All credit goes to LunaCognita aka Cary Martynuik.
Video Description:
In this presentation, we will be taking a closer look at a very interesting bit of amateur video footage shot in Salida, Colorado back in 1995 by a man named Tim Edwards, showing an Unidentified Object in the sky.
Since Mr. Edwards shot this footage, it has been shown in several different television and film documentaries that deal with the UFO phenomenon - and with good reason in my opinion. This was a clear sky, broad daylight sighting (approx
9:30am local time), providing Mr. Edwards with excellent seeing/filming conditions. The footage shot by Mr. Edwards provides us a decent look at this unidentified object
, and in addition, it is worth noting that there were also multiple confirmed eyewitnesses to this incident as well, including Mr. Edwards young daughter (who was the first to sight the UFO in the sky and draw her father's attention to it). These other eyewitnesses provide powerful supporting testimony and confirmation that should effectively nullify any concerns anyone may have regarding the possibility of this footage being a hoax. It is indeed authentic footage of a confirmed unidentified flying object caught on tape.
As you will see in this presentation, the raw footage of this incident suffers from significant camera shake due to the unavoidable fact that Mr. Edwards did not have access to a tripod at the time and the camera lens was zoomed in @ 8x to allow for high magnification filming of the UFO. The application of image stabilizing techniques to compensate for the camera shake can therefore afford us an improved, cleaner look at what I feel should be already considered as some impressive footage.
The raw copy of the Edwards footage I used as the Alpha source file for this presentation was acquired from a History Channel television documentary dealing with the UFO phenomenon. I chose this particular version of the Edwards footage to serve as the Alpha file simply because it was the best quality copy I was able to obtain.
In this presentation, I broke the footage into two different segments, labeled as Sequence
#1 and Sequence
#2. The first sequence is a 14.5 second portion of the footage that shows both the UFO in the sky as well as a near-field stable object in frame - the edge of the roof of the building that Edwards was standing beside at the time of filming can be seen throughout the duration of this first sequence on the lower right side of the field-of-view (FOV). Because of this, I elected to do two different stabilized versions of sequence#1.
Version A of sequence
#1 targets the UFO itself, locking it in place in the FOV by correcting for any camera motion along both the X and Y axises (left-right/up-down).
Version B of sequence
#1 is an "X-axis only" (left/right) stabilizing correction that ignores the UFO and instead targets the edge of the roof that is visible on the right side of the FOV. No attempt was made to correct along the Y-axis here (up/down) even though there clearly is up/down camera shake occurring, and the reason is because there is simply no discernible feature visible along the edge of the roof that can be used to determine the required Y-axis corrections. It does appear as if the corner of the roof enters into view for a split-second at the bottom of the FOV in sequence#1, but it is not visible long enough to exploit for positioning data, so was ignored. Rather than attempt to determine Y-axis corrections using the UFO movement for that data, I instead elected to show only the X-axis fix in that version.
Sequence
#2 is a 13 second segment of footage showing the UFO that does not have the edge of the roof visible in the FOV. For this sequence, I show the raw footage with a picture-in-picture stabilized and contrast enhanced view of the UFO, followed by a magnified version of the same scene as well.
I did not attempt to make any Z-axis (rotational) stabilizing corrections at all in this presentation because by my estimation, the exclusion of these rotation corrections did not in any way negatively influence the viewability of the scene. Several interpolated/blur frames were deleted from the final renderings of each stabilized example in an effort to clean that motion-corrected footage up as much as possible.
For those interested, MUFON investigator Bruce Maccabee wrote an excellent article outlining the facts of this compelling UFO incident that was filmed by Tim Edwards, and that article can be read online here -
http://www.qtm.net/~geibdan/news2/drb.html
Fellow researcher "Easynow" has also compiled and presented some of the information related to this particular UFO case and made it available on his blog for everyone. Thanks Easy!
http://easynowsufoblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/multiple-witness-ufo-sighting-salida.html
Cheers everyone,
LC
LunaCognita@gmail.com