On June 10, 2018, an overnight weather webcam on Whidbey Island, WA captured this image of an unidentified object:
The weather webcam belongs to Greg Johnson, who is the owner of Skunkbayweather.com.
This website is fairly well-known for it's weather webcams, which Greg has been maintaining for over 10 years.
Initially, Greg thought the object was a missile, which prompted him to post the image on the internet so that more people could research it. Somewhere along the way, Greg became aware of a helicopter that was tracked by radar in that area, at that time. After talking to the crew of the helicopter, this was Greg's final verdict:
So in the end, the webcam owner said it was unquestionably a helicopter.
Below I will go through all of the evidence, and explain how a helicopter could produce an image that looks like a missile.
Analysis:
Anyone familiar with camera illusions, knows that a single picture is not always what it seems, because a 2D image does not always accurately capture what is happening in 3D space. So to begin, we first need to examine the equipment/methods that were used to capture the image.
Greg provided this quote about his setup:
I contacted Greg, to confirm that 3.5 was referring to the aperture setting, and he confirmed that was the case.
A 20 second exposure is a big clue as to what is going on. Anyone who has taken long exposure shots of moving objects, knows that the resulting images are often extremely distorted, or invisible, depending on many variables. If there are lights on the object, quite often the lights leave long light trails in the picture... and that is what's happening here.
What we are looking at are the light trails of a helicopter, as it moves through the 20 second exposure. What looks like the body of the missile, is really the rear navigation light on the helicopter.
The exposure starts with the helicopter already in frame, and the rear light trail merges into the brighter searchlight trail, as the helicopter moves away from the camera during the exposure.
This graphic helps visualize the orientation of everything:
We can confirm this phenomenon by examining boats that pass in front of the camera during that same recording. They exhibit the EXACT same type of behavior... small lights that merge into brighter lights, as the boat moves through the exposure.
Here I have rotated the boat and put it next to the mystery object, for a direct comparison:
As you can see, they create the EXACT same shape.
The primary reason people rejected the possibility of a helicopter, is because they couldn't understand how a helicopter could produce a shape that appears to be the defined cylindrical body of a missile. However, as I have just shown, we observe the exact same shape occurring on passing boats.
It logically follows that if a boat can make that shape, a helicopter can as well.
Furthermore, it is exactly what one would expect to see, if a long exposure was taken of a moving object that had multiple lights on it.
An additional aspect of the illusion, involves the graininess of the photo, and the width differences between the two lights.
The pixelation of the enlarged photo causes the small light trail to appear to have a shaded body on the right side. The fact that the small light trail is located on the edge of the large light trail, greatly enhances this illusion.
Both of these factors give the illusion that there is a physical object present, that is the same width as the larger light trail.
If we isolate the 'object' by itself, without the width of the larger light at the base, it loses the illusion of a shaded right half... appearing as a normal thin light trail.
The perspective of the camera is also a factor.
On first glance, it appears that the object is moving vertically through the clouds, but that's an illusion due to the perspective of the camera. The helicopter is passing directly overhead, horizontally, towards the land in the background.
This picture shows how a horizontally moving object can appear to be moving vertically, depending on your perspective:
Helicopters often travel with the nose pitched down slightly, which would cause the extremely bright and downward pointed searchlight to be more visible from this orientation, than a normal front navigation light normally would be.
Here is a video of an air ambulance extremely similar to the one that passed over the webcam, and you can see that it's nose is pitched down as it travels forward.
The brightness of the searchlight makes the resulting light trail it leaves behind, appear almost glowing, resembling a burning exhaust trail.
In this long exposure of an airplane, you can see that on the far right side, it produces a light trail similar to what we see with the mystery object... a well defined, almost glowing trail, that could be mistaken for a burning exhaust trail, without context.
Another characteristic of long exposure photography, is the tendency of moving objects to disappear.
If a long exposure is taken of a fast moving object, generally the object is either heavily distorted, or invisible. For example, in this long exposure photograph of a highway, the light trails are visible, but the vehicles themselves are not.
If the mystery object was a missile, we would not expect the body of it to be captured on a long exposure shot.
Again, we can use the boats from the same recording to confirm this phenomenon. When they are enlarged, we observe that the body of the boats are invisible... it is only their lights that were captured on the exposure.
If the body of a relatively slow moving boat was not captured by the camera, we wouldn't expect the body of a missile to be captured either. This further supports the claim that we are not looking at the body of a missile, in the webcam photo.
Finally, let's discuss the evidence that supports the claim that there was a helicopter in that area, at that time.
Here, Greg shows the location of the webcam, and the direction it is pointed:
A live radar feed captured an aircraft with the registration number N952AL flying over the Whidbey Island webcam, at the same time that the object was captured on video.
(Time is in UTC)
That registration number corresponds to an air ambulance registered to Airlift Northwest. When contacted, they confirmed that their flight path passed directly over the webcam at that precise time:
Later, they provided more information about the flight, stating that the searchlight was retracted but not switched off:
This is all consistent with the location and appearance of the mystery object in the webcam photo.
Conclusion:
Normally, a helicopter on radar, along with confirmation from the crew, would be the end of the story on an unidentified flying object showing up in a photograph. However, in this case the resulting image was so unusual, that it quickly spawned many theories online.
Before the knowledge of the helicopter route was known, the rumor that a missile had been fired off the coast of Washington state was in full gear, especially in communities devoted to unusual/alternative news.
Even if a person wanted to claim that the radar footage and the report from the crew were faked, I think the video itself is the one of the strongest pieces of evidence we have, that we are looking at light trails from a helicopter. The light trails from the boats produce the same shape, and their physical bodies are not visible.
To sum it up:
Do we have a clear picture of a helicopter? We certainly do not... but lets consider the evidence we have for either theory.
Evidence that supports a helicopter:
- Radar data of a helicopter in that location, at that time.
- Confirmation from the crew that flew the route.
- An image that matches the light trails left by the moving boats in the same video, which is consistent with what one would expect from a long exposure shot of a vehicle with multiple lights.
- Basic photography knowledge that moving objects generally disappear on long exposures, confirmed by the boats in the video.
Evidence that supports a missile:
- It looks like a missile
It may seem flippant to summarize the evidence for a missile that way, but it's accurate... the only evidence we have that it is a missile, is that the picture looks like a missile.
At the end of the day, the evidence overwhelmingly points to the object being a helicopter. The owner of the recording equipment, who is very experienced with it, also believes it is unquestionably a helicopter.
Feel free to leave comments, or email me at wmerthon@mail.com if you would like to discuss this topic further.
Rebuttals:
Below I will go over some of the more common rebuttals I have seen.
1. Lack of additional navigation lights.
Besides the rear navigation light, aircraft are required to have lights on the left and right sides of the aircraft. I have seen some people say that the lack of additional navigation lights being visible, means it isn't a helicopter.
Again I point back to the fact that this is a 2d image trying to recreate 3d space... on top of that, it is a 20 second exposure. A single picture is far from concrete evidence, in regards to something like this.
To explain what I mean, I have selected several clear examples of aircraft captured on long exposures, where the navigation lights do not consistently show up in the pictures.
All of these images come from this video. I've included a link to full size below each picture, if you would like to zoom in for closer inspection.
In this example, two aircraft are in frame at the same time. Both are required to have multiple navigation lights, but they only show up on one of the aircraft:
This example shows two photographs of the same aircraft, two frames apart:
Different aircraft, same location:
Same aircraft, one frame difference:
As you can see, just because all directional lights are not visible on a long exposure photograph of an aircraft, in no way does that mean that they are not present on the aircraft.
This is a perfect example of how photographs, and specifically long exposure photographs, can be misleading.
2. Dragging the shutter.
There is one unique situation that I have seen mentioned, in which the body of a missile 'might' be visible in a long exposure shot. This is more of a thought experiment, because to my knowledge there are no examples of it occurring in a similar situation, but I will still discuss it.
A long exposure works by keeping the shutter open so that photons accumulate on the sensor. The amount of photons that show up from any one area during the exposure, determine what is displayed. Stationary objects reflect many photons from one area, while moving objects reflect comparatively few photons as they pass through those same areas. This results in stationary objects being visible, but objects in motion being blurred or invisible.
There is a technique that some photographers use called 'dragging the shutter', in which they will take a long exposure photograph of a moving object, but provide a flash of light at the very end, so that the moving object will be fully illuminated in it's final position, and be more visible in the picture.
This is an example:
It's theorized that under the right conditions, the burning exhaust of a missile could provide enough illumination for the body of the missile to be reflected onto the sensor in the last instant. In theory it makes sense, but there are two major problems.
One, if this were to happen, you would expect the lower section of the missile body to be more defined than the upper section, since the source of illumination is at the bottom. Examining the mystery object (the small light trail), we see that it remains essentially the same brightness over its entire length.
Secondly, and more importantly, there are no examples of this happening. While it's difficult to recreate the exact conditions, there are many long exposure pictures of missiles/rockets, but none have the body of the missile/rocket present. If the exposure was set to a very short time... say 1/2 a second... it would be more plausible, but in this case, the exposure was 20 seconds long.
I consulted with several online photography communities, and the professional photographers I talked with agreed that it would be extremely unlikely, if not impossible, for the defined body of a missile to be captured under these circumstances.
3. Unnatural illumination of the environment.
Some have said that the entire environment was illuminated by the object, claiming that the exhaust of the missile was so intense, that it made the entire sky appear unnaturally bright, which a helicopter could not do.
It's true that the sky brightens considerably around the time that the mystery object appears, and it also happens before sunrise should have occurred that day.
This is easily explained by looking at recordings of previous nights, from the same camera. In those, you will also notice the sky start to brighten around the same time, which proves it is not due to the mystery object. It happens because the webcam owner has adjusted the settings specifically for night time recording, which causes the environment to look brighter than normal.
Here is a video recorded 5 days prior to the mystery object's appearance, and you can see the sky brighten around the same time.
Also, this likely plays a role in making the searchlight appear to look more like a burning exhaust trail, than it would if no night time filters were applied.
Here is a quote from one of the professional photographers I was discussing this with, who confirms that these settings will alter the brightness of the video:
References:
Several people around the internet have posted research that got me started on this path, and whose data/reasoning I may have intentionally or unintentionally referenced in my analysis.
I would like to particularly acknowledge these sources:
This thread is full of great information, and some really detailed discussion about the object. It's a great read to watch them try to unravel the mystery almost in real time. This thread laid the foundation for my analysis, and I reference several examples from it.
That forum has a lot of well researched and interesting debate about similar unexplained, or controversial, topics. Highly recommended, either for entertainment or research.
This is one of (if not 'the') first articles that went through a lot of the evidence, primarily focused on the radar of the helicopter, and the conversations with the helicopter crew. While there was a slight mistake in their description of what caused part of the image, the article is a great summary of everything, and is the source of some of my examples related to the helicopter evidence.
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