- The president of the organization that
sued for the video footage, also made an appearance on Fox on the
same day of the government-released video clips. He appeared for a few
minutes on Mr. O'Reilly's show, on which the new footage was also
aired. On that show, the JW president made the absurd statement "this
definitely proves a plane was present." Even O'Reilly, well known
as a staunch supporter of the administration was forced to state "I
can't see a plane there."
-
-
- Yet the very next day, I heard the same
Judicial Watch president live on a radio show sing a completely different
tune about what could be seen, and that "more footage is to be released
soon." The reason for his flip-flop opinion will probably never be
known, unless his bank account (or JW) had a mysterious large deposit of
untraceable origin that day. Supposedly more footage is to be released,
but has not as of this writing. One can imagine the bickering going
on inside the pentagon over this matter. After all, this isn't like doing
post-production work on a motion picture that can take months. All an un-named
employee must do is to take 5 minutes and make a copy of good RAW video
footage and release it. No credits, no music, no editing. Period.
-
-
- Unfortunately, with professional video
editing workstations used in motion pictures today, the next footage that
shows a plane will be perfect and undetectable as a fake. And it will appear
near election time or about the time Iran is to be invaded, when voters
at the polls will remember it and think the "war on terror" is
justified. Even though no jumbo-jet was ever there. The biggest problem
the government has? There never was a plane.
-
-
- WHERE ARE THE OTHER CAMERA TAPES?
-
-
- The current video footage recently released
has a very slow frame rate of about frame per second, which could
never be used to conclusively prove a plane was actually present that
never touched the lawn or the giant wooden cable spools in the way.
But what of the other 80+ video cameras from various businesses all around
that side of the pentagon? Why are these videos still missing? We know
that at the hotel across the road from the building, the staff were rewinding
and watching the surveillance camera video tape over and over when the
feds came in and took it. What was it they saw, and why haven't any of
them come forward to testify what they saw? In the following analysis,
we will look at whether or not a standard, real-time video camera such
as those commonly used will actually be able to capture the image of an
aircraft. For worse-case speed in the following analysis, we will assume
that the fictional aircraft has an average airspeed just before
impact of 500MPH.
-
-
- A SHORT PRIMER ON NTSC VIDEO
-
-
- This is by far the most common surveillance camera
video standard still used in the United States and Canada. NTSC is an acronym
for the National Television Systems Committee. Use of this standard [1]
insures low cost recording on almost any standard American VCR. The NTSC
video specification defines a fixed video field rate of 59.94 FIELDS (not
completed images) per second. There are TWO randomly interlaced FIELDS
of video in each video FRAME. Each field has 262.5 scan
lines, for a total of 525 scan lines required to form the completed image.
(In actual use, about 486 scan lines are usable, since many scan lines
are reserved for sync, retrace and other network signals such as color
control, data, closed captioning, timing, etc...) With LCD televisions,
almost all of the 486 scan lines are visible. About 400 lines are
visible with CRT-based televisions, as a result of intentional overscanning
off the screen at the top and bottom. The missing scan lines are used
to compensate for power line and television circuitry fluctuations which
may cause a reduction in vertical picture size, producing a black bar(s)
at the top and/or bottom of the screen.
-
-
- On older televisions when the picture
shrank vertically from a defective electronic component, one could
see a fat black arrow in the middle of a thick black bar at the top
of the screen. That was just the appearance of the video sync.embedded
in the video scanning. However, it is not what the sync. signal actually
looks like. (Normally these lines are never visible.)
-
-
- The actual NTSC video frame rate is 59.97/2,
giving us 29.98 completed frames of video/second. This is why when you
look at something off to the side of a CRT-based television screen you
can perceive a slight flicker. The peripheral vision of the retina in your
eye has a higher frequency response than at the center of the retina.
Therefore, you can perceive the video frame rate.
-
-
-
- PROOF WHY A PLANE WILL BE SEEN ON VIDEO
IF PRESENT
-
- No one that I know of has attempted to
analyze this issue purely from a video frame rate perspective. A video
camera can be thought of as a crude stroboscopic still camera capturing
60 individual still fields (NOT frames) per second when played back on
a recorder or computer, with a pause or still frame capability that
can display the individual fields. We will be concentrating on
the camera's horizontal viewing distance, since this is the expected path
of the plane at ground level.
-
- Standard NTSC video is still used
in many low cost surveillance cameras. It does not create the jerky, slow
motion video one sees from a web or computer network camera running
at 1 to 5 frames/sec. using considerable compression. With NTSC video,
no compression is involved. (The actual NTSC spec. predates all forms of
computer video compression by many decades.)
-
- With two interlaced fields per NTSC
image frame, each complete frame requires 0.0333 seconds (33 milliseconds)
for a complete video frame. For our point of reference, let's
consider an outdoor camera that could easily cover approximately 500ft. or more of horizontal distance. This could
easily be the situation with a camera at the gas station across
the street from the pentagon. It will probably cover an even
wider field, since any camera's field of view is an infinitely widening
cone (although the focus of the camera's lens and resolution drop off
with distance.)
-
- With all that said, let's do some numbers
to see if the plane will be captured by an ordinary NTSC video camera.
Some readers may see this as the long way to calculate it, but this
will clearly illustrate my point:
-
- 1. First, let's convert the plane's distance
it travels into feet so it can be compared to the horizontal view of a
video camera. A plane traveling at 500MPH (500MPH x 5,280ft (or 1 mile) travels
2,640,000 ft. in one hour.
-
- 2. There are 3600 seconds in one hour.
2,640,000ft. per hour/3600 seconds = 733.333. Therefore, our missing
plane travels at 733.333ft. per second, which is slightly more than twice
as fast as a Formula 1 race car. Although this is fast it won't be
invisible.
-
- 3. As stated eariler, we will assume
that a typical surveillance camera conservatively covers about 500ft on
the horizontal axis (from left to right.) This will equate to 68% of the
733ft. our plane travels in one second. Of course, this would require an
unobstructed field of view. Many outdoor cameras have the focus set to
infinity (or near infinity) to capture everything in the camera's field
of view. Therefore, the length of time that the camera will capture images
of the plane will be considerable longer.
-
- 4. Let's return to our video calculations
above. Every 33 THOUSANDTHS OF A SECOND we have a completed, interlaced
video field which covers about 500ft. of horizontal space. If we take
68% (from step 3 above) of 29.98 complete frames/second, we are left with
20.386 usable frames/sec.
-
- Conservatively, this means that
some or all of an aircraft will be visible in AT LEAST 20 FRAMES (or 40
FIELDS) OF VIDEO.
-
- And even though it will be blurred,
an aircraft will be visible. We will NOT see any background buildings
or trees in the distance wherever the body of the plane is in any
video frame.
-
- Consider a race car at the track covered
by today's NTSC video cameras. Even when the car zips past a fixed track-side
camera only a dozen or so feet away from the lens at more than 200MPH,
one can still see something in the video image. If the same car was moving
at 500MPH twice the distance away from the same camera, the effect would
be about the same. The farther an object is from a camera, the slower it
will appear to move. When you look up in the sky at a jet traveling
at 550MPH just a few miles above you, it appears to move very slowly simply
because of the distance. When watching planes land at a nearby airport,
one may not imagine that the aircraft land at speeds around 100MPH.
-
- >From this analysis we have been able
to prove that not just one frame, but that 20 frames or more will
show any aircraft in the distance. And if the camera ran at a slower video
rate, such as 15 full frames per second? Then we would see the
image of the plane in at least 10.2 frames.
-
- Now all we need is just ONE of the missing
80+ tapes that shows an aircraft.
-
- That is - if any of these recordings still
exist.
-
- Ted Twietmeyer
-
- www.data4science.net
-
- VIDEO STANDARD REFERENCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC
- (Note: The above cited video standard
does have one small error regarding frame rate, which I corrected
above.)
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