News of the day

 

Now being a bit of a science buff (though by no means an expert) and undoubtably a skeptic I want to be the first to call "bugs" on this one.

 

 

So, being analytical regarding the film ... too fast for the human eye - can only be captured by a video camera and then only be seen when the video is slowed down frame by frame. Makes you think perhaps - the trick is to think in the right direction. Namely why a video camera and not the naked eye.

 

There are two parameters that are important to consider when analysing video footage - that is the frame-rate and the shutter-speed - these two timings are not the same, the first determines how many times the shutter opens in a second and the second determines how long it is open for. A typical domestic video camera could have a frame rate of 25fps and a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second.

 

Video cameras can't capture the flight of a bullet or an arrow (for example) - those are too fast for the frame-rate and exposure time of the camera.... a bullet travels at 600 mph, an arrow 200 mph yet we can film a jet aircraft at 600mph or a car at 200 mph so what's the difference?

 

The obvious difference is the size of the object, but there is another factor to consider.

 

The visual appearance of speed is a relative thing dependant upon how close you are to the moving object. If an object is far away moving across your field of vision it will take a long time, whereas the same object moving at the same speed but closer to you will flash by in seconds.

 

The options open to us are either a far away big object going unbelievably fast, or a small object quite close that isn't moving fast at all. And in this case unbelievably fast would have to be considerably faster than a jet aircraft - which puts it into the realms of science-fiction or (bringing this into the real world) implausible (though not improbable) and if it were a small object up close then it would be travelling relatively slowly.

 

So what else can we glean from the video? Well when they slow down the film we see object as a series of stationary images caused by the frame-rate of the camera - the time interval between them is fix and gives us a good indication of how "far" the object travels in 1 frame and within each frame the motion-blur of the object gives us a good indication of how "far" the object travels while the shutter is open. If we knew both values we could determine a relationship between size and distance. For example if the camera was running at 25pfs with a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second and the object was a jet-aircraft it would have travelled 36 feet between frames and be blurred by 9 feet - from that we could measure the length of the jet and extrapolate how far it was away from the camera - simple trigonometry.

 

Yet when we look at the video the object has certainly moved between frames but it isn't particularly motion blurred, yet it is blurred in that it is out of focus. That tells us three things -

 

1. It's not moving very fast.

2. It's quite close.

3. It's quite small.

 

As I said: I call "bugs"

 

 

 

They have them in Colorado, they like potatoes, they're about say >|                 |< big and they fly:

 

 

 

 

ie. bugs

It's interesting how they're employing blitzkrieg principles, except they're going up against lightly armed militia and civilians instead of Soviet soldiers.