Mexican Airforce films UFOs

[Thomas]

Like I say, the video suggests the infra-red objects were in or above a large town with an airport and a port, so you'd expect a lot of people to notice something going on, whether it was balloonists or helicopters flying around.

We're talking an altitude of 3500 meter above surface, a helicopter and a ballon is quite small, if not invisible, at such a height.

 

[wipeout]

We're talking an altitude of 3500 meter above surface, a helicopter and a ballon is quite small, if not invisible, at such a height.

I think that's the height the plane is at, and a lot of news reports say the same for the objects, but the camera is pointing downwards at something distant, so it's much lower, and closer to Ciudad del Carmen which makes me wonder what people there saw, if anything.

 

[mummymonkey]

The pilots said that the objects turned back during a chase and surrounded the plane.

Apparently the screens showed they were behind them too the left and in front of them.

Flares can't move that fast, and neither can balloons.

9 years of de-briefing aircrew on radar and imaging systems means I refuse to believe a word they say without double checking everything first. One weapons operator claimed the full moon was causing his system to lose lock.
I saw the IR footage (edited) but I didn't see any radar film. Radar film should give the objects range.
As it stands I still think the objects may be on the ground some distance to the north. Perhaps at sea. Are there oil/gas rigs in that area?
I'd like to view the whole film unedited.

 

[wipeout]

9 years of de-briefing aircrew on radar and imaging systems means I refuse to believe a word they say without double checking everything first.

That's cool that we have someone here who has experience of that.

I'd always wondered about the "oh, but they're a trained observer" argument that gets used about soldiers, police, etc. who witness UFOs is not giving them a bit more credit than many are due.

Amateur or professional astronomers or meterologists are the ones that know the sky best and what's usual or strange but, oddly, don't ever seem to photograph much of anything I note...

 

[Hexxenhammer]

Awesome thread!

On the History or Discovery channel recently they had a show on UFO's that was actually (shock!) of a skeptical nature. They recreated 3 famous UFO/plane encounters down to the last detail. One was a original flying saucer sighting in Oregon(?), the second I can't remember, and the third was an encounter a P-51 pilot had that led him to crash and be killed. In all cases the scientists and researchers were able to recreate the encounters by mundane means.

Wait! the second was Roswell and the experiment was on false memory. They led a bunch of people they told they were taking on a nature hike past an area where they planted a soldier, some crime scene tape, and some scrap metal. People remembered all kinds of wacky stuff that never happened.

What's interesting here is the IR. If your typical alien spacecraft moves without any visible engines, I see no reason why they would have a bright IR sig. Also, you just can't judge size, distance, or airspeed with your eyes while flying, and that might even be more true if you're just looking at a screen.

 

[Thomas]

As it stands I still think the objects may be on the ground some distance to the north. Perhaps at sea. Are there oil/gas rigs in that area?
I'd like to view the whole film unedited.

Then it's a hoax from the pilots wouldn't you say. I have never been a pilot myself, except in about 8-12 computer flight simulators ..I don't know about in real planes, but in a simulator you can't look down at sea level from any height without knowing that you're doing it, especially not in daylight(these guys claims that the objects is at altitude 3500m) Would that also go for the real thing?

If the explanation should be oilrigs, then it's pretty pathetic, because it's a routine flight looking for drug trafficers, i.e. they should have seen them before. I see no reason to assume those objects were not at the altitude they claim?

And furthermore, why would 3 of them show up on radar, and the other 8 don't?

reuters bureau
Mexico has a long history of fanciful UFO sightings, most of which are dismissed by scientists as space debris, missiles, weather balloons, natural weather phenomena or hoaxes.

 

[AtheistArchon]

- On flares: every flare I've ever seen has been fired from the ground upwards, i.e. military infantry flares used to mark pick-up points and to illuminate the battlefield. These have always been colored in some manner, never just white light. I don't know about aircraft-dropped flares, although I don't suppose there would be a need to color those.

- Also, I was under the impression that aircraft flares used for the purposes of missile evasion were rather short-lived. I dunno.

- But anyway, it would be quite a coincidence to me to see two sets of three flares in almost the exact same geometric pattern hovering right next to each other. The angles are too precise.

- And still, I'm really at a loss here... I want to say these are experimental aircraft of some sort, but we're talking about a large, sandy area of Mexico here. Unless the USAF outsourced its clandestine ops? (That's actually not a bad idea now that I think about it. Hard to keep things like test flights a secret in our society, easier in "Tobasco, Mexico".)

- Meh. Like someone else said, it's all speculation at this point. I'm still leaning towards fixed objects on an airborne platform of some type.

 

[wipeout]

I think the explanation will turn out to be that the aircraft's infra-red camera picked up heat sources from the coastal town of Ciudad del Carmen and the aircrew misinterpreted distance, altitude and direction as they passed in and out of cloud and relied on a zoomed-in camera view pointing downwards.

What the heat sources actually were in the town or at its port or its airport, I just don't know.

 

[mummymonkey]

Then it's a hoax from the pilots wouldn't you say. I have never been a pilot myself, except in about 8-12 computer flight simulators ..I don't know about in real planes, but in a simulator you can't look down at sea level from any height without knowing that you're doing it, especially not in daylight(these guys claims that the objects is at altitude 3500m) Would that also go for the real thing?

If the explanation should be oilrigs, then it's pretty pathetic, because it's a routine flight looking for drug trafficers, i.e. they should have seen them before. I see no reason to assume those objects were not at the altitude they claim?

And furthermore, why would 3 of them show up on radar, and the other 8 don't?

I doubt if it's a hoax by the pilots. Looking at the film again I noticed the camera elevation is 1-2 degrees. (Presumably wrt the horizon). Which would put the heat sources more or less at the same height as the aircraft.
I can't speak Spanish so I've no idea what the radar operator is saying, but I'm puzzled that the radar was able to pick up and track these objects. Radars are very directional and would have a hard job tracking any object buzzing closly around the aircraft. They also have a minimum range.

 

[wipeout]

I'm puzzled that the radar was able to pick up and track these objects because the aircraft is pointing east and the camera is pointing northwest...

Not sure about it doing that!

I think the elevation might be the plane's itself, amounting to a very slight climb, as the camera is pointing downwards as can be judged by the clouds moving beneath in some footage.

 

[anduin]

And still, I'm really at a loss here... I want to say these are experimental aircraft of some sort, but we're talking about a large, sandy area of Mexico here. Unless the USAF outsourced its clandestine ops? (That's actually not a bad idea now that I think about it. Hard to keep things like test flights a secret in our society, easier in "Tobasco, Mexico".)

Just some nitpicking. The Yucatan is not a sandy area, it is quite green. This is a link to Ciudad del Carmen, the closest spot to the event:

http://www.sanbachs.net/cgi-bin/mexico/mexico2.cgi/City=CAR

 

[richardm]

- On flares: every flare I've ever seen has been fired from the ground upwards, i.e. military infantry flares used to mark pick-up points and to illuminate the battlefield. These have always been colored in some manner, never just white light. I don't know about aircraft-dropped flares, although I don't suppose there would be a need to color those.

I think it depends on what you want to use them for. You certainly used to be able to get magnesium flares (e.g. in Star Shells), which burned with a while light that was used to illuminate an area. Sometimes they'd be coloured for use as signals. I imagine that in these days of night vision hardware they're hardly used for illumination any more, though.

 

[mummymonkey]

I think the elevation might be the plane's itself, amounting to a very slight climb, as the camera is pointing downwards as can be judged by the clouds moving beneath in some footage.

I'm sure the elevation refers to the camera. It's shown as a figure along the bottom and by a cursor on the left. At the start of the film when the camera shows some ground features the elevation is -30 then -14. It also changes as the camera is tilted up. Later, when the camera is pointing at the objects, it's indicating +2.

 

[SCSimmons]

- These have always been colored in some manner, never just white light.

Remember, they never made visual contact with these objects. The footage you're seeing is from an IR camera, and has no relation (other than positional) with what the objects would look like visually. Whatever they were, they were obviously hotter than they were bright ...

My main question is: how did they determine that the radar contacts were from the same source as the IR contacts? The contacts evidently didn't match in number or duration, and distance isn't measurable in the IR footage that was shown. The parallax gives some information, but not enough; they could have been objects a mile away tracking the course and speed of the plane, or stationary objects twenty or more miles away, or something in between. I don't know how you'd match up the radar contacts with that little to go on ...

-Christian

 

[Hellbound]

These have always been colored in some manner, never just white light.

Um, no.

You've only seen signal flares, most likely the non-parachute ones (what we call star clusters), which generally are colored. However, white signal flares exist, also, and are used for battlefield illumination. Also, almost all the artillery launched or vehicular launched flares are white, for illumination purposes. Our artillery would launch white flares every night over the town nearby, from 8Pm local to about 10PM. Always white. Provided visibility for patrols in the area.

Even with night vision we still use flares for illumination, because NVGs are not very good for detail, leave out color, have problems with contrast, restrict field of view, have a slight magnification effect making it hard to do up-close work (like checking your indicators and radio dials inside the vehicle), and just don't provide the equivalent of normal, lighted vision. In a situation like Iraq illum flares were great, because the enemy did not have long-range weaponry that could target the flare source (not to mention artillery launched flares, and even hand-held illum flares, don't light up until after the top of their arc, making source identification difficult to impossible). Also, considering that we had all the tanks and helicopters, and they had very little that could take those out, the light was considered more beneficial than not.

Anyway, the formations of the lights do seem to be more precise than flares, as even with little wind the flares will move around in relation to each other.

To get to my point, outside an immediate combat or emergency situation (where signalling is important and can't be done via radio), you're more likely to see white flares than anything else.

 

[wipeout]

I also thought the elevation number referred to the camera, but it's +2 in the first photo which has the clouds beneath:

http://www.rense.com/general52/deff.htm

Video of the same bit:

http://www.ufocasebook.com/mexicomilitary1.mpg

An alternative explanation is that it is the camera angle but the plane itself is tilted left so the camera is level relative to the plane and pointed downwards relative to the ground. The longitude and latitude don't change relative to each other to any great amount in those photos over a few minutes, however, so the plane is still flying roughly eastwards.

If the plane is tilted that much and is still travelling roughly eastwards over the few minutes of footage those photos were taken from, then that suggests high winds maybe?

Which goes against my balloons idea I'd guess.

However, the first link says "winds no bigger than 35 kms. / hour" ...

So the pilots were possible flying at a strange angle for reasons best known to themselves.

 

[Q-Source]

Update

Yesterday a group of scientists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico said that the lights captured by the Mexican airforce were not UFOs but an atmospheric phenomenon known as "centellas". This is a sort of electric shocks caused by gas in disequilibrium.

As usual, when something weird turns out to be just a natural event the media lose interest and do not talk about it. So, I cannot provide any link in English, I only watched the conference that those scientists gave on TV and read it on a newspaper in Spanish.

 

[wipeout]

Hey, see what I've just found...

The Campeche coast on the Gulf of Mexico, where the objects were filmed, is Mexico's main oil- and gas-producing region. Oil platforms there release or burn off some of the gas they produce.

It's from an article in which a scientist puts forward a different theory about "electrical flashes emitted spontaneously by the atmosphere" way up in the sky.

Edit: I just noticed Q-Source just mentioned the same idea just before me that those scientists suggest.

http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20954~2147323,00.html

Personally, I don't go with the scientists and I go back to our earlier camera-pointing-downwards-at-distant-industrial-heat-emissions theory.

It would also show why they were intermittent, extremely intense, a surprise to the pilots and have a pattern if they were from some sort of oil platform just off the coast near Ciudad del Carmen. An oil platform could show up on radar too.

People, I hope we may have found a winner here....

 

[wipeout]

As far as I'm concerned, unless new footage shows something different, then the mystery is solved.

It was a UFO all right...

Unidentified "Flying" Oil-Platform...

Opposition party members in the poor southern state of Campeche said soldiers and police used violence to get the workers off the platform in Campeche Sound early Friday, arresting them and hauling them off in helicopters. "The judicial authorities had been using helicopters since yesterday to intimidate the workers," said Camilo Massa Perez, a PRD opposition official in the oil mining city of Cuidad del Carmen. "They used the Mexican navy to besiege the platorm ... the workers were treated like animals, they tied them up with ropes and handcuffed them," he added. "They resisted arrest, and were treated very violently."

http://www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/drillbits/970907/97090703.html

Unbeknownst to the Foreigners, many Domestics share the penchant for Carmen-complaining. "People complain about Carmen, and many move away, but they always come back," one Carmelita passionately says. The ties that bind Carmelitas together don't dissolve if they do move away. Often the drifters stay in such close contact that they know the latest gossip almost as soon as the inhabitants do.

One factor compelling stray Carmelitas to return home is the surrounding Gulf of Mexico waters, which cool hot mental and physical temperatures. Its tide softly laps up to the hard-sanded, sporadically oil-splattered beaches within the city. On clear nights, beach visitors can see the blazing lights from the offshore oil platforms, which lie about a mile from the shore.

http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/travel/lwatts/lwcarmen.html

The plane's camera was pointed at the city of Ciudad del Carmen and the oil-platform with blazing heat sources is only mile from it!

Ahahahaha! It really couldn't fit much better.

The pilots were being "chased" by an oil-platform...

 

[Thomas]

As far as I'm concerned, unless new footage shows something different, then the mystery is solved.

There is just couple of things that the oilplatform-theory fails to explain:

• Why did only 3 of the 11 objects show up on radar?
• Why did the pilots say the objects where at altitude 3500m?
• Why did 6 of the objects appear in somewhat two identical formations? (I dont belive that oil is found in formations?)
• Wouldn't the pilots have to be quite stupid to not knowing that the IR camera where pointing down at ground-level if the airplane was tilted to the side while filming the entire 15min phenomena?

I have never heard about 'centellas', and I don't know anything about them, but I think it sounds reasonable that this phenomena could be the cause if the oil platforms burn off some of their oil in that exact area.
On the other hand, the quote in the previous post supports the helicopter/flare-theory because it states that the police in that area use helicopters. It also explains the radar/IR contradictions, the altitude, the formations(+changes) and doesn't involve that the pilots are stupid.

Nothing is conclusive, but among the theories we have by now, I think that the oilplatform-theory failes to explain too many things and involves a too basic flaw from the pilots that makes no sense to me.

/thomas