JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Our state bird, the California seagull, is responsible for a number of UFO sightings in my state. Their wings are gray on the topside and white on the underside. They have white breasts. When you see a flock of them in the distance against a mountain backdrop, whether you see them at all depends on which side they're collectively exposing. When they wheel together, they fundamentally disappear and reappear and resemble a single object. It's pretty eerie the first time you see it.
The video referred to in the original post is not without its problems. Because the framing includes foreground elements, we get some lay of the land plus illumination cues. Look at the light glinting brightly off the windows of the passing automotive traffic. This tells us we have a fairly small phase angle. Shadows are going to fall more or less directly away from us. This in turn tells us to look for shadows only a small angular distance away from the foreground object. Translated into the terms of our video, it means that if the object passes in front of the mountain, we should look for a shadow cast on the mountainside facing us.
Working against us is the likelihood of this being a cell phone camera photographing at the remote extent of its digital zoom. Our pixels are big and fuzzy. Plus it's been compressed and reprocessed for online media distribution. Losing spatial resolution and incorporating compression artifacts blurs the occlusion cues. If I were analyzing this film for pay, I would need to get hold of the original video file from the original camera to minimize the detrimental effects. Then there are deconvolution techniques that have the potential to undo the artifacts of the digital zoom.
The other major problem goes back to the natural circumstances of the scene. As objects recede into the distance and thus have more hazy air between them and the camera, the relative differences in coloration and brightness become less pronounced. This is something artists have used since Leonardo's day to create the illusion of distance. Everything meant to be far distant is depicted using a smaller range of tones and hues. On the one hand, we can look at the suspect object and say it must be far distant because its tone and hue are only slightly different than objects presumed to be farther away. That of course presumes that the absolute tones and hues of the object are not accidentally the same as those of the distant mountainside. On the other hand we can't be absolutely sure that the object hasn't passed in front of the mountain and that its outline has become unclear due to the various artifacts previously mentioned. However, I believe I can see a number of frames where the object is apparently occluded in a way that makes my interpretation the best description of the transit.
Here there are frame-to-frame comparisons we can make to determine to some statistical level of certainty whether motion is occurring in front of the mountain regardless of the similar colors. To make those comparisons persuasive I would again want to have the most pristine digital video that exists.
I've drawn the conclusion that the object passes behind the mountain. That's not conclusively indicated by the present data. But it's reasonably parsimonious.