- Very interesting! A neat puzzle. Some thoughts...
- Maussan is not the reported author of the vid, and the Mexican government has already admitted that the incident was recorded by a government plane, so even though he's a documented kook, it doesn't appear to be a deliberate hoax. Also, as you can see, this video isn't natural-color video, it's FLIR (Forward-looking infra-red) and they use it for tracking drug runners. As such, we're not really seeing "lights", we're technically seeing heat.
But it's very interesting, because we also see clouds. The heat signatures pass behind the clouds, so it doesn't appear likely that we're looking at a light reflection of any type (which would then have to cause heat), and since this camera is enclosed within a dome on the underside of the plane, reflections like this would have to be a feature on or very near the aircraft or the dome (or the camera itself). I don't know a heck of a lot about IR cameras, but it makes sense to me that a heat signature would fade when passing behind a dense cloud of ice and water vapor, and that's what we see.
- The little + signs popping up on the video is the software trying to pinpoint targets, and it uses brightness, not radar, to do it, so those don't mean very much. You can see them tracing out the lighter areas on the ground in the beginning. However, according to my two Spanish-fluent officemates, the pilots say that at one point, two of the signatures do show up on radar... but only two. This is important, because if that's true, then it's pretty hard evidence that the objects we're seeing are at least actually flying. The altitude of the Mexican aircraft at the time was around 11k feet, and even though we could say that perhaps the signatures might have been stationary and it was actually the plane that was moving (possibly indicating heat sources on the ground, 'passing' behind clouds), that doesn't work if the signatures are 11k feet up in the air with the plane.
- Also interesting is the number of signatures at different points in the vid. First there's one ("un punto", a point), but others appear as they 'chase' it. The stereotypical "formation" is seen in that these signatures seem to be moving at the same speed and in the same direction. At first I thought we might be looking at a large jumbo-jet with several engines along each wing, but the camera pulls back to show up to 11 or 12 signatures, some hotter than others (due to distance, apparently). Still, they do appear to come in groups of 2 or 3... but this doesn't explain why we don't see all the heat signatures throughout the video, each "engine" as bright as its twin. I know it's possible for a fighter aircraft to fly on just one engine, but I'm not sure why a formation of them would fly along switching them on and off... and I'm also aware of no jets that have three engines.
- The next thing I thought of was meteor burns; a chunk of rock breaking up in the atmosphere and leaving pieces falling behind it. But this is nonsense, because meteors skipping off the atmosphere, even very large ones that might break up, travel WAY too fast to be captured for so long, even by an airborne camera. Besides, astronomical agencies would have been able to detect such an event, and it would have been visible for hundreds of miles... with noise to boot, I wager. And thinking of this, I discovered another interesting thing: the heat signatures are rounded, not streaking and leaving long heat-trails behind them. Obviously not meteoric, but then again, wouldn't a jet engine leave an elongated heat trail? And wouldn't a pilot be able to see a visible vapor-trail created by traditional jet engines? THAT kinda makes me scratch my head. I can only guess that the government has developed planes that don't leave vapor trails, a-la stealth aircraft, since a vapor trail would kinda give the game away if you're trying not to be detected. It makes sense that this could be a stealth aircraft of some sort, but with 11 engines turning on and off? Maybe a wing of them flying in formation, but how often do several stealth aircraft fly four at a time in formation? I don't know.
- On the still-pictures page there, the third and fourth vid pictures show a marked similarity between the two most prominent groups of three signatures. Note they are similar, not symmetrical. Each group of three seems to have the middle signature slightly positioned closer to the right, with the left-most signature down a bit. If they were symmetrical, that would be a very strong indicator that we're looking at a reflection or a camera distortion of some sort, but that's not the case. It does appear, however, that each group of three signatures is either fixed onto one object, or fixed individually onto two objects with three "engines" each, flying beside each other. But why would they be arranged like this? The plane could be in the middle of a bank or a turn, and so dipped down to the left a little, but that wouldn't be sustainable for nearly as long as we see the vid.
- I'm stumped. I don't believe these are alien spacecraft, but I also don't know what these actually are. They will probably turn out to be experimental aircraft of some sort, but to be perfectly honest, I wasn't aware that Mexico had ANY Airforce, much less newfangled stealth aircraft. They may be ours, on loan to help with the drug runners? Or... spying on Mexico? But why spy on Mexico with billion-dollar aircraft?
- Hrmmm. A nice puzzle.
