One cause for the apparent speed is parallax. If the target is far closer to the camera platform than to the ocean below, the effect is multiplying the camera platform speed by the ratio of the distances. What is not shown is the view from the other camera platform as the relative speed would be minimized and therefore the footage uninteresting. Note that the missile shares the same tremendous speed, but at 90º to the flight path.
Were I to guess, the target was a balloon of some type and the impact was insufficient to trigger the warhead - like shooting a rifle at a bubble bath. Maybe it carried a radiosonde that was in an insulated container and provided a radar return.
[edit] Isn't a hellfire a laser designated missile? Many polymers, particularly thin ones, are transparent to near IR, a popular wavelength for battlefield lasers, so a balloon envelope would not be detected, though the payload could be. OTOH, some Hellfire variants have on-board mm-wavelength radar for target tracking and terminal guidance.[end edit]
It should be easy to see what a range finder measured as distance to observed target, what the altitude the camera platform was operating at, what the slant angle was to the target, what the relative bearing from the camera platform path to the target was, and how fast the camera platform was moving. Some of this information appears to have been cropped out from the presentation.
The inexplicable parts of this encounter are why only one view is shown when two camera platform vehicles were involved, why critical data is not presented, and why it made it this far with that information missing. Is there a pro-UFO lobby expecting visitors from other planets, ones who are capable of crossing light-years of space in reasonable amounts of time, but are so shy they only get captured on cameras following the invention of cameras, but went without notice until then?
Last edited by MechEngr; 11th September 2025 at 12:55.