He literally says something to the effect of "I'm only saying that the glare is obscuring the true shape of the object" in the first minutes of the video.
Yet the title of the article says the video was camera glare. Which doesn't even make sense. But what it suggests is that the entire contents can be explained away as camera glare. So blame the media in this case perhaps?
There is no way to watch this video and come away with the understanding that there was no object at all. It spends a tedious several minutes demonstrating the connection between glare and objects emitting light, and multiple long, tedious disclaimers that it is not arguing that there is no object at all in the video. You have to want it to be saying something else to take away a different message.
Of course you can, the submitted article does exactly that. His emotions convey that he knows exactly what's going on, and he states, repeatedly, that it is lens flare. Rationally we can see that this is missing the forest for the trees, but anyone who doesn't think as critically will deduce that this is only a camera artifact. He operates this way on purpose, so that people who want to believe him have the proof they are looking for, and everyone else will quibble about meaningless details.
From the submission: A new detailed analysis of the modern poster child for UFO footage makes the case that the object in the video is not anything other than glare on the Navy jet’s gimbal camera system.
Done. Pilots are idiots, and so are your open minded friends. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
I didn't read the article. I only watched the video.
The video to me made a convincing case that the object seen in the video file is a glare at the location of a heat-emitting object.
I'd now be ready for a follow-up discussing whether the motion of the object (accounting for the gimbal system) is unusual or not. The video didn't get into it one way or another, but it's the obvious next question to ask.
He says that it is glare, at tedious length. As of last year he thought it was the exhaust of another aircraft[1], plus he has stated his goal is to debunk UFO videos. He could have spent some of his tedious length and extensive reconstruction demonstrating the apparent position and velocity of that other plane, but he chose to spend it going on about what he should think is an inconsequential detail.
He says that it's glare produced by an object that the plane is tracking. He does not say that the entire phenomenon is glare; he says the opposite of that. The level of parsing you're doing here dwarfs whatever tone you picked up from the video itself.
Looking forward to his analysis of the angular velocity, which would be far more interesting. I'm sure it will be out soon since the model on his website should already contain it.
He says it is glare, yes, but he also references other IR camera footage to provide other examples of glare. And in each of the examples there is an object that is the source of the heat glare (e.g. a burning car).
I had also never heard of this incident before. My takeaway from the video: There's a camera glare artifact around an object; the motion of the object has to be understood while taking the camera gimbal system's actions into account. The next step would be to model the object's motion while doing so and checking if it's doing anything interesting.
I agree the video would be better if it made any effort to get into that. It's like Part I to a two-part story!
Science deals with the data we can see, not the infinite number of unfalsifiable hypotheses we could construct in the space we don't see. Believing in the god of the gaps doesn't make you "open minded".
