Speaker 1: I want you to just for a second close your
eyes picture this. You're strapped into a seat that costs
more than a high end sports car. You're inside this
fuselage and it has that distinct smell, you know, that
mix of recycled air, a little bit of ozone and
high octane fuel.
Speaker 2: You're in a Merlin C twenty six A. This is
a serious piece of military hardware exactly.
Speaker 1: And you're not just looking out a window. You are
staring into this bank of monitors and they're all hooked
up to a star Safire three electro optical system.
Speaker 2: Which is I mean, that's just the fancy, sterilized way
of saying you have a camera that can see a
lit cigarette from three miles away in the pitch black.
Speaker 1: You're the eye in the sky. Your whole job is
incredibly specific. Find the heat signatures, find the drug runners
who are just skimming across the Gulf of Mexico.
Speaker 2: And you know the rules of the game. Physics is
a strict mistress. Everything, and I mean everything in our
atmosphere has to play by her rules.
Speaker 1: Right. You want lyft, you need airflow, you want propulsion.
Speaker 2: You generate heat. There's no way around it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but then something happens. A blip appears on your
screen and it's not a plane. It is definitely not
a boat. It's a fleet eleven glowing orbs. They're locked
in this like rigid formation. They're moving its speeds they
just don't make sense. And their thermal signature, yeah, shouldn't exist.
Speaker 2: And then comes the part that really messes with your head,
the scariest part.
Speaker 1: Your eyes. Your own two eyes, they see eleven of them,
but your million dollar radar system it only sees three.
That discrepancy. That's the stuff of nightmares for a pilot,
for an operator.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate reversal, isn't it. The watcher becomes the watched.
It forces you to question your instruments, then your eyes,
and then you know, eventually your entire sense of reality.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host, and today we
are pulling on a thread that I think leads us
straight into the unknown. We aren't looking at some grainy
polaroids from the nineteen fifties that someone found in their
grandpa's attic.
Speaker 2: No, and that's a really crucial distinction to make. Right
at the top, we are analyzing data. This is data
captured by government agencies with military grade sensors. This is
verified footage from the modern era.
Speaker 1: This is an anecdotal No, it's empirical.
Speaker 2: We have this whole stack of investigations that were conducted
by the proof is out there from the History channel,
and this includes analysis from military experts, physicists, video forensics teams,
I mean, the whole nine yards.
Speaker 1: A lot of smart people have looked at this stuff.
Speaker 2: And the mission for this particular thread is simple, but
it is also slightly terrifying.
Speaker 1: We are looking at orbs spheres glowing lights, you know,
the tic TACs of the sky as they've been called
more recently, right, and.
Speaker 2: We're going to examine four distinct cases where these spheres appear.
They fly in these perfect formations, they dive straight into
the ocean without making a splash, and this is where
it gets really really interesting. They seem to have a
habit of just hanging out new nuclear facilities, which just
raises this massive question. Are these natural atmospheric phenomena that
we just don't understand yet? Are they maybe adversarial drones
from I don't know, a superpower that's way ahead of us,
or are they something else? Entirely.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack all of this. We are going to
start with a case that is I think widely considered
one of those significant pieces of military footage ever released
to the public.
Speaker 2: We're going back to the Gulf of Mexico. This is
the Mexican Air Force flotilla.
Speaker 1: Incident, right, so set the scene for us. Get us
right there in the cockpit. What's happening?
Speaker 2: Okay, So it's March fifth, two thousand and four. It's
a routine patrol. You've got this Mexican Air Force surveillance
plane that's see twenty six a we mentioned, and it's
scanning the Gulf of Mexico, specifically the campesh region.
Speaker 1: And their job is counter oncotics purely.
Speaker 2: They are looking for drug smugglers. And the tool they're
using is FLR for looking infra red. Now, for anyone
listening who might not be a total military tech geek,
FLR doesn't see light the way our eyes do.
Speaker 1: It sees heat.
Speaker 2: It sees heat. It's detecting infrared radiation. So on the
monitor inside that plane, the operator is probably looking at
what they call white hot or black hot mode.
Speaker 1: What's the difference there, It's just a.
Speaker 2: Preference for the operator in white. Hot hotter objects appear white,
and cooler objects appear black. So a cold ocean at
night would look dark, gray or black. But the hot
engine of a smuggler's little Go fast.
Speaker 1: Boat that would light up like a Christmas tree.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it would show up as this blindingly bright white dot.
The whole system is designed specifically to spot that kind
of heat signature against a cold background. But on this night,
the camera operator, Lieutenant Mario Adrian Vosquez, he sees something
that just stops the whole crew in their tracks.
Speaker 1: It's not a drug runner.
Speaker 2: It's not a drug runner. It's lights, not just one light.
The footage which is now famous, it captures the string
of glowing orbs. At one point they count eleven distinct lights.
Speaker 1: Eleven and they aren't just you know, buzzing around randomly
like fireflies. They seem organized, highly organized.
Speaker 2: They appear to be flying in a four formation, a
very specific line. And the camera operator, you have to remember,
this isn't just some guy with a camquorder. This is
a trained military observer.
Speaker 1: His job is to identify things in the sky.
Speaker 2: Yes, and you can hear him on the recording. He
declares the footage one hundred percent reel and the object's real.
He's not saying, h I think I see something. He
is saying, there are solid objects out there, okay.
Speaker 1: And this is where it gets weird for me. This
is the detail that always gives me goosebumps when I
think about this case. They check their other instruments, they
look at the.
Speaker 2: Radar, and that is where the whole thing just breaks down.
That's the core of the anomaly. The infrared camera sees
eleven objects the planes radar.
Speaker 1: It only picks up three. Only three, So wait, what
does that mean are the other eight? What are they?
Are they ghosts? Are they using some kind of stealth?
How is that possible?
Speaker 2: That is the mystery. That's why this case is still
debated so fiercely. You have a visual confirmation on thermal
of an entire fleet, but you have a radar return
that suggests only a few solid objects.
Speaker 1: So it implies that whatever these things are, either they
have a radar cross section that radar waves are just
passing right.
Speaker 2: Through, or they're implying some kind of advanced jamming or
stealth technology that we don't understand, or maybe the three
on radar were different from the eleven on FLR. The
whole thing is a paradox.
Speaker 1: And now when this video was released, and it's a
huge deal that it was released by the Mexican Secretary
of Defense General Ricardo Clemente Vega Garcia. I mean that's
not some.
Speaker 2: Fringe group, No, that's the government, that's the top.
Speaker 1: They released it, and the UFO community obviously went absolutely wild.
They saw this as definitive proof of fleets.
Speaker 2: Well, it definitely echoes those historical accounts, doesn't it. It
goes all the way back to the Foo fighters from
World War Two.
Speaker 1: Oh right, the orbs that would just follow Allied pilots
over Europe exactly.
Speaker 2: Pilots would come back from missions and report these glowing
balls of light that would just track their wingtips. They'd
move it impossible speeds. They never shot at them, they
never showed any hostility. They were just watching.
Speaker 1: And we saw something pretty similar much more recently, didn't
we That incident in twenty twenty with Captain Eric Delgadoovermonare.
He was a commercial pilot flying a cargo plane I
think correct.
Speaker 2: An Airbus A three twenty, and he recorded this glowing
orb just pacing his plane, tracking it for a full
twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: Twenty minutes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just like this Mexican Air Force case, Delgado's TCAs,
that's the traffic collision avoidance system, and the air traffic
controllers on the ground saw absolutely nothing on their radar.
Speaker 1: So we have a clear pattern here, visual confirmation sometimes
on multiple spectra like thermal and visible light, but total
electronic silence on radar.
Speaker 2: The pattern is what's so compelling.
Speaker 1: But because this is thrilling threads, we have to look
at the other side of the coin. Not everyone looks
at that footage and sees a fleet of alien craft.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. And skepticism is healthy here, in fact,
it's necessary. The source material we're looking at highlights the
analysis of Mickwest, who is a very well known forensic
video analyst and a prominent skeptic, and he.
Speaker 1: Takes a very pragmatic, very grounded look at the Mexican
Air Force.
Speaker 2: Footage he does, and his theory is oil wells oil wells.
Speaker 1: But the pilot, the crew, they said the objects were flying,
they were moving with them. Oil Wells tend to stay
in one place.
Speaker 2: They're famously stationary they are, but West's argument isn't about
the oil wells moving. It's about perspective and optics. Specifically,
it's about something called the parallax effect.
Speaker 1: Okay, left unpacked parallax. This is one of those concepts
that I sort of get, but I struggle to visualize
it sometimes. Can you break it down? Sure?
Speaker 2: Think of it like this. Imagine you're in a car.
You're driving down the highway at say, seventy miles per hour.
You look out your side window. What do you see?
Speaker 1: The fence posts, the trees right next to the road.
They're just a blur whush, whush.
Speaker 2: Whish, exactly impossible to focus on. They are blurring past
you at high speed. Now, in that same car, look
past those trees way out to the look at a
distant mountain range or maybe a bright full moon in
the sky.
Speaker 1: It looks like it's standing still, or sometimes it even
feels like it's following me.
Speaker 2: Precisely. That is parallax. The closer an object is to you,
the faster it appears to move relative to your motion.
The farther away it is, the more stationary it seems. Now,
to make it more complicated, let's introduce a middle layer
let's say some clouds.
Speaker 1: Okay, so clouds between me and the distant mountain. Right.
Speaker 2: So now if the plane is flying forward and there
are clouds between the plane and the distant lights, and
those clouds are also moving, your brain completely loses its
fixed point of reference. It gets confused, very confused. And
Mick West argues that the flir camera on that C
twenty six A was pointing more or less horizontally out
toward the horizon right where a huge oil field is located,
the Canterrell oil field.
Speaker 1: So the argument is that the orbs are actually just
the burnoff flares that you see on top of the
oil rigs.
Speaker 2: That is the theory. The formation of the lights, he argues,
perfectly matches the known layout of the oil platforms in
that field and the motion. The fact that they look
like they're flying alongside the plane is an optical illusion.
It's caused by the plane moving past them and the
clouds drifting by in the middle ground.
Speaker 1: So the free isn't moving at all. The observer is.
Speaker 2: That's the argument. It's a very clever, grounded explanation.
Speaker 1: It sounds plausible on paper. I mean, it explains the
formation perfectly because the oil rigs don't drift out of formation.
But there have to be holes in that theory, right,
it feels too simple.
Speaker 2: There are some significant ones, and the investigators in the
Proof Is out there really dug into them. First, there's
the issue of distance.
Speaker 1: Half far away were they?
Speaker 2: The investigation team calculated that those oil wells were nearly
one hundred miles away from the plane's position.
Speaker 1: One hundred miles Wow. Yeah, with a flame, even a
big one one hundred miles away, show up that hot
and that large on a FLR camera.
Speaker 2: That is the central debate. FLIR is incredibly sensitive, but
one hundred miles is some massive distance to look through,
especially through humid maritime air over the Gulf of Mexico.
There's a lot of atmospheric distortion.
Speaker 1: But there was something more damning than that, Wasn't there
something about the light itself?
Speaker 2: Yes, the visual characteristics. This is the part of the
counter argument I find most compelling. Fire behaves in a
very specific way. It flickers, It flickers, it's turbulent. An
oil flare is an open flame, a chaotic chemical reaction.
It pulses, it expands, it contracts, it dances.
Speaker 1: Around, and these orbs in the video.
Speaker 2: They were steady, They had a constant luminosity. There was
no flickering at all. They appeared as solid, glowing spheres,
not like dancing flames. If you look at a simple
candle flame on a thermal camera, you can see it dancing.
These were locked in solid.
Speaker 1: Plus, that still doesn't explain the radar, does it not?
Speaker 2: Really, the radar issue was still there. If they were
oil rigs, they wouldn't show up on an airborne radar
as moving aircraft targets. But they also probably wouldn't appear
as three distinct blips that seemed to be moving with
the plane.
Speaker 1: Right, oil rigs don't show up as bogies on your
six o'clock.
Speaker 2: Exactly, So you're left with this split decision. If you
believe mcwest, the crew was disoriented, they misread the range
to the horizon, and they got spooped by a complex
optical illusion of distant fire.
Speaker 1: But if you believe the crew and the other analysts.
Speaker 2: Then they were surrounded by eleven objects that defied both
radar and our understanding of aerodynamics.
Speaker 1: And then another expert they brought in, marked D'Antonio. He
looked at the other conventional theory. Could it have been
a convoy of drug smuggler planes?
Speaker 2: Right, maybe they were flying in formation. But D'Antonio points
out that smugglers just don't do that. They don't fly
in these championship level formations like the Blue Angels or
the Thunderbirds.
Speaker 1: It's the opposite of stealthy exactly.
Speaker 2: Smugglers separate to avoid detection. They fly low, they fly erratically,
they scatter, They do not form a tidy parade line
in the sky. D'antonio's conclusion was that the behavior of
the lights completely rules out conventional aircraft.
Speaker 1: So we are left with a Mexican Air Force crew.
These are trained observers, and they are on the record
saying it's real. We have their government releasing the tape
and essentially saying we don't know what this is, and
then we have debunkers saying it's just oil rigs, which
doesn't quite fit all the data.
Speaker 2: It remains a genuinely unexplained event. And what I find
so fascinating and frankly refreshing is that the Mexican government
was willing to say science, please help us. They didn't
bury it, they didn't classify it into oblivion.
Speaker 1: They ask for answers, which is more than we can
say for some other governments, certainly historically. But let's shift gears.
Let's move from the air over the Gulf of Mexico
to the waters of the Caribbean. Because if you think
formation flying is weird, just wait until you hear about
what happened in Puerto Rico.
Speaker 2: This is the Aguadilla incident August twenty fifth, twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1: This one is just it's wild. The setup is a
US Customs and Border Patrol plane, it's a DHC eight
turboprop and it's taking off from Rafael Hernandez Airport in Aguadilla,
Puerto Rico.
Speaker 2: It's a routine mission, just after nine pm, so it's dark,
and as they're climbing out, they spot a strange pinkish
light approaching from the northwest over the ocean.
Speaker 1: And again, what's the first thing they do. They switch
to thermal imaging. This is high quality military grade equipment.
We're not talking about an iPhone.
Speaker 2: Video here, No, this is top of the line gear and.
Speaker 1: What they captured has become absolutely legendary. In these circles.
On the thermal camera, it's this metallic looking sphere and
it's maybe three to five feet wide, and it is
booking it.
Speaker 2: It's moving fast, it's zipping around the airport. Then it
heads out over the ocean. And this is where we
have to talk about a concept called trans medium travel
trans medium.
Speaker 1: It sounds like something from a seance.
Speaker 2: It does, but it's a real physics and engineering term.
A medium is just the substance you're moving through. Air
is a medium, water is a medium.
Speaker 1: And moving through them requires totally different physics.
Speaker 2: Totally different. Moving through air requires aerodynamics, wings, lift control surfaces.
Moving through water requires hydrodynamics, propellers, ballast. They are vastly
different environments with completely different densities.
Speaker 1: Right, you can't fly a plane underwater, and you definitely
can't fly a submarine in the air exactly.
Speaker 2: Water is roughly eight hundred times denser than air. If
a conventional aircraft hits the water at high speed, it's
like hitting concrete. It disintegrates. But in the Anguidilla video,
this sphere flies over the ocean. It's moving at about
ninety five miles per hour and then it just enters
the water.
Speaker 1: It splashes down, but it doesn't crash.
Speaker 2: No, it submerges. It barely even slows down. It just
goes right in and then just a few seconds later
it re emerges. It transitions from air to water and
then back to air seamlessly.
Speaker 1: And then, as if that's not impossible enough, it does
something even crazier.
Speaker 2: It splits bifurcation, that's the term for it. Upon re
emerging from the water, the single object splits into two
separate distinct craft. They fly in formation for a little bit,
and then one seems to be absorbed back into the
other before it flies away.
Speaker 1: Ploop. Now there are two yes.
Speaker 2: And this is the point where all the conventional natural
phenomenon arguments just start to completely fall apart. You can
argue about balloons or drones for a light in the sky,
but you can argue that a balloon can fly, submerge
without damage, pop back out of the ocean, and then
clone itself midair.
Speaker 1: No know on Earth technology can do that, not even close. Now.
The source material mentioned a group called the Scientific Coalition
for UAP Studies or SCU. They did a really deep
dive pun intended into this footage. What did they find
out about its physical properties? Like it's heat?
Speaker 2: This is just a brilliant piece of forensic analysis by
Rich Hoffman and his team at SCU. They needed to
determine the temperature of the object to get a clue
about its propulsion system.
Speaker 1: So how do you do that from a grainy thermal video.
Speaker 2: Well, they got lucky. They used the thermal footage and
they found a frame where there were cows on the
ground near the airport. Cows cows. They used the cows
as a thermal baseline because we know the approximate body
temperature of a cow. By analyzing the gray scale of
the video, breaking the image down into two hundred and
fifty six shades of gray, they could match the temperature
of the object to the known temperature of the livestock.
Speaker 1: That is unbelievably clever. It's like something out of a
detectives show.
Speaker 2: It is, it's brilliant. And the result they got was
that the object was approximately one hundred and four degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: One hundred and four degrees so that's warm, but.
Speaker 2: It's not hot exactly. A jet engine's exhaust is somewhere
around fifteen hundred degrees, fifteen times hotter than this object.
If this were a missile or a jet power drone,
it would be glowing white hot off the charts on
that camera one hundred and four degrees. Is it's strangely
biological or maybe it's indicative of some kind of low
heat mechanical system we just can't comprehend.
Speaker 1: What about the size? How do they figure that out?
Speaker 2: Another clever bit of analysis. There's a point in the
video where the object flies behind a light post at
the airport. Since they know the dimensions of the light post,
they can use it as a ruler, essentially to calculate
the object's size.
Speaker 1: And they came up with three to five feet in diameter.
Speaker 2: Correct, So it's small.
Speaker 1: So let's go through the checklist of conventional explanations. What
about a bird, a really warm one.
Speaker 2: They looked at that. Hoffman notes that the thermal signature
didn't match what they call biological avionics. The way a
bird's heat is distributed across its body, its wings, its head,
plus the speed the maneuvers the lack of any flapping
wing structures, it rules out a bird pretty definitively.
Speaker 1: Okay, what about a balloon? That's always the go to
explanation for weird things in the sky.
Speaker 2: The wind data just kills the balloon theory. The SCU
team pulled the meteorological records for that night. The wind
was blowing steadily at eighteen miles per hour from the
northeast and the object, the object was moving against the
wind and also maneuvering in all directions. Balloons are slaves
to the wind. They don't do that, okay, So.
Speaker 1: Not a balloon, not a bird, not a conventional drone,
because drones have rodors or wings, and this was a
smooth sphere that's certainly not a drune that can go
for a swim and then duplicate itself.
Speaker 2: We are left with a genuine high strangeness anomaly. And
what's interesting is that it fits into a much larger
context for that specific area. Puerto Rico has this long
documented history of USO's unidentified sub merged objects.
Speaker 1: Right The sources mentioned a case from way back in
nineteen sixty three involving the USS.
Speaker 2: WASP, Yes, a major anti submarine warfare exercise. They were
tracking a submersible objects that was traveling at speeds and
depths that were frankly impossible for any submarine of that
era or even this era, something like one hundred and
fifty knots underwater, and.
Speaker 1: Then in the nineties there were other reports.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Navy pilots operating in the region reported seeing these
huge dark masses moving at incredible speeds deep underwater.
Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder what is going on down
there in the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest part of
the Atlantic. We're always looking up at.
Speaker 2: The sky, so maybe we should be looking down. The
ocean is the perfect place to hide. It cover seventy
percent of our planet, and we have mapped less of
the ocean floor than we have the surface of Mars.
If you were an advanced intelligence and you wanted to
monitor Earth.
Speaker 1: The ocean is the perfect base of operations absolutely, which
brings us to our next thread. We've talked about military
surveillance planes, We've talked about border patrol, but what happens
when these things show up near something even more sensitive
than our borders. Let's talk about nukes.
Speaker 2: This is a deeply disturbing pattern, and it's one that
goes back to the very dawn of the atomic age.
Speaker 1: So we're jumping forward now to twenty nineteen. We're in
Two Creeks, Wisconsin, and this is a civilian sighting this time.
Speaker 2: That's right, The witness is a man named Miles Pinoche.
He's a Marine Corps veteran. He's at home. He looks
at his window and he sees this bright light in
the sky. He doesn't have a good camera, so he
actually calls a neighbor who comes out and films it.
Speaker 1: And the footage shows this large, glowing orange orb in
the darkness, and there are three smaller dimmer lights nearby.
Speaker 2: Visually it's pretty spooky, but the context here is everything.
The location is what makes this case so important. This
was filmed directly over the Point Beach Nuclear power plant.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we have to ask the question, why do
they love our nuclear facilities? Is it like a refueling station?
Are they siphoning off energy somehow?
Speaker 2: That is one of the more exotic theories that they
utilize the high energy output from these plants for some
kind of recharge. But there is another theory one that
is a little bit more well, a bit more humbling
for us. It's called the galactic zoo theory.
Speaker 1: I love this one, ok tell us about the galactic zoo.
Speaker 2: The concept, in a nutshell is that some advanced non
human intelligence is monitoring us the same way we monitor
animals in a wildlife preserve or a zoo.
Speaker 1: So we're the monkeys and Earth is the enclosure.
Speaker 2: Basically, yeah, And the theory goes, when the monkeys and
the enclosure get a hold of matches or in our case,
nuclear weapons, the zookeepers get very, very concerned.
Speaker 1: So they aren't intervening to say hello, they're intervening to
make sure we don't and down the habitat exactly.
Speaker 2: It's a planetary management perspective. They're just checking on their investment,
making sure the pets don't destroy the cage with their
new toys.
Speaker 1: And this isn't just a theory that was born from
this one Wisconsin case, right, I mean, there's a serious
historical precedent for this. Oh.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The source material brings up the famous Malmstrom Air
Force Base incident from nineteen sixty seven. And this isn't folklore.
This is a case that has been verified by multiple
military witnesses, including officers, and it's been discussed in recent
congressional hearings.
Speaker 1: So what happened at Malmstrom?
Speaker 2: A red glowing orb appeared over one of the minute
Man nuclear missile launch facilities in Montana, and suddenly the
missiles in that silo. These are independently powered, heavily secured,
isolated systems. They started shutting down one by one. The
launch readiness lights went from green to red. They went offline.
Speaker 1: That is absolutely terrifying. I mean, if they have the
capability to turn them.
Speaker 2: Off, can they turn them on? That's the terrifying implication.
It demonstrated a capability to remotely manipulate our most secure,
most dangerous technology. So when we see an orange orb
hovering over a nuclear plant in Wisconsin in twenty nineteen,
the immediate thought in this community is they're back. They're
checking on the inventory butt and.
Speaker 1: There was always a butt on thrilling threads. We have
to look at the specific evidence for this Wisconson case,
and the analysis here takes a very sharp turn away
from the paranormal.
Speaker 2: It does. An aviation expert they consulted, Tim McMillan. He
points out that while the object was in restricted airspace,
the light itself didn't do anything extreme. There was no
sudden acceleration, no impossible turns like we see in other cases.
It was just hanging there.
Speaker 1: In rich Hoffman, the same analysts who did that brilliant
work on the Puerto Rico video. He had a very
different take on this one.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this shows how good science works. Hoffman didn't
go in with a preconceived notion. He analyzed the video
frame by frame, and he noticed something very subtle. There
was a brief flash of a structure that was illuminated
below the light. It looked like the roof of a building.
Speaker 1: So the light wasn't slowing eye up in the sky.
Speaker 2: Baffman believes it was attached to a structure on the
ground or at least very low. He analyzed the perspective
of the shot and concluded that the camera was looking
more or less straight ahead, not angled up at the sky.
Speaker 1: And the color the orange glow.
Speaker 2: High pressure sodium vapor lights. They're extremely common for industrial areas,
parking lots, street lights. They emit that very distinct monochromatic
orange glow. Hoffmann's conclusion is that despite the sincere belief
of the marine veteran that it was an object in
the sky, the video most likely shows distant street lights
or security lights on a building, perhaps distorted by atmospheric conditions.
Speaker 1: Wow, that is a tough one because you have a
very credible witness and marine saying I know what I saw.
It was in the sky, and then you have careful
video analysis that says it's a street light.
Speaker 2: And it highlights this constant tension between eyewitness testimony and
forensic video evidence. At night, without any points of reference
for depth perception, a light on a distant hill can
easily look like a light hovering in the sky. There's
even a name for it. It's called the autokinetic effect.
Speaker 1: Autokinetic effect, what's that?
Speaker 2: It's a physiological trick your own body plays on you.
If you stare at a single stationary point of light
in a pitch black environment, your eye muscles make these tiny,
involuntary micro movements to keep the image centered. Okay, your
brain doesn't know your eyes are moving, so it interprets
that motion as the object itself moving around. It's a
very common illusion. Even experienced pilots get fooled by it
when looking at a single star or a distant light.
Speaker 1: So the Wisconsin case might be a bust as far
as proving alien visitation goes, But that galactic zoo theory
it still remains a pretty compelling explanation for why the
genuine phenomena seem to congregate around our military and nuclear sites.
Speaker 2: It does. It provides a motive if we are being watched,
our weapons of mass destruction are probably the most interesting
and alarming things about us from an outside perspective.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's move to our final case for today. We've
had the deepot ocean, we've had the nuclear plant. Now
let's go to a much more mundane setting. Let's go
to a backyard.
Speaker 2: Barbecue Independence Day, Almans, North Carolina.
Speaker 1: It's July fourth. You can imagine the scene. Fireworks are
probably going off. A local man is outside with his family,
just looking up at the sky and he sees something
that is definitely not a firework.
Speaker 2: It's a classic orb a bright glowing sphere. But the
key detail here right off the bat is the duration.
Speaker 1: Right meteors last for a second, maybe two fireworks last
for a few seconds. This object was filmed for over
eight minutes.
Speaker 2: Eight minutes is an eternity when you're holding a camera
up to the sky.
Speaker 1: It really is. And at the six and a half
minute mark of the video we see that familiar trick again, bifurcation.
It splits. You can hear the witness on the tabe
he's just yelling one went up, one's coming down.
Speaker 2: The main orb appears to release smaller objects. It splits
into three distinct lights, and as it does this, the
shape of the main object changes. It streamlines that elongates
into a kind of tear drop shape.
Speaker 1: Now I've seen my share of weather balloons. They are around,
there's spheres usually yes.
Speaker 2: But the skeptics and specifically marked Antonio in this initial
phase of analysis, they looked at that tear drop shape
and he suggested that maybe it was a weather balloon.
And what they filmed was the payload breaking off.
Speaker 1: So like the box with the instruments, the bottom falls
off and the now lighter balloon just shoots up.
Speaker 2: Work, that's the idea. And as it shoots up rapidly,
the aerrsistance would stretch it vertically, potentially creating that tear
drop shape. It's a very logical physics based theory, but.
Speaker 1: Logic has to match all the data. And this is
where Deanna Hence, who is an atmospheric scientist, comes in
to sort of rain on the balloon parade.
Speaker 2: She does. She points out a few critical flaws in
that weather balloon theory. First, the payload the weather instruments,
they usually come down on parachutes. They're designed to be recovered.
They don't just break off and plummet to the ground.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense. What else?
Speaker 2: The brightness? This is a big one. Balloons are reflective,
they reflect sunlight. But this was at night and the
object in the video isn't reflecting light, it's emitting light.
It was glowing intensely on its own.
Speaker 1: And the real ticker.
Speaker 2: The local National Weather Service office confirmed there were no
official weather balloons released in that area at that time.
Speaker 1: So no balloon. The reflectivity ruled out birds. There were
no FAA lights, so it's not a plane or a drone,
and it lasted way too long to be a meteor.
Speaker 2: We are left with another genuine unidentified label on this case.
But I want to touch on something else that was
brought up in the investigation by a researcher named Alexis Brooks.
She mentioned the contact encounter hypothesis.
Speaker 1: This is the idea that's linked to the duration of
the sighting. Right.
Speaker 2: Yes. She suggests that if a sighting lasts for an
extended period, say five minutes or more, it might be
more than just a passive observation. It might involve a
form of non human intelligence making some kind of subconscious contact.
Speaker 1: That feels like a bit of a stretch. But it's
interesting that the witness himself said he felt a conne
to it. He actually called the local military base to
report it, got no real answers, and he felt, well,
he felt ignored.
Speaker 2: It adds this whole other psychological component to the phenomenon.
If these things are real and they are watching us,
is the interaction purely physical, a nuts and bolts thing,
or is there a cognitive a consciousness aspect that we
are completely missing.
Speaker 1: So let's try to bring all these different threats together.
We have Mexico, Puerto Rico, Wisconsin, in North Carolina. When
you lay them all out, what's the picture that's forming here?
Speaker 2: I think the picture is one of a technology or
a phenomenon with an incredibly advanced capability, a capability that
ignores our borders and our physical mediums. We see this
recurring theme of bifurcation, the ability to split into multiple objects.
Speaker 1: We saw it in the water in Puerto Rico, and
we saw it in the air in North Carolina.
Speaker 2: Which suggests it's not just a single vehicle. Maybe it's
a carrier of some kind or a probe deployment system.
Speaker 1: It can multiply its presence exactly.
Speaker 2: Then you have the heat signatures. In the Porto ric case,
the object was one hundred and four degrees warm, but
not propulsion hot like a jet engine. In the Mexico case,
the objects didn't flicker like fire. This points to an
energy source that is efficient and low heat, something we
don't have.
Speaker 1: And then there are locations they are consistently seen watching
our borders, like in Mexico, They're in our oceans like
off Puerto Rico, and they are very interested in our
energy and weapons and infrastructure like in Wisconsin and the
historical Malmstrom case.
Speaker 2: It all reinforces that surveillance hypothesis. Whether you want to
call it the galactic zoo theory or just simple reconnaissance,
the pattern suggests an intelligence that is methodically gathering data
on Earth's capabilities and strategic assets.
Speaker 1: And in terms of the sources themselves, we have this
mixed bag, which I think actually adds credibility to the
whole topic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I completely agree. If every single video was one
hundred percent definitely aliens, it would actually be more suspicious.
What we have is a more realistic picture, right, so
Mexico genuine Un explained that radar visual mismatch is just
too hard to debunk with simple explanations. Puerto Rico genuine
unexplained and probably the strongest case of the four, that
trans medium capability is the smoking gun for a technology
far beyond our own was a concept Likely explained. It's
a great example of why we have to be so
careful and not let our desire to believe override the evidence.
It shows that even credible witnesses can be mistaken.
Speaker 1: And finally, North Carolina, I'd.
Speaker 2: Say genuine unexplained the weather balloon theory was the best
conventional shot and it just doesn't hold up against the
atmospheric data and the visual evidence.
Speaker 1: So it really is a puzzle, a puzzle with pieces
that just don't fit into the box that science and
physics have given us.
Speaker 2: And that is the most exciting part of science, isn't it.
When the pieces don't fit, it means you need a
bigger box.
Speaker 1: So here's the thought I want to leave all of
you with Today. We talked about this idea of the
galactic zoo. We humans, We love our zoos, We build them,
we feed the animals, we treat their disease as we
watch them. But if we saw a chimpanzee in an
enclosure suddenly playing with a live hand grenade, we would
step in.
Speaker 2: Or if the chimpanzee started systematically dismantling the cage.
Speaker 1: Right, So, if there is a higher intelligence out there
watching our zoo, are they benevolent keepers? Are they just
trying to stop us from nuking the cage? Or are
they just watching the greatest reality show in the cosmos
waiting to see if we get canceled.
Speaker 2: It's a very humbling question to ask. Are we as
a species worth saving or are we just interesting to watch?
Speaker 1: So I want to ask you, the listener, directly, if
you were the zoo keeper of Earth, would you intervene?
Would you stop us from making our big mistakes? Or
would you let nature take its course? And what do
you make of that split we saw in Puerto Rico,
that bifurcation? Is that technology or could it be some
kind of strange biology we haven't even discovered yet.
Speaker 2: Leave your answer in the comments. We do read them,
and honestly, the theories that you all come up with
are often better and more creative than the experts.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on this session of thrilling threads.
Keep your eyes open, keep watching the skies, and we
will see you in the next one.
Speaker 2: Stay curious,