Ben Hansen breaks down UAP video filmed by former F 18 Pilot

This happened August 18th off the coast of LA, not too far from supposed UAP hotspot Catalina Island. It was filmed on an iPhone, so this video doesn't show a defined craft. These objects paced his plane for around 15 minutes, and were seen by several other planes.

Don't expect anything like the Tic Tac, Gimbal or Go Fast video detail. Ben does a great job of dissecting this, spent hours speaking with the pilot and others

Pretty cool footage, nice chat from Mr Hansen too. Five orbs in flight by the look of things. The description of the orb that just descended from above like a shooting star.......................... Orb for sure

I'll need to rewatch. All I saw were the 2 lights side by side on the left hand portion of the screen

Basically what you have here are some lights in the sky, what on the Hynek Scale are called nocturnal lights. Yes, you have an experienced pilot who called it in and was well-treated by ATC, but the bottom line is that he "saw some lights."

a reply to: vlawde

I am open to the UFO phenomenon. In fact, if I am told “conspiracy theory’ all I see is a massive attempt at shutting down any type of critical thinking. So, those words will only make me look even harder at the subject; however, this is rather anticlimactic. Flashing lights? This could be replicated (I believe, maybe wrong) with some sort of laser pointer. You got to give me more than this here!

originally posted by: StarsInDust
a reply to: vlawde

Flashing lights? This could be replicated (I believe, maybe wrong) with some sort of laser pointer. You got to give me more than this here!

He was at 41,000 feet.

Interesting.
Let's see what happens.

Mick West and a few others have weighed in, and are saying

the lights on the video appear to be a reflection of the iPhone 13 Pro autofocus system

Although the pilot says he saw them with his own eyes, and the lights were seen by others, so.... Here's a good article by Joe Murgia going over this
www.ufojoe.net...

The one thing that bothered my about the video (that is addressed in Joe's article) is the lights are always way over on the left side of the screen, and the distance between them never seems to change.

BTW, here is new footage from the USS Zumwalt taken by a sailor. Pretty clear it's a drone

A former drone industry analyst who declined to be named due to their current employment highlighted several other features of interest. The analyst commented that “while the video isn't of the best quality, I don't see anything on the drone that would make me think it's something that couldn't be purchased off the shelf from a current commercial drone manufacturer.” The analyst added, “the fact that the narrator said that there was a pattern of flight where there were no changes in altitude tells me that the drones were either programmed to fly a certain route or controlled from a distance while possibly on altitude hold, which to me isn't the hallmark of any advanced technology.”

www.thedrive.com...

originally posted by: vlawde
This happened August 18th off the coast of LA, not too far from supposed UAP hotspot Catalina Island. It was filmed on an iPhone, so this video doesn't show a defined craft. These objects paced his plane for around 15 minutes, and were seen by several other planes.

Don't expect anything like the Tic Tac, Gimbal or Go Fast video detail. Ben does a great job of dissecting this, spent hours speaking with the pilot and others

Ben doesn't do a good job at all of dissecting this.

He should start by saying the video shows a UFO or UFOs and he doesn't know what they are, but he doesn't do that. At time 6:30 he says:

"This is not something occurring in the cockpit, like a reflection off the windscreen, you know, lights inside the cockpit, definitely not."

But then the video he shows at 20 minutes or so is confirmed to the 99.99% level at least to definitely be a reflection in the cockpit of lights from the focusing system of his iPhone:

Retired F-18 Pilot Reports 5 UAPs Pacing His Aircraft Over Channel Islands 8-18-22

So why does Ben say definitely not a reflection in the cockpit? He says other pilots reported some lights in the sky, but we don't have any videos from them so we don't know what they saw.

You could hypothesize that maybe the pilot saw some lights in the sky that did what he describes in his story, and that maybe when he got his iPhone to record them, he ended up recording reflections of his autofocus system instead of the actual UFOs. Maybe that's what happened, but the problem I have with that interpretation is that when the pilot looked at the video he sent to Ben Hansen, he should have been saying something like "These lights don't look or behave at all like the UFOs I saw and was trying to record", but at least Ben's understanding appears to be that the lights which are reflections of the autofocus system are the UFOs.

The posts in that thread suggest that the twitterverse is split with half saying no those lights are not reflections of the autofocus system, and with the other half saying yes they are definitely lights from the autofocus system, but pilots are infallible so he can't be referring to those as the UFO, but then they don't agree on what the actual UFO might be since the only other lights are a few stars, and some city lights. As Hynek found in his UFO research, pilots are not infallible, and some of the highest misperception rates of UFOs of any profession, maybe we have yet another example of such a misperception here...it certainly appears so.

Apparently Ben Hansen is going to dig into this reflection issue with further discussions with the pilot, but I didn't see any updates yet on his youtube channel.

originally posted by: schuyler
Basically what you have here are some lights in the sky, what on the Hynek Scale are called nocturnal lights. Yes, you have an experienced pilot who called it in and was well-treated by ATC, but the bottom line is that he "saw some lights."

Whether the pilot actualy saw nocturnal lights, I can't say, but the Ben Hansen video in the OP does not appear to show lights in the sky or nocturnal lights, it shows reflections from his iPhone autofocus system.

originally posted by: vlawde
Mick West and a few others have weighed in, and are saying
"the lights on the video appear to be a reflection of the iPhone 13 Pro autofocus system"

Although the pilot says he saw them with his own eyes, and the lights were seen by others, so.... Here's a good article by Joe Murgia going over this
www.ufojoe.net...

This is a very sloppy line of thinking to think other pilots confirmed the lights, since they may not have even seen the same lights. The video the pilot sent to Ben doesn't even show lights in the sky, except for some stars. And if you want to think the pilot saw them with his own eyes, you would have to believe what he saw looked exactly like and behaved exactly like the autofocus lights on his iPhone, or else if they didn't, why didn't the pilot say the UFOs he saw with his eyes are not what is showing up on the video, do you see the problem there?

I will be interested to see if Ben Hansen publishes anything further on this, since apparently he is having ongoing discussions with the pilot to try to get to the bottom of this.