Back in 2019, the mainstream media (like the NYTimes and CNN) gave credence to UFO theories, publishing some videos that appeared to show flying objects doing impossible things. The most famous being the GIMBAL video, where this object suddenly rotates in a way impossible with earthling technology.
The reality is that this video shows nothing unexplainable, or even unusual. This is what infrared images look like when there’s optical defects and the camera rotates.
In this document, I write up my own debunking of the video (except for mentioning that simulation issue below). One of the problem with conspiracy-theorists is that they don’t directly address issues, but talk around them, such as ad hominem attacks on other people, or debunking things not central to the argument. In this blogpost, it’s my claims (not anybody else’s, except for that simulation thing), and there are no secondary issues.
There are three levels of explanation for what we see here.
Explanations by the ignorant conspiracy-theorists, who have no experience with optics, and for him, any explanation of technology is confusing and untrustworthy.
Explanations by the knowledgeable, who have seen such things before in their own optics, who understand exposure, aberrations, and gimbals.
Explanations by obsessed experts who overanalyze the above video to depths you wouldn’t think possible, to prove there’s nothing interesting.
The ignorant
Near the end of the video, the object appears to rotate. You can see it in the two still images below:
If you have no knowledge of an alternate explanation, it certainly looks like alien technology.
That’s pretty much the entire explanation: we see something rotate in an impossible way.
The Knowledgeable
What knowledgeable people see is just standard issues with optics and cameras: overexposure, aberration, and gimbal.
First of all, the object is overexposed. It’s gone past 100% of the brightness the camera sensor can handle. Some call this saturation or glare. There is some dispute about the correct name for this, but that doesn’t change what’s happening.
When this happens, the light blooms. This obscures the object behind it.
We are certain this happened because the pixels are saturated, at 100% of their possible values. Open a frame from video, put it into an image editor, and use the ‘eye dropper’ tool to sample the color. I did this in MS-Paint to prove that the black at the center is saturated, with an RGB value of [0,0,0].
Thus, we know for a fact that saturation or overexposure or glare is happening. In many of the debunking videos, they call it glare or flare.
But this doesn’t explain the shape. With enough overexposure, the shape is completely distorted. With less overexposure, the shape may be determined by the shape of the source. For example, the oval shape may be due to two jet engineers.
The next step is to look at the optics, the lenses and mirrors. Optics have imperfections, that result in aberrations. These aberrations become more noticeable when the picture is overexposed.
Here is a post on an astronomy forum discussing the coma aberration of a lens when pointed at a light when overexposed. It includes various examples. One of them matches what we see in the UFO video almost exactly.
Such problems are common. I have a telescope for looking at the stars. It would develop this sort of aberration when the temperature dropped around freezing. It was because the refractor (mirror) was clamped down too tightly, so the mirror couldn’t expand/contract properly. Loosening the clamp fixed the problem. Given the rough and tumble of jet fighters, I can imagine that the optics get abused.
This isn’t proof. We don’t know for sure whether optical aberrations is the cause. It’s just that such things have normal explanations, those that the knowledgeable are experienced with. We don’t need space aliens to explain what we see here.
But this doesn’t explain why the object rotates. This is explained by the gimbal system within jet fighters that “lock onto” an object, then keep the image steady by rotating both the optics and camera. When flawed optics (with aberrations) rotate relative to the camera, overexposed objects will appear to rotate.
This obvious when the camera is zoomed out. There are black areas on the corners/sides of the image because the camera is being rotated. As the fighter flies past the point, the gimbal keeps rotating, so these black areas creep around the edges of the screen.
You can see it in this video on YouTube. As they are talking, the jet is flying by, and the gimbal keeps rotating the camera. In the two pictures below are about 40 seconds apart from that video, where the camera has rotated around about 90 degrees.
We know 100% that gimbaling is happening in the GIMBAL video. Indeed, we see the horizon move around a bit, because gimbaling isn’t perfect (we can be fairly certain the aliens aren’t moving the earth, so changes in horizon must mean changes in camera orientation).
I could also go into gimbal mechanics a bit more. The speed at which the gimbal rotates the images varies. Sometimes it’s a slow rotation, sometimes it’ll be a brief fast rotation when you hit specific angles, and sometimes it’ll be a brief fast rotation as the computers try to avoid a situation called “gimbal lock”.
We don’t know for sure at this point whether this explains the fast rotation seen at the end of the GIMBAL video. We are back to Occam’s Razor: which is more likely, the gimbal behaved as we know gimbals do, or space aliens.
The Obsessed Experts
The above section creates a possible explanation with just a little knowledge of exposure, optics, and gimbals. But it doesn’t prove that’s actually what happened. We know there no reason to believe space aliens, but we don’t know what happened.
Obsessive experts have gone to a whole new level to debunk the video. The work of many of these people is explained in this video. It’s long and involved, but it makes four specific points, each of which is a slam-dunk proving the [exposure/optics/gimbal] explanation.
The first item is the lack of rotation at the beginning of the video. The horizon rotates, because one part of the gimbal is moving, but UFO doesn’t rotate with the horizon, because the camera doesn’t rotate. In the screenshot below, the green lines show the change in angle of the horizon, while the red line shows the change in angle of the object (which doesn’t change, so only one line):
If space aliens, then somehow they are rotating their craft to exactly match the rotation of the optics in the airplane.
The second item is that each time the UFO appears to rotate, the entire scene is bumped. This can be seen by anybody watching the film, but the experts make it easier to see with video analysis tools showing motion.
[No, you can’t see it in this still image, I only include it so that you know what to look for in the video.]
This isn’t unusual. While motion can be smooth, it’s harder getting things in motion, so takes more energy. It’s likely you’ll experience bumps in the image whenever one of the items in the gimbal starts moving, even if it’s smooth while in continuous motion.
If space aliens, then these bumps are inexplicable.
The third item is that when the UFO object rotates, so does the entire sky. The sky has lighter and darker patches due to imperfections in the sensors. In a chip, some parts are more sensitive than others. When you rotate the sensor, areas of brightness caused by this defect will also move.
The video makes this clear, masking off the UFO and just looking at the sky. It then moves back-and-forth at this point in order to demonstrate light patches moving through the sky.
[Again, I’m showing you where to look, but you can’t see the effect with just one still image.]
The final item is a mathematical model between the movement of the airplane and the needed gimbal adjustments. They reconstructed movements by looking at the horizon, movement of clouds, and the numbers printed around the display that shows such things as angles of the plane and camera. They analyzed the video frame-by-frame.
They show that in the following image. The white line is represents the angle the camera needs to be at, and the green line shows the adjustment of the camera rotation. The timing of the camera rotation matches the timing of the UFO rotating.
The first three of these four items you can verify yourself. You can easily prove that at the start of the GIMBAL video, that the UFO object doesn’t rotate with the horizon. You can also easily see that the camera bumps every time the UFO rotates. You can easily see the bright patches rotate with the UFO.
But this fourth item, you just have to take their word for it, unless you are willing to do a lot of obsessive math.
But weren’t these arguments debunked?
Whenever I mention this UFO nonsense on Twitter, people replay claiming these things have been debunked.
It’s not true. You see a lot of content by podcasts claiming to debunk things [*], but they are non-specific, talking around the issue rather than directly confronting things. Their arguments are based upon typical fallacies, like appeal-to-authority (“trust me, I’m a navy pilot”) or ad hominum (“Mike West is full of crap”).
Nowhere do they specifically debunk any of the claims above.
The above claims stand on their own. This Mike West guy has been very prominent creating debunking videos, but he’s just a good educator. He didn’t come up with these arguments himself, he’s just very good at creating videos to explain the arguments from others.
I agree that calling it “glare” instead of “overexposure” is a bad way of describing what’s going on. Mike West chooses a bad word to describe it. But that doesn’t change what it is. We know it’s an issue here regardless of which words you use to describe it.
Conclusion
This issue just won’t die. The press gave it more credibility than it deserved, and the crazies won’t give it up. Just from the basics, we know that the video is perfectly explainable. Obsessed nerds have gone the further step and demonstrated likely proof. Despite this, the thing still keeps appearing as the poster child for “aliens among us”.