(http://www.loogix.com/img/res/1/3/2/0/7/4/132074701493386.gif) LunaCognita
UFO Video Enhancement Series
The 1995 Salida, Colorado UFO Footage
Jul 4, 2010
In this presentation, we will be taking a closer look at a very interesting bit of amateur video footage shot in Salida, Colorado back in 1995 by a man named Tim Edwards, showing an Unidentified Object in the sky.
Since Mr. Edwards shot this footage, it has been shown in several different television and film documentaries that deal with the UFO phenomenon - and with good reason in my opinion. This was a clear sky, broad daylight sighting (approx 9:30am local time), providing Mr. Edwards with excellent seeing/filming conditions. The footage shot by Mr. Edwards provides us a decent look at this unidentified object(s), and in addition, it is worth noting that there were also multiple confirmed eyewitnesses to this incident as well, including Mr. Edwards young daughter (who was the first to sight the UFO in the sky and draw her father's attention to it). These other eyewitnesses provide powerful supporting testimony and confirmation that should effectively nullify any concerns anyone may have regarding the possibility of this footage being a hoax. It is indeed authentic footage of a confirmed unidentified flying object caught on tape.
As you will see in this presentation, the raw footage of this incident suffers from significant camera shake due to the unavoidable fact that Mr. Edwards did not have access to a tripod at the time and the camera lens was zoomed in @ 8x to allow for high magnification filming of the UFO. The application of image stabilizing techniques to compensate for the camera shake can therefore afford us an improved, cleaner look at what I feel should be already considered as some impressive footage.
The raw copy of the Edwards footage I used as the Alpha source file for this presentation was acquired from a History Channel television documentary dealing with the UFO phenomenon. I chose this particular version of the Edwards footage to serve as the Alpha file simply because it was the best quality copy I was able to obtain.
In this presentation, I broke the footage into two different segments, labeled as Sequence #1 and Sequence #2. The first sequence is a 14.5 second portion of the footage that shows both the UFO in the sky as well as a near-field stable object in frame - the edge of the roof of the building that Edwards was standing beside at the time of filming can be seen throughout the duration of this first sequence on the lower right side of the field-of-view (FOV). Because of this, I elected to do two different stabilized versions of sequence#1.
Version A of sequence #1 targets the UFO itself, locking it in place in the FOV by correcting for any camera motion along both the X and Y axises (left-right/up-down).
Version B of sequence #1 is an "X-axis only" (left/right) stabilizing correction that ignores the UFO and instead targets the edge of the roof that is visible on the right side of the FOV. No attempt was made to correct along the Y-axis here (up/down) even though there clearly is up/down camera shake occurring, and the reason is because there is simply no discernible feature visible along the edge of the roof that can be used to determine the required Y-axis corrections. It does appear as if the corner of the roof enters into view for a split-second at the bottom of the FOV in sequence#1, but it is not visible long enough to exploit for positioning data, so was ignored. Rather than attempt to determine Y-axis corrections using the UFO movement for that data, I instead elected to show only the X-axis fix in that version.
Sequence #2 is a 13 second segment of footage showing the UFO that does not have the edge of the roof visible in the FOV. For this sequence, I show the raw footage with a picture-in-picture stabilized and contrast enhanced view of the UFO, followed by a magnified version of the same scene as well.
I did not attempt to make any Z-axis (rotational) stabilizing corrections at all in this presentation because by my estimation, the exclusion of these rotation corrections did not in any way negatively influence the viewability of the scene. Several interpolated/blur frames were deleted from the final renderings of each stabilized example in an effort to clean that motion-corrected footage up as much as possible.
For those interested, MUFON investigator Bruce Maccabee wrote an excellent article outlining the facts of this compelling UFO incident that was filmed by Tim Edwards, and that article can be read online here -
REPORT ON THE SALIDA VIDEO
by Bruce Maccabee, MUFON photo/video analyst (http://www.qtm.net/~geibdan/news2/drb.html)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUey9e_U2Q
(http://www.loogix.com/img/res/1/3/2/0/7/4/132074701493386.gif) LunaCognita
UFO Video Enhancement Series
The 1998 "Somerset" UFO Footage
Jul 8, 2010
This particular segment (or segments, rather) of footage we will be looking at in this presentation involves a UFO sighting that occurred on July 4th, 1998 just outside of the town of Somerset in southwest England, filmed by a man named Rod Dickinson.
As always, the enhancements shown here were built from the highest quality copy of the source footage that I was able to obtain. Unfortunately in this case, I was not able to acquire a complete unedited copy of the raw Somerset footage to work with, and it is my understanding that Mr. Dickinson is no longer in possession of the original raw tape. This forced me to use a segmented copy taken from a UFO documentary in which the raw footage had already been broken apart and edited into several short highlight clips. This fact has most definitely negatively influenced the quality and quantity of visual data available for enhancement.
As you will see, the raw footage of this UFO encounter clearly suffers from significant camera shake/instability issues. In fact, I have to say that this is the shakiest, most unstable UFO video footage I have ever personally analyzed. These already brutal instability issues are further magnified by the fact that the raw copy of the footage I was forced to use as the Alpha source file appears to have been subjected to some level of video compression, which, thanks to the brutal amount of shake, creates significant interpolation blurring and frame "ghosting" being introduced/amplified. This effect is blatantly apparent in every copy of this Dickinson/Somerset UFO footage I have ever seen, and the copy I used as the Alpha source file for this presentation is no exception, with a high number of raw frames showing both the actual UFO as well as a second "ghost" of the UFO visible in the same frame, offset 180 degrees opposite of the direction of shake travel.
Just to give you a better idea of how detrimental this ghosting effect was to the stabilization process here, in the segments of footage I show labelled as "Sequence#1" and "Sequence#4", roughly 50% of the frames had to be eliminated from the stabilization process due to being ruined by blurring and/or ghosting effects. "Sequence#3" was even worse, with close to 70% of the raw frames being garbage and unusable for the same reasons. Still, even with those significant negative factors working against the stabilizing process, I still considered this footage interesting enough to warrant the effort involved in trying to improve the viewability of the scene.
Also, please keep in mind that the term "UFO" does not mean "a spaceship flown by aliens". It means "Unidentified Flying Object" - an object that is visible in the sky that cannot be positively identified as a known object of terrestrial origin. There is simply no way for us to tell from this footage just what this object is, where it came from, how it got there, or where it went afterwards. By definition, that makes it a "UFO".
Cheers everyone, and I hope you enjoy this presentation!
LunaCognita
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQMIRKttXHQ
(http://www.loogix.com/img/res/1/3/2/0/7/4/132074701493386.gif) LunaCognita
X-15 Rocket Plane
UFO Encounters on the Edge of Space
Aug 13, 2010
This presentation focuses on a pair of reported UFO incidents that occurred in 1962 during the X-15 Rocket Plane Research Program. Both these encounters, one during an April, 1962 X-15 flight by NASA test pilot Joseph Walker and the other during a July 1962 flight by USAF test pilot Major Robert White, took place at extremely high altitudes, right on the fringe of space.
During Major White's high-altitude test flight, while at apogee he reported sighting and visually tracking an unidentified object "for a full five seconds before it moved away". Two frames of film from the X-15's rear-facing "wing and empennage" stop-motion 16mm camera appear to capture an object (or objects) that seem to match Major White's visual description of the UFO he saw.
Several months earlier, during NASA test pilot Joe Walker's X-15 high-altitude flight, cameras aboard captured what Walker later described as being "five or six disc-shaped or cylindrical objects" near his aircraft.
During a May 11th, 1962 lecture at the "Second National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space Research" in Seattle, Washington, Joe Walker also claimed that one of his mission objectives during his April 1962 flight in the X-15 was to detect and film UFOs at high altitude.
During the lecture, Walker showed several photographs to the audience of these UFOs captured on film, although NASA has since only ever made one of these frames public.
Here is the link to the online version of the August 3, 1962 issue of LIFE Magazine that I reference in this presentation, where Major Robert White describes the UFO he saw out the window during his record-breaking July 17, 1962 high-altitude hop in X-15-3.
LIFE MAGAZINE 3 Aug 1962 (http://books.google.ca/books?id=JU4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA54#v=twopage&q&f=false)
Major Robert M. White X-15 UFO Sighting(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/434265main_ECN-101a.jpg)
QuoteOn July 17, 1962, Major Robert White flew the X-15 to an altitude of 314,750 feet, or 59 miles, becoming the first "winged astronaut." He was the first to fly at Mach 4, Mach 5 and Mach 6; he was the first to fly a winged vehicle into space. After a career of 'firsts' White died on March 17, 2010.
White was one of the initial pilots selected for the X-15 program, representing the Air Force in the joint program with NASA, the Navy, and North American Aviation. Between April 13, 1960, and Dec. 14, 1962, he made 16 flights in the rocket-powered aircraft.
His July 17, 1962, flight to an altitude of 314,750 feet set a world record. This was 59.6 miles, significantly higher than the 50 miles the Air Force accepted as the beginning of space, qualifying White for astronaut wings. The X-15 rocket-powered aircraft were built by North American Aviation and developed to provide in-flight information and data on aerodynamics, structures, flight controls and the physiological aspects of high-speed, high-altitude flight.
A follow-on program used the aircraft as testbeds to carry various scientific experiments beyond the Earth's atmosphere on a repeated basis. Information gained from the highly successful X-15 program contributed to the development of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo manned spaceflight programs, and also the space shuttle program. The X-15s made a total of 199 flights and the first aircraft X-15-1, serial number 56-6670, is now located at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
According to an article by Al Hallonquist, White's achievements as an X-15 pilot "allowed him to become the fifth American to attain astronaut wings and only the second Air Force pilot to do this."
X-15 Pilot Robert White Dies (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/robert-white.html)(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/1962_001.jpg)
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(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/1962_003.png)
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/1962_004.png)
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/1962_005.png)
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/White_005.png)
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/White_004.png)
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/White_003.png)
Major Robert White X-15 Space Record Plane Flown To 59-mile Mark 1962 Universal Newsreel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6QAG896rwo
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/White_002.png)
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/White_001.png)
X-15 Spaceplane Pilots Encountered UFO's
Joseph Walker NASA X15 Pilot(http://img339.imageshack.us/img339/6080/x15withwalker400.jpg)
QuoteOn May 11, 1962 NASA pilot Joseph Walker said that one of his tasks was to detect UFOs during his X-15 flights. He had filmed five or six UFOs during his record breaking fifty-mile-high flight in April, 1962. It was the second time he had filmed UFOs in flight. During a lecture at the Second National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space Research in Seattle, Washington he said:
"I don't feel like speculating about them. All I know is what appeared on the film which was developed after the flight."
To date none of those films has been released to the public for viewing.
National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space (http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/53018)
UFO sightings by NASA Astronauts (http://www.syti.net/UFOSightings.html)(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/Walker_001.png)
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/Walker_002.png)
(http://www.thelivingmoon.com/49ufo_files/04images/Scans/Walker_003.png)
QuoteJoseph A. Walker was a Chief Research Pilot at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center during the mid-1960s. He joined the NACA in March 1945, and served as project pilot at the Edwards flight research facility on such pioneering research projects as the D-558-1, D-558-2, X-1, X-3, X-4, X-5, and the X-15. He also flew programs involving the F-100, F-101, F-102, F-104, and the B-47.
Walker made the first NASA X-15 flight on March 25, 1960. He flew the research aircraft 24 times and achieved its fastest speed and highest altitude. He attained a speed of 4,104 mph (Mach 5.92) during a flight on June 27, 1962, and reached an altitude of 354,300 feet on August 22, 1963 (his last X-15 flight).
He was the first man to pilot the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) that was used to develop piloting and operational techniques for lunar landings.
Joseph A. Walker - NASA Test pilot (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/Biographies/Pilots/bd-dfrc-p019.html)The Mighty X-15 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr5pvwDZvNU
Joseph Walker NASA Astronaut UFO Sighting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8deyx3xlXCY
(http://htmlimg2.scribdassets.com/e3xt47a5n76ne4g/images/7-eca1d1bc2e/000.jpg)
(http://htmlimg2.scribdassets.com/e3xt47a5n76ne4g/images/8-6f03a5f22c/000.jpg)
SOURCE: MUFON Journal (http://www.scribd.com/doc/21367981/Mufon-Ufo-Journal)
(http://www.loogix.com/img/res/1/3/2/0/7/4/132074701493386.gif) LunaCognita
UFO Video Enhancement Series
Israel's "Giant UFO" - 1996 Hatzor Sighting
Oct 31, 2010
In this brief presentation, we will take a closer look at three short segments of video footage shot in 1996 showing a UFO over Kibbutz Hatzor, Israel.
On three consecutive nights in August of 1996, multiple eyewitnesses near the Israeli town of Hatzor (over 100 people in total) reported seeing what was described as being a "Giant UFO" in the night sky that was visible for several hours each night. As the villagers gathered to watch this bright object hovering in the night sky, Amishai Shouah, one of the settlers living in Kibbutz Hatzor, was able to film this UFO with a video camera, and since then, the strange and compelling footage he captured has been shown in various UFO television documentaries around the globe.
I apologize in advance for the minimal level of production effort I sunk into this particular presentation, but this is just a rather basic video that I initially threw together without any intention of ever actually showing publicly, so the only goal I had here was to quickly show some of the enhanced visual evidence I have put together that is related to this 1996 Hatzor UFO encounter. Due to the resolution and quality of the raw "alpha" copies of this footage that I had to work with, the enhancement potential was somewhat limited here, but I am confident that a better quality copy of this footage would allow for more object detail to be extracted from the scene, so if anyone out there happens to have a better quality copy of this Hatzor UFO footage, feel free to email it to me!
In this presentation, I employ an enhancement technique known as "frame-stacking" on the raw video footage in an effort to give a better, cleaner look at the UFO. In certain cases, frame-stacking can be employed to forensically attack the raw frames of film and produce an enhanced composite still-frame of a stable (or motion-stabilized) scene.
Frame-stacking exploits the fact that the video footage we are analyzing is comprised of many sequential still images shown in rapid succession to simulate the appearance of motion to the viewer's eye. When the raw footage is providing us with a stable (or stabilized) scene that has little or no movement in the field-of-view, it might appear as if the footage is comprised of many individual still frames that all seem to capture the identical view. However, appearances can be deceiving, and the truth is that those individual frames that together comprise the raw video footage each have slight variances between them, with each frame suffering from its own unique random noise and compression artifacts. "Frame-stacking" works by analyzing and comparing all the raw frames that make up a segment of footage, allowing for the detection and subtraction of random noise and artifacting from each individual raw frame. Those individual cleaned frames are then "stacked" together in order to construct a high-resolution enhanced composite image of the captured scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49UQl0oMuQA
It should also be noted that "stacking" is by no means a new method of enhancing video or motion picture film footage. It is a digital enhancement technique that has been around since the early-1960s, and in many cases it can provide us an improved, cleaner look at some of the deeper image detail that is actually buried beneath the random "noise" in the raw footage.
Raw footage links of UFO over Kibbutz Hatzor, Israel (filming credit goes to Amishai Shouah)
Shot on the night of August 22nd,1996 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whvDN9tRV4g
Shot on the night of August 24th, 1996 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3cw2A-iUH4
Here is a link to a segment from an "FX Network" UFO documentary where they discuss this specific Hatzor UFO incident while examining Shouah's supporting video evidence -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s9sVDaWCYk