(ABC) Congressman shows never-before-seen video at military UFO hearing. In this video, a Hellfire missile is alleged to have been deflected by a UAP resembling the “tic-tacs” of previous reports.
The current assessment follows, informed by valuable data from the intercept:
The target was a miniature hybrid airship of Chinese origin.
The shell is fabric stretched over a tensegrity frame.
In cutting edge application, the deformable tensegrity shell is collapsible and inflatable for trans-medium underwater deployment, and modifiable in flight to vary the tradeoff of aerodynamics with endurance.
The impact tore the fabric of the tensegrity shell, with jagged edges visible even in low resolution IR. The drone was badly damaged, spinning out of control from angular momentum imparted by the Hellfire. If it continued to fly, it would be due to compensations by the heavier-than-air component.
The target did not “continue on its way”, because it was almost stationary. The illusion of movement is provided by the change in perspective of the tracking gimbal-mounted sensor of the MQ-9 Reaper, resulting from the velocity of the Reaper, not the target.
The false appearance that the Hellfire was deflected was produced by loss of laser lock when the Hellfire punctured the target, briefly enveloping the laser sensor in fabric. The Hellfire transitioned from the laser lock program to the inertial backup program, causing a control response that superficially resembled deflection.
The video is a teaching moment for adversaries who wish to jam the Hellfire guidance system, which explains why the video was leaked without accompanying engineering data.
The control of a deformable tensegrity is cutting edge technology, involving nonlinear controls and recently, neural networks. A hybrid buoyancy design, with extended endurance compared to pure heavier-than-air designs, is particularly valuable to a power seeking to extend its reach. See (China) Soft Multicopter Control using Neural Dynamics Identification and (U.S.) Morphing-Enabled Path Planning for Flying Tensegrity Robots as a Semidefinite Program.
Since DoD, for good reason, does not provide Congress with technical data and specialist briefers, the UAP brouhaha will remain fertile ground for those who, intentionally or not, misrepresent these events to an audience utterly incapable of informed judgement.
One of the most enduring myths, endlessly exploited by extraterrestrial advocates, is that an observer can even crudely estimate the altitude and velocity of an unfamiliar object. No one, even a pilot with thousands of hours, can do this without supplementary, non-optical assumptions. For example, you might be able to estimate the distance of an airliner, because you know you are looking at an airliner. When a UAP offers no assumptions of how big it is, this becomes impossible — for everyone.
This is what you’re up against:
Optical illusion