object. The apparent acceleration when the ATFLIR stops tracking it at the last bit of the video is simply a continuation of this movement, as is shown here.

The slow right to left movement during the whole video could be caused by the jet banking a little to the right, or by a slight movement of the object, or both. It is not remarkable at all.

Nobody knows why the ATFLIR lock broke. Maybe because the WSO was fiddling with the settings too frequently. The object's movement with respect to the jet did not change, so this cannot be the cause.

As for the pilots mentioning rotating and terrific speed, these UFO’s were observed by these pilots with their own eyes. And these were pilots that used the FLIR system all the time. If they say it took off at “terrific” speed then it took off at terrific speed. If they said it was “rotating” then it was rotating. The crafts they were seeing were not dependent on the FLIR.

a reply to: neutronflux

I know your a technical guy, so you might like reading this 'Estimate' from members of the Department of Physics, University at Albany, and the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies.

“…or that these craft exhibit technology far more advanced than any known craft on Earth. In many cases, the number and quality of witnesses, the variety of roles they played in the encounters, and the equipment used to track and record the craft favor the latter hypothesis that these are indeed technologically advanced craft. The observed flight characteristics of these craft are consistent with the flight characteristics required for interstellar travel…

We have characterized the accelerations of several UAVs and have demonstrated that if they are craft then they are indeed anomalous, displaying technical capabilities far exceeding those of our fastest aircraft and spacecraft. It is not clear that these objects are extraterrestrial in origin, but it is extremely difficult to imagine that anyone on Earth with such technology would not put it to use. Even though older sightings are less reliable, observations of seemingly similar UAPs go back to well before the era of flight…”

"With acceleration estimates in hand, we obtained a ballpark estimate of the power involved to accelerate the UAP. Of course, this required an estimate of the mass of the UAP, which we did not have. The UAP was estimated to be approximately the same size as an F/A-18 Super Hornet, which has a weight of about 32000lbs, corresponding to 14550kg. Since we want a minimal power estimate, we took the acceleration as 5370g and assumed that the UAP had a mass of 1000kg. The UAP would have then reached a maximum speed of about 46000mph during the descent, or 60 times the speed of sound. The power, P, required to accelerate the UAP is given by

P=Fv=mav=ma2t,

(15)for which F is the force, m is the mass of the UAP, v is its velocity, and a is its acceleration. The power required varies as a function of velocity, and hence as a function of time. Figure 3C illustrates the power required to accelerate the UAV as a function of time, assuming that the UAV is propelled in a conventional way. The required power peaks at a shocking 1100GW, which exceeds the total nuclear power production of the United States by more than a factor of ten."

www.mdpi.com...

originally posted by: Guest101
This means that most (if not all) of the closure speed is due to the jet flying towards the object.

While that analysis may be a little iffy, as your statement suggests, a balloon is not ruled out by the closing speed analysis, and I would agree with that much, even if some parts of the analysis are questionable, like the 10nm assumption. If it was only 10 nm away, I'd expect the FLIR to be able to measure a distance to the object, which it was unable to do, and the initial radar contact distance might have been 30-40 nm if the following linked document is at all credible:

The questionable pdf about the incident, with no heading that Knapp posted on LasVegasNow's website, also says something similar, about no discernable movement of the object, with the only closure being the result of the aircraft's movement, on page 10 of the pdf:

media.lasvegasnow.com...

"The object, according to the FLIR, appeared stationary.There was no discernable movement from the object with the only closure being the result of the aircraft's movement."

A little before that in the pdf, it states the initial contact was 30-40 nm away on radar, but how much time elapsed between that and the FLIR video being made isn't stated, so it's hard to assess how consistent that is with the 10 nm distance estimate from the source on Metabunk.

To me it seems odd the pilot didn't keep flying toward the UFO and try to get a visual on it, but the pdf makes it sound like they just gave up on it after it appeared to move off the left of their FLIR display.

So as far as physical maneuvers go, the unidentified object isn't doing anything a balloon can't do, yet the pilot who made that video says it wasn't behaving by the normal laws of physics. I have to wonder if he was asked to lie about that as some patriotic project to feed the public false information, because I have a hard time believing he really thinks the UFO in his FLIR video is defying the normal laws of physics.

Navy Pilot Who Filmed the ‘Tic Tac’ UFO Speaks: ‘It Wasn’t Behaving by the Normal Laws of Physics’

That's a pretty big discrepancy for the pilot to say a UFO which doesn't appear to be moving any more than a balloon would move is not "Behaving by the Normal Laws of Physics", so I feel like I'm getting fed BS, and there are many other inconsistency issues with this entire story, and with the other videos released by TTSA and then the Pentagon.

a reply to: spiritualarchitect

originally posted by: spiritualarchitect
As for the pilots mentioning rotating and terrific speed, these UFO’s were observed by these pilots with their own eyes.

Only one UFO was observed visually that I'm aware of, from the stories relating to the FLIR video, the tic-tac that Fravor described. So I don't know what you mean by "these UFOs" plural since Fravor's tic tac is the only visually sighted UFO that day I'm aware of.

If they said it was “rotating” then it was rotating.

We can all see the apparent rotation, but the video is named "gimbal" for a reason, because the gimbal mechanism can cause such a rotation effect. So no, the video does not imply the UFO was rotating just because the image appears to rotate, explained by Goddard's Journal in this video:

www.mdpi.com...

There are serious flaws in that assessment. The authors even state what the flaws are with respect to the Tic-Tac sighting by Fravor, this is from page 9 of the pdf pointing out serious flaws:

it appears that the Tic-Tac UAV intentionally went to their CAP point, although it is neither clear how the UAV determined the CAP point coordinates nor why it would perform such a maneuver. However, it should be noted that the UAV was not observed on radar moving to the CAP point, but that it was discovered that a UAV had moved to the CAP point just after the encounter. Since there were several UAVs in the area at the time, it is not clear that it was the specific UAV that CDR Fravor encountered, but it was one of the UAVs in the area.

So the physicist makes calculations as if it was the same thing at the CAP point but he also points out there were multiple UAVs in the area and it was not observed either on radar or visually or by any other means going between the points he used in his calculations. At least he points out the multiple flaws in his assumptions upon which his calculations are based, but it seems like junk science to assume it was the same object with no real evidence to back up the assumption and given the flaws in the assumptions that are stated in the paper.

On page 11 Knuth calculates an acceleration, but there is no acceleration, so that entire calculation is flawed. The video posted by Phage earlier refers to another physicist who also screwed up the analysis, and there is yet another paper which also calculates an acceleration, but all are wrong, there is no significant acceleration, it's just a loss of target lock followed by zoom change as explained here, Phage is right, and the video he linked is right, that there is no great velocity or acceleration; Knuth and the other physicists are wrong in claiming otherwise.

originally posted by: Phage
There is no great velocity or acceleration demonstrated. The point is moot.

Knuth also makes errors in his other assumptions about other UFO events with which I'm very familiar, like JAL1628, but that's not the topic of this thread so I won't get into those errors here.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
If it was only 10 nm away, I'd expect the FLIR to be able to measure a distance to the object, which it was unable to do, and the initial radar contact distance might have been 30-40 nm if the following linked document is at all credible:

At a closure speed of 400 kts (400 nm/hour), the jet covers 20 nm in 3 minutes so yes, it might fit the initial 30-40 nm distance at first radar contact (at least approximately) since the 10 nm estimate is already 30 s in the ATFLIR video and may easily be 5-10 nm off.

I guess the ATFLIR can only determine a distance using a laser, but it needs a significant reflection for that and of course the WSO needs to switch on the laser in the first place.
Imagine being in his shoes, closing in on an unknown object that totally outmanoeuvred your wing commander a bit earlier. Would you point a laser at it..?

Also found a nice animated gif in the same Metabunk threat that shows the gradual growth in size as the jet comes closer:



It does look tic-tac shaped in most of the video, like in these snapshots on Metabunk (the bottom pictures are IR combined with TV):