UFOSINT: Open Source Intelligence and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

welcome to the talk UFO synth open source intelligence and unidentified aerial phenomena my name is Isaac baskgrace and I guess we'll just start on a little bit of information about myself so I'm Isaac as I said I'm a fourth year ethical hacker I'm originally from Liverpool so that could come out of my accent please just uh if you need to tell me to slow down I'm really interested in threat intelligence and specifically where that meet meets ocean research is something that I really really like doing so this was actually really fun to uh to to make my dissertation is on video game and teaching the security therein uh yeah I'll do a talk next year and come back if there's any interest in that and that's my Twitter at and I used to be a pretty weird kid so as a child I spent a lot of time with my nan watching documentaries on the History Channel and Discovery and that kind of thing including Unsolved Mysteries and UFO conspiracies um I was a pretty anxious kid and these conspiracies scared me quite a lot this talk is heavily influenced by that childhood anxiety but um as I grew up I realized that Ancient Aliens and other conspiracies are pretty much just a cope for people without common sense and for you know who have a desire for things to be a little bit more than they've seen Occam's razor tells us that the simplest explanation is usually correct and that is definitely heavily informed this talk as well um understanding this reality has really helped reduce my anxiety over the years but with that said the fascination that I've had with UFO Still Remains but with a little bit more of a skeptical view attached to it so let's start with what UFOs actually are the various governments of the world prefer the term unidentified aerial phenomena because they're both more accurate not all UFOs are objects and there's also less stigma no need to talk about Little Green Men when you're giving a report about UFOs if you're a fight pilot for example um they're basically what they say on the tin though uh Birds could be a UFO if you've lived in a cave and never seen a bird before so in this talk I'll be going over examples of uap's cotton images and on video and I'll be aiming to provide a logical rational explanation using some pretty simple ocean techniques to be honest um I think honestly the explanation is often good or just as good as I should I should say as the lack of an explanation and I promise that's not like when someone says that store brand color is just as good as Pepsi I actually mean this if we have time at the end as well I might go over one particularly compelling case which there isn't really a rational explanation at the minute um but there might just be one question on your mind at this point who cares right why does it matter UFOs are weird but ultimately probably pretty harmless phenomenon the we can all get a bit of a laugh and a bit of a joke out of what's the point in ruining all the fun and debunking them like this while the US military almost definitely definitely cares if something's flying in their airspace without permission and can't be determined well that's that's a breach baby and the last thing the absolute last thing that the US needs is a foreign drone or or balloon in their backyard recently uh the U.S Department of Defense announced the establishment of the old domain anomaly resolution office of which the UAP task force the lovely logo of which well I'm not sure if I'll actually use the logo whatever is on screen at the moment so just a quick note before I continue I'll be talking a lot about the US and the US government in relation to uaps and this is for a few reasons think of one alien movie where the us or a standard for the US isn't the primary protagonist or antagonist uh you just can't it's really difficult you also won't often hear of Russia or China suffering a Cyber attack for example not that it doesn't happen just because they're not willing to admit it and it's the same with UFOs the US government also has an annual report into UAP sightings in the previous year uh they commissioned a Project Blue Book in 1952 which was a government registry of settings that ran up until 1969. so let me just give a really quick example of when it's not a military threat and it's a genuine you know threat to human safety you may know of the original War of the Wilds incident when Orson Welles broadcast the radio Play version of the book and people thought it was real Panic ensued everyone you know crying and throwing up and stuff well a Spanish language version was actually broadcast on radio keto the same thing happened again got a little bit more out of hand though um people realized it was fake they rioted they burned down the building holding radio keto which killed seven people uh the firefighters were off dealing with the non-existent UFOs at the time so they weren't able to respond properly it's it's a horrible incident and I think this really illustrates how important debunking UFOs is but how do you actually do that so in this section I'll go over a few common mistakes people make when they think that what they're seeing is a UFO so the first thing that it could be are camera artifacts these are in camera or around camera effects uh examples that I'm given here are bulky which I'll explain in a bit black dots which hover when some camera sensors get blown out with light lens flares and this is a speck of dust on the lens that is reflecting the light kind of weirdly astronomical stuff anything in space so the examples I'm giving here are transient lunar phenomenon which in this case is a comma impacting the moon a couple of planets often Venus for some reason uh an asteroid which is a comet that crashes on Earth and a comet which is an asteroid that doesn't crash on Earth this is a personal favorite of mine uh atmospheric phenomena a lot of clouds in here you watch the movie nope and you'll get why clouds kind of seem a little bit weird to people the examples I'm giving here are iridescent clouds which is when ice crystals like light Lord ways the next one's a Virgo hole next one's lenticular clouds and the last one is sent Elmo's Fire which is a personal favorite a favorite of mine and it happens by metal objects pass through an area of high electrical disturbance such as a thunderstorm and begins to radiate plasma if you're if you're a pilot or Noah pilot they'll probably have seen it at some point often explanations can be entirely man-made phenomena so you know balloons LOL um light projections onto clouds rocket launches which by the way how cool is that photo right and the absolute bane of my existence Elon Musk and his Starling project which is that last image over there now the final category that it often is is nature so Birds often get mistaken for UFOs there's a video you can find online where a news report in Milwaukee captures a load of UFOs live turns out they're just birds at night reflecting light from below weirdly and there's like Trails but that's a high exposure on the camera at night time whatever the next two images are seed dispersal images and insects which are both also pretty common so now let's go over some case studies this is to best apply the kinds of things I've just mentioned uh we'll start with a more recent one the balloons so I'm starting here because this is the only balloon incident when I when I started writing the talk uh probably everyone's heard of it by this point but uh just if in case you haven't a high altitude balloon that was of Chinese origin originally was spotted and tracked over both the US and Canadian airspace uh norad's recent change for the filters that they use to track objects has confirmed that this is a super common thing but it was the first one that actually got spotted by people uh also before this recent incident Roswell was probably a balloon for example um the object was roughly round in shape as you can see in that image below it was floated silently and this whites which are all really common UFO sightings so this could go some way to explaining others and a fun additional non-ufo related facts this incident resulted in the first air-to-air kill ever performed by the F-22 fighter jet in U.S history as well as you know the following balloons really keeping them safe out there boys so yeah as I just mentioned there obviously other incidents have happened since there were two in Alaska one in Yukon which is a territory just uh east of Alaska a couple in South America and there was one in Romania Moldova which were probably Russians targeting Ukraine for military purposes um do you does anyone honestly think that aliens who are Advanced enough for faster than light travel would let their aircraft get shot down or spacecraft I suppose I don't think so it's some sticks and stones technology we have at the moment the prevalence of social media and patent seeking brains that we all have in our lovely Noggins there results in fear-mongering of irrational explanations so now that's out of the way we can get onto the actual quote-unquote UFOs uh the title of the post that I found this on is the inverkeything sphere in Scotland allegedly not seen with the naked eye when the image was taken it's not imply that it's a cloaking advice and it's traveling at a significant rate of speed well probably not in the key thing is about 55 kilometers south of where we are at the moment I picked this because it's pretty close and fun start you know so let's look at the image the texture's abnormal uh normally UFOs are pretty smooth well at least reportedly smooth anyway the sharp shadows in the bottom of the image are similar to the Shadows on the object are at least more similar than the trees in the background you know so that implies that the object is pretty close to the camera so it's got to be kind of small right the other thing though that you may have noticed if you're Keen eyed is that there is a dog in the bottom left hand corner of the image uh it's quite a long story short it's probably just a dog's ball in mid-throw so yeah I thought that was pretty funny let's go a little bit more International though shall we so this is a tick tock taken outside of the sapphire gentlemen's club in downtown Las Vegas the Mojave Desert where Las Vegas is situated as you'll know if you played uh Fallout New Vegas is a pretty popular place for UFO enthusiasts that's where Roswell happened is where Area 51 is located that kind of thing um so this Tick Tock video is showing a bunch of lights in the sky above Las Vegas the lights appear pretty curved they're not in any visibly symmetrical order maybe it's a bunch of UFOs bunch of aliens flying above the sky that kind of thing well I don't think that's the case as you can see in this diagram here that was helpfully provided to me by Reddit these lights are probably just a series of up lights on the various hotels in the area those red lights are the Las Vegas Hilton the yellow light strips are from the win and Encore hotels and the small strip of light is from Trump International baby yeah so the the phenomena is probably caused by reflective ice crystals formed in the cloud layer during a recent Arctic blast phenomenon that happened in the US over over the winter the reflectivity was probably increased by the relative warmth of the desert as more ice crystals that are smaller are more reflective than less larger crystals so maybe this kind of thing isn't something that you would have seen if if Las Vegas was situated in Montana for example so this one's a little bit more interesting so here you'll be able to see a video taken from the live feed of the International Space Station it was taken approximately the 12th of June 2021 the lights as you can see moving across the screen right now slowly move from left to right a constant rate of Speed without deviating from their path there are as you can probably notice other smaller points of lights behind the main lights which could in theory be construed as stars in space so let's do a little bit of investigating the camera from the original footage is pointed downwards at Earth this is confirmed by this similar shot on the left taken on uh January the 28th 2023 the Stars therefore in the original footage are likely dead pixels from the camera Overexposed the elements of space the theory that UFOs could be objects flowing between Earth and the ISS which is I might remind you 417 kilometers above the Earth is still in theory possible but the likely explanation is that the lights are from fishing vassals which emit enough light to be seen from the ISS in particular they're probably squid fishing ships that operate at night using light sources to attract the squid to the surface of the water oh no this is a really interesting case that I personally did quite a deep dive into myself um this video shows three men hiking up a volcano in antuko in Chile the man if you could hear the audio uh speaking in Spanish obviously uh confirm that's where they are uh as you can see there's a point of light there just sort of staying still um the guy in the video says that it could be Goku Going doing the uh the Genki Dharma which I assume is pretty funny so I used the information provided by the the men in the video to find his exact location on Google Earth the guys were looking West down into a valley I confirmed this location using the shape of the mountains uh and the sort of geographical formations in there if you can note the small hill at the bottom there that's the exact same the mountains on the left look like a single Mountain because of Google Earth's Fulbright lighting and the fact that there isn't any Haze you'll also notice from the original video as well as from this analysis that the light is below the Horizon and is therefore emanating either from the valley or in between the camera and the valley itself if it's a floating object well it's probably not a floating object I took this image from Google street view this is a a small village a locality in Chile named paluka which is quite near the volcano as you can see over on the left of the image that is the volcano uh that that we were talking about earlier the camera is Facing East as you can tell from the uh from the compass in the bottom right hand corner of the image and this building over here on the right uh it has a another aluminum a steel or a tin roof it's essentially you know highly reflective material right so what's probably happened is that the light has bounced off of this roof into the camera which was situated on top of the mountain but that doesn't really explain the Triangular shape that you saw earlier on in the video well that can be explained by the bulky effect this is a boki it's caused by the shape of the camera aperture when trying to photograph an autofocus light emitting object the shape in this case is triangular because the smallest number of blades you can have in the camera's aperture and still work is three you can see an example of a three sort of bladed bulky on the right there but you know you can get any shape of bulky depending on the aperture that you have or if you have like some tape in front of the uh the lens in a specific shape you can make star-shaped bowkies you can make everything it's great so all of the things I've spoken about up until now have been odd but perfectly reasonably explainable phenomena these videos I'm about to show you though are not the same as the previous View note I will be playing these videos with the sound off because they're very very loud the audio is pretty important for two of them though as it shows kind of what's going through the aviators Minds at the time but we're mostly interested in the visuals here that if you really want to know what they're saying I highly recommend going and finding them yourself there's actually plenty of um like deep dives into this topic elsewhere I can recommend a couple of videos if you come up to me afterwards in 2004 the U.S Navy carrier strike group led by the USS Nimitz spotted targets moving off the coast of Southern California and Northern Mexico a pair of fighter jets led by Commander David fravor approached the targets identified as dots on the radar that made erratic movements the radar system on the USS Princeton which was part of the strike group was taken offline and recalibrated because they thought that it was you know a mistake on the the new radar systems part but the dots only became sharper and Commander Alex Dietrich took off and approached the white a white oval object hovering above a disturbance in the ocean they described it as looking like a giant Tic Tac one of the Jets that came out after fraver and dietrich's was equipped with an advanced targeting forward-looking infrared camera also known as an app flare and footage was captured which is what you're looking at now named FLIR f-l-i-r highly skilled Pilots testimony and footage rule out some common aerial phenomena like planes balloons that kind of thing at this time there is no rational explanation supported by all of the available evidence which means that this is a genuine unidentified flying object so this is the first of two more recently taken videos that were Declassified at the same time as the previous video this was taken off the coast of uh Virginia in the United States in the time period approximately 2014-2015 we don't know the dates exactly obviously for obvious reasons and this was taken by a jet associated with the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group this one is probably the easiest of the three to actually identify so the infrared footage that you're seeing on the screen at the moment was taken in BLK or black mode which means that hot objects are black the object appears to be traveling fast but once The Parallax effect is taken into account as well as the movement of the jet you can figure out using on-screen information that is traveling at about 40 kilometers an hour the distance the object can be determined by other on-screen information so at this point the the video is paused it's 3.3 nautical miles to the Target as determined by that 3.3 RNG number in the in the corner there we're going to use a 3.6 for for this because uh that's the bit that I did the maths on the camera at this point is elevated negative 36 degrees I'm going to use 33 because when it was 3.6 nautical miles away it was elevated at about 33 degrees angle the altitude of the uh of the aircraft is 25 010 feet above sea level and we can use all of that plus a little bit of trigonometry to show that it's approximately 12 000 feet away from the aircraft and therefore about 13 000 feet from sea level all the evidence available to us including the fact that it's a cold object it's not traveling particularly fast it's traveling you know a high altitude but not like too high points to this possibly being a seabird seabirds have cold external feathers for insulation so that accounts for the coldness and they tend to travel quite far out quite long distances for extended periods of time it's probably a seabird so the second video in this series of videos is not quite as clear-cut as the first one so as you're able to see in this video there's an object sort of floating a little bit further away The Parallax can be accounted for a little bit as you can see that the aircraft is banking to the right so you know moving around or whatever but there's no distance to the object so we don't really know what it is and also the camera is angled slightly upwards two degrees upwards um you can see that that the the object is rotating rotating this rotation can be accounted for by our old friend artifacting so the outfit has a stabilization mechanism internally um and the camera lens itself has another layer of glass in front of it that glass can cause diffraction uh to the lines and eventually to the sensor which means that when the assembly is rot