Description

The drone video shows a balloon moving upwards at a slight rate. Any other “erratic” movement is an optical illusion created by the drone/camera. Since many people on this sub fail to understand parallax, I’ve gone and explained it here with a demonstration in Blender.

I’ve set the focal length of the camera to 166mm since that’s what the drone specified comes with: https://www.dji.com/mobile/mavic-3-pro/specs?startPoint=0

As you can see, even as the ground plane seems to make minimal movement, the balloon makes erratic movement. This is because of the focal length of the lens and because the camera is rotating on an axis to match the movement of the ground as the drone moves through space, causing a rapid movement in the opposite direction of any object in between, especially if it’s much closer to the camera than the ground (like the balloon). And this demonstration uses a stationary object to show it’s possible with anything whether it’s moving or not.

At 4:55 in the original video, the drone stops making any movements and you can see the balloon’s natural movements. It’s simply moving up.

This was an extremely quick and dirty demonstration, someone with more time could possibly recreate the whole scenario with the available flight data. Hopefully this is a good starter explanation for those who can’t to see why it’s just an optical illusion.

Lastly, I don’t think the original uploader had malicious intent with this video, I think they also fell for the optical illusion. If you look through OPs post history, you can see they have a strong bias towards UFOs being real, so this is just a result of that bias.