I received a DM from a mod on here to help better explain the footage that is now in circulation. I have read countless of misinformation regarding this video and honestly I’m not surprised because it’s reddit. Rewatch the video. You can clearly see the subject leave the frame of the FLIR. The person who is video tapping the video on their phone does a great job at keeping everything in frame. This is why I am speaking on this.
I have work on FLIR systems for 15 years on aircraft. (I no longer work then due to medical issues so I’m out of the military) I’ve had FLIR systems tore apart in my shop to overhaul them for future missions. These things get HOT so they degrade a lot and need time for maintenance. I’ve also worked with engineers and field service technicians to better understand FLIR. The company will come to the base and help educate technicians on how to use and fix them. I needed to know how FLIR works in order to do my job. Whatever the pilot or operator needed to know, I also needed to know. It was required.
Moving forward; the footage is showing someone manually tracking the subject. You can tell this by the choppy tracking movement. This is caused by the insane sensitivity of the FLIR. All FLIRs That I have come into contact with has this issue. All pilots and operators are trained to lock onto targets in order to keep safety a priority for other crew members. There was either something wrong with the FLIR that prevented the pilot or operator from locking on or the subject could not be locked on for whatever reason. I didn’t have the opportunity to track my own UAP while i was in so im not sure why this thing wasnt being tracked. If you watch the video over you can see the cross over shoots the subject once or twice and then coming back into the frame. If this were bird poop it would never leave the frame. The brid poop would also be blurry. It would be very obvious. Since there is an outer shroud bolted onto the gimbal on its roll axis and this craft is flying at a good amount of speed the gimbal is doing a lot of rolling. The bird poop would have rolled from side to side. You can also see this if there were bug guts on the shroud. In my 15 years in, I’ve only cleaned these FLIR units that had bug guts on them. Not once have I’ve seen them with bird poop. When the FLIR is turned off, the shroud rolls into itself to protect the glass from the elements from outside. Crews in charge of the vehicle or aircraft prior to departure are responsible to clean the shroud. It normally in a checklist. Pilots and operators rely on this system heavily. Some pilots I’ve came across won’t even fly if there FLIR has a slight malfunction. Pilots and operators know what they are doing when it comes to FLIR and this operator or pilot knew they were tracking something.
During my time working on these I was privileged to view real world footage in order to fix these for Crews. Most of the time symbology and tracking were always the biggest complaints and needed to see how the gimbal was moving.
I can confidently say that there is no bird poop on the shroud. I was telling the mod that this is probably the best footage out there if this is real. Since officials want to go with bird poop this is most likely real.
Mods if this post gets out of hand and disrespectful please lock it. Please try and keep this open for discussion. I have been waiting for footage like this to come out. I’m convinced we have visitors now.
To those who have done a nice job at stabilizing the video, thank you.
Again I was asked by a mod to share my experience with FLIR. This is not to discredit anyone’s ideas on what’s going on in the video. I’ve seen 100s of videos where tracking is involved and this is classic to a pilot or operator tracking and calling into their agency to engage it.
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