Gimbal UFO - A New Analysis

The "Gimbal" UFO is the poster child of modern UFO videos. Leaked in 2017, and officially released in 2019, it's considered by many to show a genuine anomalous craft, exhibiting flight characteristics beyond current human technology.

But is it? There are four observables in the video, four things you can check yourself, that demonstrate that the most likely thing we are looking at is actually a camera artifact. It's probably an infrared glare, hiding the hot object behind it, and rotating only because the camera rotates when tracking the target from left to right.

This does not mean it's not a "UAP", or that it's not unidentified, or that it's not an amazing craft - it just means it's not actually exhibiting any incredible behavior, and so this opens the door to more mundane possibilities, like a distant small jet, just flying away, the heat of the engines (viewed up the exhaust) creating a large glare in the thermal camera.

Edward Current's analysis of possible target flight paths.
   • “Gimbal” UFO 3D Reconstruction (likel...  

Simulator: https://www.metabunk.org/gimbal/

00:00 Introduction
00:22 The Four Observables
01:18 What's going on
01:59 What I'm not Addressing
02:27 A full 3D recreation
03:01 The ATFLIR camera
03:25 Field of View less than the Moon.
03:55 External Gimbal Axes
05:05 Tracking left to right
05:45 Why the rotation?
06:45 Incorporating Bank in the sim
08:15 Rotating the camera rotates the image
08:47 Derotation
09:07 Real world derotation
09:22 Glare examples
10:21 Glare does not rotate
10:43 Glare derotated "rotates"
11:06 Dero does not rotate it alone
11:27 Differences between sim and video
12:05 ATFLIR's inner mirrors
12:51 Minimizing roll
13:23 Incorporating the glare angle in the sim
13:46 Observable #1 - No rotation while banking
15:23 Observable #2 - Bumps before rotation
16:01 Observable #3 - Rotating patterns
16:24 Observable #4 - Derotation match
17:12 TL/TW? Implications if it's not a glare....
17:58 Background information
19:23 Patent limitations
20:06 Credits

realityseaker's original research on the first 20 seconds.
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Metabunk Discussions:

Investigation the role of pitch and other facts in the glare angle, Markus.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/calc...

Edward Current's work on a full 3D model of the object's movement:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/gimb...

realityseaker and Edward Current on the initial lack of rotation during banking.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/does...

Using OpenCV to track the cloud motion
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/auto...

Credits:

Many Thanks to

Markus Pitch, Graphs, Data, etc
Edward Current 3D Path analysis
Chris Lehto Early Feedback
Mendel Analysis
Robert Hildebrandt ATFLIR Model
jplaza Analysis
jarlrmai Analysis
dimebag2 Analysis
Multiple Anonymous A variety of help

And many more, thank you all for the helpful analysis, valuable feedback and criticism, and useful discussions.


Source code
If you just want to read the code, then it's mostly in a single file:
https://www.metabunk.org/attachments/...

If you want to edit/run the code, and look at the data, then there's a full zip of the project directory. It needs to be run on a server (which can be a local server) due to the local file loading.
https://www.metabunk.org/f/gimbal-sou...

There's one additional external dependency, the Three.js library, and a variety of utilities from the examples/jsm folder. Here's the version I'm using. This should be in a folder three.js in the root of the server (which you can obviously change in the code).
https://www.metabunk.org/attachments/...