Extracting and animating data from the "UFO Video Captured By Homeland Security"

originally posted by: Excallibacca
I can't help with challenge 2 other than to say don't even start on it until the spreadsheet is 100%.

Understood.

Give me a column assignment and I will do one.

Great. Thanks for volunteering.

AD, AH, AU and AY are probably the next priorities so I'll take you as having assigned yourself the first of those (i.e. Column AD).

Just post here or send me a U2U if you have any problems.



I should probably keep a note of the people that have volunteered to do a thread:

Column AD : www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: IsaacKoi

I'll be on AD as soon as I'm off work.

I also just got with a programmer buddy of mine and he's gonna try to figure out the best way to plot things. He also loves spreadsheets so he might be willing to help.

originally posted by: Excallibacca
I also just got with a programmer buddy of mine and he's gonna try to figure out the best way to plot things. He also loves spreadsheets so he might be willing to help.

Great stuff.

I look forward to hearing more.

(Assuming that the input about spreadsheets and plotting them is something anyone can follow and implement, I also have some large UFO databases that it would be interesting for me to try to plot/animate. But one thing at a time...)

originally posted by: IsaacKoi
I simply think that if people are going to spend time on the case, these resources and challenges may narrow (or eliminate) potential points of dispute - avoiding wasting time on pointless polarised debates.

It may also provide a template for examining similar sightings where there is available data like this (or can be extracted), such as the Nellis AFB UFO.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

originally posted by: Blue Shift
It may also provide a template for examining similar sightings where there is available data like this (or can be extracted),

Well, let's see where this thread goes (if anywhere...) first.



I'm certainly interested to see if this little experiment in the use of ATS to distribute some of the work involved in performing a detailed examination of such footage works or not.

originally posted by: Daalder
I don't get it...
Forgive my dumbass questioning but:
What on earth is a US airplane of HOMELAND security doing over Puerto Rico?
That's not quite homeland is it?

Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States.

Great thread as usual...

I'll be watching with anticipation.

a reply to: IsaacKoi

Not sure if this was posted, it's from my friend at Scientific Coalition for Ufology.
Puerto Rico Aguadillia Radar Data Animation

originally posted by: odzeandennz
a reply to: IsaacKoi

I kinda get it.

but clarify for me please. lol.

does your data proves it could not have been a bird, or drone, or any current commercial or military vehicle. ?

pardon my ufo ignorance. hehe. I'm not on the ufo boards too often.

Everyone that does not think this is an air craft of any sort believes it is a balloon. It's rediculous, but yes, a balloon.

more threads like this one needs to be in the ufo boards (as opposed to 'flying humanoid').

critical thinking, intellectual consideration, sensible thought, controlled methods.

at the same time, I feel the results of the data will be biased or lean to one conclusion( as it already feels)

because the ones doing this research are without a doubt 'believers', so very little proof will be needed to draw to a conclusion; or at best, inconclusive evidence will result to what was already speculative, a ' UFO ' .

so to be sure, this research is not to unravel what kind of craft this may be, but to reinforce that it can only be a UFO.
what if this turns out to be indeed a military drone that HLS happen to film by accident, would people still be on the fence about the origin of the tech? (I think I might know the answer already).

I'm pretty sure we have some really, really top secret training facilities on Puerto Rico. I'm not surprised someone saw something out of the ordinary. Puerto Rico is a territory, so there might be interesting legal loopholes in having something located there.

originally posted by: MystikMushroom
I'm pretty sure we have some really, really top secret training facilities on Puerto Rico.

You mean... above top secret???



(Sorry, had to.)

This is top-tier thread-writing, OP, thank you. This is also definitely the best UFO footage I've ever seen.

Interesting. Anybody know the make and model of the camera deployed on the aircraft? You'd be surprised how things like that sometimes have a technical manual listed in .pdf right on the internet. Because that would tell you what exactly the "auto" and "dflt" (default) other mode fields are indicating.

I tried recently searching "aircraft telemetry camera" but my search results are getting a lot of garbage data to see if I could find anything relevant. So more specifics such as a model number would certainly help.

Funny thing is, my only personal daytime UFO sighting was a smallish shiny metallic spherical object. I would have dismissed it as being a mylar balloon if not for the fact it was going in a perfectly straight line opposite of the prevailing wind that day. (I know it's not much of a sighting account, but just a few things stuck out as odd on something that otherwise would have went unnoticed. Particularly that in my experience balloons don't go upwind.) The footage in this video reminds me of that.

a reply to: pauljs75

The wind at your level may not hav been same direction or speed at its level.

I am on mobile just now I can see tree tops in front of me bending for right to left yet clouds above them going left to right.

originally posted by: pauljs75
Anybody know the make and model of the camera deployed on the aircraft? You'd be surprised how things like that sometimes have a technical manual listed in .pdf right on the internet.

It appears to be a L-3 Wescam MX-15D camera.

SCUFOR report, page 8 of PDF :

"Forward Looking InfraRed Systems, Inc. (FLIR) was initially contacted to determine if the thermal imaging system was manufactured by their company. A photo obtained of the thermal camera system was shown to a FLIR representative. The FLIR employee indicated that it was not their thermal system but it belonged to L-3 Wescam, a Canadian company. Wescam Inc. is a subsidiary of L-3 Communications Holdings, Inc. A Wescam representative confirmed that it was their state of the art Wescam MX-15D thermal imaging system".

Wescam website:
www.wescam.com...

Wescam MX-15 products overview information webpage (not very informative for our present purposes) : www.wescam.com...

Wescam MX-15D Youtube video:


Wescam MX-15 product data-sheet (much more detailed than above webpage):
www.wescam.com...

In relation to basic information about the Wescam MX-15D, it looks like there is a simulator of its operation. Details of the simulator may be an additional route to technical information about the camera e.g. : www.aerosimulators.com...

So far, I've found no sign of any Wescam MX-15D (or other MX-15) manuals online, or on torrent websites.

An anomalous event, some hard data, a detailed report and now peer review !

Science comes to the fringe at last.

Thanks Isaac, you should receive a Govt grant for this kind of research.

Even if the final result indicates a balloon this is very worthwhile and how it should be done.

originally posted by: iDope

originally posted by: odzeandennz
a reply to: IsaacKoi

I kinda get it.

but clarify for me please. lol.

does your data proves it could not have been a bird, or drone, or any current commercial or military vehicle. ?

pardon my ufo ignorance. hehe. I'm not on the ufo boards too often.

Everyone that does not think this is an air craft of any sort believes it is a balloon. It's rediculous, but yes, a balloon.

Probably the most detailed analysis of a UFO video ever made, to prove it's balloon.

This case is and always will be inconclusive imo.

Great work again though Isaac, well done.

originally posted by: skyblueworld
This case is and always will be inconclusive imo.

Great work again though Isaac, well done.

Oh, I think that it will be possible to address some issues conclusively.



But we'll see. One step at a time.

I'm still hoping for a bit more help addressing the challenges I mentioned in the OP:

originally posted by: IsaacKoi
Challenge 1 : Extracting data from the video into a spreadsheet (partially completed)

Challenge 2 : Plotting and animating some of that data (whether using After Effects, Cinem4D or otherwise) on a map or maps (whether sourced from Google Earth or otherwise).

Edit to add : By the way, as my OP hopefully made clear, the tools and preliminary work reflected in my OP are the collective work of various members of PRRR - not just me. While it's hard to give individual credits for each element of collective projects, the most useful tools so far (i.e. the video with frame numbers and the associated frame set) are - as mentioned in my OP - the work of Lance Moody.

Well, I had some spare time so I figured I would try and write a quick program that would use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read the data from each frame. I figured since the data is in a fixed position on each frame I could simply select a region and iterate through each image while using OCR on only the region I select, to get the data we want. Unfortunately the quality of the images and the unreliability of the open source OCR I used called Tesseract OCR means the output is not favorable. So I am going to abort the project.

Screenshot:

Enlarge

If anyone is interesting in playing around with it, or continuing my work, or integrating a different OCR API with my base project, I uploaded the source and a debug build of the application to GitHub:

github.com...

Just so you know, I didn't have much luck selecting individual numbers out of the longitude and latitude data. I had more luck selecting the entire region as you see in the red rectangle in the screenshot above. The first two frames showed the best results because they are pure black and white. Perhaps if we programmatically applied some image filters / manipulation to each image to make the data stand out more before reading with OCR we would have better luck.

originally posted by: WeAre0ne
Well, I had some spare time so I figured I would try and write a quick program that would use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read the data from each frame. I figured since the data is in a fixed position on each frame I could simply select a region and iterate through each image while using OCR on only the region I select, to get the data we want. Unfortunately the quality of the images and the unreliability of the open source OCR I used called Tesseract OCR means the output is not favorable. So I am going to abort the project.

Thanks.

Incidentally, I did try running the PDF version of the frame set (which can be downloaded from the links in the post on Treat 3 above) through Adobe Acrobat's OCR function - with no joy whatsoever.

(Trying that OCR tool was one of the reasons for my creating the PDF version. I was disappointed to find that it had no success at all...).

Given the number of columns that I've completed already, I don't think it would take very long to complete the remaining columns. But it's very boring, hence my desire to share the workload by seeking volunteers to take one of the remaining columns each...



So far, the list of volunteers is:

Column AD : Excallibacca