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Comment by electrograv | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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