I’m a data scientist professionally. OP of the Porterville 4k UAP footage u/Jesusalanis111 was gracious enough to provide his drone telemetry data to me to analyze from a mathematical and factual perspective. TLDR at the bottom.
First, a small rant. After the original video was posted, r/UFO immediately tried to shit on u/Jesusalanis111, by making assumptions about a similarly named person on Linkedin and his job history, among other not-so-nice things. There isn’t much to wonder what that does for further disclosure. I get y’all want credibility, but that’s not the way to do it.
Apologies in advance if my format is a little ghetto. I’m not going to put this in Blender or anything, and I think you’ll see why we won’t need any 3d visualizations as I get into it.
Let’s do some fact finding
The general flight path throughout the action in the video is down bearing 170-176 degrees, or in a southerly direction, as indicated by the heading from the drone’s telemetry data, because the drone knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn’t…
The drone begins a near vertical ascent around 15:28:40 mark local time.
~43 seconds later at the 15:28:23 timestamp, the object is level with the horizon. By normalizing the drone pitch angle with the camera gimbal pitch angle throughout the flight, I was able to find that this timestamp is the point where the true viewing angle relative to the drone crosses from positive to negative. In other words, the drone was “looking up” at the object in the frames prior, and in the rest of the footage the drone is “looking down” at the object.
Since this timestamp is where the crossover occurs and the relative viewing angle is zero, we can conclude that the drone is true and level with object, at ~606ft AGL. Horizon reference also corroborates, and the altitude is not sufficient for major differences in curvature of the earth, indicated by 1.14 x Sqrt(606) = 28.06 miles to horizon, but we don’t need to be that precise anyways.
We now have a factual basis for the approximated altitude AGL of the object.
The drone reaches corrected viewing angle of zero at 15:28:23
The drone reaches max altitude around the 15:30:24 timestamp at ~1,640ft AGL, and has a corrected gimbal pitch angle of -40 degrees.
Object circled in red at drone max altitude with -40 corrected pitch angle
Since the drone only changed position vertically during the initial ascent to max altitude, we can use some simplified trigonometry to determine the distance from the drone to the object, the horizontal distance between the drone and the object, and thus the object’s GPS location. Don’t worry if you’re rusty on your trigonometry from high school, I have a visual below that will help all of this math make sense.
Formula for this is the altitude difference (1,640-606 = 1,034ft) divided by the tangent of the reciprocal angle, or 1,034/tan(40) = 1,232ft horizontal distance separation. Similarly, the hypotenuse can be calculated as 1,034/cos(50) = 1,608ft distance from drone direct to object.
You can verify the math [here](https://everydaycalculation.com/right-triangle-calculator.php)
Now that we have the horizontal distance separation, we can calculate a GPS fix on the object using the known latitude and longitude of the drone, the horizontal distance, and the bearing, which is 170.6 degrees as indicated by the drone’s telemetry data. I did the math in Python, but you can verify with NOAA’s calc here
Python Code:
def get_point_at_distance(lat1, lon1, d, bearing, R=6371): “”” lat: initial latitude, in degrees lon: initial longitude, in degrees d: target distance from initial bearing: (true) heading in degrees R: optional radius of sphere, defaults to mean radius of earth (km) Returns new lat/lon coordinate {d}km from initial, in degrees “”” lat1 = radians(lat1) lon1 = radians(lon1) a = radians(bearing) lat2 = asin(sin(lat1) * cos(d/R) + cos(lat1) * sin(d/R) * cos(a)) lon2 = lon1 + atan2(sin(a) * sin(d/R) * cos(lat1),cos(d/R) – sin(lat1) * sin(lat2)) return (degrees(lat2), degrees(lon2),)
Which comes out to 36.05934973634786, -119.01853790835312. Plotting that on Google Earth and compensating for altitude, we get the visual below. I’ll refer to this point as Fix #1.
I drew the picture below in Paint because I’m a caveman. The icon for Fix #1 was shamelessly stolen from u/hamsternose
Approximation of the trigonometry and GPS fixes being calculated relative to the flight path
Checking Fix #1 in Google Earth from the position of the drone and similar angle, we can see that it corroborates with the video taken at the same timestamp (15:30:24), providing circumstantial evidence that our measurements are accurate, or accurate enough.
Fix #1 as visualized in similar angle and altitude as the flight telemetry
Fix #1 visualized in the video at 15:30:24 local
I used the same method to take another fix at timestamp 15:32:50 after another vertical ascent. With a corrected gimbal angle of -56, creating a reciprocal angle of 34 degrees. Assuming altitude of the object was constant and an updated bearing of 176.2 degrees, I got Fix #2 at 36.057295399876075, -119.0182015749948.
Fix #2 as visualized in similar angle and altitude as the flight telemetry indicates
Fix #2 visualized in the video at 15:32:50 local
Now that we have two fixes and time elapsed between them, we can calculate speed.
Time/speed/distance calc is [here](https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/latitude-longitude-distance)
The object traveled approximately 756 feet or 0.14318 miles over the course of 146 seconds, at a rate of 3.5mph. Weather data taken from Porterville Municipal Airport on December 17th appeared to have light and variable winds, with no particular prevailing direction. Given that the object wasn’t moving very fast, this checks out.
Approximation of the trigonometry and GPS fixes being calculated relative to the flight path
As far as Parallax, the gimbal had moved quite a bit throughout the flight, likely because u/Jesusalanis111 is getting the hang of his brand new, dope ass drone that provided us with all this sick ass data. Gimbal movement with correlating altitude movement is explaining the erratic object movement we are seeing in the video, although altitude fluctuations would affect parallax more in this case given the object’s altitude above ground, and the ascent/descent speed of the Mavic 3 drone. I had to actually smooth the corrected camera pitch with a moving average to get it to look nice on a graph.
Ironically, the angle offset from u/hamsternose’s post earlier very well may have a ~34° offset (Fix #2) from vertical to obtain the side view of the lettering that could validate what I’ve done here.
Conclusion: So it’s kind of a nothingburger and the object is not anomalous. While this confirms what many have been saying, I think that a more scientific approach is what r/UFO needs to enhance credibility and hope that this write-up may have inspired the community to pursue scientific means for figuring out if UAP phenomena is credible when the data is available. Nevertheless, I think it’s pretty cool that u/Jesusalanis111 posted it here for us to look at and was transparent with the associated data.
TLDR: Visual distortions/erratic movements are induced by parallax, the object is in fact most likely a balloon.
submitted by /u/WeAreSOL
[link] [comments]