The above image and the following video show objects that appeared in the course of filming a documentary, In The Cobbler’s Shoes. They were initially unseen during production.
Watching the sky closely in this 90 seconds of super slow-motion footage, filmed north of San Francisco Bay, reveals small objects rapidly moving through the sky.
Though edited together these are excerpts from digital video filmed over one week. The flying objects seen in these clips were shot on a small, high-quality HD camera at 30 frames per second. In the editing room, upon seeing a brief image in one shot, the footage was slowed down, revealing the high-speed objects. We decreased the speed of additional exterior wide-angle footage and saw similar anomalies. Because the footage is being viewed so slowly and the objects move rapidly, they do not move smoothly and occasionally skip a frame. Using known geographical locations, the objects are estimated to be traveling at 18,000 miles per hour.
For Full-screen mode - click the square icon after starting play. There is no audio.
There is no claim about these objects other than their incredible velocity; beyond known capabilities for anything flying within a few thousand feet of the Earth’s surface.
Government Plays Ignorant
Recent reports about the U.S. Government hiding evidence of alien technology have received the attention of mainstream news, yet we are no further along in comprehending the nature of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).
The minimal and inconclusive reports — Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (2021) and the 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — do little to help us understand what many observers have seen in the skies above Earth for decades.
The combined intelligence and military branches of the United States, after years of obfuscating data and denying the existence of unidentified flying objects, have summarized their knowledge:
The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP.
Even if recent allegations are true — that there have been attempts to reverse-engineer crashed discs — the clearest statement to date from the government on the topic reveals how little is known:
We were able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence. In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained.
Although some of the findings are top secret, everything remains beyond their ability to comprehend. With millions of dollars to investigate, a deflating balloon is all that has been identified. If there is a hidden agenda to minimize attention, confessing ignorance continues to be a successful strategy.
The mainstream news media remain reluctant and cautious in covering UAP, mirroring government bewilderment. The flying objects recorded by military pilots have been continually reported as unidentified, but much of the press has relied on the skeptics to unequivocally explain them away, either in principle or as camera glitches and optical anomalies, rather than considering all possibilities with an open-minded approach.
Despite a prevalence of closed minds, reports on US Navy pilots' sightings have increased the openness and potential for fathoming this ongoing mystery. Eyewitnesses with knowledge of aerial activities, including military and commercial pilots, who previously had much to lose by being honest about what they've seen, are less likely to be derided or dismissed; a new organization formed to report sightings. This turning point reflects the changing attitude on the topic.
And in the face of minimal and disparaging press coverage over many years, a huge proportion of people would like to know more about this phenomenon. A Gallup poll in 2019 indicated that one-third of all Americans believe that some unidentified flying objects are from somewhere off-planet. According to a recent Pew Research poll, 65% of the U.S. population believes in intelligent life beyond Earth; few see UFOs as a major national security threat.
The self-assuredness of those who dismiss the importance of the topic has not stopped an increasing number of scientists to contradict mundane explanations; some are calling for more serious inquiry, including those working on the Galileo Project. The general shift towards open consideration of unidentified aerial phenomena gives newfound freedom for those with personal experience with UAP to share their insights.
A Very Fast Disc
Many years ago, in my first experience with UFOs, I saw a spectacular disc-shaped flying object. The memory remains vivid and extraordinary. What I witnessed is unexplainable within commonly accepted norms of visible activity above the Earth.
I have always been an avid and astute observer of aerial phenomena. My childhood home was under the flight pattern of Mitchell Field, a military airbase that was near our neighborhood. I had a passion for identifying aircraft of various sizes and shapes and assembled model planes of those that I had seen. My dad called me eagle eye, as I could identify small things in the sky from very far away. As a devotee of the emerging space age, by my twelfth year, I was physically and mentally preparing to attend the US Air Force Academy in advance of becoming an astronaut.
At the age of fourteen, on a warm summer evening at dusk, a friend and I were sitting at the edge of a small lake in the Catskill Mountains, north of New York City. We were healthy, athletic, clear-headed teens on a break after dinner at a rural children’s camp. We had never discussed or heard of UFOs; they were beyond our imagination.
The lake was less than a quarter-mile wide. Across the water, there were rolling hills to the west. The sun had just set, and the cloudless, windless, August sky was still a bright blue. Something approaching us caught our attention. Initially, it appeared as a glistening unidentifiable object, flying in our direction over the hills, about halfway to the western horizon.
It became apparent this was something extraordinary. We watched as a disc-shaped object approached us, at no more than a thousand feet above the terrain and high enough to reflect the last direct light of the sun.
Without a sound, the disc headed directly toward us at a steady pace. It was slightly larger, but no faster than a single-engine plane; it had a round, bright, metallic form, and a flat underside with a curved top.
We were absolutely frozen in wonderment as it came closer.
It reached the airspace just above the far side of the lake, still exhibiting no means of propulsion. Then, without stopping, in complete silence, the disc accelerated away at ninety degrees, disappearing into the northern horizon within a second.
It was incredibly faster than anything I have ever seen.
The entire sighting was profoundly moving. It was the disc’s impossible turn and dramatically rapid departure that bolted us to our feet. Feeling a mixture of exhilaration and fear, we ran from the lake up a trail back toward camp. We had to let someone know about our sighting.
Out of breath at the top of the hill, with hearts pounding, we stopped and expressed the same thoughts. Who would understand? No one would believe us. We shook hands and agreed to keep the experience to ourselves.
This encounter continues to shape my perspective and has given me some reference to the reports of others who have witnessed similar phenomena. It also gave me the ability to recognize similar objects years later.
Understanding the Impossible
Beyond the description of glowing shapes of triangles, cigars, or discs, it is the swiftness of these objects that has startled many observers. For those who have had sightings of moving UFOs, including seasoned pilots, their speed and agility leave us with an unforgettable impression.
Initially, I had attempted to encapsulate what I had seen within the limits of my young mind, not really comprehending the incident. The experience as a teen later opened up my imagination. And it was after seeing published photographs of similar discs, some years after, that I considered what had happened that summer evening.
I began to read about UFOs and the various theories about what they were. Attempts to explain them as meteors, solar flares, balloons, or pranks were laughable, considering the details of our sighting.
Press coverage, outside of the tabloids, explained away UFOs within the boundaries of contemporary science or would mock people who dared to describe seeing something unearthly. I was consequently guarded about where I shared my story; the taboo on mentioning the topic in conversation seemed as strange as the phenomenon itself.
The inability to even consider that UFOs are extraterrestrial is fascinating. It fits with the general reluctance to posit or tolerate new paradigms and conforms to the history of science presented by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn details how our worldview is resistant to change; it takes completely new ideas and discoveries, often engendered and revealed by a single, free-thinking individual, to question and upend scientific dogma.
The resistance to breakthrough concepts stems from the reluctance to perceive or process anything strange without reference to what is already known. Science is often limited and distracted by the authority of conventional wisdom. A majority of researchers and journalists commenting on the UAP issue, eagerly insist it would be impossible for whatever they are to be extraterrestrial in origin. The naysayers confidently tell us that even if there is alien life in our galaxy and elsewhere, enormous interstellar distances can never be traversed by any beings. They assure us that the limitations of the speed of light and the amount of energy required to approach it, prohibit consideration of this feat.
Unreasonable over-confidence that we have attained supreme knowledge of all manifestations of energy ends the discussion of the topic before it begins. The skepticism about UAP and their origins emanates not from knowledgeable consideration, but rather from an overt anthropocentric view and a fearful need for a stable reality.
The Will To Know More
Rather than dread the unknown, it is important to consider where we are in understanding the primal forces of the universe and what that knowledge could lead to. Our grasp of wave energy, including light and gravity, has grown in the last one hundred years. But we are only at the beginning of comprehending fundamental universal forces with relatively primitive references and gauges.
All of our faith in the scientific realm, from the sub-atomic to the astronomic, is built on observations that we define and evaluate within the electromagnetic spectrum. Much of this data is directly applicable to practical use. Yet the dogmatic insistence that this range of energy is all that exists, has diminished our ability to increase understanding of the universe, our planet, and ourselves.
Small particles and waves have been observed behaving in a manner that defies known functional models, suggesting we have much more to learn about the very nature of reality. Concepts that not long ago were completely speculative, including quantum entanglement, wormholes, extra dimensions, and travel beyond the speed of light are the subject of experimentation and serious discussion among an increasing number of dedicated scientists.
Considering the history of scientific development and very recent discoveries, it is likely that this limitation of perception will be surpassed in the not-too-distant future. We certainly have the ability to reach a greater understanding of our world, leading to contact with other sentient life in the universe. Human progress is predicated on our willingness to re-evaluate and go beyond self-imposed barriers.
Attaining Visibility
The slow-motion images in the assembly at the beginning of this article were recorded and discovered by accident.
A few years ago, I was filming landscape images for a documentary, In The Cobbler’s Shoes, just north of San Francisco, that included wide shots of the sky. While editing, I noticed something that seemed to blur across the monitor. Slowing down the video footage to view individual frames, there was what appeared to be a flying object skipping across the horizon.
These objects were not going anywhere near or beyond light speed, though fast enough to be relatively invisible.
If not for my early personal sighting, I would have not noticed or perhaps dismissed these as inconsequential blips. I decided to look more closely at other footage I’d recently shot and did some simple analysis. Although none of the discs were particularly clear, similar images sped through about a dozen other segments of the unedited footage. The skipping meant that the objects were moving fast enough to not be captured by every image in the video camera’s thirty frames per second. They certainly were not dust, bugs, or electronic anomalies in the recording.
With reference to some known locations in footage with a view across San Francisco Bay, the distance of one flying object was estimated at four miles away from the camera at approximately one thousand feet in altitude. Using a map to gauge the distance traversed in the video, the aircraft crossed five miles in one second, which calculates to a speed of 18,000 miles per hour.
Although the International Space Station is circumnavigating Earth at a similar speed and it is the initial re-entry velocity of a space shuttle, nothing within a few miles of the planet’s surface is known to travel that fast. This extraordinary speed defies tolerances to atmospheric friction and the gravity forces on a flying object or its contents.
A 2019 published scientific report on Unidentified Aerial Vehicles in the 2004 Nimitz Encounter reviewed naval air data to estimate the acceleration and g-force of similar objects tracked by naval pilots and radar. Although the incident itself was widely covered, this rarely cited analysis of those events and the documentary footage I’ve described, both document incredible speeds and raise the same key questions.
Considering their unprecedented velocity, it is likely that the aerial phenomena are often unseen and unidentified precisely because of their imperceptible motion. Most often, these silent objects are invisible and are barely noticeable when viewed on-screen at standard frame rates. The sightings we know about only represent a small fraction of the activity in the sky above the Earth.
With minimal equipment and basic math, I was able to gather enough imagery and data to raise some intriguing questions. This also presents a central problem for those interested in further investigation. While some researchers are prepared to develop and direct a comprehensive experiment on a small budget — and can only wonder why they haven’t been funded — governments and educational institutions with immense resources appear to be dabbling in the dark.
The motivation to find the phenomena has not been great enough to engender productive research in the right areas. It does not require much ingenuity to begin serious observations and analysis of these objects. Logic and appropriate technology need to be applied to understand them. It seems this has not yet happened.
(I am attempting to raise funds to film these objects in much higher resolution. If interested in supporting this project see: gofundme.com/f/identifying-flying-objects)
Velocity is the Message
Whether called UFOs or UAP, detailed reports and sharp images over the last seventy-five years haven’t changed the unidentified status of sightings. The government’s naive reports are shielding knowledge, though their ignorance shines through. US Navy pilots did not identify or steadily track the unknown flying objects and have described them as evasive.
The technology behind this phenomenon greatly surpasses ours, and the activity is likely initiated with great consideration and planning. Are these objects stealthily speeding around us, controlled by sentient beings with the expectation of eventually being perceived? To whom do they expose themselves, and why?
If we posit that interstellar ships have arrived using sophisticated means beyond our knowledge, they would certainly also have the ability to travel locally without the influence of Earth’s gravity and avoid terrestrial tracking. The minimal information gathered to date supports this simple, profound evaluation of the enigma.
Whatever they are, there is no apparent aggression. The most detailed and provocative sightings have been by non-military observers without weapons. This may be an indication that technological development that includes interstellar travel is dependent on societal advancements that have eliminated violent conflict.
However, we remain in the dark and can only speculate about the meaning and methodologies of unidentified aerial phenomena above the Earth. They have been virtually invisible; revealing their staggering pace will help to understand their intentions.
I, and many others, have witnessed the man-made reversed engineered version of these UFOS, both on a military base and nearby, on several occasions. For the moment however I would like to draw your attention to this lecture by Dr. Dunning:
https://youtu.be/bduDeZ4GA0c
Warning: you may not sleep very well tonight…
Thank you for writing this. I wish you included more detail about how you determined the speed. Birds sometime appear as rods in video. The bottom line is, if the object is "far" it is going very fast. If it is "close" it is not. I am not saying your conclusion is wrong, I just wish you got into details as to how you made this determination.