Description

So everyone's been talking about the six-pointed star shape in that PR104 Yellow Sea video from the last Pentagon release. Got curious whether the star was actually part of the object or something else, so I grabbed the official DVIDS file and spent a few hours going through it frame by frame.

Couple things stood out. The six spikes stay in the exact same orientation relative to the screen for the whole clip, even while the sensor's panning to track it. They're arranged in three straight pairs, all crossing through the same hot spot in the middle. When I averaged a bunch of frames together the spikes actually got sharper instead of blurring out. That only makes sense if they're locked to the screen, not tumbling around with whatever's actually out there.

https://preview.redd.it/ijx9hg2t57dh1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=…

Basically looks a lot more like a lens/sensor artifact (diffraction or glare around something really hot and small) than the actual shape of whatever's causing the heat signature

Doesn't tell you what it actually was though - still could be a balloon, a plane, a flare, whatever. Not enough in the public file to nail that down imo. Just seems like the star shape specifically probably isn't the part worth chasing.Wrote up the full thing with file hashes, frame extraction, a test against another PURSUE video as a control, and a rough optical simulation that reproduces the pattern - link below if anyone wants to dig into the actual numbers or tell me I got something wrong.

https://www.theexclusionzone.com/yellow-sea-star-pr104-forensic-analy… (https://www.theexclusionzone.com/yellow-sea-star-pr104-forensic-analy…)