> she cites the now-discredited "Gimball Video". (sic)
When/where/by whom was the Gimbal video discredited?
I’m especially curious because I’m somewhat of an “expert” in the area (having worked on those sensor systems and seen tons of footage in a former life) and I think it’s a legitimate object of some sort [1]. Though I don’t believe it’s extraterrestrial.
1. Eg. The footage of a purported object speeding right over the ocean looks just like a cruise missile flying low level.
> U.F.O. skeptics and experts in optics have long said many of the videos and sightings by naval aviators represent optical illusions that have made ordinary objects — weather balloons, commercial drones — appear to move faster than possible.
> Military officials have largely come to the same conclusion.
…
> Another video, known as Gimbal, shows an object that appears to be turning or spinning. Military officials now believe that is the optics of the classified image sensor, designed to help target weapons, make the object appear like it is moving in a strange way.
I don’t know, define discredited. Define consensus. I really love that it’s a game developer who seems to be thinking outside the box enough to provide explanations for the public materials. I guess the expertise is not as valuable as it seems, in the narrow problem of explaining camera rendering, and indeed someone with a games background knows a lot about that.
> shows an object that appears to be turning or spinning.
In this particular case, the turning and spinning just looks like artifacting in my "expert" opinion. I guess it doesn't help that the flight crew audio states it is spinning, but both things can be true. I've seen artifacting like this on FLIR footage a number of times.
Honestly, Mick West reaches hard for any way to debunk everything and his conclusions on certain subjects are just flat out ridiculous.
Ex: Suggesting that what kids saw at the Ariel school sighting were just puppeteers. Those kids are now adult professionals and have stuck to what they saw. Don't take my word, have an open mind and watch the past and recent interviews with them.
Was great to see him put in his place on the News Nation post-interview segment.
I understood intellectually the problems with memory but I never felt them viscerally until I listened to The Coldest Case in Laramie, which is a podcast series about what it sounds like. There are interviews with various people who are utterly believable, but at some point the host gains access to the police reports and interview transcripts from when the crime took place, and she reacquaints these people with what they stated originally.
They are totally baffled. They literally cannot believe that what they remember happening in vivid detail never happened, that what they stated in reports from 20 or 30 years ago - which must be true - has little relation to their present day recollections. Hearing the disbelief and confusion in their voices really made the fallibility of memory real to me.
"Gimbal" is a speck of dust (or fly, or bird poo) on the lens of a gimbal-mounted heat-tracking camera. The entire video is predictable given the physics of such a device [1]. Not my idea, it's been around since this news first broke [2].
Totally, Gimbal and Gofast were immediately discredited as Gimbal, well, being the gimbal of the sensor + contrast enhacement and Gofast being the parallax effect on a probably balloon moving at normal wind speeds. The last one I haven't seen conclusions, but if you squint it looks like an airliner at a distance. Finally the green tringle one also was discarded as a lens artifact.
Mick West’s analysis involves the gimbal lock idea, which I am convinced of, but he claims that the infrared shadow is the shape that a two engine plane gives off when it is at an angle, and one engine is occluded by the plane’s body. This seems more plausible to me than dust on the dome, which I imagine those sensors must have some way of handling or they would be useless.
How does one explain the eyewitness testimony of the 4 people involved?
>Fravor reported that he saw an object, white and oval, hovering above an ocean disturbance. He estimated that the object was about 40 feet (12 m) long.[7][4] Fravor and another pilot, Alex Dietrich, said in an interview that a total of four people (two pilots and two weapons systems officers in the back seats of the two airplanes) witnessed the object for about 5 minutes.[8] Fravor says that as he spiraled down to get closer to the object, the object ascended, mirroring the trajectory of his airplane, until the object disappeared.
The history of UFO sightings is nothing but eyewitness testimony, often from groups of people. If there weren't a video this wouldn't have escaped the tabloids.
Adding a video which is a textbook demonstration of gimbal+heat tracking behavior does not lend weight to their testimony.
EDIT: The testimony you quoted isn't even associated with "Gimbal", it's associated with the decade-earlier "FLIR" video.
But according to Fravor's report, the 2 planes were sent there by their ship because the radar at picked up something. So it means that if it is made up, it involves the 2 pilots and their 2 weapons specialist, plus an undetermined number of radar operators, and their chain of command in the USS Princeton who dispatched them.
So from my understanding, it was picked up by at least one type of sensor.
There is still a probability, there was an artifact on the radar, AND the crew then decided to make up a story, but, Alex Dietrich, the second pilot had just started a few weeks earlier, and it was her first real world mission. I don't think that typical people tries to do a prank on one of their first assignments, on the spot, more so with colleagues they don't know very well.
But it is still possible I guess, even if I have hard time what could be the motivation of everyone involved.
I am not a military person, but I would assume that "radar picked up something" is a pretty common reason for planes to be in the air. This time, there just happened also to be something on the lens of the FLIR camera.
VFX artists react had a pretty good video where they're pretty sure the footage over the ocean is just a bird. The oddness is due to the camera optics and the vessel that's recording it traveling extremely fast.
Do you assume, US fighter pilots get stumped by birds often?
I find it really remarkable how far behind the curve HN is on this topic. It's literally the nerdiest, most avant-garde topic of all. Yet here people behave like their own grandfathers.
TheHill.com reports on Congress acting on the mounting evidence for ET craft crash retrieval programs illegally hidden from democratic oversight, people on HN discuss whether birds fly high.
> It's literally the nerdiest, most avant-garde topic of all.
It's not avant-garde at all. It's the same old nonsense that comes around every 10-20 years with new lipstick on it. The "pilots are trained observers" canard is literally the same shtick from all the way back to Kenneth Arnold's flying saucers from 1947. After going around this hamster wheel a bunch of times, forgive me if I'm not excited by another round of "the evidence is about to be released any day now" chatter.
The Hill is reporting on the shenanigans of opportunist or dumb as rocks congresspeople who figured out there’s some demographic of marginal voter who cares about this.
Exactly. That right wing grifters have piled onto the current UFO conspiracy push doesn't lend it any additional credibility. If anything, it detracts from it.
Have you actually watched his video on the Gimbal craft? I thought that was a big piece of evidence myself, went into his video at the recommendation of someone here on HN with heavy skepticism, and came out sufficiently convinced it was not actually a UFO. He's also classy with his debunkings. To me that's a big bonus. Other YouTubers whose niche is debunking things seem to love being snarky, sarcastic, and condescending. Doesn't make his points any more/less valid though.
I'm not generally a fan of Mick West, particularly when he gets into specific debunkings of videos, because his argumentative framework depends on the same flawed approach as those he's debunking: he starts from the conclusion that the aliens are not here, and then claims any evidence offered against this conclusion is insufficient. He depends on the same fallacy as his opponents. The only difference is the conclusion from which he starts. And of course he has an inherent advantage of credibility because his conclusion doesn't require any extraordinary evidence. That's why it feels like he's just taking cheap shots - in many ways he's on the easier side of the debate (but ironically it's become the harder side because it's nearly impossible to deprogram his opponents out of their cult).
However, I did enjoy his recent video [0] on Grusch, where he focuses on the meta arguments against the narrative itself. He does a good job of describing the logical and dialectical flaws in the claims of the so-called "whistleblower" (who needs to get approval to speak publicly), and the reporting of the story itself (which was rushed and published by the same group of people with monetary and reputational incentives to uncritically promote the same narrative for which they've previously lost credibility).
It's called circular reasoning. Conclusion cites the premises, which in turn the premises cite the conclusion. Evidence (or lack of) is used to prove it self. When you start with a false or circular premise, anything that follows is technically true. It's a powerful (bullshitting) tool that can be used to prove or disprove anything.
It's bayesian reasoning. If I tell you that I predict the sun will explode tomorrow, you should consider the sun's track record of not exploding when evaluating my claim.
There's no bayesian reasoning here, just someone assuming something to be proved to be already true. Statements don't become self-evidently true just because someone assigned probabilities on them.
Also, using only past billion occurrences of the sun not blowing up, and then still concluding that the sun will not blow up despite of any recent indications of the sun showing anomalous activity seems a more accurate analogy.
Mick West presents rational reasons for why his assumptions are true, he's not simply asserting his assumptions as correct.
> despite of any recent indications of the sun showing anomalous activity
The whole point is that the videos are not in fact the indications of anomalous activity that they're made out to be. There are mundane explanations for all of them.
This comment makes it seem like the video does not contain rational arguments. It very much does. If you're skeptical about them, why not address them.
I find the gimbal one to be… really dumb. The navy releases a video called gimbal and doesn’t say anything. Later experts look at it and say, “looks like gimbal lock”.
And what… people don’t believe that the navy also concluded it was gimbal lock?
One thing about the object flying over the ocean people often ignore was the setting was at black hot, meaning the object was significantly colder than the water below. I have some speculate that it could be a bird but I can't see how a bird could be so cold unless it was dead.
The gimbal video gets its name from the strange way the object appears to rotate in the footage, what some people have claimed is “the craft reconfiguring itself”.
Ive seen convincing analyses that this rotation effect is the objects infrared shadow changing shape as it moves relative to the observer. The shape change is almost exactly what we would expect if we were observing a two engine plane, and one engine became occluded behind the body of the plane, hiding its infrared signature from the observer.
When/where/by whom was the Gimbal video discredited?
I’m especially curious because I’m somewhat of an “expert” in the area (having worked on those sensor systems and seen tons of footage in a former life) and I think it’s a legitimate object of some sort [1]. Though I don’t believe it’s extraterrestrial.
1. Eg. The footage of a purported object speeding right over the ocean looks just like a cruise missile flying low level.