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Comment by DoctorOetker | Hacker News Reader

From the very first time I saw this video, there is a moment with a very tell tale sign that it is some unexplained optical effect:

around 1m40s the object rotates simultaneously with camera rotation, twice, and at twice the angle of rotation the camera makes! now think of how if you rotate a mirror some angle alpha, then the reflected view rotates an angle of 2 alpha. So to me this is a tell tale sign of some optical effect. Do I have a complete explanation? No, but then again there is no complete specification of the observation: what is the sensor layout and optical setup like?

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It's a raytheon ATFLIR[0]. The rotation precisely matches the point at which the 'up-down' tracking reaches it's upper stop and the body of the pod has to rotate. The concensus was that it's some internal reflection within the pod window.

[0] https://www.raytheon.com/capabilities/products/atflir

What "consensus"? I've read the Wikipedia article on the incident and found no information of any consensus of this sort. The objects in question were visually tracked by multiple aircraft, and were detected by multiple radar systems.

A lot of discussion from here:

https://www.metabunk.org/nyt-gimbal-video-of-u-s-navy-jet-en...

But there was also discussion on skeptics.com and skepticforum.com when it was news last year.

Also note that the organisation that released the videos is a known scammer who has been caught trying to monetize the UFO community many times.

They were dispatched to investigate it after it showed up on radar.

It could be but the incident is odd the object was tracked by a surface vessel and 2 F-18s were sent to investigate they’ve seen it but they had no optical sensors then the object spirited away at about 2400 mp/h and tracking was lost then another pair of F-18s was sent when the object has been reacquired this time with the FLIR pod form which part of the footage in the video is from.

While it can be a sensor malfunction or even a viral marketing campaign 4 naval aviators as well as multiple radar operators have made sensor and visual contact with it and they had no fucking clue what it was.

Is there any officially acknowledged evidence of the story (minus the IR footage)?

To me the probability of independent means of sighting with simultaneous obviously optical effect hallmarks is very low...

great observation. I think a likely explanation for a lot of these "sightings" is that they are simply artifacts in a complex sensor system!

Let's think of all the cool UFO sightings we'll hear about once they start putting GANs in those sensors. Then the machine will be able to, quite literally, imagine things.

The pilots could physically see it tho, the first pair didn’t had any EOS on board and could only track it visually and with their radar.

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