Yeah, I know.  I’ve been very busy with my company lately, and hope to get back to posting/experimenting within a week or so.

-John

Last night, we drove from Cedar Park to a darker location just west of Lago Vista. I brought along my industrial camera, which shoots 1280×960 monochrome images very clearly. I used a 25mm lens, which is fairly narrow field, but nothing like a telescope, which you would not want. I tried to keep the gain setting relatively low, since amplifying low-light signals introduces lots of speckle noise (commonly called the “mosquito” effect, because it looks like swarms of mosquitos.) Instead, I opted for longer exposure times (experimented with 1 to 4 seconds) which has a number of benefits:

• The pattern of movement of any moving object is etched into a small number of frames…almost like skywriting.

• The reduced number of resulting frames means you can record for many many hours without using much hard drive space.

• Most importantly, you can now see objects that you would never see with a shorter exposure.

Although we never captured any anomalous lights (nor did we expect to) we did demonstrate the incredible sensing abilities of this arrangement. For example, here’s a commercial aircraft flying overhead at cruise (i.e. almost certainly above 30,000 feet):

Here was a lower one, probably 8,000 to 10,000 feet, on approach into Austin:

Most amazingly, I was able to capture 2 satellites which were completely invisible to the naked eye. This gives me great encouragement, because most large satellites can be seen by a person with good vision (which I have.) So these satellites must have been fairly small, possibly debris of some kind. This is one of the images, the streak in the middle of the frame is the satellite. It’s not a “falling star”, the it took 4 seconds to cover move this distance (the length of that line.)

Unknown satellite presumably at orbital altitudes (4-second exposure)

The other interesting thing about this image is that with the longer exposure, you’re seeing far, far more stars/galaxies than you would with the naked eye. This image is peppered with reflexes, but without the camera you’d be hard pressed to see more than 2 or 3 of these.

So I really think this is a good setup for a longer trial run. Most of my experiments last night were 5 to 10 minute runs, with 1 to 4 second exposure times. I like the 4 second exposure best, I think. Catching the satellites was an exciting surprise, given that I was only on-site for less than an hour and shot a total of maybe 30 minutes worth of video.

I will try longer, fixed setups at 4-second exposures tonight if the beautiful weather holds.

-John

I’m in the planning stages of a Sky Search night. Basically, it will involve taking a special monochrome machine vision camera and some custom software out to a remote location and doing some recording on a clear night.

So here’s the thing: I choose monochrome because color adds noise. Mono has the clearest signal. The custom software to control it will save a stream of data, probably RLE (run-length encoded.) I expect the images to be 98% black, with only stars or other moving objects visible.

The goal: Image moving objects that exhibit rigid or otherwise strange motion characteristics. Abrupt right-angle turns, instantaneous acceleration/deceleration, “butterfly” motion, etc. All of these are tell-tale signs that an object is not moving under normal aerodynamic principles.

Anything interesting will be posted here and on YouTube.

-John

Yet again, here’s a high-profile NASA astronaut giving a sober, almost clinical recounting of personal experiences involving UFOs. It’s one thing to say, “it was probably swamp gas” or “the planet Venus”, but when he says it was a saucer-shaped craft that flew overhead and landed by extending 3 legs. I think that’d be pretty hard to confuse with other more terrestrial phenomena.

I love this series.  I think the best proof of unexplainable UFO phenomena is from credible, qualified eyewitness accounts.  The National Press Club assembled a collection of the most credible, level-headed eyewitnesses ever under one roof and gave them a forum to tell their stories.

This is the first video in the series, but I urge you to watch the others.