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UFO-Forschung - Blick in die Presse: Ex-official who revealed UFO project accuses Pentagon of disinformation campaign

27.05.2021

Lue Elizondo's inspector general complaint asserts that officials have tried to discredit him since he went public.

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The former Pentagon official who went public about reports of UFOs has filed a complaint with the agency’s inspector general claiming a coordinated campaign to discredit him for speaking out — including accusing a top official of threatening to tell people he was "crazy," according to documents reviewed by POLITICO.

Lue Elizondo, a career counterintelligence specialist who was assigned in 2008 to work for a Pentagon program that investigated reports of "unmanned aerial phenomena," filed the 64-page complaint to the independent watchdog on May 3 and has met several times with investigators, according to his legal team.

The claim that the government is trying to discredit him comes weeks before the director of national intelligence and the Pentagon are expected to deliver an unclassified report to Congress about UFOs and the government’s strategy for investigating such encounters. The report is expected to include a detailed accounting of the agencies, personnel and surveillance systems that gather and analyze the data.

“What he is saying is there are certain individuals in the Defense Department who in fact were attacking him and lying about him publicly, using the color of authority of their offices to disparage him and discredit him and were interfering in his ability to seek and obtain gainful employment out in the world,” said Daniel Sheehan, Elizondo’s attorney. “And also threatening his security clearance.”

Sheehan, a public interest lawyer and activist, has a long history of taking on the federal government on behalf of high-profile clients, including defending The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case as well as one of the Watergate burglars.

He is also widely viewed as a provocateur who has an abiding interest in UFOs and has spoken publicly about alien visitations. He also served as counsel for the Disclosure Project, led by ufologist Steven Greer, that has sought to force more government transparency on UFOs.

When asked for comment, Elizondo referred questions to Sheehan.

Sheehan maintains the goal of Elizondo’s IG complaint is much bigger than clearing his name: He wants to compel the Pentagon to clear up all the ambiguity about what it knows about UFOs.

“Nobody seemed to be taking this thing seriously,” Sheehan said of Elizondo’s concerns when he left the Pentagon in 2017. “The different units and different groups that are responsible for responding to this particular phenomenon … they're not briefing each other on this.”

“The old dodge,” Sheehan says, “is ‘oh well, the real problem was that one shop wasn't communicating with the other shop.’ That’s the classic bureaucratic dodge. I’m trying to get the Defense Department to clarify for the public and media what exactly is the cartography inside the Defense Department for dealing with this particular phenomenon.”

A spokesperson for the Defense Department IG's office declined to comment on the status of Elizondo’s complaint. “I cannot speculate or deliberate about complaints that our office may have received,” said Dwrena Allen. “I certainly cannot confirm or deny the existence of an investigation to the same.”

But a day after Elizondo filed his complaint, the IG announced a probe into Pentagon “actions” on UFOs, which is being undertaken by the assistant inspector general for evaluations on space, intelligence, engineering and oversight.

"We may revise the objective as the evaluation proceeds, and we will consider suggestions from management for additional or revised objectives," stated the IG’s memo announcing that probe.

It remains unclear whether Elizondo’s claims will be found to merit an official investigation, but his legal team says he is scheduled to meet again with investigators from the IG next month.

Elizondo has become a minor celebrity since he retired from the Pentagon in October 2017 and went public about the Advanced Aerial Threat Identification Program, or AATIP, a secret Pentagon effort that was initiated in 2008 by then-Sen. Harry Reid. POLITICO and The New York Times revealed the existence of the office and Elizondo's role in it in December 2017.

Elizondo complained at the time that his Pentagon bosses were failing to take seriously numerous intrusions into military airspace by high-performance aircraft of unknown origin.

"It was during this time I grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of resources and interest by senior leadership," he states in the IG complaint. "UAP reporting to our office was increasing, yet our resources were minimal, and leadership involvement was almost non-existent.

"After increased frustration, " he added, "I became alarmed by the frequency and duration of UAP activity in and around controlled U.S. airspace. The instances seemed more provocative, and during one instance, they came within feet of a U.S. fighter aircraft."

After he retired from government service, Elizondo also shared with the media a trio of Navy videos he got declassified before he left government service.

He claims he has since endured a coordinated effort to malign his reputation, including Pentagon press statements asserting he had no official role in UFO research, even after his role was officially confirmed. He also alleges a personal vendetta from a Pentagon rival he claims has sought repeatedly to damage his career, including trying to have him investigated for releasing the video after he had been cleared of any wrongdoing.

Elizondo charges "malicious activities, coordinated disinformation, professional misconduct, whistleblower reprisal and explicit threats perpetrated by certain senior-level Pentagon officials," according to the complaint, which includes dozens of supporting documents.

POLITICO is declining to publish the names of the Pentagon officials who are cited in the IG complaint because it is unclear whether they are being investigated.

But Elizondo told the IG he has evidence, in the form of emails, documents and the public record, "which suggests a coordinated effort to obfuscate the truth from the American people while impugning my reputation as a former intelligence officer at the Pentagon."

"These negative actions against me have resulted in great personal and professional challenges to me and my family," he adds in the complaint.

In recounting one episode in the days after he left government service, Elizondo claims a senior official warned him that he would "tell people you are crazy, and it might impact your security clearance."

"I responded … by telling him that he can take any action he thinks is prudently necessary, but that I was not mentally impaired, nor have I ever violated my security oath," Elizondo wrote in the complaint, saying he did not meet with the official again "after our discussion as I feared he would take retribution against me."

The IG complaint also charges that the Pentagon's press operation has engaged in a disinformation campaign to discredit him by suggesting he was lying about his UFO work.

He cites several public statements asserting the department had no record of his involvement in UFOs even after saying that he did work for AATIP.

"Several internet bloggers were notified ... that I had no duties regarding AATIP and that AATIP did not involve the study of UAPs," Elizondo told the IG. "As a result, the bloggers began to disseminate reporting, accusing me of being a fabricator."

He said when he inquired why the Pentagon had changed its official story about AATIP, he claims one individual directly involved told him he “was not happy with the way this was being handled internally with the Department.” The official also said he “was aware I ran AATIP, but forces within the building were telling him not to admit it," according to Elizondo.

The Pentagon public affairs office declined to comment for this story.

The Defense Department this month publicly acknowledged in a statement that the AATIP program was involved in UFO research, but it has not corrected the record on Elizondo's involvement, he says.

“It goes beyond simple ambiguity,” Sheehan said. “There [are] actual discordant narratives that are going on. They’re professing a substantial amount of confusion.”

Elizondo maintains that the efforts to punish him for coming forward continue. The IG complaint outlines that his release of the three unclassified UFO videos was investigated by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and "there were no findings of me conducting any kind of Unauthorized Disclosure.”

But he says he was contacted this April by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency advising him to submit to a new interview to maintain his clearance even though it was renewed in January 2021. And he maintains he was told it was about concerns over whether he violated the rules when he made the UFO videos public.

"Despite a previous favorable AFOSI investigation, I am under accusation of releasing the videos in an unauthorized manner," he wrote in the IG complaint.

Elizondo has continued to publicly maintain that he believes the government is covering up what it knows about UFO sightings. And Sheehan also claims Elizondo’s experience within the Pentagon’s bureaucracy signifies a much deeper resistance to coming clean.

He said there is “this extraordinarily bizarre process going on in the heart of the national security state bureaucracy where general officers, secretaries of defense are not being briefed in on something that is transparently within their jurisdiction.”

“That is a profound and fundamental problem that they view as being above their pay grade,” Sheehan added. “They know something is going on, and they don’t dare go there.”

Quelle: POLITICO

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Anmerkung:

Ein durchschaubares Manöver von Seiten Elizondo ist zu beobachten nach dem er selber weiss, nicht das Ergebnis im Juni heraus kommt das sich die Ufologie-Gemeinde davon versprach. Also wird wie immer im Vorfeld solcher "großen Ankündigungen in der UFO-Szene" schon die Hintertür geöffnet um bequem aus dieser Angelegenheit zu kommen und natürlich die große Verschwörung weiter zu schüren. Sieht man sich die Behauptungen über die Jahre an in der die NAVY-Videos für Wirbel in der UFO-Szene sorgen und vor allen Dingen die hineininterpretierten  "Flugfähigkeiten"  auf Grund schlechter Bildqualität stellt man schnell fest, der Glaube,  Wunsch der Gedanken ist. 

Da passt es auch gerade in die Zeit das der "ultimative Alien-Autopsy-Film-Beweis" vor 30 Jahren und sich als Fake herausstellte, nun der Original Film für $1 Million versteigert wird. Ein Schelm der sich Böses dabei denkt und den wahren Grund solcher UFO-Manipulationen kennt!

H.Köhler/CENAP

Blick auf die Alien-Autopsy-Film Versteigerung:

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Quelle: Intrado

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Update: 28.05.2021

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No longer confined to the fringe, UFO theories move into the mainstream

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The subject of UFOs in the US is getting serious treatment from mainstream media and heavyweight politicians. Next month Congress is set to review a report from the director of national intelligence about the government’s secret files on the subject.

 

UFOs are now serious business.

So serious, in fact, that they have been given a new name. No longer called UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects, a term often associated with people of questionable sanity, the mysterious objects that have been reported by the hundreds, are now the source of discussion in serious scientific circles and have been rebaptised with the more serious-sounding moniker Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs.

Last June, officials made public the existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, housed within the Office of Naval Intelligence. Six months later, the 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act asked the director of national intelligence work and the secretary of defence to put together a report detailing everything the government knows about UAPs.

The report, which Congress is expected to review in June, will draw on classified military files and will address decades of sightings and videos, which date back to the 1940s. That such objects exist is increasingly becoming gospel; Officials from former president Barack Obama to Senator Marco Rubio to former senate majority leader Harry Reid are publicly saying that earth has been visited by flying objects that we don’t understand.

"What is true – and I'm actually being serious here – is that there's footage and records of objects in the skies that we don't know exactly what they are,” Obama told “The Late Late Show” on May 17. “We can’t explain how they move, their trajectory, they did not have an easily explainable pattern.”

Also that month, the CBS magazine show “60 Minutes” interviewed two Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz who were diverted in 2004 to investigate an peculiar radar signal. They described seeing an object shaped like a Tic Tac that was able to move straight up and down at inexplicable speeds.

In the same broadcast, Christopher Mellon, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defence for intelligence under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, said the government had observed on radar objects capable of manouvres that could not be approximated. “There’s nothing that we can build that would be strong enough to endure that amount of force in acceleration,” he said.

In an interview with Fox News a month earlier, former intelligence director John Ratcliffe said there have been far more sightings than the public is aware of and described the phenomena like this: “We are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for or are traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.”

Encounters of which kind?

The government has slowly been opening up about UAP sightings for more than a year. In April 2020 the Pentagon released three short videos showing such objects, and earlier this year Reid said the footage “only scratches the surface of research and materials available".

Reid called for further investigation. “The US needs to take a serious scientific look at this and any potential national security implications,” he said. “The American people deserve to be informed.”

French officials went public with stories of similar sightings decades ago. In 1999 a group of a dozen retired French generals and other experts issued a report called “UFOs and Defence: For What Must we Prepare Ourselves?”

What officials and scientists aren’t saying is that these are aliens coming from another planet to visit us. They simply don’t know what these objects are, they say. The discussion is still largely couched in distinctly concrete terms and centers around the concern that these craft may represent a threat from enemies here on earth.

At least one official has been willing to go further, though. In December 2020, Haim Eshed, the former head of the space directorate of the Israeli Defence Ministry, told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that humans have been in contact with extraterrestrials and have signed a co-operation accord with them. 

“There is an agreement between the US government and the aliens,” he told the newspaper. "They signed a contract with us to do experiments here."

Former president Donald Trump was in on the secret, he said, and had been “on the verge of revealing” it but was asked not to due to fears of “mass hysteria”.

Eshed’s assertion doesn’t seem to represent the consensus view in Israel. The chairman of the country’s Space Agency, Isaac Ben-Israel, told the Times of Israel that while the scientific community thinks the chances that there is life in outer space is “considerable, not small,” he doesn’t believe “there were any physical encounters between us and aliens".

NBC News followed up on Eshed’s statements about the agreement with aliens with the White House, Israeli officials and the Pentagon, but were unable to get a comment from any of them. A NASA spokesperson told NBC that the agency was searching for life in the universe, but had not yet found it.

Flying saucer watchers who are hoping for clear answers from the government are likely to be disappointed. While the report presented to Congress is expected to be detailed, the public will be given only the unclassified version, which is likely to be far less complete.

Quelle: FRANC24

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Update: 30.05.2021

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Those amazing Navy UFO videos may have down-to-earth explanations, skeptics contend

The truth may be out there ... or right here at home, in the form of camera quirks and other less sexy phenomenon

An exposé on 60 Minutes. A 12,000-word treatise in the New Yorker. Breathless cable-news coverage of alien craft.

UFO enthusiasts are having their moment ahead of the release of a Congressionally-mandated report on what the Pentagon calls “unidentified aerial phenomenon.” The coverage of Navy videos purporting to show evidence of strange, unknown aircraft has featured the voices of so-called ufologists — UFO researchers — and Navy pilots who say they’ve seen mysterious objects in the skies off San Diego and the East Coast.

For the record:

11:40 AM, May. 29, 2021A previous version of this story incorrectly said former Navy pilot David Fravor filmed Navy UAP videos in 2015. Fravor was a witness to the 2004 sightings but did not film any of the videos.

Crews on Navy warships have reported seeing unidentified aircraft similar to those captured on video. Other accounts detail mysterious drone sightings by the crews of Navy destroyers west of San Clemente Island. The island serves as a training base and ship to shore gun range for the Navy.

But as the videos revived decades-old theories of extraterrestrial visitation, the frenzy has been frustrating for those who specialize in debunking hoaxes and conspiracy theories. These skeptics point to more down-to-earth explanations.

 
 

“There’s nothing new here, it’s the same grainy videos we’re used to seeing,” said Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine.

In August, the Defense department established the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force after Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., added language into the Defense Intelligence Authorization Act that called on the Pentagon to produce a report on unidentified aerial phenomenon within 180 days. When former President Donald Trump signed the massive government stimulus and appropriations bill on Dec. 27, the defense intelligence bill was included, and the clock started ticking.

The Pentagon will deliver its UAP report to Congress in June. The UAP Task Force’s examination of unidentified phenomenon is ongoing, a Pentagon spokesman said last week.

Retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich, one of the Navy fighter pilots who said she saw an unidentified aircraft near San Diego in 2004, told the Union-Tribune’s Kristy Totten on her News Fix podcast recently she is wary of the UFO community’s jumping to conclusions.

“Just because I’m saying that we saw this unusual thing in 2004 I am in no way implying that it was extraterrestrial or alien technology or anything like that,” Dietrich said.

 

She also said she doesn’t expect the Pentagon report to provide the kind of answers many are looking for.

“I think that the report’s going to be a huge letdown,” Dietrich said. “I don’t think that it’s going to reveal any fantastic new insight.”

Three of the most well-known videos were taken by Navy F/A-18s over both the Pacific and Atlantic. The three — known as “Gimbal,” “Go Fast” and “Flir1" — were filmed by Navy Advanced Targeting Forward Looking Infrared, or ATFLIR, pods which attach to the fuselage of the aircraft.

Flir1, which was filmed off the coast of San Diego in 2004, was published anonymously on a UFO website in 2007, according to a 2020 Popular Mechanics report on the history of the video. In 2017, it received renewed attention when it was published by the New York Times. Flir1 and two additional videos were published by former Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge’s “To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science” website in 2019.

After the release of the videos, the Navy acknowledged they were real, calling the objects in the videos “unidentified aerial phenomenon.”

In 2020, the Pentagon released the three videos itself. In a statement, it said it did so “in order to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real, or whether or not there is more to the videos.” The Pentagon said at the time the phenomena observed in the videos remained characterized as “unidentified.”

The Nimitz encounter

Mick West, a former video-game designer, is one of the best-known skeptics pushing back on the claims of UFO enthusiasts. On his website, Metabunk.org, and on his YouTube channel, West experiments with cameras to show how light and motion can deceive viewers.

The three videos released by the Navy were filmed by infrared cameras. FLIR1 was captured off the coast of San Diego in 2004 by a fighter operating off the aircraft carrier Nimitz, while Go Fast and Gimbal were captured by an F/A-18 operating off the carrier Theodore Roosevelt off the coast of Florida in 2015.

West said that FLIR1 and Gimbal, and the images on them — described by some as showing aircraft with no directional control surfaces, intake or exhaust — are consistent with what could be expected if you filmed a fighter jet flying away from the camera. The apparent shapes of the aircraft — one saucer-like, the other like a Tic Tac — are due to glare on the lens of the camera, not proof of flying saucers, West maintains.

“What we’re seeing in the distance is essentially just the glare of a hot object,” West said as he watched the FLIR1 video with the Union-Tribune. “So we’re looking at a big glare, I think, of an engine — maybe a pair of engines with an F/A-18 — something like that.”

 

As for the maneuvers the craft appears to make, West said that the information on the screen, such as the zoom level, indicates that it’s not the mystery aircraft making sweeping motions, but the camera. When the object appears to dart off to the left, that is actually an effect of the camera losing lock and moving to the right.

Another factor affecting people’s perception of these videos, West said, is the fact that the cameras themselves are moving at high rates of speed. At the forward end of the ATFLIR pod is an electro-optic sensor unit that houses an internal gimbal assembly and an external rotating housing. In order to maintain a “lock” on an object, both the gimbal and the outer housing are in constant motion — as is the F/A-18 to which the pod is attached.

Combined with the high zoom rate of the camera, the resulting image might reflect a parallax effect — with the relationship of the object and its background changing depending on the angle of view, similar to how electrical poles appear to zoom past on the highway while more distant objects remain still.

Eyewitnesses to the FLIR1, or so-called “Nimitz encounters,” tell a different story. The day before FLIR1 was shot, other F/A-18 pilots, including Dietrich, also saw a Tic Tac-shaped object in the air.

“We encountered this thing that we refer to as the Tic Tac because that’s what it looked like,” Dietrich said. “It was unlike anything we’d ever seen (and) unlike anything I’ve seen since. That’s why we refer to it as ‘unidentified.’ We came back to the ship, we gave our reports and then went on with our training — went on with our lives and our careers.”

Several sailors on board the San Diego-based guided missile cruiser Princeton say they also saw the objects in the 2004 encounter. Five former Princeton sailors told Popular Mechanics in 2019 that their ship’s brand-new radar system began detecting unidentified aircraft performing extraordinary aeronautical maneuvers. They said the objects appeared on the radar to descend from 60,000 feet to just 50 feet in a matter of seconds.

It was these radar tracks that led to Dietrich and her wingman to divert and attempt to intercept the aircraft. The next day, another pilot was able to lock onto something with his ATFLIR — resulting in the video now known as FLIR1.

A touch of trig

The parallax effect also offers a more mundane explanation of the Go Fast video, West contends. Go Fast was shot from a Navy jet operating off the coast of Florida with the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in 2015. In the video, a small undefined object appears to be flying low, at a high rate of speed above the ocean.

However, West said, this is an illusion of the two-dimensional video, one that can be demystified by the readout on the screen and a little trigonometry.

Once the camera locks onto the object, West said, the video presents the illusion that the camera is stationary. This isn’t the case, West said. The jet’s true air speed is 369 knots. After factoring in the altitude of the aircraft, the angle of the camera and the distance to the target, West determined the object to be flying at 13,000 feet above the ocean — not directly above, as it appears in the video.

 

“It’s not actually anywhere near the ocean even though it looks like it’s skimming over the surface,” West said. “Because of the extreme zoom and because the camera is locked onto this object ... the motion of the ocean in this video is actually exactly the same as the motion of the jet plane itself. You’re seeing something that’s actually hardly moving at all and all of the apparent motion is the parallax effect from the jet flying by.”

After a little more math, West estimated the speed of the UAP to be about 30 to 40 knots. Since the infrared image indicates the object is also colder than the ocean below it, and it’s moving at the wind speed of that altitude, West said he thinks it’s likely a weather balloon.

‘Complicated illusion’

Perhaps the most striking of the three officially released Navy videos is Gimbal. Also filmed off the Florida coast in 2015, Gimbal appears to show a large object the shape of a top rotate in a manner inconsistent with known aircraft.

West admits that the object’s rotation is difficult to explain. “Gimbal is complicated — you’ve got this ridiculous illusion of movement when it’s actually essentially the same thing” as FLIR1, he said.

Still, West said the object in Gimbal is most likely just another jet.

“I think what’s clear about Gimbal is it’s very hot — it’s consistent with two jet engines next to each other and the glare of these engines gets a lot bigger than the actual aircraft itself so it gets obscured by it,” West said.

The odd top-like shape, West said, might be attributed to diffraction spikes from the glare, similar to someone taking a picture of a flashlight shining directly into a camera lens.

To explain the apparent rotation, West pointed again to the ATFLIR pod and the parallax effect. Early in the video, the F/A-18 is in a left bank turn, West said.

“At the start of the video, it looks like the object is moving rapidly to the left because of the parallax effect,” he said. But when the plane has kind of finished its turn, it looks like it slows down and stops because now it’s flying straight toward it so there’s no parallax. You get this complicated illusion.”

The rotation of the object, West said, can be attributed to the gimbal roll of the electro-optic sensor unit of the ATFLIR pod trying to maintain lock on it. He again points to the information on the display screen in the video.

 

“Gimbal starts off at 54 degrees left and it goes all the way to 7 degrees right,” West said. “At 3 degrees left is when (the object) makes its big rotation. That is the point at which (the ATFLIR pod) is doing a large exterior correction for the gimbal roll.”

The Gimbal and Go Fast videos were shot by the same pilot, according to former Navy pilot David Fravor. Fravor, one of the Nimitz pilots who saw the 2004 Tic Tac, told podcaster Lex Fridman in 2020 that he isn’t moved by West’s explanation.

“It’s funny how people can extrapolate stuff who’ve never operated the system,” Fravor said of West’s critique. Fravor also told Fridman there were up to five other objects in the air that day flying in formation with the “Gimbal” aircraft and that several other sailors were tracking them.

A spokesperson for defense contractor Raytheon, which designed the ATFLIR cameras, declined to comment and referred questions to the Pentagon. The Union-Tribune also asked UC San Diego, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University to make experts on infrared camera and electro-optic technology available to comment for this story. None did.

The ‘bokeh effect’

Two videos taken on Navy surface ships were published this year by filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who also runs the website ExtraordinaryBeliefs.com. Corbin’s films explore phenomenon such as alien craft allegedly hidden from the public by the government and humans with alien implants.

One of the videos, which appears to be a sailor’s cell-phone video of a night-vision screen, seems to show a triangular or pyramid shaped craft with flashing lights flying over the San Diego-based guided-missile destroyer Russell in 2019.

In the video, which is saturated in green night vision, one of the pyramid-shaped objects blinks periodically. Corbell told Fox News “this is probably the best UFO military filmed footage certainly that I’ve ever seen, but I think also that the world has ever seen.”

West said the video is an example of a well-known photographic effect that occurs when a camera captures images of out-of-focus light called “bokeh.”

In a video West shared on YouTube, he demonstrates how the effect works and essentially recreates what is seen in the Navy video.

West says any night-vision camera with a triangular-shaped aperture would show a green pyramid. The flashing of the object, West said, is identical to the navigation lights found on aircraft.

 

West further said that when one factors in the relative location of the ship and the date, that the other “pyramids” in the video are celestial objects — specifically the planet Jupiter and some stars. He points out the Russell was operating under the route aircraft take when flying from Hawaii to Los Angeles.

“There was just a whole bunch of planes flying overhead at the time,” West said.

The most recent video appears to show a spherical blob flying above the ocean before diving into the wave or beyond the horizon. On Twitter, Corbell described the object as a “transmedium” vehicle, able to operate above and below the water. The video was filmed off the coast of California by the San Diego-based littoral combat ship Omaha.

West said the glare of an out-of-focus object with a heat signature might produce a similar image on an infrared camera. If that object is a jet aircraft flying away from the ship, West said, it might produce the same illusion of dropping into the water when, in fact, it had only flown over the horizon.

Known unknowns?

While the military has confirmed the videos themselves are real, the Pentagon has not said whether it has since identified the objects — which West said gives the impression that the military either hasn’t identified them or can’t identify them.

The Union-Tribune asked the Defense department to clarify whether any of the unidentified phenomenon in the UAP videos have since been identified. Gough declined to do so.

“To maintain operations security and to avoid disclosing information that may be useful to potential adversaries, DOD does not discuss publicly the details of either the observations or the examination of reported incursions into our training ranges or designated airspace, including those incursions initially designated as UAP,” Gough said.

Given that the objects have been seen in areas where the U.S. military trains, another hypothesis put forward is that the objects in the videos show advanced Chinese or Russian surveillance drones. Rubio, in his 60 Minutes interview, pointed out the national security implications of that.

“Anything that enters an airspace that’s not supposed to be there is a threat,” Rubio said.

 

Dietrich told News Fix she’s also concerned about adversaries.

“We want to know if there’s something off our coast or in our skies,” Dietrich said. “It could be a threat, it could be an adversary. We like to classify and categorize things and when we can’t it’s important to flag it.”

For skeptics, even that possibility seems far-fetched.

Shermer, of Skeptic magazine, said that it’s unlikely any government could develop technology that’s significantly more advanced without detection by other “great powers.”

“It would be like if we were still using rotary phones and they had smart phones — it would never happen,” Shermer said. “Even with the Manhattan project, the most secret project ever, the Russians had the bomb four years later.”

The Pentagon’s refusal to debunk its own UFO videos is frustrating, Shermer said. And even if the June report is as mundane as Dietrich and others expect, he doesn’t think it will matter to UFO enthusiasts.

“If the government issues a report saying it’s all artifacts of camera, balloons, bokeh — the ufologists are not going to accept it,” he said. “Nothing satisfies a true believer.”

Quelle: The San Diego Union-Tribune

 

 

 

 
 

 

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