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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

People lack depth perception in the sky which makes it easy to wildly misunderstand things.

A great example shown by some UFO show was a side camera from the space shuttle. The footage has a nice curvature of the earth, with lot's of little specks that seem to be orbiting it way out in the distance. You see a maneuvering thruster fire then in slow motion a few heartbeats later these specks shoot off in a new direction.

Now, if you assume they where large objects far away they must have been moving incredibly quickly and have insane acceleration. However, if you realize they are flecks of paint etc/ near the shuttle pushed out of the way by the maneuvering thruster then they where not actually moving fast relative to the shuttle at any point.

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That’s why the FA-18 footage is so compelling to me. This is not the easily fooled human eye we’re talking about: Radar tracking and thermal vision almost completely eliminates simple optical illusions from the list of natural explanations.

Even more bizarre is how the craft appears totally cold, while there is a warm thermal halo of some kind around the craft, with a pattern very reminiscent of high energy fields.

The object in the video is hot. Most military FLIR devices can be toggled between "white hot" and "black hot". If you look in the lower left corner of the video, there's an indicator that says "WHT" and the object appears white. At about 12 seconds into the footage, the coloring is inverted and the indicator changes to "BLK" because the pilot toggled it.

The halo is an artifact of the FLIR device. Every FLIR I've ever seen does that in areas where there's a high temperature contrast.

Hot is consistent with artificial. The second law of thermodynamics says if you are using energy you must dissipate heat. As far as we know this would still apply even with some kind of hypothetical exotic propulsion system.

> Hot is consistent with artificial.

I never said it wasn't.

Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense! In that case I suppose the main strangeness of the video is the shape of the object. Makes you wonder if these might be some secret experimental military craft or drones that happen to be weirdly shaped.

Your analysis is one of the more obvious explanations and as such it has been considered thoroughly before for the cases that remain unexplained. Typically these cases include radar signatures or other corroborating evidence.

If the F-18 HUD footage in OP is real, that would indicate the avionics picked it up, tracked it, and reported the heading and velocity. This is also interesting because the FLIR showed the object as mostly black: not emitting heat as a jet would.

The object is hot. Military FLIR devices can be toggled between "white hot" and "black hot" settings. You can see the BLK/WHT indicator in the lower left corner of the footage. The pilot/observer toggles it at about 12 seconds into the video.

The most compelling sightings are by people like pilots, multiple witnesses, or are radar confirmed. Radar+visual rules out a ton of illusions.

I too place little stock in random untrained people seeing lights in the sky or lenticular clouds or taking videos of such with cell phone cameras.

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