Speaker 1: I really want you to put yourself in this scenario
Speaker 1: for a second. You are an astronomer, right, and you know,
Speaker 1: not just some hobbyist in a backyard with a telescope
Speaker 1: you bought online. You are a trained professional at a
Speaker 1: national observator.
Speaker 2: You've got the high end optics, the serious hardware, exactly.
Speaker 1: You've got this incredible gear pointed squarely at the Moon,
Speaker 1: and you're just staring at that stark, beautiful, cratered surface,
Speaker 1: collecting baseline.
Speaker 2: Data, just a normal Tuesday night, right.
Speaker 1: But then something completely shatters your sense of reality, because
Speaker 1: gliding across the lunar mare casting a faint shadow is
Speaker 1: a massive, dark donut shaped.
Speaker 2: Spacecraft, a literal donut.
Speaker 1: Yes. And when I say massive, I mean forty kilometers across. Wow.
Speaker 1: I mean that is like taking the entire city of London,
Speaker 1: ripping it out of the ground and just throwing it
Speaker 1: into space.
Speaker 2: Which is a terrifying visual by the way.
Speaker 1: It is, And it gets worse. It's cruising across the
Speaker 1: lunar surface at twenty kilometers per second. And to make
Speaker 1: it even wilder, your data says it is rotating, yeah,
Speaker 1: spinning fast enough to generate its own artificial gravity. Now,
Speaker 1: if I told you this was a pitch for like
Speaker 1: a sci fi blockbuster, you'd probably say it sounds a
Speaker 1: bit derivative.
Speaker 2: A little to Hollywood.
Speaker 1: Yeah right. But here's the thing that literally kept me
Speaker 1: up late last night. This wasn't a movie pitch. This
Speaker 1: was an actual, formal published report issued by researchers at
Speaker 1: a national government astronomical observatory in August twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2: It's just it creates this immediate cognitive dissonance. I mean,
Speaker 2: when a claim of that magnitude a forty kilometer gravity
Speaker 2: generating megastructure comes from an anonymous forum post, you just
Speaker 2: scroll past it, you don't even register it exactly. But
Speaker 2: when it comes from an institution equipped with serious hardware,
Speaker 2: an institution with a century long pedigree in the sciences,
Speaker 2: your brain is just forced to halt.
Speaker 1: You have to pay attention, you do.
Speaker 2: You have to ask what they are actually seeing because
Speaker 2: the data is real. The photons hit the camera sensor.
Speaker 2: So what is the actual physical reality causing that specific
Speaker 2: pattern of light and shadow?
Speaker 1: Well, welcome to thrilling Threads. This is the place where
Speaker 1: we take a massive stack of your sources and unravel
Speaker 1: the most fascinating stories hidden inside. And today, I mean,
Speaker 1: my desk is absolutely buried.
Speaker 2: You have an absurd amount of paper over there.
Speaker 1: I really do. I've been sifting through articles from space
Speaker 1: dot Com, the IC, the Jerusalem Post, the Skeptical Inquirer,
Speaker 1: and the Key of Post. But beyond the mainstream media,
Speaker 1: we are diving deep into dense astrophysical preprints.
Speaker 2: I heavy stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, raw data reports from the Ukrainian National Academy of
Speaker 1: Sciences and incredibly detailed analytical essays by Harvard astronomers. I
Speaker 1: had to read some of these physics papers three times
Speaker 1: just to wrap my head around the math.
Speaker 2: It is a genuinely staggering collection of information. You have
Speaker 2: this wild collision of mainstream news hysteria, frontline military intelligence reporting,
Speaker 2: and highly technical, peer reviewed astrophysics, and.
Speaker 1: It's all swirling around the exact same patches guy, exactly.
Speaker 1: So the mission today is to tear into these wild
Speaker 1: August twenty twenty six reports from this Ukrainian observatory claiming
Speaker 1: giant UAP's unidentified aerial phenomena. We're just swarm in the moon.
Speaker 2: But we aren't just going to look at the headlines.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not at all. We are going to trace the
Speaker 1: history of these specific claims backward. We have to look
Speaker 1: at the ongoing war in the region, the psychological pressure
Speaker 1: cooker these scientists were operating, which is huge, it's everything.
Speaker 1: And then we are going to use rigorous, step by
Speaker 1: step optical physics to figure out what was actually happening
Speaker 1: in sicilunar space.
Speaker 2: And for you listening, the reason this specific case study
Speaker 2: is so vital is that we live in a hyper
Speaker 2: connected era. A headline about a forty kilometer lunar spaceship
Speaker 2: will travel around the globe ten times before the scientific
Speaker 2: method can even get out of bed.
Speaker 1: That is so true.
Speaker 2: The story we are dissecting today is an absolute masterclass
Speaker 2: in critical thinking. It demonstrates in brutal real time just
Speaker 2: how easily advanced technology, raw data, and brilliant minds can
Speaker 2: be utterly compromised when the world around you is in
Speaker 2: a state of chaos.
Speaker 1: So let's start peeling back the layers. If frontline troops
Speaker 1: and astronomers were suddenly seeing massive anomalies on the Moon
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty six, we have to figure out how
Speaker 1: that paranoia got started.
Speaker 2: We can't just jump straight to the forty kilometer donut exactly.
Speaker 1: We have to rewind the clock to September twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two because this was part of an ongoing, highly documented saga.
Speaker 1: There was a paper published on the pre print server
Speaker 1: ARKIV by a researcher named Boris Ziliev and his team
Speaker 1: working out.
Speaker 2: Of the main astronomical observatory of the National Academy of
Speaker 2: Sciences of Ukraine, the MAO NASU.
Speaker 1: Right, and we should probably establish what that is, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: To give some crucial context, the MAO NASHUE is not
Speaker 2: a fringe organization. It was founded in nineteen forty.
Speaker 1: Four, so they've been around long time.
Speaker 2: It is a highly respected body that has contributed significantly
Speaker 2: to our understanding of the cosmos, from planetary physics to
Speaker 2: stellar dynamics. The global science tific community pays attention to
Speaker 2: their publication.
Speaker 1: They are amateurs, not at all.
Speaker 2: In this particular twenty twenty two paper, Ziv and his
Speaker 2: team were utilizing specially calibrated meteor cameras at two distinct
Speaker 2: weather stations.
Speaker 1: One was located in the capital.
Speaker 2: Kiev, right, yes, and the other was in a village
Speaker 2: called Vinnerifka, which sits about one hundred and twenty kilometers
Speaker 2: to the south Okay.
Speaker 1: So they published this paper claiming that the daytime sky
Speaker 1: over Ukraine was practically swarming with unidentified craft and they
Speaker 1: broke these objects down into two very specific categories.
Speaker 2: The first one was the cosmics, right.
Speaker 1: They described these as luminous objects, meaning they were visibly
Speaker 1: brighter than the background of the bright daytime sky, and
Speaker 1: they gave him these majestic bird names like swift, falcon, eagle.
Speaker 2: Very poetic.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They claimed these cosmics were flying solo but also
Speaker 1: in coordinated squadrons. But the second category they documented was well,
Speaker 1: far more perplexing from a physics standpoint.
Speaker 2: They labeled them phantoms. Phantoms according to their censor data,
Speaker 2: phantoms were completely dark objects. They described them as having
Speaker 2: a contrast of practically zero, meaning they were entirely.
Speaker 1: Black, just absorbing every single photon of light that hit
Speaker 1: them exactly.
Speaker 2: And based on the dual camera setup they were using
Speaker 2: between Key and Venerifka, the team calculated that these phantoms
Speaker 2: were between ten to forty feet wide, so roughly three
Speaker 2: to twelve meters across.
Speaker 1: And the kicker was the speed they clocked these pitch
Speaker 1: black objects traveling through the lower atmosphere at speeds to
Speaker 1: fifteen kilometers per second. That is roughly thirty three thousand
Speaker 1: miles per hour.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that number is wild.
Speaker 1: I remember reading that in the source material and just
Speaker 1: stopping cold. Thirty three thousand miles per hour. Let's ground
Speaker 1: that in reality for a second for everyone listening. An
Speaker 1: intercontinental ballistic missile re entering the atmosphere tops out of
Speaker 1: what maybe fifteen thousand miles.
Speaker 2: Per hour around there.
Speaker 1: Yes, and those things are designed specifically to survive massive
Speaker 1: thermal friction. They still look like blazing meteors when they come.
Speaker 2: Down, literal fireballs.
Speaker 1: Right, So the Ukrainian team is cleaning objects twice as
Speaker 1: fast as our fastest nuclear delivery systems are flying around.
Speaker 1: My immediate thought is, if a completely black object the
Speaker 1: size of a school bus is moving at thirty three
Speaker 1: thousand miles per hour through the thickest part of its atmosphere,
Speaker 1: how does it stay black?
Speaker 2: It wouldn't.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't the sheer friction ignite the air around it. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen a shooting star, that's just a
Speaker 1: pebble hitting the atmosphere and it creates a streak of
Speaker 1: fire visible for hundreds of miles.
Speaker 2: A tiny pebble exactly.
Speaker 1: So how could something massive move that fast, completely silently
Speaker 1: and not look like a miniature sun.
Speaker 2: That intuition you have is the exact physical paradox that
Speaker 2: caught the attention.
Speaker 1: Of Auvi Lobe, the Harvard guy.
Speaker 2: Yes, he's a former chair of the astronomy department at
Speaker 2: Harvard University and the head of the Galileo project, which
Speaker 2: specifically looks for evidence of extraterrestrial technological signatures.
Speaker 1: So he's not a skeptic who just dismisses UFOs out
Speaker 1: of hand.
Speaker 2: The furthest thing from it. Loba is highly receptive to
Speaker 2: the idea of non human technology. He wrote a whole
Speaker 2: book arguing that the interstellar object Umorimua might have been
Speaker 2: an artificial solar sale. Oh wow, right, so he is
Speaker 2: not a rigid dismiss a skeptic. But when he read
Speaker 2: this twenty twenty two paper from the Ukrainian Observatory, he
Speaker 2: immediately identified a fundamental breakdown in the basic laws of
Speaker 2: thermodynamics and optics.
Speaker 1: Because physics is physics, right, It doesn't matter if the
Speaker 1: craft was built in a secret underground base or in
Speaker 1: another star system. Precisely, if it is flying through our air,
Speaker 1: it has to interact with the nitrogen and oxibure molecules
Speaker 1: in our air.
Speaker 2: That is the cornerstone of lobes rebettal. It relies on
Speaker 2: an elegant, unbreakable chain of logic. The Ukrainian astronomers only
Speaker 2: detected these phantoms because they appeared dark against a bright sky. Okay,
Speaker 2: tracking For any physical object to appear dark against a
Speaker 2: bright daytime background, it must be blocking the background light
Speaker 2: from reaching the camera lens makes sense. Light itself is
Speaker 2: an electromagnetic wave. Therefore, if the object is successful blocking light,
Speaker 2: it is interacting electromagnetically with matter. And if it interacts
Speaker 2: with light, there is absolutely no physical loophole that allows
Speaker 2: it to pass through a dense soup of atmospheric gases
Speaker 2: without also interacting with those air molecules.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like walking through a crowded room. You
Speaker 1: can't say I'm only going to bump into the people
Speaker 1: wearing red shirts, but I'll magically pass right through the
Speaker 1: people wearing blue shirts.
Speaker 2: That's a great analogy.
Speaker 1: If the object is solid enough to block photons of light,
Speaker 1: it is solid enough to smash into a wall.
Speaker 2: Of oxygen that is a perfect way to visualize it.
Speaker 2: In physics, we talk about this in terms of a
Speaker 2: cross section.
Speaker 1: A cross section.
Speaker 2: Yeah, think of a cross section as the effective target
Speaker 2: area an object presents for a specific type of collision.
Speaker 2: The cross section for the electromagnetic interaction of air molecules
Speaker 2: with solid matter is actually substantially larger than it is
Speaker 2: for light with matter.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it hits more air than it does light exactly.
Speaker 2: So if this phantom is plowing through the troposphere, pushing
Speaker 2: trillions of air molecules out of the way at fifteen
Speaker 2: kilometers per secon the kinetic energy being converted into heat
Speaker 2: would be catastrophic.
Speaker 1: It would just be a bomb.
Speaker 2: Lobe actually sat down and did the math. He calculated
Speaker 2: that an object three to twelve meters wide, moving at
Speaker 2: fifteen kilometers per second in the lower atmosphere would release
Speaker 2: a tarowat of optical power a terrawat.
Speaker 1: I mean, I know that's a massive number, but what
Speaker 1: does a tarowat actually look like in the real world.
Speaker 2: To put a tarowat of continuous power into perspective, it
Speaker 2: is roughly equivalent to the total electrical power consumption of
Speaker 2: the entire human race at any given moment.
Speaker 1: Wait, the entire human race at once.
Speaker 2: Every city, every factory, every light bulb on Earth combined, right,
Speaker 2: all of that energy released by a single object in
Speaker 2: the sky over Kiev. It wouldn't be a dark, stealthy phantom.
Speaker 2: It would be a blindingly bright, world shaking fireball that
Speaker 2: would likely blind anyone looking at it and shatter windows
Speaker 2: for miles.
Speaker 1: Just from the heat of it pushing the air.
Speaker 2: Yes, and because the astronomers explicitly stated in their data
Speaker 2: that these objects were completely dark, and because you know,
Speaker 2: Kiev was not vaporized by a tarot watt firebug, right.
Speaker 1: Which we would have noticed.
Speaker 2: Lobe concluded that their fundamental kinematic measurements had to be
Speaker 2: deeply flawed.
Speaker 1: So if the laws of physics aren't broken, then the
Speaker 1: math on the paper is broken. Exactly If they got
Speaker 1: the speed and the size that drastically wrong, there is
Speaker 1: only one variable in their equation that could be throwing
Speaker 1: everything else off. They must have messed at the distance.
Speaker 2: The distance is the key.
Speaker 1: They thought they were looking at massive objects very high up,
Speaker 1: but they were actually looking at small things much closer
Speaker 1: to the camera.
Speaker 2: That is the exact deduction Lowe made He reasoned that
Speaker 2: the Ukrainian team had overestimated the distance to these objects
Speaker 2: by a factor of ten.
Speaker 1: A factor of ten.
Speaker 2: Yes, in optics, angular velocity, which is how fast something
Speaker 2: appears to move across your field of vision, is entirely
Speaker 2: dependent on distance. If you take their data and assume
Speaker 2: the objects were ten times closer to the camera lenses
Speaker 2: than the astronomers calculated, everything snaps back into physical reality.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if we fix the math, would we get.
Speaker 2: Their angular motion across the sky now translates to a
Speaker 2: physical speed that is ten times slower, so about one
Speaker 2: point five kilometers per second, which.
Speaker 1: Is still fast, but not thirty three thousand miles an hour, right.
Speaker 2: And the physical size of the objects becomes ten times smaller,
Speaker 2: roughly zero point three to one point two meters.
Speaker 1: Let me process that one point five kilometers per second
Speaker 1: and about three feet long.
Speaker 2: Does that ring any bells?
Speaker 1: That sounds terrifyingly familiar, especially considering where this observatory is located.
Speaker 1: They were looking up at the sky over Kievan twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two. That isn't an alien spacecraft. That is the
Speaker 1: exact size and speed profile of an artillery shell.
Speaker 2: It is a sobering tragic realization. The researchers were utilizing
Speaker 2: incredibly sensitive equipment to observe the skies over an active,
Speaker 2: brutal war zone. They were capturing the ballistic arc of
Speaker 2: heavy artillery and misinterpreting the data as hypersonic, extraterrestrial or
Speaker 2: advanced classified craft.
Speaker 1: I do want to bring up another perspective on this
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two paper, though, Okay sure, because our sources
Speaker 1: mentioned Mick West, the researcher who runs the metabunk form.
Speaker 1: He spends his life analyzing and debunking UAP footage. He
Speaker 1: looked at the same data from the Ukrainian team, but
Speaker 1: came with a slightly different conclusion than Lobe about what
Speaker 1: the phantoms were.
Speaker 2: Right, Mick West proposed a biological explanation bugs basic exactly.
Speaker 2: He argued that the dark phantoms were likely insects like
Speaker 2: flies or beetles, flying extremely close to the camera lens.
Speaker 2: His argument hinged on the frame by frame data provided
Speaker 2: by the observatory so well. In the sequential photographs, the
Speaker 2: objects appeared to change their speed erratically. In one fraction
Speaker 2: of a second, the object covered a certain number of pixels,
Speaker 2: and in the next rame it covered twice as many, so.
Speaker 1: It looked like it was speeding up and slowing down right.
Speaker 2: West argued that an artillery shell follows a very predictable,
Speaker 2: smooth ballistic trajectory. It doesn't radically hit the gas mid air.
Speaker 2: But an insect darting around a few feet from a
Speaker 2: lens absolutely.
Speaker 1: Does the classic out of focus bug tricking a security camera.
Speaker 1: We've all seen those videos of ghosts that turn out
Speaker 1: to be a b off exactly.
Speaker 2: But Lobe pushed back on the insect theory, didn't he
Speaker 2: He did.
Speaker 1: He pointed out that Mick West was falling into a
Speaker 1: common optical trap.
Speaker 2: He did, and it highlights a brilliant nuance in optical geometry.
Speaker 2: Lobe countered by explaining that an object moving at a
Speaker 2: perfectly constant speed can create the visual illusion of changing
Speaker 2: speed if its distance relative to the observer is changing.
Speaker 1: Wait, explain that a bit more.
Speaker 2: Think about standing on a sidewalk as a car drives
Speaker 2: past you. When the car is a mile down the
Speaker 2: road coming toward you, it looks like it's barely moving.
Speaker 2: As it gets right in front of you, it zips
Speaker 2: past in a blur. Then as it drives away, it
Speaker 2: seems to slow down again. Oh, I see the car
Speaker 2: didn't suddenly hit the brakes and then accelerate. Its angular
Speaker 2: velocity across your field of vision changed based on its proximity.
Speaker 1: To you, because the closer it is, the more your
Speaker 1: field of view it crosses in the same amount of time.
Speaker 2: Precisely, Lobe argued that the the erratic pixel jumps in
Speaker 2: the Ukrainian data, we're perfectly consistent with constant speed artillery
Speaker 2: shells moving on an angle either toward or away from
Speaker 2: the cameras, rather than perfectly parallel to them.
Speaker 1: It's incredible to think about highly educated astronomers looking at
Speaker 1: their own skies and coming away with such a massive misinterpretations.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: But to really grasp how a century old institution could
Speaker 1: make these errors, we can't just look at the math.
Speaker 1: We have to look at the psychology of the environment.
Speaker 2: The context is everything we need.
Speaker 1: To transition from the quiet academic observatories to the muddy,
Speaker 1: chaotic front lines of the military. Because this isn't just
Speaker 1: a story about miscalibrated telescopes. It's a story about the
Speaker 1: devastating fog of war and how prolonged anxiety literally rewires
Speaker 1: human perception.
Speaker 2: The historical context here is vital for understanding that psychological shift.
Speaker 2: If we look back to nineteen sixty seven, during the
Speaker 2: Soviet era, planetary scientists working at this very same main
Speaker 2: astronomical observatory.
Speaker 1: In people like ikkovel.
Speaker 2: Yes prominent figures like him, regularly observed strange anomalies. They
Speaker 2: saw flashing, reddish objects and strange streaks in the sky.
Speaker 2: But their institutional culture at the time was intensely conservative
Speaker 2: and grounded.
Speaker 1: So what did they do with those reports?
Speaker 2: They collectively dismissed all of it. They attributed it to
Speaker 2: satellite orbital decay, rocket booster stages, re entering the atmosphere,
Speaker 2: or just weird atmospheric phenomena. They had absolutely zero interest
Speaker 2: in entertaining the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
Speaker 1: So what changed? Why did the same institution go from
Speaker 1: rolling their eyes and flashing lights in nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 1: to publishing papers about alien armadas in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: It's because the sky itself weaponized.
Speaker 1: Right post independence and severely post twenty twenty two, monitoring
Speaker 1: the airspace over Ukraine was no longer an esoteric academic
Speaker 1: pursuit of charting stars or tracking meteor showers.
Speaker 2: It became a desperate, high stakes requirement for national survival.
Speaker 1: The national security apparatus was forced to heavily militarize every
Speaker 1: aspect of airspace monitoring. When your cities and power grids
Speaker 1: are under constant daily threat from ballistic missiles, hypersonic lide bombs,
Speaker 1: and autonomous drone swarms.
Speaker 2: The luxury of academic skepticism evaporates.
Speaker 1: Exactly every single anomalous blip on a radar screen, every
Speaker 1: flash of light in the sky is a potential mass
Speaker 1: casualty event. You have thousands of soldiers and defense personnel
Speaker 1: looking up, and they are tasked with instantly differentiating between
Speaker 1: a domestic reconnaissance drone, a foreign loitering munition and incoming
Speaker 1: cruise missile, a harmless weather balloon or a starlink satellite.
Speaker 2: The pressure is unimaginable, and.
Speaker 1: When your brain is subjected to that kind of unrelenting,
Speaker 1: high stake stress, it starts seeing threats everywhere. You are
Speaker 1: actively primed to find the monster.
Speaker 2: In the dark, which brings us to a crucial incident.
Speaker 2: In our source material from May twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Five, Yes, the flash video right which.
Speaker 2: The military didn't declassify and make public until a year
Speaker 2: later in May twenty twenty six. This came directly from
Speaker 2: a senior Ukrainian drone warfare and electronic intelligence advisor named
Speaker 2: Serhi Biskresnov.
Speaker 1: Who goes by the call sign flash. Yes.
Speaker 2: The flash video sent shockwaves through the defense intelligence community.
Speaker 2: The footage was captured by a pilot from the Ukrainian
Speaker 2: Unmanned System's Forces.
Speaker 1: And they were just using a regular drone, right yeah.
Speaker 2: The pilot was operating a standard commercially available DJI Mavic
Speaker 2: three T drone. It's heavily utilized in the conflict because
Speaker 2: it is equipped with a high resolution thermal imaging camera.
Speaker 1: Very useful for spotting things at night.
Speaker 2: Absolutely during active combat operations. At an altitude of roughly
Speaker 2: eight hundred meters, this drone pilot captured a crystal clear
Speaker 2: infrared video of a highly anomalous object hovering over the battlefield.
Speaker 1: The visual description of this object from the thermal feed
Speaker 1: is pure nightmare fuel for a.
Speaker 2: Soldier, it really is.
Speaker 1: It was described as a flattened spherical central body, but
Speaker 1: protruding from it were six very distinct, sharply pointed cones
Speaker 1: or spikes.
Speaker 2: Like a sea orch and almost.
Speaker 1: Yes or bizarre mine and on the thermal camera which
Speaker 1: reads heat signatures. It had a pronounced highly active thermal
Speaker 1: plume trailing behind it, so.
Speaker 2: It was generating heat, lots of it.
Speaker 1: But the detail that really got under my skin when
Speaker 1: reading the report was its behavior. It was just hovering there,
Speaker 1: completely silent, moving at a crawl, and totally unresponsive to
Speaker 1: the military drone observing it.
Speaker 2: It didn't try to evase.
Speaker 1: No, it just floated over an active war zone.
Speaker 2: The reason the specific footage caught fire globally wasn't just
Speaker 2: its bizarre shape, but its morphological twin in the historical record.
Speaker 1: Wait, we've seen this shape before.
Speaker 2: We have. In twenty thirteen, a United States Central Command
Speaker 2: infrared platform operating in a combat zone in the Middle
Speaker 2: East captured a strikingly similar video.
Speaker 1: Are you serious?
Speaker 2: Yes? That incident is designated in US intelligence files as
Speaker 2: dowuap p R thirty eight. The twenty thirteen American video
Speaker 2: showed an eight pointed star shaped object, also featuring alternating
Speaker 2: cones or arms, projecting from a central hub, floating over
Speaker 2: a military area.
Speaker 1: So twelve years earlier, a totally different military force saw
Speaker 1: almost the exact same spike sphere.
Speaker 2: There were technical differences, To be fair, the US footage
Speaker 2: showed internal cold spots within the main body, whereas the
Speaker 2: Ukrainian footage showed a distinct external heat plume.
Speaker 1: Okay, so different thermal signatures.
Speaker 2: Right, But the geometric similarities between the two objects, observed
Speaker 2: twelve years apart in entirely different war zones were impossible
Speaker 2: for intelligence analysts to ignore.
Speaker 1: Let's put ourselves in the boots of that Ukrainian drone
Speaker 1: pilot for a second. You are operating in a trench.
Speaker 1: You see the spike heat venting sphere hovering above your sector.
Speaker 1: Your first thought is absolutely not, oh wow, we are
Speaker 1: being visited by interdimensional beings.
Speaker 2: Definitely not.
Speaker 1: Your immediate panic conducing thought is what kind of black
Speaker 1: budget enemy tech is this?
Speaker 2: Is it a new electronic warfare jammer?
Speaker 1: Right? Is it a laser designator painting my unit for
Speaker 1: an artillery strike? When your entire daily existence revolves around
Speaker 1: sing an endless barrage of advanced weaponry, your brain files
Speaker 1: everything under enemy threat.
Speaker 2: That is the critical geopolitical and psychological bedrock of this
Speaker 2: entire deep diet, Well, this entire thrilling threads analysis. The
Speaker 2: military anxiety bleeds directly into the civilian and academic sectors because.
Speaker 1: The astronomers are living in the exact same world as
Speaker 1: the soldiers.
Speaker 2: The exact same combat environment. The immense pressure to monitor
Speaker 2: the sky, combined with the constant looming dread of advanced,
Speaker 2: unclassified enemy weaponry created a cognitive environment that was incredibly
Speaker 2: vulnerable to misinterpreting data.
Speaker 1: The baseline level of institutional paranoia and urgency had completely
Speaker 1: eroded the standard scientific filters.
Speaker 2: It stripped them away.
Speaker 1: If frontline troops are seeing spiked spheres on thermal cameras
Speaker 1: in your city as being bombed daily, your threshold for
Speaker 1: what constitutes normal is just gone. And this is the
Speaker 1: vital context that explains how we finally arrive at the
Speaker 1: main event.
Speaker 2: The August twenty twenty six lunar reports.
Speaker 1: Yes, we've unraveled the twenty twenty two fantoms that turned
Speaker 1: out to be artillery shells. We've analyzed the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five military drones spouting thermal spheres. Now the stage is
Speaker 1: perfectly set to understand the staggering reality breaking claims published
Speaker 1: regarding the moon.
Speaker 2: This is the moment the narrative escalates from misidentified local
Speaker 2: phenomena in the Earth's atmosphere to alleged megastructures operating in
Speaker 2: deep sicaluinar space.
Speaker 1: I want to set the scene for this because the
Speaker 1: details matter. We are back at the vineyf To Metior station,
Speaker 1: that small village about one hundred and twenty kilometers south.
Speaker 2: Of Kiev, same one from the twenty twenty two paper.
Speaker 1: Yes, the observations took place over the late summer and
Speaker 1: autumn of twenty twenty five, so they spent months analyzing
Speaker 1: the data before the reports caused an absolute uproar at
Speaker 1: the Third Summer School on Atrophysics in Kiev in August
Speaker 1: twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2: Let's look at the hardware they were relying on, because
Speaker 2: it's important, go for it. They were using an Intersalter
Speaker 2: M six ZHO three telescope. They paired this with an
Speaker 2: ASI two ninety four pro Hi speed astronomical camera. They
Speaker 2: were shooting continuous video of the Moon at twenty to
Speaker 2: fifty frames per.
Speaker 1: Second, which means their exposure times were really short.
Speaker 2: Right, exactly the amount of time the camera shutter is
Speaker 2: open to collect light for each frame was incredibly short,
Speaker 2: Just tiny fractions of a second, what does that matter? Well,
Speaker 2: using high frame rates and short exposure times is standard
Speaker 2: operating procedure if your goal is to track fast moving,
Speaker 2: bright objects like meteors burning up in the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Which is what a met youor station normally does exactly.
Speaker 2: But as we will explore in a moment, that exact
Speaker 2: hardware configuration becomes an immense liability when you are trying
Speaker 2: to resolve faint, low contrast objects against an overwhelmingly bright
Speaker 2: background like the illuminated surface of the Moon.
Speaker 1: Okay, put a pin in that. Let's look at what
Speaker 1: the Ukrainian team actually claimed to have found on September seven,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five. They categorize these lunar anomalies into two
Speaker 1: distinct buckets.
Speaker 2: The first group they called atmospheric anomalies.
Speaker 1: Now they didn't meet Earth's atmosphere. They meant these objects
Speaker 1: appeared to be positioned in the extremely thin exosphere of
Speaker 1: the Moon, locked in place relative to the lunar surface,
Speaker 1: hovering there. Yeah, and they claimed these objects were flashing
Speaker 1: rapidly pulsing light two dy eight times per second.
Speaker 2: The flashing alone is unusual, but the detail that elevated
Speaker 2: this from an oddity to a claim of extraterrestrial intelligence
Speaker 2: was the assertion of synchronous behavior.
Speaker 1: Synchronous like flashing together.
Speaker 2: Yes, the team stated that their analysis proved these objects,
Speaker 2: which appeared to be separated by hundreds of kilometers across
Speaker 2: the lunar disc were flashing in perfect.
Speaker 1: Unison across hundreds of miles.
Speaker 2: Yes. They ran the data and maintained there was a
Speaker 2: statistically significant correlation in the light pulses. To the researchers,
Speaker 2: this wasn't random noise. This suggested coordinated active communication between
Speaker 2: anchored cislunar stations.
Speaker 1: They thought they were watching a massive alien communications array
Speaker 1: pinging data back and forth across the Moon.
Speaker 2: It's an incredible conclusion to jump to.
Speaker 1: And the sheer scale of these objects. The used radiometric
Speaker 1: math comparing the brightness of the flashing anomaly to the
Speaker 1: known reflection of sunlight off the lunar surface.
Speaker 2: And what do they calculate?
Speaker 1: They calculated that these quote unquote stations were anywhere from
Speaker 1: three hundred and ten meters to eighteen hundred meters wide.
Speaker 1: That is a space station over a mile wide.
Speaker 2: Over a mile.
Speaker 1: But incredibly, that was the conservative part of the paper
Speaker 1: that was nothing compared to their second.
Speaker 2: Category, the continental anomalies.
Speaker 1: Yes, if the atmospheric anomalies were bright, flashing stations, the
Speaker 1: continental anomalies were the exact opposite. They described these as massive,
Speaker 1: extremely dark targets moving actively and deliberately across the lunar surface.
Speaker 2: The team calculated a contrast of just three percent to
Speaker 2: ten percent against the lunar background with an incredibly tiny
Speaker 2: albedo of point zero two nine.
Speaker 1: Let's define albedo really quickly for anyone who is an
Speaker 1: an astrophysicist. Is that basically just a measurement of how
Speaker 1: reflective a surface.
Speaker 2: Is spot on. Albedo is a measure of reflectivity on
Speaker 2: a scale from zero to one. An albedo of zero
Speaker 2: means an object is a perfect black body absorbing all light,
Speaker 2: while an albedo of one means it reflects all light
Speaker 2: like a perfect mirror.
Speaker 1: So an albedo of points zero two nine.
Speaker 2: Means these objects were absorbing over ninety seven percent of
Speaker 2: the sunlight hitting them Against the bright reflective surface of
Speaker 2: the Moon. They appeared as massive, moving ink black shadows.
Speaker 1: So they had these incredibly faint, fast moving shadows on
Speaker 1: their video feed. What do they do they take this
Speaker 1: video data and run it through image enhancement software called
Speaker 1: matt Lab to try and pull out the detail, which.
Speaker 2: Is where things get really messy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because when they cranked up the contrast algorithms on
Speaker 1: these shadows, they claimed the software revealed distinct structured shapes.
Speaker 1: They report seeing flat disks, and most infamously, massive toroids.
Speaker 2: A toroid is the geometric term for a donut or
Speaker 2: a ring.
Speaker 1: Shape, and the scale they calculated is just baffling. They
Speaker 1: claimed these donut shaped craft were thirteen to forty kilometers wide,
Speaker 1: traveling across the Moon at speeds of six to twenty
Speaker 1: kilometers per second.
Speaker 2: The kinematic calculations the complex math detailing how these objects
Speaker 2: were moving through space became the centerpiece of their follow
Speaker 2: up paper, which had the rather sensational title UFO Dynamics
Speaker 2: on the Moon.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't say they didn't know how to
Speaker 1: write a catchy title.
Speaker 2: True. The team focused intensely on one specific toroid that
Speaker 2: they calculated to be thirty six kilometers wide. In their
Speaker 2: sequential frames, they measured this colossal ring rotating four point
Speaker 2: three degrees in two seconds.
Speaker 1: Guys, it's spinning if.
Speaker 2: You extrapolate that out, it gives the object a full
Speaker 2: three hundred and sixty degree rotation period of one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty seven seconds.
Speaker 1: I remember doing the math on that while reading the
Speaker 1: prep materials in my brain just rebelled. They calculated that
Speaker 1: a thirty six kilometer wide solid ring spinning a full
Speaker 1: rotation every two and a half minutes would generate massive
Speaker 1: centrifugal force. It would, They stated, it would create an
Speaker 1: artificial gravity of point four to seven g at its
Speaker 1: outer rim. That is almost half of Earth's gravity just
Speaker 1: from the spin. And they claimed other objects in the
Speaker 1: video were spinning so violently they were generating over two
Speaker 1: times Earth's gravity.
Speaker 2: They weren't just claiming to have spotted a weird rock.
Speaker 2: They were explicitly claiming to have discovered massive non human
Speaker 2: spacecraft utilizing advanced artificial gravity to navigate the lunar environment.
Speaker 2: Staggering and to defend the plausibility of their findings, they
Speaker 2: heavily cited previous anomalous literature, specifically a twenty twenty study
Speaker 2: by an analyst named Mark Carlotto.
Speaker 1: Oh Right, the Carlato study.
Speaker 2: Carlato had analyzed video taken by an amateur French astronomer
Speaker 2: showing dark objects transitting across the lunar crater Endymion. Carloto
Speaker 2: used the known one hundred kilometer width of the Endymion
Speaker 2: crater to calculate that the objects in that twenty twenty
Speaker 2: video were traveling at roughly fifty kilometers per second.
Speaker 1: Fifty kilometers per second, yes, to.
Speaker 2: Put that in perspective, that is thirty times faster than
Speaker 2: a standard low lunar orbit. The Ukrainian team used Carlotto's
Speaker 2: paper as a shield, arguing, you know, hypersonic massive lunar
Speaker 2: craft have been documented in the literature before, just confirming it.
Speaker 1: But hold on a second, we need a pause, step
Speaker 1: back from the spreadsheets and just apply some basic macroscopic
Speaker 1: common sense. Here a forty kilometers spinning doughnut going twenty
Speaker 1: kilometers a second.
Speaker 2: It's hard to visualize it is.
Speaker 1: That is a physical object twice the size of the
Speaker 1: island of Manhattan. Imagine picking up Manhattan, spinning it like
Speaker 1: a centrifuge, and flying it from New York to Philadelphia
Speaker 1: in about five seconds.
Speaker 2: The air resistance alone, well there's no air but the
Speaker 2: inertia right.
Speaker 1: The sheer kinetic energy, the material strength required to hold
Speaker 1: a ring of that size together under those gravitational sheer forces.
Speaker 1: It defies all known material science. How could seasoned professional
Speaker 1: scientists at a national academy look at this data and
Speaker 1: confidently publish something so seemingly absurd?
Speaker 2: That is the pivotal question of this entire investigation. How
Speaker 2: does rigorously train scientific methodology go so spectacularly wrong?
Speaker 1: It has to be a mistake, right.
Speaker 2: The answer isn't that they were unintelligent. The answer is
Speaker 2: a fast cascading series of errors in astrophysics, optics, and
Speaker 2: computational mathematics. Let's systemically dismantle these claims.
Speaker 1: Let's do it, and we have to.
Speaker 2: Start with the most fatal foundational flaw in their entire methodology,
Speaker 2: which is the degeneracy error.
Speaker 1: All right, break this down for me. What exactly is
Speaker 1: a degeneracy error.
Speaker 2: To understand the error, we have to contrast it with
Speaker 2: what they did right in the past. Think back to
Speaker 2: their twenty twenty two observations of the artillery shells the
Speaker 2: phantoms over Kiev. Even though they got the nature of
Speaker 2: the object wrong, their baseline distance tracking was grounded in
Speaker 2: a solid concept which was wide. They used two cameras.
Speaker 2: One camera was in Kiev, the other was in Vinarifka
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty kilometers apart. By having two different
Speaker 2: physical dvantage points looking at the exact same object in
Speaker 2: the sky, they could use trigonometry to calculate parallax.
Speaker 1: Oh right, Like, if I hold my thumb out at
Speaker 1: arm's lengths, close my left eye, and look at it
Speaker 1: with my right eye, it aligns with a certain lamp
Speaker 1: in my room. Yes, perfect, But if I switch eyes,
Speaker 1: my thumb appears to jump three feet to the left
Speaker 1: against the background. Because I know the distance between my
Speaker 1: two eyes, my brain can automatically calculate how far away
Speaker 1: my thumb is exactly.
Speaker 2: That is dual station triangulation. It gives you the absolute
Speaker 2: hard physical distance to an object. If you know the distance,
Speaker 2: you can accurately calculate both its true size and its
Speaker 2: true speed.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's what they did in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: Yes, But for these August twenty twenty six Lunar reports,
Speaker 2: the Ukrainian team completely abandoned that method. The vinery of
Speaker 2: cstation relied entirely on single station line of sight tracking.
Speaker 2: They were using just one telescope.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I see where this is going. If you
Speaker 1: only have one camera, you lose depth perception.
Speaker 2: Precisely, when you only have one telescope looking at a
Speaker 2: dark dot moving across a bright background, you collide head
Speaker 2: on with the distant size speed degeneracy.
Speaker 1: The distant size speed degeneration.
Speaker 2: Is a fundamental limitation of optics. If you do not
Speaker 2: possess an independent way to measure exactly how far away
Speaker 2: the object is from your lens, you literally cannot know
Speaker 2: its true size or.
Speaker 1: Its true speed, because it could be anything.
Speaker 2: Mathematically speaking, a tiny, slow moving object located very close
Speaker 2: to your telescope looks identical on a two D sensor
Speaker 2: to a massive, incredibly fast object located hundreds of thousands
Speaker 2: of kilometers away.
Speaker 1: It's like going Imagine you are looking out the window
Speaker 1: of an airplane at cruising altitude. You see a dark
Speaker 1: shape flying past your window against the backdrop of the
Speaker 1: patchwork farm fields below right. If you assume the shape
Speaker 1: is way down there, thousands of feet below, skimming the ground,
Speaker 1: you might calculate that it's a massive Boeing seven forty
Speaker 1: seven flying at five hundred miles an hour, But in reality,
Speaker 1: it could just be a pigeon flying ten feet outside
Speaker 1: your window, exactly because it's a silhouette against the background
Speaker 1: without depth perception. The math for a distant seven forty
Speaker 1: seven and a close pigeon is exactly the same.
Speaker 2: That is a brilliant analogy, and that is precisely the
Speaker 2: trap the Ukrainian researchers fell into. They made one massive,
Speaker 2: unverified foundational assumption.
Speaker 1: They assumed it was at the moon.
Speaker 2: Yes, because the objects were visually crossing the face of
Speaker 2: the Moon in the telescope's eye piece. They simply assumed
Speaker 2: the objects were physically located at the Moon, which is
Speaker 2: roughly three hundred and eighty four thousand, four hundred kilometers away.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Every single mind bending calculation, the forty kilometer size, the
Speaker 2: twenty kilometer per second speed, the artificial gravity was entirely
Speaker 2: built on that single unverified assumption of distance.
Speaker 1: So the entire house of cards rests on the distance.
Speaker 1: Let's play with that math. What happens if we pull
Speaker 1: that assumed distance way back? What if the object isn't
Speaker 1: three hundred and eighty four thousand kilometers away in lunar orbit.
Speaker 2: Let's do exactly what the peer reviewers did and apply
Speaker 2: the kinematic math to a much more terrestrial common scenario.
Speaker 2: Let's assume the object is actually in.
Speaker 1: Lower orbit leo, Okay, much closer.
Speaker 2: Let's say it is orbiting about one thousand kilometers above
Speaker 2: the surface of the Earth, and it just happened to
Speaker 2: pass through the telescope's line of sight while they were
Speaker 2: filming the Moon.
Speaker 1: Got it.
Speaker 2: If we shrink the assumed distance in their formulas from
Speaker 2: three hundred and eighty four thousand, four hundred kilometers down
Speaker 2: to just one thousand kilometers, the math collapses instantly into reality.
Speaker 2: What happens to the doughnut that terrifying gravity generating thirty
Speaker 2: six kilometer wide toroid? It instantly shrinks down to just
Speaker 2: ninety three point six meters across.
Speaker 1: Wait a minute. Ninety three point six meters, Well, that
Speaker 1: isn't just a random number that feels incredibly specifically familiar
Speaker 1: in aerospace, It.
Speaker 2: Is extremely specific. Ninety three point six meters is the
Speaker 2: exact physical length and optical profile of a SpaceX Falcon
Speaker 2: nine upper stage rocket or a similarly sized standard piece
Speaker 2: of heavy orbital space debris.
Speaker 1: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 2: And let's look at the speed under this new distance assumption.
Speaker 2: It drops from a hypersonic impossible twenty kilometers per second
Speaker 2: down to a leisurely twenty eight point six meters per
Speaker 2: second relative to the observer's angular line of sight.
Speaker 1: And let me guess that speed is normal.
Speaker 2: That speed at that distance is the standard mundane orbital
Speaker 2: velocity of space junk.
Speaker 1: That is absolutely unbelievable. They thought they were looking at
Speaker 1: a Manhattan sized alien mothership cruising over lunar craters, but
Speaker 1: they were actually just staring at a discarded piece of
Speaker 1: Elon Musk's space junk drifting in Earth's orbit.
Speaker 2: It really is quite the realization.
Speaker 1: And the irony here is palpable, because, if I recall correctly,
Speaker 1: a falcon On upper stage actually did impact the Moon
Speaker 1: in August twenty twenty six, the entire cislunar environment was
Speaker 1: practically a junkyard of our own making at that time.
Speaker 2: Exactly we are polluting our own line of sight.
Speaker 1: But identifying the object as a rocket booster only solves
Speaker 1: the size and speed anomaly. True, we still have to
Speaker 1: dismantle the rest of their claims. For instance, what about
Speaker 1: the atmospheric anomalies. The researchers claimed they had video of
Speaker 1: objects positioned hundreds of kilometers apart on the lunar surface,
Speaker 1: flashing in perfect synchronous unison. How does a piece of
Speaker 1: dead space junk explain coordinated Morse code?
Speaker 2: It doesn't, and the objects weren't flashing. What the astronomers
Speaker 2: recorded was a classic fundamental optical phenomenon known as atmospheric scintillation.
Speaker 1: Scintillation is that the scientific term for why stars appear
Speaker 1: to twinkle when we look up at night.
Speaker 2: It is exactly that space is a vacuum, but Earth
Speaker 2: is wrapped in a thick blanket of moving gas. When
Speaker 2: light from a distant source, whether it's a star or
Speaker 2: sunlight reflecting off space debris, or the Moon itself, passes
Speaker 2: down through Earth's atmosphere to reach a telescope lens, it
Speaker 2: doesn't travel in a straight, unimpeded line.
Speaker 1: It gets messed up by the air.
Speaker 2: Right it hits turbulent layers of air. These layers have
Speaker 2: different temperatures, different densities, and shifting thermal currents. Think of
Speaker 2: the heat waves you see shimmering above black asphalt on
Speaker 2: a hot summer day.
Speaker 1: Oh sure, the mirage effect.
Speaker 2: Exactly that turbulence refracts, distorts, and modulates the intensity of
Speaker 2: the incoming light. Now consider the telescope at Vinerivka. It
Speaker 2: was zoomed in incredibly tight on the Moon. Its field
Speaker 2: of view was microscopic compared to the sky.
Speaker 1: So a tiny straw of vision.
Speaker 2: Therefore, the light paths from these separate objects on the
Speaker 2: Moon were traveling through the exact same narrow column of
Speaker 2: turbulent air to reach the camera sensor.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see it. So a massive thermal heat wave
Speaker 1: ripples through the upper atmosphere directly above the telescope in Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Because the field of view is so narrow, that single
Speaker 1: heat wave distorts the light of everything in the lens
Speaker 1: at the exact same moment.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Earth's atmosphere was literally acting like a dimmer switch,
Speaker 2: turning the light up and down. Wow, the objects on
Speaker 2: the Moon were not pulsing. The arab of the telescope
Speaker 2: was pulsing. It was a common mode atmospheric modulation.
Speaker 1: But wait, why did it look so sharp on the video?
Speaker 2: Because the telescope was shooting at such high frame rates
Speaker 2: up to fifty frames per second, it perfectly captured the
Speaker 2: high frequency shimmering of the atmosphere. The researchers fundamentally failed
Speaker 2: to filter out the environment, and.
Speaker 1: They misinterpreted a breeze in Earth's atmosphere as coordinated alien signaling.
Speaker 2: They really did.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the colossal size is a fatal math error
Speaker 1: based on single lens distance assumptions. The synchronous flashing is
Speaker 1: just atmospheric heat waves. But we still have one massive
Speaker 1: elephant in the room. The shapes the shapes. The researchers
Speaker 1: didn't just say they saw dark spots. They put these
Speaker 1: images through matt Lab and published pictures of highly distinct toroids, donuts,
Speaker 1: and flat discs if they were looking at a cylindrical
Speaker 1: Falcon nine rocket booster. How in the world does a
Speaker 1: computer algorithm accidentally turn a tube into a perfect hollow donut.
Speaker 2: This is perhaps the most fascinating cautionary technical error in
Speaker 2: the entire saga. It goes to the heart of how
Speaker 2: digital imaging works at the extreme limits of physics.
Speaker 1: Let's get into it.
Speaker 2: Remember the baseline data these objects had incredibly low contrast,
Speaker 2: just three percent to ten percent against the blindingly bright
Speaker 2: backdrop of the Moon. Furthermore, because of the distance and
Speaker 2: the size of the telescope lens, these objects were infinitesimally
Speaker 2: small on the actual camera sensor. How small we are
Speaker 2: talking about tiny faint specks of digital noise, barely two
Speaker 2: by two pixels wide. They were operating at the absolute
Speaker 2: unforgiving diffraction limit of the telescope's resolving power.
Speaker 1: So on the raw video feed, these objects were just
Speaker 1: barely perceptible gray smudges. You weren't clearly defined ships.
Speaker 2: Barely a smudge. Now what happens when you take a
Speaker 2: faint two pixel smudge near the diffraction limit of a
Speaker 2: lens and you run it through an aggressive extreme contrast
Speaker 2: enhancement mathematical algorithm in software like matt Lab.
Speaker 1: I mean, my intuition is that the software will clean
Speaker 1: up the image and reveal the hidden true details of
Speaker 1: the object, like those spy movies where they yell enhance.
Speaker 2: Right, But that is in how physics works. Instead of
Speaker 2: revealing the object, the software actually reveals the optical signature
Speaker 2: of the telescope itself.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by the telescope's signature, The telescope
Speaker 1: puts its own shape onto the image.
Speaker 2: Essentially, yes, every circular telescope lens has a specific, mathematically
Speaker 2: defined way it bends lightwaves. This is known in optics
Speaker 2: as its point spread function or.
Speaker 1: PSF okay, point spread function.
Speaker 2: When a point of light passes through a circular aperture,
Speaker 2: the light waves interfere with each other. This creates a
Speaker 2: specific pattern called an airy disc. It consists of a
Speaker 2: bright central point surrounded by a series of faint, concentric
Speaker 2: circular diffraction rings.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to picture that.
Speaker 2: If you drop a pebble into a completely still pond,
Speaker 2: you see a central splash surrounded by expanding circular ripples.
Speaker 2: An airy disc is exactly that, but made of light waves.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm visualizing the ripples in the pond. So the
Speaker 1: camera sensor is capturing this tiny speck, and because of
Speaker 1: the lens, that speck actually has a microscopic, invisible ripple
Speaker 1: of light around.
Speaker 2: It, exactly in the raw, unedited footage, you can't see
Speaker 2: the ripple because it's too faint. But mattlab algorithms are
Speaker 2: designed to find edges. They look for tiny differences in
Speaker 2: contrast and aggressively amplify them.
Speaker 1: Oh no, so when they cranked up the contrast.
Speaker 2: When the Ukrainian researchers artificially cranked up the contrast matrix
Speaker 2: on those two pixel smudges, the software algorithm locked onto
Speaker 2: that first diffraction ring, that first microscopic optical ripple of
Speaker 2: the airy disc, and mathematically amplified it. It grabbed the ripple,
Speaker 2: It brightened the ring and darkened the center. They mathematically
Speaker 2: transformed a blurry, solid dot of sensor noise into a
Speaker 2: hollow ring like geometric structure.
Speaker 1: They quite literally prompted a computer algorithm to generate a
Speaker 1: mathematical doughnut where absolutely none existed in physical reality.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the software just highlighted the flaws in the lens.
Speaker 1: That is wild. The software just hallucinated a spaceship out
Speaker 1: of a lens artifact. But what about the rotation? The
Speaker 1: paper went into immense detail calculated that donut was spinning
Speaker 1: four point three degrees every two seconds, which is how
Speaker 1: they got the artificial gravity claim.
Speaker 2: This is the tragic punchline to the entire study. They
Speaker 2: didn't measure a spinning spacecraft. They meticulously measured the rotation
Speaker 2: of the digital artifact. The four point three degrees of
Speaker 2: rotation over two seconds was simply a combination of the
Speaker 2: minor mechanical tracking errors of the telescope mount struggling to
Speaker 2: follow the moon, combined with the camera sensor's slight rotation
Speaker 2: and relative to the Earth's turning.
Speaker 1: Are you serious?
Speaker 2: Yes, that microscopic drift was mapped onto the artificially generated
Speaker 2: matt lab. Donut They calculated the centrifugal force of a
Speaker 2: telescope's tracking error.
Speaker 1: It is a breath taking cascade of cognitive and mathematical failures.
Speaker 1: A single lens miscalculation turns a piece of orbital garbage
Speaker 1: into a forty kilometers ship, a localized heat wave makes
Speaker 1: it look like it's transmitting Morse code, and a heavy
Speaker 1: handed computer algorithm turns a blurry pixel into a spinning
Speaker 1: gravity ring.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: It is the ultimate cautionary tale of how brilliant people
Speaker 1: can perform incredibly complex, rigorous math on fundamentally bad assumptions
Speaker 1: and end up writing total science fiction, which.
Speaker 2: Brings us to the inevitable fallout. Because when you publish
Speaker 2: a paper claiming you have mathematically proven the existence of
Speaker 2: gravity generating alien megastructures in cis lunar space, the broader
Speaker 2: scientific community is going to put your data under a microscope.
Speaker 1: I can imagine astronomy is a collaborative but fiercely critical field.
Speaker 1: You don't just draw bombshell like that without someone checking
Speaker 1: your math.
Speaker 2: And in August twenty twenty six, the pushback was incredibly
Speaker 2: swift and it was severe. The criticism didn't just come
Speaker 2: from external skeptics.
Speaker 1: Like Avi Low, it came from inside.
Speaker 2: The most devastating blow came from inside their own house.
Speaker 2: The Academic Council of the m O NASU, the very
Speaker 2: institution that employed the researchers, convened a formal emergency seminar
Speaker 2: to review the findings.
Speaker 1: Wow they call a council.
Speaker 2: They brought in independent physicists, optics experts, and data analysts,
Speaker 2: and the resulting report did not pull any punches. The
Speaker 2: council formally censured Zeliev and his colleagues, a.
Speaker 1: Formal censure from the highest council of your own institution.
Speaker 1: That is basically a career death sentence in academia. What
Speaker 1: were the specific charges in the censure?
Speaker 2: The council issued a public statement declaring that the processing, filtering,
Speaker 2: and interpretation of the observational results were conducted at an
Speaker 2: inadequate scientific level. They systematically pointed out the significant errors
Speaker 2: in determining the distance to the opbot. They eviscerated the
Speaker 2: lack of dual station triangulation, and most importantly, they criticized
Speaker 2: the team's complete failure to rule out both natural phenomena
Speaker 2: and artificial terrestrial objects like the rampant space debris.
Speaker 1: They basically said, you guys forgot to check for space junk.
Speaker 2: Yes, the Council accused the authors of postulating wildly unjustified
Speaker 2: conclusions without applying basic critical scientific analysis.
Speaker 1: It's a brutal rebuke, but absolutely necessary to protect the
Speaker 1: integrity of the institution. And you really have to look
Speaker 1: at the astronomical environment of August twenty twenty six to
Speaker 1: understand why the wider community was so frustrated.
Speaker 2: It was a very busy month in space exactly.
Speaker 1: This was objectively the worst possible time in recent history
Speaker 1: to point a telescope at a dark speck and immediately
Speaker 1: assume it was extraterrestrial. The sheer volume of cis lundor
Speaker 1: clutter in August twenty twenty six was unprecedented.
Speaker 2: The sky was an absolute mess of natural and artificial phenomena.
Speaker 2: In that single month. You had the perihelian and close
Speaker 2: Earth approach of Comet ten temple, which scattered dust and debris.
Speaker 1: Right and eclipses too right you had.
Speaker 2: A total solar eclipse that was partially visible in Ukraine,
Speaker 2: altering atmospheric lighting conditions. You had a partial lunar eclipse.
Speaker 2: You had a planetary conjunction of the Moon and Saturn.
Speaker 1: And on top of all of those natural events, as
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, you had a discarded SpaceX Falcon nine
Speaker 1: upper stage literally crashing into the lunar surface. The space
Speaker 1: between Earth and the Moon was a crowded.
Speaker 2: Highway, it really was.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, back on the ground, the country is still
Speaker 1: fighting a grinding, massive war. The researchers are living in
Speaker 1: a city where drones, cruise missiles, and artillery shells are
Speaker 1: constantly filling the sky and threatening their families.
Speaker 2: This is where Avi Lobe's final philosophical reflection on this
Speaker 2: entire saga becomes so deeply poignant. He noted that the
Speaker 2: scientific method does not stop at national borders, and it
Speaker 2: does not bend to human suffering cold like that, whether
Speaker 2: you are an experimentalist freezing in a war zone or
Speaker 2: a theoretical physicists sitting comfortably at Harvard, everyone must obey
Speaker 2: the same fundamental laws of logic, optics and thermodynamics.
Speaker 1: But when you look at it through the lens of
Speaker 1: human psychology. You can entirely see how the intense pressure
Speaker 1: of wartime survival could degrade those standard peer review filters.
Speaker 1: You absolutely can When you spend years looking at the
Speaker 1: sky desperately trying to identify hypersonic threats before they impact
Speaker 1: your city, your brain gets physically rewired. You lose that objective,
Speaker 1: academic distance.
Speaker 2: You want answers immediately because ambiguity equals death exactly.
Speaker 1: That primal urgency completely bypassed the slow, methodical, skeptical rigor
Speaker 1: that astronomy demands.
Speaker 2: It is a deeply human failure, not a mechanical one.
Speaker 2: The intertent house telescope functioned perfectly, the high speed camera
Speaker 2: captured exactly what was.
Speaker 1: There, and the software did what it was told.
Speaker 2: The software algorithms executed their mathematical commands exactly as programmed.
Speaker 2: It was the human interpretation and interpretation, heavily warped by stress, expectation, trauma,
Speaker 2: and flawed geometric assumptions that transformed ordinary space junk and
Speaker 2: microscopic optical artifacts into a phantom marmada.
Speaker 1: So, as we wrap up this massive investigation, what does
Speaker 1: this all mean for us? We've gone on quite an
Speaker 1: incredible journey.
Speaker 2: Today we really have.
Speaker 1: We started by looking at completely black phantom UFOs zooming
Speaker 1: over key at impossible speeds in twenty twenty two. We
Speaker 1: moved to front line military drone footage capturing spiked thermal
Speaker 1: spheres hovered over trenches in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: And it culminated in the staggering twenty twenty six claims
Speaker 2: of gravity generating forty kilometer megastructures tearing across the moon.
Speaker 1: And at every single step of that journey, we found
Speaker 1: that rigorous scientific analysis could explain this seemingly impossible.
Speaker 2: By looking at kinetic energy dissipation, applying parallax triangulation, understanding
Speaker 2: atmospheric scintillation, and decoding optical diffraction limits the supernatural dissolved
Speaker 2: into the mundane.
Speaker 1: It really highlights yu you listening right now need to
Speaker 1: arm yourself with a toolkit of critical thinking. When you
Speaker 1: are scrolling through your feed and you see a viral
Speaker 1: headline claiming an impossible world changing discovery, always take a
Speaker 1: breath and check the baseline methodology.
Speaker 2: Ask the simple boring questions.
Speaker 1: How many cameras did they use, did they actually physically
Speaker 1: measure the distance, or did they just assume it to
Speaker 1: make the math work. Because, as we've learned today, sometimes
Speaker 1: a forty kilometer alien spaceship is really just a blurry
Speaker 1: piece of an old Falcon nine rocket twisted by a
Speaker 1: math algorithm and a turbulent breeze.
Speaker 2: It serves as a beautiful, humbling reminder that the universe
Speaker 2: is complex and wondrous enough entirely on its own, without
Speaker 2: us needing to project our own mathematical artifacts and psychological
Speaker 2: fears onto it.
Speaker 1: Jil said.
Speaker 2: Discovering the truth requires immense patients, rigorous verification, and a
Speaker 2: willingness to accept that the boring explanation is almost always
Speaker 2: the correct one, which.
Speaker 1: Brings me to a final thought out what to leave
Speaker 1: you with. Given how easily advanced sensors, high end telescopes,
Speaker 1: and highly trained astronomers were completely tricked by ordinary space debris,
Speaker 1: atmosphere heat waves, and software contrast algorithms, it makes you
Speaker 1: wonder it really does. How much of our historical UFO
Speaker 1: footage do you think is just a trick of the lens? And,
Speaker 1: more importantly, in a world that is increasingly filled with
Speaker 1: both orbital junk and highly classified military secrets, how do
Speaker 1: we keep our minds open to the genuine possibility of
Speaker 1: the unknown without losing our grip on the fundamental laws
Speaker 1: of physics. Let us know what your stand is in
Speaker 1: the comments below. We would love to read your take
Speaker 1: on this.
Speaker 2: It's a delicate, vital balance we all have to strike
Speaker 2: as we look up at the stars.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us for this extensive
Speaker 1: deep dive on thrilling threads. We'll catch you next time
Speaker 1: as we unravel another incredible story from the edge of science.