Unusual Ask...

[Stephen Sanchez]

Hi friends, I'd like some VFX artist references.

We booked an interview a week from now with a guy who claims the authenticity of two leaked videos from 2014 that show the fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (his twitter post on the matter). The two videos in question are below. Both are presented to be recorded simultaneously. So, two vantage points.

Stereo Satelite: https://web.archive.org/web/20170606182854/https://youtube.com/watch?v=5Ok1A1fSzxY

FLIR: https://web.archive.org/web/20140827060121/https://youtube.com/watch?v=ShapuD290K0

Regardless of the information portrayed in the videos or the speculative claims made by the poster, I'd like to have an opinion from an industry VFX artist on whether this is produced or captured. I only know editors, so I'm asking folks here who may have connections that can assist.

Thank you my friends. You can DM me to share contacts. Our team would like to chat, zoom call, or fly the person out. Thank you.

[Karim D. Ghantous]

I personally am not convinced of the authenticity of these images. Maybe they're authentic, maybe they aren't. I am guessing that they aren't, but that is going by feel.

[Joerg Polzfusz]

IMHO The „stereo“ version is lacking details like the shadows cast by the aircraft’s body and tail wings.
And the pseudo infrared version should always show that the engines and their output are a lot hotter than the other parts of the aircraft. Not to mention that it looks like being made from another aircraft flying at the same flight level as the aircraft (which wasn’t the case according to the stereo version) and I doubt that the movement of the three „ufos“ are matching the movements of the three „ufos“ from the stereo version….

But I am not an expert…

You might also want to check which satellite in the area was able to do this stereo video and how the poster on YouTube managed to get access to it (with nobody else having access to this video)…

Another good question: why should any satellite track the flight of a civilian aircraft in stereo (unless it’s a military satellite tracking the test flight of three new anti-aircraft missiles)?

Edited November 6, 2023 by Joerg Polzfusz

[Phil Rhodes]

I'm not an expert either, but like Joerg, I'd expect to see more sign of the heat of the airliner's engines, especially in the cone directly behind the engines themselves, and in terms of the cooling and spreading of the contrails, which does not seem to occur. I'd expect behaviour to vary by altitude, pressure, humidity and other conditions, but see here. It's a matter of the dynamic range of the thermal imager and it's not necessarily completely unconvincing. It's notoriously difficult to fake thermal imaging footage, either way. I was once asked to do it for a military-themed short film because high resolution thermal imaging cameras are rare and expensive, especially with very long lenses. It's hard to get it to look right, though we were featuring humans.

There's some vibration in the thermal imaging shot which appears to be generating absolutely no motion blur, which is slightly suspicious, but thermal imaging cameras may have very odd behaviour as regards shutter speed, so again, while slightly odd, this is far from conclusive.

I'd say if this has been faked from the ground up, in a 3D rendering package, or something, it's been done with a reasonable degree of enthusiasm. Just adding in the swirling dots is a more trivial job. The cold trails are a nice touch.

But in my view the problem with this is more logical than visual. In the thermal-imaged footage, the camera aircraft appears to fly barely beneath the engine exhaust trails, just a few seconds after the airliner passes. It's a dramatic, dynamic shot, the sort of thing you'd see in an action movie, but if you think about it, it's a really unsafe bit of aviation. I suspect this would count as a critically dangerous failure of separation (an airprox) unless the view is from something like a military combat aircraft which has been specifically tasked to follow the airliner. These aircraft were within seconds of colliding.

This opens up other awkward questions about the provenance of this footage. What exactly is claimed about where it came from? Who shot it? Where was it shot? Is the airliner in the cruise, in which case why does it appear to be executing what would count as a fairly tight left turn in the thermal footage. And a right turn in the stereo footage, assuming what we see beyond it is the sea, since you refer to it as satellite material. If it's not satellite material, then the blue we see may be the sky, in which case it's a left turn.

If it's in the cruise, it would be travelling at perhaps 450-500 knots and tens of thousands of feet. This is considerably beyond the capability of most things which could reasonably be described as a "UAV." Something like a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper is fairly typical of the general arrangement of unmanned military aircraft likely to be equipped with thermal imaging, with straight wings and a turboprop propulsion system. It typically operates at under 250 knots. They're designed for long loiter times and low fuel consumption, not speed, and would be considerably outpaced by anything Boeing or Airbus have ever made. The only common thing with the speed and altitude performance to intercept a commercial airliner in the cruise is a fighter jet. It's possible some militaries may have high performance drones capable of doing what's shown here but it's certainly not common, which raises the question as to why this particular airliner was of interest to the military.

Like so many things of its type, this raises more questions than it answers, and in the end the answer to the question "are there aliens," in a universe as vast as the one we are known to inhabit, the only reasonable answer is "presumably," and that's neither surprising nor controversial. The sad reality is that we have only one example of life existing on a planet to work with, so it's hard to tell, but it's completely plausible that there have been alien civilisations which grew up and died out millennia ago, or alien life which never evolved beyond single-celled organisms, etc. The idea of alien life is not a stretch. The idea of them travelling to earth and bothering airliners probably is.

 

[Jon O'Brien]

I'm also not an expert but it looks quite fake to me. Why is the airliner making a large banking turn in the air? Is it trying to evade the orbs? Not likely?

If the aliens exist I wish they'd stop forever being so boring and unoriginal. Always the same games and deception. Around and around in circles we go, down through history. They used to call them leprechauns in Ireland. Boring little grays they call them now.

Edited November 6, 2023 by Jon O'Brien

[Stephen Sanchez]

I'm just looking for a VFX artist that can comment on.

[Robin Phillips]

I think you need a forensic video expert, and someone who has a lot of experience with this sort of footage if you're trying to verify authenticity. if you want to see how it could get pulled apart, the first thing to do is to pull it into resolve and crank the gamma up to see if anything looks out of sorts. thats usually a fast way to reveal mattes, bad regrains etc. But without a 100% known good version of the same kind of footage so you have a baseline for comparison, this might be a fools errand. one of the classic ways to fake UFO footage is to degrade the image so as to integrate the elements, and if you dont know what the footage should look like, you will have a harder time spotting a fake. 

But if you're looking for a vfx artist to interview, potentially on camera, about supposed UFO encounters, it sounds like you might be asking someone to put their reputation on the line. that may be difficult to find. 

[Stephen Sanchez]

I think we found the perfect VFX folks to comment on it for us. Corridor Digital we're happy to help. Unfortunately our schedules didn't allow for one of them to fly in. So they made a video for us to present during the show.

For anyone who's curious, here's the result of this effort.

After Corridor's video plays, the reaction was... You know, I've never experienced an interview like this before.