API 11 Kevin Knuth

[pigfarmer]

In API #11 Dr.Knuth suggested to one of his classes that they try to take some photos of planes coming and going from nearby Albany International Airport. Been there many times - it's a busy place.

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying like hell to get pics of military transport planes that I see quite often. Also tried to get some of literally anything coming & going from the regional airport I'm only two miles from.

The next time I hear someone say 'everyone is carrying a smartphone these days so how come nobody has taken a picture of a xyz?' where xyz is a UFO, Bigfoot, a ghost or whatever my left eye is going to roll up into my skull.

This is proving far more difficult that I anticipated. The weather hasn't cooperated or more often than not I'm caught off guard or driving and by the time I get the phone out, unlock it, open the damned photo app the opportunity is gone. If you're serious about trying to do this - say you're hunting the skinwalker - go get a dedicated piece of hardware you can get to instantly.

Still trying.

 

[APIGuy]

In API #11 Dr.Knuth suggested to one of his classes that they try to take some photos of planes coming and going from nearby Albany International Airport. Been there many times - it's a busy place.

For the last couple of weeks I've been trying like hell to get pics of military transport planes that I see quite often. Also tried to get some of literally anything coming & going from the regional airport I'm only two miles from.

The next time I hear someone say 'everyone is carrying a smartphone these days so how come nobody has taken a picture of a xyz?' where xyz is a UFO, Bigfoot, a ghost or whatever my left eye is going to roll up into my skull.

This is proving far more difficult that I anticipated. The weather hasn't cooperated or more often than not I'm caught off guard or driving and by the time I get the phone out, unlock it, open the damned photo app the opportunity is gone. If you're serious about trying to do this - say you're hunting the skinwalker - go get a dedicated piece of hardware you can get to instantly.

Still trying.

Just to test out skywatching techniques, I will shoot stills and videos of planes using my Sony mirrorless camera and various lenses. I do get results, but it's harder than people think.

One major problem is that autofocus will probably fail in many cases, especially at night, and most people either don't know how to use manual focus on their phones, or their phones don't support it.

 

[Thomas R. Morrison]

It's great to have some legitimate feedback about this issue. Gene and Chris would often say on The Paracast that with everyone carrying a high-rez camera in their pockets these days, we should be seeing a bunch of good UFO photos and videos now, but since that hasn't happened, then either A.) AAV sightings must have dropped dramatically in recent years and/or B.) the phenomenon must be deliberately eluding us ala the "cosmic trickster" hypothesis.

That struck me as a flawed conclusion predicated on the false premise that smartphones are magical devices that can capture high-rez close-ups of objects miles away on a moment's notice, so about a year ago I asked people to try photographing airplanes with their smartphones. Unfortunately nobody took me up on that suggestion, so it's great to get some input on this topic now.

In May of this year I dug a little deeper into this subject and found that the human eye has roughly the equivalent of 576 megapixel resolution, compared to the iPhone 7 which has a maximum resolution of only 12 megapixels. Then when you factor in the essentially instantaneous autofocus, image stabilization, aperture, and tracking of the human eye, it's no mystery at all that a witness can't show us what they've seen just because they had a smartphone in their pocket at the time. Smartphone tech just isn't anywhere near the supremely sophisticated biotech of the human eyeball/brain imaging system yet.

But all of that assumes that people will immediately reach for a camera in the first place, when they see something anomalous in the sky, and that's not my experience at all. When you don't know what you're seeing, your instinctive reaction is to figure out what you're seeing before you do anything else - you stand there and go through the list; airplane...no, helicopter...no, rocket...no, balloon...no. And if you're seeing something that defies the laws of physics as you understand them, you're astonished by it, and you don't want to miss a moment of observation in case it darts out of view at any moment (which it usually does). Then, when it's gone, you start thinking about evidence. But then it's too late.

 

[Area201]

It's great to have some legitimate feedback about this issue. Gene and Chris would often say on The Paracast that with everyone carrying a high-rez camera in their pockets these days, we should be seeing a bunch of good UFO photos and videos now, but since that hasn't happened, then either A.) AAV sightings must have dropped dramatically in recent years and/or B.) the phenomenon must be deliberately eluding us ala the "cosmic trickster" hypothesis.

That struck me as a flawed conclusion predicated on the false premise that smartphones are magical devices that can capture high-rez close-ups of objects miles away on a moment's notice, so about a year ago I asked people to try photographing airplanes with their smartphones. Unfortunately nobody took me up on that suggestion, so it's great to get some input on this topic now.

In May of this year I dug a little deeper into this subject and found that the human eye has roughly the equivalent of 576 megapixel resolution, compared to the iPhone 7 which has a maximum resolution of only 12 megapixels. Then when you factor in the essentially instantaneous autofocus, image stabilization, aperture, and tracking of the human eye, it's no mystery at all that a witness can't show us what they've seen just because they had a smartphone in their pocket at the time. Smartphone tech just isn't anywhere near the supremely sophisticated biotech of the human eyeball/brain imaging system yet.

But all of that assumes that people will immediately reach for a camera in the first place, when they see something anomalous in the sky, and that's not my experience at all. When you don't know what you're seeing, your instinctive reaction is to figure out what you're seeing before you do anything else - you stand there and go through the list; airplane...no, helicopter...no, rocket...no, balloon...no. And if you're seeing something that defies the laws of physics as you understand them, you're astonished by it, and you don't want to miss a moment of observation in case it darts out of view at any moment (which it usually does). Then, when it's gone, you start thinking about evidence. But then it's too late.

Great points. I want to note most "ufo hunters" use infrared or night vision cameras, so that's not usually a common option or even used on smart phones. So the can "hide" in plain sight if they stay just outside the visible spectrum.

 

[Thomas R. Morrison]

Great points. I want to note most "ufo hunters" use infrared or night vision cameras, so that's not usually a common option or even used on smart phones. So they can "hide" in plain sight if they stay just outside the visible spectrum.

Yeah I recently posted this video that was taken by a professional FLIR technician, which appears to show exactly that: an object hovering in the daytime sky that appeared on FLIR but was invisible in the optical range:

UFO videos

 

[pigfarmer]

Gene and Chris would often say on The Paracast that with everyone carrying a high-rez camera in their pockets these days, we should be seeing a bunch of good UFO photos and videos now, but since that hasn't happened,

Gene is just moving around hot air and Chris is deeply entrenched in his own groove

But all of that assumes that people will immediately reach for a camera in the first place

I know from certain competitive sports that you can practice all you want but when the buzzer sounds you get tunnel vision. Very, very difficult to overcome. Something exactly like that at work here with our natural response to something out of the ordinary. How many times have you heard "I never even thought about my camera...." ?

 

[APIGuy]

How many times have you heard "I never even thought about my camera...." ?

Many times.

 

[Thomas R. Morrison]

Gene is just moving around hot air and Chris is deeply entrenched in his own groove

I’ve been bewildered by Chris’ attachment to the “cosmic trickster” idea for a long time, because his conclusions regarding the cattle mutilation phenomenon seem to be so prosaic – it sounds like he believes that they’re mostly if not entirely attributable to military testing activity involving prions and/or other environmental contamination, and natural predation etc.

So I was struck by an example that he gave in his most recent Dark Matters interview as evidence for the cosmic trickster notion (I’m always reluctant to call it a “hypothesis” because even a hypothesis has to meet a certain level of scientific credibility, and this idea just doesn’t do that). The example he gave consisted of two personal sightings of an unmarked yellow UH-1 “Huey” helicopter. He said that they were no longer in service, and he therefore concluded that he had witnessed something of paranormal nature, presumably a manifestation produced by the cosmic trickster.

I could hardly believe my ears – instead of simply concluding that somebody is operating one or more unmarked UH-1 helicopters, he cited this as evidence that we have to throw out all reason and several laws of physics to conclude that reality itself is being manipulated by some unseen and virtually omnipotent supernatural entity.

But he's also the only person to ever create a viable scientific observatory to collect scientific data on the AAV phenomenon for public analysis with his San Luis Valley UFO Data Acquisition Project. Hopefully once his observatories collect compelling scientific data indicating real physical devices of an advanced technological nature, he'll have a change of heart and abandon this cosmic trickster idea.

I know from certain competitive sports that you can practice all you want but when the buzzer sounds you get tunnel vision. Very, very difficult to overcome. Something exactly like that at work here with our natural response to something out of the ordinary. How many times have you heard "I never even thought about my camera...." ?

Many times.

That’s an excellent example. I’ve been very cautious about using words like “stunned” and “transfixed” to describe our reaction to the sighting that day, because on The Paracast and elsewhere they’ve been trying to make that into a psychological trauma akin to PTSD or something, and twist it into some kind of hallucinatory experience associated with this cosmic trickster idea. People are seriously arguing that simple but striking sighting events like mine involve a confrontation with something so incomprehensible that our minds manufactured the exact same group hallucination involving a pair of bright objects zig-zagging across the sky, so that our rational mind could “deal with” what we were seeing.

Poppycock. We simply saw a pair of bright objects zig-zagging across the sky at high speed, and we were glued to the spot we stood because we had never seen any object move in that fashion, and we were trying to figure out what it was. It’s a perfectly natural reaction. Because the first thing you want to know, instinctively, is if you’re in any danger. And you can’t determine that if you don’t know what you’re seeing. Once you realize that they’re not coming at you, and they’re not anything scary like an ICBM or something, you’re simply fascinated – you want to watch as closely as possible before it’s gone. And trying to follow a pair of objects zig-zagging across the sky takes concentration, like trying to follow the flight path of a mosquito buzzing around your head.

I doubt that any of us would’ve reached for a camera even if we’d all had them in our pockets that day; we were too busy trying to figure out what we were looking at.

It’s a different matter when you see an unidentified light just hovering in the sky – that’s not alarming at all; it could be a star or a plane or any number of mundane things. So people take pics and videos of that kind of stuff all the time. But when you see something unambiguously and repeatedly defying the law of inertia, the last thing on your mind is pulling out a camera. It didn’t even occur to me to get one until after I lost sight of those things, and of course then it was too late because they didn’t come back.

 

[pigfarmer]

his conclusions regarding the cattle mutilation phenomenon seem to be so prosaic – it sounds like he believes that they’re mostly if not entirely attributable to military testing activity involving prions and/or other environmental contamination, and natural predation etc.

Been a while but Dulce Base by Greg Valdez makes a decent case for the prosaic explanation.

I've seen several odd things in the sky that I ultimately have been able to explain, some immediately and some not until years later. It is troubling that people often reach for the least likely explanation first. I'd love to see something truly anomalous and would be willing to bet I'd be standing there with the same Spielberg-closeup look of wonderment on my face as everyone else. Not picky - I'd take an AAV, a cryptid, ghost, actually getting on the fastest moving line at the supermarket, whatever.

As I've said in other threads/forums, Chris has certainly spent a lot of time actually going and doing to see for himself so I say more power to him. This is just a pastime for me, he's living it. Having said that, the way he speaks and some of the stuff I've heard him say doesn't particularly make me want to read his books. His camera project sounds interesting - wonder why someone like Bigelow or basically anyone with $$ hasn't done that for themselves. If they have I never heard about it.

 

[APIGuy]

Been a while but Dulce Base by Greg Valdez makes a decent case for the prosaic explanation.

I've seen several odd things in the sky that I ultimately have been able to explain, some immediately and some not until years later. It is troubling that people often reach for the least likely explanation first. I'd love to see something truly anomalous and would be willing to bet I'd be standing there with the same Spielberg-closeup look of wonderment on my face as everyone else. Not picky - I'd take an AAV, a cryptid, ghost, actually getting on the fastest moving line at the supermarket, whatever.

As I've said in other threads/forums, Chris has certainly spent a lot of time actually going and doing to see for himself so I say more power to him. This is just a pastime for me, he's living it. Having said that, the way he speaks and some of the stuff I've heard him say doesn't particularly make me want to read his books. His camera project sounds interesting - wonder why someone like Bigelow or basically anyone with $$ hasn't done that for themselves. If they have I never heard about it.

There is UFODATA, but I believe they are struggling to fund it adequately. Marsha talked to Mark Rodeghier last year on this very topic.

 

[pigfarmer]

There is UFODATA, but I believe they are struggling to fund it adequately. Marsha talked to Mark Rodeghier last year on this very topic.

Gave it a listen. Very interesting. Sounds like Chris O'Brien stole a march on that. We'll see. Shame there wasn't a bit more cooperation.

 

[humanoidlord]

i always laugh when i hear some skeptic using this excuse, cameras don't always work

 

[humanoidlord]

So I was struck by an example that he gave in his most recent Dark Matters interview as evidence for the cosmic trickster notion (I’m always reluctant to call it a “hypothesis” because even a hypothesis has to meet a certain level of scientific credibility, and this idea just doesn’t do that). The example he gave consisted of two personal sightings of an unmarked yellow UH-1 “Huey” helicopter. He said that they were no longer in service, and he therefore concluded that he had witnessed something of paranormal nature, presumably a manifestation produced by the cosmic trickster.

he is right, phamton planes and helicopters are a know type of manifestation