Hello, I'm new here. Big fan of Mick West's analysis, always been fascinated by weird stuff in the sky.
I've seen that the new footage of supposed MH370 abdusction is all the rage right now and I wrote a big post on Reddit r/ufo which is pending approval.
I'll basically just past it here because I think I have some valid points.
TL;DR: the video can't be real because of satellite imaging limits (don't just pick this quote and show me hyper detailed ground imaging as counterargument, I'll address it in the detailed explaination), I'll give other additional clues for why it probably is fake, but the main reason is just that you can't get that quality out of satellite images operating at the geostationary altitude, the only one that could (partially) explain still clouds and lack of parallax movement.
Skip to the IMPORTANT PART if you aren't interested in the clues and just want the hard numbers.
First of all, I'm no physicis nor engineer, but I know enough about optics and imaging (mainly from photography and especially astrophotography background) to know that the video, despite how well made it is, can't be real.
Before the calculations, let me say what made my spider senses tingle as soon as I saw the video:
First of all it's as screengrab, the original video seems kinda low resolution on his own, and so is the recording, it's the oldest trick in the book if you want to hide editing flaws and make the analysis harder.
It's also really convenient that the text is cut off, not making it possible to clearly identify what those numbers and letters meant. Some claim it's a model of spy satellite (USA-184 or NROL-22) however said satellite would be way too small to allow for that image quality and, for reasons I'll explain later, the orbit isn't compatible with the observations.
Talking about the action seen in the video, it just feels too much of a perfect scenario, three spheres doing spiral patterns kidnapping a plane mid flight just seems like a scene out of X-Files!
I've heard people complaining telling other people "How do you think something like that would look ?!?", my problem is that it would look exactly like this based on my sci-fi knowledge, which is what I guess inspired the author. Not a proof of course, but a bit sus to me.
Another super odd fact is that we have not just one, but TWO angles of the same incredible footage from the most remote location possible.
How can we have TWO cameras pointing at a random plane out of the thousands flying at a given time, and that plane is right about to be abducted by aliens (cuz, implying the video is real, there is no other explaination here apart from alien tinkering with space time!).
And no, before anybody says that, nobody has even remotely the capability of simultaneous worldwide meter resolution live feed coverage, that would imply hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of hubble sized satellites, each one requiring his own rocket launch to put it in orbit, pretty sure we would have noticed that, so if the video is real then it would imply they were tracking that specific plane with both a gargantuan spy space telescope and a drone. Seem pretty sus to me that we knew in advance that this pecific plane was about to be vanished by aliens, and also that said aliens who are capable of bending spacetime would still perform the abduction despite a drone filming everything nearby (because they sure would be aware of it!).
And if aliens don't care about being seen we should have more videos of this stuff happening, don't you think?
Let's get to the hot part now: camera tech.
It's super weird that a spy satellite would provide full color VIDEOS (important that it's a video, not a still image), because a sensor capable of capturing color images implies you are sacrificing a lot of resolution and signal to noise ratio, both things that are crucial if you're interested in achieving the highest quality imaging of small details, and the reason every single space telescope that I'm aware of operates with monochromatic cameras. Remember Trump's leaked satellite photo? That was monochromatic for a good reason!
One might say: "but I've seen satellite imaging in color". Yes, but that's either because there was a good reason for it to be in color (ie stuff like Google Earth etc) or simply because they combined three images taken using RGB filters (or, more likely, LRGB) that are subsequently combined into the final color images, but you can't get a color video using filters on a mono sensor so that wouldn't be an option.
Now, could there be super high resolution spy satellites with color sensors? Sure, but it's very unlikely, not that it matters as we'll see in the important section where I explain why this can't be satellite video footage.
The look of the image is weird aswell, it doesn't seem to be footage from a satellite, which is usually much cleaner and with better resolution (at least for the imaging scale of the satellite), while here it looks like an video from a normal camera), but again that's just swamped by the compression and screengrab artifacts so it can't be judged properly (starting to see a pattern here, uh?).
Another odd clue: when the planes blinks into oblivion we see a bright flash, and what is weird is that we don't see a clear diffraction spike nor any internal lens reflection artifact or loss of contrast, all things that happen when you photograph a bright light with a mirror telescope (and that's the only possible way to build a large space telescope). Just google "telescope diffraction spike", you'll see what I mean.
So far I just listed clues, but now let's come to the:
IMPORTANT PART:
Diffraction limit.
What is diffraction limit? Essentially how detailed of an image an optical system can produce given it's aperture (in this case how wide the mirror is) and operating wavelength, and that's the absolute best scenario not counting loss of contrast from mechanical diffraction (ie caused by the mirror's support structure), loss of resolution from the sensor (especially in this case where it's a color sensor!), atmosphere, movement of the craft, etc.
This is an hard limit. You simply can't break it regardless of how advanced you think NRO tech is, definitely not without image processing via stacking, doconvolution, drizzle, etc, but it's all stuff you simply can't do in a video.
How can you calculate the diffraction limit?
Just use this tool
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/angular-resolution
Input the optic diameter, a wavelength (I picked 550 nm as a visible light middle ground) and it will give you the resolution (possibly in arcseconds, to make it easier to plug it into the next tool).
We now have the angular resolution, but how does it translate to object size in the real world? Just use this other tool
https://www.1728.org/angsize.htm
Plug in the arcsec from the previous tool, pick a distance in meters (ie 400.000 meters, roughly the ISS altitude and possible that of some spy satellites) and it will output the resolution in meters.
Does it work? Let's use a real craft as an example, the WorldView 3 imaging satellite. It has an aperture of 110cm and operates at 620km of altitude. Plug in the numbers and you get 0.371 meters for the green light channel and 0.26 meters for 320nm blue wavelength. What's the resolution spec you can find for that satellite online? 31 centimers, so the numbers match perfectly.
Do we know the size and altitude of the spy telescope? No, but we can take educated guesses (especially for the altitude).
Let's say they used the best they probably have, an Hubble like 2.5m space telescope, we know it's something NRO is capable of.
Biggest space telescope we have is the James Webb Space Telescope, it's almost impossible for a number of reasons (remember, the JWST is INSANELY complex, and we're talking about videos from a telescope at least 10 years old counting launch date, and in any case a JWST like spy scope wouldn't match the header of the video mentioning the NROL-22, indicating something is off) even for the US GVT to have such an instrument available for spying (because it would be so big that we'd have noticed it and tracked it in the night sky, but we can calculate for that too.
Remember, you can't hide stuff in space, we have ameteurs photographing the ISS in insane detail, a behemoth like that wouldn't go unnoticed!
Now we need the altitude:
How high was the satellite? Very high. Proof? There is absolutely ZERO parallax shift in the clouds compared to whatever's underneath (regardless of them being smaller clouds or waves as someone suggested) or between the clouds themselves. There is just some slight movement (and over a minute, considering how fast windws are at that altitude, that's sus on his own) that could be some simple warp or actually even just some artifact due to the extreme video compression and artifacts, but asolutely nothing indicating parallax that would suggest that it's footage coming from a moving satellite.
The only way to have a footage that still is if the satellite is geostationary, and even in that case it would pretty much be IMPOSSIBLE for the clouds to be that still at that altitude if the view of the satellite is fixed in place as indicated by lack of parallax motion (using the 65m long Boeing 777 as reference, 1px of the video in 720p is roughly 54 centimeters!).
The small discrepancy that could indicate clouds movement (implying it's not artifact) consists of a few pixels at best, meaning at several km of altitude with strong windws those clouds AT BEST moved by a couple of meters, and never relative to each other, they just appear to change shape VEEEERY slightly, again by such a small amount that it could be video compression or editing shenanigans.
Compare it to footage from the ISS (like the live feed you can find on Youtube), just see how fast clouds zip by and how you can see the various layers of clouds move in respect to each other and compared to the ground. And that's relatively wide angle footage, you would notice it SO MUCH MORE if it was a telephoto shot, especially if it was stabilized on a particular subject at an altitude like in this video.
Even a Molniya that the NROL 22 spy satellite has wouldn't achieve that, unless the video was taken at the apogee at minumum speed, but that's at an even higher altitude than a geostationary orbit ruling it out even more.
So, it can't be a relatively low orbit satellite flying by, but could it be geostationary? Nope.
Let's make the calculations (again using 550nm as a visible light middle ground) and the altitude of 35.786km!
For a 250cm aperture telescope we get 0.0554 arcseconds of resolution, that transalte to a resolution of 9.6 meters. Definitely not enough for the footage we saw, remember each pixel in that video at 720p is 50cm, pretty much what you'd get if the WorldView 3 if it was a few hundreds km higher, but still in a MUCH lower orbit compared to what's implied here.
So that's it, video is impossible with REASONABLE assumptions.
But as I said, let's assume, irreasonably, that NRO is operating a 6.5m JWST like behemoth, what would its resolution be? We get 0.0213 arcseconds at 550nm, translated to geostationary that's 3.7 meters, again nowhere nearly enough resolving power for that footage, especially since that's the perfect scenario with a monochromatic camera, hence not even counting the loss of resolution from a color sensor or any other form of image degradation you'd get in the real world.
What is 100% sure is that no telescope in the SBIRS program (the one mentioned in the video text) has capabilities even remotely close to those of the HST/big spy scope, let alone to the JWST that still wouldn't be enough for a footage like this, and that's assuming those satellites even have optical imaging capabilities at all!
Oh, and all the calculations are made assuming we're looking straight down from above the plane, which is clearly not the case case since we're seeing clouds at an angle, so the distance is even higher easily adding thousands of km! (And would it even be possible to have clouds that look like that, with the angle and separation clearly visible, from that far away without them being all compressed by the perspective? I'm not sure).
Again, the clouds are the most suspiscious thing, people have claimed that they move slightly, honestly I don't think it's the case and the movement (which very small) could be simply explained by compression/editing artifacts which plague the video, if there was any real wind movement or, more important, parallax movement it would be unequivocable and constand during the whole video, like I said you can see how evident it is in the ISS onboard footage. Same goes for the flash illuminating the clouds, some claim it is super accurate, I say it's not hard to make by slimply brightening the edges a bit in the flash frame while the low quality of the video hides all eventual imperfections.
One last thing, always about clouds: google pictures of "clouds from satellite" and "clouds from plane", see for yourself which one resembles more the ones seen in the video, which would reinforce my hypotheis that what we're seeing is just a 2d photo of clouds photo on which the plane was composited on.
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detai...in-sky-malaysia-royalty-free-image/1503418106
This one in particular is not the same image but looks extremely similar, even with the small white dots that aren't moving in the video, just apply a curve regulation to clip the white a bit and it looks exactly the same kind of photo!
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detai...f-a-plane-above-royalty-free-image/1186044529
The smoking gun would be to find the source image/video, but after so many years it might be impossible, implying it's wasn't a photo whoever made the video took himself.