Yesterday we fished through the the fishing story behind - how, where, and why - this picture of an unidentified flying object was taken.  All-in-all the story matches up with reality.  On to the photograph…

For the purposes of this exposition we used (and when I say we, I mean me) IRIS Photography Software that is primarily designed for and used for Astronomical Photographs.  There are some very interesting aspects of the UFO photograph, but before we go over them we need to wade through the sea of aircraft that already exist and compare them to this photograph.  Also we will use the term UFO to describe the mystery aircraft, this being, that UFO does not stand for alien craft, rather Unidentified Flying Object.

As a last note, if you believe me to be wrong on any of the points I’ve made, feel free to email me, with evidence I would be happy to change what’s written here.

Existing Planes

F-35, F-22, F-18, F-16 (including the F-16XL), F-15, F-14 - all these aircraft do not fit the profile for this UFO.  The forward fuselage is longer and further from the supposed engine intake area of this UFO.  Furthermore the rear end, everything past the “nose” portion of the UFO, is too wide to be any F-# aircraft in existence.  Finally, small fighter aircraft flying at altitudes where contrails form (above 26,000 to 28,000) are not as observable as a 747.  Therein, it’s more then likely this UFO is bigger then a fighter jet.

The SAAB 35, Draken, while having the delta shape and extended nose section, similar to the UFO, the rear end on the Draken sticks out because of its engine - the UFO does not exhibit this characteristic.  The SR-71 is big enough to be spotted, as is, however its profile does not match very well.  The SR-71 has a slightly extended rear end, and the nose section of the SR-71 is about the same size, in length, as the delta wing section (each section takes up the forward and rear half of the aircraft, respectively); the UFO’s rear section is a bit bigger then the nose section.  As for the rear end of the SAAB 35 and SR-71, the UFO has a sizeable notch in its rear.  Overall, though, a varient of the SR-71 would most likely fit the UFO’s profile, as a rear notch and bigger engines are more modern productions.

MiGs are also a possibility but like the F-# aircraft they are not comparably wide enough and the wings of the modern MiGs start where the pilot sits, which could not be the case for the UFO.  Chinese aircraft are another possibility, but with the lack of data on Chinese aircraft, especially their experimental regime, one cannot make side-by-side comparisons.   That being the case, in general, Chinese fighters exhibit a delta wing configuration where the wing begins well after the pilot’s seat, some (like the J-10) have smaller canards, and multiple (but smaller) engines.

If anything, among existing aircraft from the Super-Nations of the present-day, a variant of the SR-71 or some experimental Chinese aircraft are likely candidates for the UFO (keeping in mind there is no reason to believe the Chinese would be piloting the UFO, rather like the U.S. did with the MiGs, it would have been captured/stolen/rebuilt by the U.S. and, again like the MiGs, housed at Area-51).

UFO Characteristics

Keeping in mind those aircraft we just mentioned, look for the characteristics mentioned above, and how they don’t match.

All images here are cropped, rotated 90 degrees to the right, tilted - perspectivly - to compensate for the aircraft’s supposed climb, and blown up by a factor of around ten using a bicubic interpolation from the original photograph.  Each image has a “figure” label; the second figure is in keeping with the original coloring of the photograph, albeit ten times larger.

Figure 1 shows us the UFO with the edges bled and sharpened, meaning the edges are all exaggerated but continuous.  The striking elements of the photograph are pointed out with the red arrow(s).  At Figure 1 - A, and highlighted in red to make it more visible, we see two protruding booms, projecting out of the nose of the aircraft.  Most experimental aircraft have these projections for taking measurements, most operational aircraft have smaller versions and usually one one boom out the nose.  The F-117 has multiple protruding booms, but but they are much smaller.  It is important to note that NASA recently conducteda supersonic test that used a large extended boom to combat supersonic shockwaves.  However, as one can see in Figure 1 there are two booms, which would seem to defeat the supersonic boom-combatant stance, but that being said I’m no expert on supersonic flow theory, so two may be better then one and we can’t rule that out.

We also can’t rule out that these projections could be coincidentally parallel “artifacts” in the photo.  I don’t find this too likely as no other parts of the UFO depict any sort of artifacts (or any other parts of the photo on the whole), and these two booms also seem to sharpen to a point, which is traditional nose-boom design.  Finally these two booms do appear in Figure 2 below, with original color, but they are not as clear.

Keeping with Figure 1 and 2, we can also observe, as the arrows point in Figure 1 - B, that the UFO does not have symmetrical contrails (about the traditional y-axis).  Contrails can either form off of lifting surfaces or from engine exhaust, I do not believe they can form off of a vertical tail surface.  It is unlikely that the thicker center contrail is due to any surface of the plane, we can decidedly conclude that it is due to engine exhaust.  The right contrail is thinner then the central contrail; if we were to assume that it was due to a surface of the plane, then it would beg the question why isn’t their a similar thinner contrail on the symmetrically opposed left side.  We can readily assume that the aircraft is symmetrical, and that because there is no contrail on the left side the right side contrail cannot be due to a surface of the aircraft.

The only other option being that it is due to engine exhaust, as well, which would place the symmetrically opposed left side engine - offline.  This can lead us to our first general theory: this UFO was flying at visible low altitudes because it could not maintain higher altitudes with only 2 out of a 3 engines, and to maintain the stability of the craft the thrust of the symmetrically opposed engine, to that of the offline engine, was throttled down.

(Pt. 3 to come tomorrow…)