Description

I am an engineer with experience working on infrared sensors. I worked at Goddard's DCL (Detector Characterization Lab) while we developed the TIRS satellite imaging system—which uses infrared to detect all kinds of interesting stuff like moisture content and fires. Imagine a guy in a white "bunny suit" inside a clean room, working with aluminum dewars to cool satellite imagers to cryo temps—that's me.

Nowadays, I'm film editor in LA. This combination of experience, I think, gives me the bona fides to comment on the veracity of this video. I chuckled when I first saw this video—it's very clearly a fake to me. but a chuckle doesn't convince anyone else, so I'm hoping this will.

As the camera pans across the sky, following the plane, an "inkblot" effect appears and the plane disappears behind it. But what of the sky? In two frames, you can see that the inksplot doesn't track with the rest of the frame. It's stationary—and the sky moves behind it.

If the "explosion" were real, it would track with the rest of the sky, but it doesn't—the sky very clearly moves behind it while the inkspot stays stationary in the frame. Video editors will very quickly recognize this as an overlayed effect—one that our mystery author forgot to track with the motion of the camera.