Mexican Airforce films UFOs

[wipeout]

A film has been released by the Mexican military which shows UFO filmed from aircraft infra-red cameras which were otherwise invisible. Here's the story with a picture, but I've seen no footage as yet.

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/040511/80/etbal.html

Anyone have any more info or ideas on this?

I'm doing some looking myself.

[wipeout]

Some additional info in this report:

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/am...exico.ufos.ap/

[UnTrickaBLe]

Let's see the video.

[wipeout]

I'm looking for the video but even though the story is all over the news I can't find the video itself anywhere!

Maybe the Men in Black have got to it.

[Uh_Clem]

Jaime Maussan? Isn't he same guy that released this (absurd) footage?

http://www.jman5.com/mexufo.htm

Wipeout:

NASA actually has a group called the M.I.B. It stands for Mishap Investigation Board.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/doctree/8621.htm
Although they're not so much "Moulder and Skulley" as they are typical govt' bureaucrats when you meet them in person.

[materia3]

Keep watching. FOX News (cable) has just shown the video footage a few minutes ago.

[MattO]

Here's a long article:

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


Video is on this page:

http://www.thesandiegochannel.com/vi...68/detail.html

[wipeout]

Ah... thank you for finding the video!

I had to go to the main page...

http://www.thesandiegochannel.com/index.html

... as the direct link didn't work for me for some reason. It's still easy to find on that page, though.

Now, I'm off to watch it and see what it's like...

[wipeout]

I guess the Men in Black are at it again as the video doesn't work for me. Anyone else have any luck with it? And what do you think, if so?

[wipeout]

Quote:

Originally posted by Uh_Clem
Jaime Maussan? Isn't he same guy that released this (absurd) footage?

http://www.jman5.com/mexufo.htm

Ahahah! Ed Wood would be proud.

Quote:

[/b]NASA actually has a group called the M.I.B. It stands for Mishap Investigation Board.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/codeq/doctree/8621.htm
Although they're not so much "Moulder and Skulley" as they are typical govt' bureaucrats when you meet them in person. [/b]

Interesting -- and a crashed saucer would qualify as a "mishap" of course.

[Uh_Clem]

Mozilla didn't like their page, had to use IE.

I didn't see the "darting" in and out of the clouds that the yahoo article described. Nor did they seem to be "moving about". All the lights stayed the same distance apart and traveled at a constant rate.

It's hard to judge any distance on the video but it looked to me like a large six-engine plane with lights at the wingtips flying paralell to them at about the same speed.

[Marian]

Maybe the video cut out on me, as it seemed to end abruptly. I'm hoping there was something more, because what I saw was really unimpressive.

Special effects have spoiled me, I expect so much more now. ;(

[Jeff R]

Mexico has an Air Force? I did not know that.

[Hypocolius]

I saw it on Sky News. The second film looks very dodgy, very reminiscent of reflections from the window of the plane.

[Patricio Elicer]

Quote:

Originally posted by wipeout
I guess the Men in Black are at it again as the video doesn't work for me. Anyone else have any luck with it? And what do you think, if so?

The video doesn't work for me either

EDIT:

Here's another link to the video, it worked for me.

UFO's over Mexico?

Seems not be a reflexion on the plane window, since the "UFO's" are seen emerging from behind the clouds in one part of the shot

[curious]

The video here worked for me with explorer. I saw a much better/longer clip at a friends house but I'm not sure where they got it. The lights (11 at one point) weren't doing much but I couldn't think of a good mundane explanation for what I saw, assuming the video was real.

As the story goes whatever it was wasn't visible, they only picked it up with radar and IR and it seemed to sort of react to them.

[SquishyDave]

Quote:

Originally posted by Hypocolius
I saw it on Sky News. The second film looks very dodgy, very reminiscent of reflections from the window of the plane.

I don't speak spanish, but the video I saw was a spanish TV segment, they showed a picture of the plane, then pointed out something on the bottom of the plane, encased in a tinted dome, I think it was the infrared camera, so reflections off the windows might not be a possibility.

Isn't infrared at a lower energy than visible light? And thus visible light would travel better through air? Or is that totally wrong? If it's not wrong, those heat sources wouldn't be from lights or anything that would produce visible light, but they could be engines or exhaust from a plane or something else.

Or you know, maybe it's beings from other planets who want to explore the uncharted regions of the human anus.

[Patricio Elicer]

Quote:

Originally posted by SquishyDave
I don't speak spanish, but the video I saw was a spanish TV segment.

I'd love to see that video, I guess it is not in the internet

Technical question: Infra-red cameras are supposed to capture the object's heat, that is, wave lenghts that are outside the "visible" part of the spectrum, right?. So, is it possible that a cloud blocks a radiation of this sort?

[SquishyDave]

Quote:

Originally posted by Patricio Elicer
I'd love to see that video, I guess it is not in the internet

Technical question: Infra-red cameras are supposed to capture the object's heat, that is, wave lenghts that are outside the "visible" part of the spectrum, right?. So, is it possible that a cloud blocks a radiation of this sort?

The video I saw was the one MattO linked to further up. I needed to us Internet Explorer though, it wouldn't work in Opera.

Good point, I realised I don't even know what time of day it was.

[Patricio Elicer]

Unfortunatly MattO's link doesn't work for me currently. Maybe later...

[UnTrickaBLe]

This link works quite well...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ilitary_ufos_1

It's really hard to say what was shown on that video. There needs to be a full investigation. The radar did seem to be picking up the objects sporadically, though. I believe the Xs that showed up on some of the objects indicate radar confirmation.

[richardm]

Quote:

Originally posted by SquishyDave

Good point, I realised I don't even know what time of day it was.

The clock at the bottom right of this picture seems to indicate 17:something hours, so it was presumably daylight.

I'd have thought that the most likely explanation would be some other jets flying along. Their engines glow like that under IR viewing, while the rest of the aircraft might not be visible. Certainly, they showed up on radar which is consistent with that.

[wipeout]

Hey, it's the return of the Foofighters.

It's certainly more interesting than the Belgian triangle footage, which were just US Navy spy satellites you can spot if you make the effort. NOSS, they're called.

From the footage I've seen so far of the Mexican Air Force incident, I find it difficult to tell if those are just clouds or both clouds and mountains, and what the surface is and even if the infra-red sources are travelling along on the ground or close to it, and how fast they are moving or even if they are moving at all.

Could be a bunch of hot things sitting still on the ground, for all I can tell.

I've seen ball-lightning so I know there are some strange things flying around up there for sure, but I'm not preparing to worship our alien overlords just yet from what I've seen so far of this latest incident.

[wipeout]

The airforce plane's footage gives the planes geographical position and the direction the camera is pointing in, so with a map we could work out the direction and get a rough position of the infra-red sources.

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

Now I just need to go and find a map...

[DaChew]

Excellent! Finally aliens are doing something useful.

Obviously, they've decided that our western civilization is the only correct way for this planet to progress and have begun providing our aircraft with missile decoys. These things show up nice and bright for heat seeking (IR) and radar guided anti-aircraft missiles so that our planes won't get hit. Of course, neither our military or our private airospace industry would ever come up with any sort of anti missile system on their own. Nope, we're just not as clever as those cow mutilating, butt probing aliens.

[wipeout]

LOL @ DaChew

[wipeout]

Having a look at some maps now...

18 27 N and 90 46 W

http://www.stevenwiseblood.com/files/mexico_map.jpg

[wipeout]

This is a much better map of the area:

http://www.virtualmex.com/campeche_sct.jpg

Unless my map reading is screwed up, the plane goes from very slightly west of due south of Campeche to due south as it flies along the 18 30 latitude line in the west-to-east direction.

The infra-red sources are slightly off to the left of north from the plane's perspective.

There's a main coastal road in the direction of the infra-red sources (slightly out of alignment with each other) but not a whole lot else, it seems, from looking at the maps.

[UnTrickaBLe]

Having looked at this very short video segment again at the AP/Yahoo link, I wonder if there is any way to confirm whether these objects were even moving? It could be the motion of the plane making stationary objects (flares) seem to move in relation to the clouds or the mountains, don't you think?

[richardm]

Quote:

Originally posted by UnTrickaBLe
It could be the motion of the plane making stationary objects (flares) seem to move in relation to the clouds or the mountains, don't you think?

Yeah. Impossible to tell from that snippet, I think.

[AtheistArchon]

- 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.

[DaveW]

I'm not up on Mexican radar technology, but it is possible that denser parts of clouds would show up as radar objects (I have seen it before on a US Navy radar set).

[UnTrickaBLe]

AtheistArchon, have you seen the entire video? Where can it be viewed? I have only seen about fifteen seconds of it so far.

[AtheistArchon]

- Untrickable: I used this link, which shows a great deal of the footage, but is in Spanish: http://www.thesandiegochannel.com/vi...68/detail.html

[Joe_Black]

infrared picks up heat i think.

[UnTrickaBLe]

That video is much longer. It doesn't really look like exhaust from a jet.

Did the Mexican plane produce any hard evidence, like how high or how fast-moving the objects were on their radar?

[Uh_Clem]

athiestarchon,

Very good post. I would like to point out that there's a few commercial jets with 3 engines though.

http://www.boeing.com/commercial/dc-10/

Although if they were persuing a couple of passenger aircraft you'd think they would show up on radar or you'd be able to feel the wake from them.

[mummymonkey]

Looks to me that the heat sources are on the ground some distance away to the north. Perhaps at sea.

[Patricio Elicer]

Quote:

Originally posted by AtheistArchon
- Untrickable: I used this link, which shows a great deal of the footage, but is in Spanish: http://www.thesandiegochannel.com/vi...68/detail.html

Not much revealing info to cast light on the issue, at least at first glance.

The conversation between the plane crew reflects the excitement of the moment, those men were in awe, or at least that seems to be the case judging from the video.

The introduction from the presenter indicates that it's a plane of the Mexican Air Force searching for planes that may introduce drug into the country.

Here are some highlights from the crew exchange

[excited tone]

- What is that?, oh my God

- Juárez, Juárez,... What is that?
- It's a dot

- Look for what is coming behind us!

- One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight .. on the screen

- Amazing!

- Their speed is,.... ohhhh!

- Chase them, don't lose them

- Eight, nine, ten, eleven,...

- We don't know what they are, we only see some luminous objects at the same altitude as ours.

- We can't make out how far away from us they are

- Fasten your seats belts!

- Speeds of 60 nods, increasing to probably 120 and 300 nods

[/excited tone]

A pilot in the interview says: "We could never identified them visually"

Yes, seems to be a nice puzzle

[FFed]

My guess is space junk. I had the good fortune of watching a russian rocket break up as it entered the atmosphere. Really cool. Just out of nowhere these big slow moving fireballs where travelling thru the sky. So that's my guess.