UFO Twitter was so excited before the Senate hearing. It was going to be earth-shattering...
Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office:
"I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as 'anomalous,'" Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.
"The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena, or other readily explainable sources," he added.
"I should also state clearly for the record that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics," said Kirkpatrick.
Oh...
Two videos were released for the hearing. The 'South Asian' video was initially described as a fast moving object with air disturbance behind. It's actually an airliner and the 'air disturbance' is an artefact of compression. The 'speed' relative to the drone being filmed is a classic effect of parallax.
The other, filmed in the Middle East, was still described as unknown but when you take account of the fact that it was also filmed by a Reaper drone the likelihood that the object was a balloon or something similar increases. A Reaper drone would be flying at a speed of between 75 and 250mph at a height of up to 50,000ft. The height above the ground gives the impression that the camera is stationary, whereas it's travelling at speed. An object floating in the air between the ground and the drone would appear to be moving against the ground even if it was completely stationary. This is the same effect as the 'tic-tac' footage. When the camera locks on it emphasises the impression of an object moving against the ground.
As a quick exercise I modelled something similar in CAD and made a movie of the result. It's just the initial phase of the camera at 5,000ft passing over a stationary object at 2,500ft but it looks like it's zooming past.
The problem with so many UFO/UAP believers is that they don't understand things like parallax, relative motion and so on.
They don't understand how a three-blade iris like this:
will create this:
when it captures a light out of focus.
And so on.