UFO Disclosure Group Releases Newest Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet UFO Encounter Video (cnn.com)

alaskana98 writes: CNN and other media outlets are reporting that the "To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science" group has released the third in a series of videos purportedly showing an encounter between Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilots and an object moving at seemingly impossible speeds off the East Coast of the United States. The video was captured by the Raytheon: Advanced Targeting Forward-Looking Infrared (ATFLIR) pod and includes audio of the pilots excitedly observing this object from far above as it zooms over the ocean surface. The ATFLIR system has trouble getting a lock on the object at first but then gets a lock on it eventually demonstrating that whatever this this was it wasn't a figment of the pilots imaginations. If the video is authentic there are indeed some strange things flying in our skies. The video can be viewed here.

Comments

Nothing to see

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like a weather balloon to me.

UFO

[aepervius]

UFO means unknown flying object. UFO does not mean alien. Just my 23 cents to those who will jump to conclusion. My own hypothesis are that the explanation are immensely far more likely to be something mundane which cannot be proven but neither can it be discarded, e.g. some dust before the equipment, insects or equally mundane stuff. Alien do not even come in the top 5.

Re:And?

[taylorius]

You do know what the letters UFO stand for, right?

Not all that fast

[Lonewolf666]

If you follow the video from 1:35 to 1:55, the range displayed on the screen drops from 4.4 nautical miles to 3.4.
That's 0.1 mile per second or 185 m/s. The speed of the F18 itself and the shifting angle makes calculating the speed of the UFO more difficult, but it looks looks like the object is approaching the plane rather than flying away. So part of the 185 m/s are from the F18's own speed. As a rough guess, the thing was doing perhaps Mach 0.5. There are a lot of man-made objects that can do that. A drone maybe?

Parallax movement for stationary object

[DrTJ]

The motion of the water is upwards/right. If they were filming with a constant pan/tilt the water would appear moving down/left given their heading.
Now, they locked the camera tracking at the object (at somewhere between 0 and 25k ft) and that would make the water appear to move upwards/right even if the object wasn't moving at all, due to the parallax effect. This is similar to how a street light appears to move relative to the background (when you look at it, i.e. track it), while the background and the light in fact are stationary, you're just changing perspective when you drive along the road.

So, it is entirely possible to get this effect with a very slow moving, or even stationary, object due to the parallax. The "apparent fast linear motion" is also consistent with the fast linear motion of the aircraft.

It could be a drone, a bird, or even a bag floating in the air. To tell otherwise, one would need more information, primarily the of the FoV of the camera.