On July 17, 2004, apparently at 03:21 p.m., in an exact location not specified, in Mexico, Pedro Avila was skywatching at his window, in the search of UFOs. Avila already had produced a number of "UFO videos" circulating on the Internet, dubbed "UFO flotillas" whereas they were obviously only kids balloons, very commonly launched in Mexico.
This time, he used for observation two cameras attached to the same directional tripod, one shooting classically and the other shooting in infra-red.
Both videos were presented thereafter simultaneous by journalist Jaime Maussan, a well-known UFO buff, as being the first case in UFO history in which an extraterrestrial ship invisible in the normal optical spectrum is revealed by its visibility in the infra-red spectrum.
Jaime Maussan presented this at the time of video-recorded public conference he organized and then marketed the video conference, this extract being bootleg by an Internet user and uploaded at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNLYyQAQw2s
The video was put forward in December 2006 by a French UFO and "secret planes" buff on a Internet forum with an aim of evidencing his thesis that the extraterrestrials use aerial devices that are not noticeable in the visible spectrum, or that invisible secret planes built by by the military on the basis of reverse-engineering of alien technology are proved by "numerous observations".
The two camera footage are shown, successively then side by side.
The ordinary optical camera shows a "UFO-free" sky:
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The infrared camera shows a luminous dot:
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Both footage are really simultaneous. The camera movements are the same.
The time during which "the UFO", i.e. the luminous dot is in the images is approximately 36 seconds.
During these 36 seconds, this luminous dot appears relatively motionless, no precise reference mark making possible to determine this with any exactitude. The two cameras are put into some motion, but the dot itself does not show any discernible displacement.
Before these 36 seconds, the luminous dot is outside the camera field. The cameras then go to this dot, it is not the luminous dot which moved into the camera field, but the pointing of the camera which goes towards the luminous point, and then keeps it in the frame, in conformity with the situation in which cameraman Pedro Avila would have located this point in the sight of the infra-red camera.
At the end of these 36 seconds, the luminous point weakens gradually, in a little more than one second, and is not visible anymore on the infra-red camera.
The video in question does not seem to have been the subject of any suitable ufological investigation, being simply shown as "evidence" of the existence of invisible alien devices by Jaime Maussan. The French UFO and "recovered alien technology" buff who put it forth had not published any thoughts nor searched for an explanation, and as justification, after I proposed my explanations, stated that "just because you consider a possible explanation does not prove that it is the explanation..."
This is the sort of inversion of the burden of proof that this gentleman uses with constancy: each UFO report that has possible commonplace explanations is, according to him, all the same an alien thing or a "secret invisible plane based on alien technology."
In the conception of ufology of serious ufologists, which is also mine, before yelling about invisible aliens spaceship, it is advisable to go through thorough and meticulous research to check all the possibilities of commonplace explanation for the report, instead of acting like all and everithing is "alien" under the pretense that the possible commonplace explanations "are not proven", something impossible anyway in a case like this one.
Observations:
The visible dot in infra-red is of a definition such that nothing can be known as of its nature:
(You do not want to be fooled by the appearance of "metallic sphere" the dot seems to have; Venus, a plane, a balloon, a bird, or any far away thing can cause such appearances in video, still dramatized by the compression algorithms for the data recording of the cameras, then again by the heavy lossy conversion to a very compressed video format suitable for Internet publication.)
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The sky has a cloud cover which seems a full overcast. But this cloud cover is complex, with multiple "packs" or layers of various clouds:
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Possible commonplace explanations:
In these circumstances, any object in the sky placed somewhere between these complex packs of vapor clouds could be, for the eye, "invisible" simply because some cloud is in the way. A plane, a bird, a helicopter, a balloon, or anything of the sort, passing in these clouds, could be "not seen."
The object does not seem to be a plane, but only at first sight. Over a duration of a 36 seconds footage, a plane could seem motionless. A helicopter, a balloon, a montgolfier, would appear naturally probably even more suitable as motionless object during these 36 seconds.
Such an object hidden by a cloud would thus be "invisible" to the naked eye or the camera operating in the visible spectrum.
But if this object released any heat, the infra-red camera, on the contrary, can detect it, and it would very possibly appear in the form of a "luminous dot."
A balloon can release heat. Once inflated, the balloon is heated by the quantity of gas under strong pressure which fills it up. This heat ends up being dissipated, but can persist a time after the balloon's release, and nothing says that this hot luminous dot is there for a long time.
A launched balloon literally carries "temperature of the ground" above in the sky, the colder sky, with its decreasing temperature gradient the higher you go.
Many scientific balloons are covered with an aluminized material reflecting the heat of the sun. Such a balloon could be hidden to the sight by some cloud below, but exposed to the sun above (the filming is at 03:21 p.m.).
Planes and helicopters might produce such an image, if their exhaust, hot gas ejections, are in the good direction relative to the camera.
A hot air balloon could hover there above the clouds. The burner of a montgolfier and the hot air in the montgolfier can be picked up by the infra-red camera, with the optical camera not seeing anything of the montgolfier behind some cloud.
At the end of the 36 seconds, the hot source decreases and "disappears" from the screen. This can be caused by the interposition of a thicker or denser additional vapor cloud, or the entry of a balloon, a montgolfier, or another object, into or behind such a denser layer, blocking this time the diffusion of the hot radiation in infra-red.
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A low cloud "A", not too thick, can be enough to mask "the UFO" from normal ocular vision or the normal camera, but not enough to mask the heat to the infra-red camera.
A "B" cloud, thicker and higher, can move and to come to mask "the UFO" to the infra-red camera, giving the impression that it "dies out" or "disappears on the spot."
The object too could have a "D" displacement and get behind or into the dense cloud "B".
