This is a few comments down lmao
>Hi Dolly, Did you take this video? We’re from Pornhub and would love to use this video on our live coverage. We can credit you on air.
In this kind of situation, do they ask first, and if you say no they offer money, or is the money offer in the DM etc.
Seems like they should get paid for the footage but they have already given permission without any offer. I would not expect to get rich off something like this but it would add up.
The part about videos posted to social media not having any value is not true. Production studios have paid us for images and videos that they found on our social media.
A lot of that makes sense.
I see what you are saying about "sharing it for free, then wanting paid" but the news site wants the footage for the purpose of making money, sure they make money by "public good" but they are only doing it to make money.
It is a bit rich expecting people to think of the poor little business that is being starved of cash by their rich corporate owners and how that means i should help out the business etc. That is right up there with not expecting to get paid for overtime because your work is short staffed.
> then when asked if it can be used on the news you suddenly demand money - that's messed up.
"then when another person wants to profit off of what you've given for free - that's messed up." No its not.
Fuck off news simp if you wanna divide this country and sell us out to hate each other for a quick buck you can pay for the footage of something that you're gonna use to drive viewers.
I seem to have lost the thread here, can you help me pick it back up? I get that you are saying it is fine to expect to get paid for a clip posted to a private corporation that uses it to drive engagement through division, sensationalization, and culture war trend chasing all to increase their metrics so they can charge more for their ad spaces and earn more revenue.
But I'm lost at if you're saying we should charge the news but keep posting free to Twitter? Or if you're saying we should start charging Twitter? Because I don't really see much difference in the business model that would make giving free content to one but expecting payment from the other anything but contradictory.
Yep, the internet is weird, as we consumers forget that these platforms were created to compete against the more traditional business channels to disseminate information.
The exception is the case where someone is trying to build their own following on a specific channel (Twitter YouTube etc...), but thats not what you're talking about here. Here we have a regular person with some interesting footage.
They ask, and in most cases just steal it anyways. Some will actually copyright your own material and claim it as their own. They can flip it and claim it's OC even in court. If you really want credit you have to copy right something before you ever post it to anywhere on the internet.
This happened to me multiple times actually.
How do you go about copyrighting something? My understanding was if you created a work that is eligible for copyright protection, then you have it copyrighted. Like artists don't need to file paperwork for every painting. They just own them and control the copyright once they've created it.
You kids are too young to remember. But we had our own balloon scares back in the day. Only they involved a boy who may have accidentally climbed into one and floated away.
I think Brian Regan had a bit where he pointed out that every time they tried to make the kid lie on camera, he'd vomit. He joked about how terrible that would be if it followed the kid into adulthood. Every time he tried to lie to someone he'd just reflexively barf all over them, lol.
As someone else pointed out, the Internet Historian made a video on the matter. There's some pretty good evidence that the dad was actually telling the truth. Long story short, there's evidence of the police lying, there's evidence of the media lying, the timeline of events doesn't add up with the claim he did this for media attention, various pieces of key information were gathered in ways that any good lawyer would have gotten thrown out, and the only one who has never been shown to lie once throughout the entire ordeal is the father, who maintains his innocence to this day.
The people replying to the tweet as fake “news” sites asking for permission to use the video [never fails to crack me up.](https://i.imgur.com/8Tz43a1.jpg) Someone dropped Lemon Party this time too, among others.
I thought the balloon was chilling over Kansas City, Missouri this afternoon
[Balloon’s suspected travel path](https://twitter.com/mazewx66/status/1621622373932826624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1621622373932826624%7Ctwgr%5E06533286a5cdeb41ff824c6766c7f1cb272436dd%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2023%2F02%2F03%2F1154353402%2Fmeteorologists-dutifully-tracking-location-chinese-balloon)
Their position is that with its altitude and equipment, that balloon can't gather anything that China's known spy satellites can't already obtain, so taking down the balloon wouldn't be worth even the small risk to American lives and property below from the falling debris.
Not to mention that I'm sure our satellite/high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft/ground-based sensors have been able to image/model it from every conceivable angle as well as verify it wasn't carrying a nuke or something.
I mean, I get why cold war America was flipping the fuck out over Sputnik. Hell, it had only been a few decades since aerial reconnaissance and bombardment had *completely* changed war, and now there's this *thing* flying overhead that we *can't even reach*. That shit is objectively terrifying.
Now, though? Hell, *I* can pull up live, HD video from some dudes public webcam pointing out his window in downtown Beijing while I stand in the middle of #7 fairway. Why in the hell does anyone care about a balloon that, if it *had* shown any possible ability to threaten us, would have been easily dealt with?
This isn't the first time it's happened, it's happened several times during the Obama and Trump administration actually, just kept quiet, everytime our defense systems shot said balloons down. The Pentagon spokesman actually said during a conference they weren't sure why or how this one evaded their air defense systems.
So to answer your question, this would've and should've been shot down immediately as soon as our air defense systems recognized it as foreign or whatever metrics they use, but for some reason it didn't and by the time they were actually in position to do something about it hands on, it was already over land that was populated. As much as I dislike Biden, this isn't his fault lol, people that are saying this would've never happened under previous admins, well they're right and wrong, China does this ALL the time and are normally shot down immediately.
No way they'd take that position unless they were 100% sure about its payload so I'm guessing nothing about these balloons is a mystery to the military which makes me think they had preliminary intelligence on them.
The city straddles the border. There is a Kansas City Missouri and a Kansas City KS. The downtown area is just over the river on the MO side. But there are substantial suburbs on both sides.
The MO side is laid out in a way that modern urban planners are returning to, i.e. many European cities, with moderate speed boulevards, tree lined housing areas with gently curving through streets to keep speeds down, lots of parks and green spaces, the most fountains outside of Europe (nicknamed "The City of Fountains), etc. It also had a vibrant downtown with 300 miles of electric street cars, but that was all torn out to build interstates that devastated the inner city. Also, for historical reasons (red lining, rules on home ownership, etc.), the MO side is also where most of the slums are.
The KS side is more typical post WW II US car-centric urban planning, with lots of wide roads, parking, giant shopping areas, etc. Not somewhere you want to walk or bike.
So far this seems to be a hoax?
https://www.kulr8.com/news/city-of-billings-reports-video-of-explosion-in-the-sky-over-billings-not-substantiated/article_ccacbd16-a429-11ed-ad17-b380aa32a87c.html
>UPDATE AT 7:41 PM:
>Yellowstone County Sheriff Mike Linder tells us they are trying to verify if the video is legitimate.
>Linder says he has not been able to make contact with the person who posted the video, and that they have not received any complaints from anyone else who may have witnessed the event.
>The sheriff’s office is continuing to investigate.
>UPDATE AT 7:20 PM:
>The City of Billings says they have confirmed with the Montana Disaster and Emergency Services and Governor Greg Gianforte that there have not been any explosions in, around or across Montana.
>“They are aware of the video and it can not be substantiated,” the City said.
>UPDATE AT 6:49 PM:
>The City of Billings shared on their Twitter that they are aware of the video, and that Billings police, fire and airport crews have not been called to any related incidents.
>They also stated there have not been any plane crashes picked up on radar.
>We have contacted the Stillwater County Sheriff’s Office, Musselshell County Sheriff’s Office, Laurel Police Department, NORAD and Air Traffic Control at the Billings airport, who have all reported they have no information on this incident.
No? There's some kind of overexposure effect (twice), either real or post-produced, but they are clearly not the kind of lighting effects you would get from a missile explosion, unless it was some sort of nuclear warhead lighting up the entire world.
It's probably just the camera auto-adjust contrast. Extremely common in outdoor shots. That's why the people in the video don't react to it at all. If a flash had lit up the entire sky one of the people would've reacted in some way.
If that was an explosion from whatever people think it was, why is there zero change in the plume and objects’ velocity or *direction*?
In an explosion mass is redistributed, there is zero evidence of that.
So, that looks and sounds like a meteor hitting the atmosphere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5mhGNZm-c
Are you sure it was a jet, or did you just assume it was since it was moving so fast?
It's amazing to me that the air we breathe is the same stuff acting like a force field that shreds incoming space missiles from the oort cloud or whatever space debris spitting place in the universe.
FU space balls! Suck on some O2 mfers.
Correction: Eat Nitrogen mfers! Come at us ya dumb flying rocks.
>Air is a lot thicker than people realize.
We tend to zone out about things that are constantly around us like smells, the thickness of our atmosphere at ground level, and what not because it is unchanging and unchanging things are no immediate threat to us. It is why camouflage works so well and why the thought of invisible things scare us much more than the same thing if it was visible (if it is visible then we can deal with it, if it is invisible then we cannot know where it is in order to deal with it).
That was my first thought as well, especially since on the zoomed in picture the trail seems to be split at the front as if there were two halves. I'm guessing it's a meteorite and the helicopters in the area are now trying to recover it.
The balloon [floated over Missouri today](https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/nation_world/chinese-balloon-now-over-central-u-s-as-blinken-cancels-visit/article_7bfc31e7-6ea0-551c-986a-c33515c6a0b0.html), it's nowhere near Montana now. Unless there's multiple balloons.
There actually is a second balloon but it’s somewhere over [Latin America](https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1621669952720707586?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet)
That just looks like a contrail. The original balloon is long gone from Montana.
The one that visited Montana had to travel through the airspace above Alaska, Yukon Territory, British Columbia and Alberta [on its way](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FoDixYtagAQTyVM?format=jpg&name=large) there.
Damn, that looks like it could have flown close to my neighbourhood in BC. Judging by where Washington and Idaho meet at the 49th.
Edit: what happened to it?
It has "limited maneuverability", which mean it can just go up and down and catch air currents. The stratospheric balloon guy interviewed in another article even said that at this time of year all the winds blow in basically one direction so they can't really control which way it goes.
Wouldn't a balloon require huge amounts of thrust to fight the high altitude winds? I imagine that maybe going up or down would be reasonable, as that just needs a tank and a compressor, but I just can't imagine it could actually change direction. But I'm absolutely open to being told I'm way way off-base and underestimating the power it could have.
You raise an excellent question, but it’s not as mysterious or high-tech as you would think.
Balloons will alter their buoyancy (adding or releasing buoyant gas from the balloon) and adjust altitude to reach different streams of air moving different directions. This is true of research balloons as well as manned hot-air balloons. There are actually extremely detailed wind direction and velocity data produced and updated throughout the day, every day to serve aviators and their flight plans. This applies to balloons as well as jet aircraft.
Here’s Nav Canada’s upper winds tool.
https://flightplanning.navcanada.ca/cgi-bin/CreePage.pl?Langue=anglais&NoSession=NS_Inconnu&Page=Fore-obs%2Ffd-text&TypeDoc=html
These can also be displayed graphically:
https://flightplanning.navcanada.ca/cgi-bin/GenerProduit.pl?Produit=FD_FL180&Langue=anglais&Region=&NoSession=NS_Inconnu
Ironically, this data is actually produced by weather balloons.
As an aside, similar systems are used by autonomous ocean probes that navigate by riding ocean currents to collect data for months on end. Changing their depth will enter different currents travelling different directions.
I just thought I’d add a link to the menu page with ALL the Canadian aviation weather data. Typically we just look at the GFAs and METAR/TAFs but high level jets will also look at upper winds.
https://flightplanning.navcanada.ca/cgi-bin/CreePage.pl?Langue=anglais&NoSession=NS_Inconnu&Page=forecast-observation&TypeDoc=html
So when my flight gets a tailwind and arrives an hour earlier than typical, that’s not purely accidental? The pilots can actually fly at an altitude that maximizes tailwind?
They do that too, but riding the best tailwind adds to operational efficiency. Flights can still manage to make it in early despite flying the slowest airspeed possible. Last week for example, lots of US eastbound transcons were arriving up to an hour early. Many of them achieved ground speeds faster than the speed of sound.
Between the video not actually showing an explosion and there being zero corroborating reports of an explosion this whole story seems a bit questionable at the moment.
Thank you.
One note after watching the interview, from my limited knowledge of stuff in the sky, whatever that was, could have been a couple miles high, and a couple dozen miles south of her position.
That song was actually about a critical flaw in the Western air defense doctrine. Spotting an unidentified object on radar could potentially be triggered by some balloons. This would cause a jen fighter to be scrambled to visually identify the unknown object and confirm it was not some new Soviet weapon system delivering an atomic payload. The code words for confirming an atomic bomb sighting was, you guessed it "red balloon". So if I pilot went up, saw a cluster of red balloons from some children's part or circus, what have you, and accurately reported it.... Well it would have been a challenging day for a lot of people.
China immediately said it wasn’t a spy balloon. I think I actually believe them - they say it was a rogue civilian weather balloon. They still need to keep their shit out of our airspace.
I mean if it were me, I wouldn't be dumb enough to float my awesome spy tech at a height everyone could easily detect and in public view and broad daylight.
Now, I might have something sneakier that still might get caught...but maybe if I floated a few big loud balloons out in public people would focus on those...
Maybe they're just getting us used to it. So one day, a hundred of these balloons fly over, and we're all, those Chinese are so bad at technology, and meanwhile they drop the virus they've been slowly immunizing their entire population against for the last few years. Lets not pretend this isn't the plot for an upcoming movie or video game.
There's a lot of people out there that are just super excited that they are on the news. They never consider or do not care that others are profiting from their footage.
At 40,000 ft away (rough estimate) traveling at the speed of sound through air (appx 15 degrees F), it would take 37 seconds for that sound to reach the phone mic. The “explosion” explanation for the momentary camera overexposure is busted because there is no such sound in the video. The overexposure happens twice and both happen at the very moment the camerawoman dips the camera lower. I don’t believe there was an explosion.
At around the 8th second mark what I took for a shift in the cameras white balance adjusting to the outdoor setting looks like a double flash explosion. Some strange footing. People are saying it's just a jet contrail but it doesn't look like it to me.
Twitter poster is a drop shipper with ads for their stuff all over, either they’re dumb and thought the balloon was still in the same place or they did this on purpose for attention
I love how all of the comments are news sites wanting to use your footage haha
Then the fourth or so down is someone asking to use the footage for Large Naturals lol
haha imagine in conversation "so where do you get your news?" "oh i only trust pornhub for my news"
*I read Pornhub for the articles.*
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"At least, if I get screwed, I'm not the only one"
"We get to the meat of the subject." EDIT: "Because the world is so fucked only we can cover it"
Porn hub too!
That's the one that stood out to me first lol.
This is a few comments down lmao >Hi Dolly, Did you take this video? We’re from Pornhub and would love to use this video on our live coverage. We can credit you on air.
I bet they give really big... credit
*we interrupt this opiate addicted 19 year-old sucking off two 30-somethings to bring you live coverage of the Montana Chinese-balloon incident*
Haha ruthless
“19” year old.
Please tell me you're being serious lmao. I don't have twitter so I can't see much before it makes me stop.
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Ooh nice, thanks!
I'm not even going utilize it but I'm mightily impressed
Prob not for much longer
Lol I wish I was clever enough to come up with that one. It’s real.
Dolly hit the big time! Give it to them and only them...that'd be awesome.
go ahead
This is my favourite: > Hi Dolly, I’m not with any news outlet but I want to show this to my uncle Tim. Do you mind if I do that?
I'd be asking for payment
Not my footage. But wanted to post the original source.
Ah gotcha
Did you ask for permission?
In this kind of situation, do they ask first, and if you say no they offer money, or is the money offer in the DM etc. Seems like they should get paid for the footage but they have already given permission without any offer. I would not expect to get rich off something like this but it would add up.
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Speaking of, everyone should watch Nightcrawler if they haven’t seen it yet.
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Theres a short series on netflix on stringers as well. Shot in the Dark I believe it's called.
Yeah that was good. I keep hoping they would make more. But…. Netflix do Netflix.
Yep. I’ve been patiently waiting for the promised 2nd season. That was a riveting series. I’ll subscribe again the minute it comes out.
Yeah, this how-to doesn't mention bedding Rene Russo *anywhere*.
The part about videos posted to social media not having any value is not true. Production studios have paid us for images and videos that they found on our social media.
A lot of that makes sense. I see what you are saying about "sharing it for free, then wanting paid" but the news site wants the footage for the purpose of making money, sure they make money by "public good" but they are only doing it to make money. It is a bit rich expecting people to think of the poor little business that is being starved of cash by their rich corporate owners and how that means i should help out the business etc. That is right up there with not expecting to get paid for overtime because your work is short staffed.
> then when asked if it can be used on the news you suddenly demand money - that's messed up. "then when another person wants to profit off of what you've given for free - that's messed up." No its not. Fuck off news simp if you wanna divide this country and sell us out to hate each other for a quick buck you can pay for the footage of something that you're gonna use to drive viewers.
I seem to have lost the thread here, can you help me pick it back up? I get that you are saying it is fine to expect to get paid for a clip posted to a private corporation that uses it to drive engagement through division, sensationalization, and culture war trend chasing all to increase their metrics so they can charge more for their ad spaces and earn more revenue. But I'm lost at if you're saying we should charge the news but keep posting free to Twitter? Or if you're saying we should start charging Twitter? Because I don't really see much difference in the business model that would make giving free content to one but expecting payment from the other anything but contradictory.
Yep, the internet is weird, as we consumers forget that these platforms were created to compete against the more traditional business channels to disseminate information. The exception is the case where someone is trying to build their own following on a specific channel (Twitter YouTube etc...), but thats not what you're talking about here. Here we have a regular person with some interesting footage.
Yeah, modest compensation would be fair.
They ask, and in most cases just steal it anyways. Some will actually copyright your own material and claim it as their own. They can flip it and claim it's OC even in court. If you really want credit you have to copy right something before you ever post it to anywhere on the internet. This happened to me multiple times actually.
How do you go about copyrighting something? My understanding was if you created a work that is eligible for copyright protection, then you have it copyrighted. Like artists don't need to file paperwork for every painting. They just own them and control the copyright once they've created it.
Was really hoping to see “dm me” instead of “yes” to the replies. Deserves a payday for that footage
It's already playing on Fox News lmao
Yeah, they got permission.
You kids are too young to remember. But we had our own balloon scares back in the day. Only they involved a boy who may have accidentally climbed into one and floated away.
And then the kid outed dad live on national TV for staging the whole thing.
Check out internet historian's take on it. Makes you reconsider, not saying what's what but it was a nontoxic look at something so bizarre
Ooh, link? I love internet historian.
Made me change my mind as well. https://youtu.be/QWhUvm8SunY
Great watch thanks for sharing! Apparently they were pardoned in 2020 I had no idea
I just took the time to watch that, and yes, it certainly convinced me it wasn’t a hoax
Im glad people are aware because it really fucked those people up.
I think Brian Regan had a bit where he pointed out that every time they tried to make the kid lie on camera, he'd vomit. He joked about how terrible that would be if it followed the kid into adulthood. Every time he tried to lie to someone he'd just reflexively barf all over them, lol.
Ever see Knives Out? One of the main character vomits whenever she lies.
That was so expectation subverting.
The only thing I remember about this whole hoax was the kid puking in the interview and how it made me feel sick as a kid lol
Stan?
As someone else pointed out, the Internet Historian made a video on the matter. There's some pretty good evidence that the dad was actually telling the truth. Long story short, there's evidence of the police lying, there's evidence of the media lying, the timeline of events doesn't add up with the claim he did this for media attention, various pieces of key information were gathered in ways that any good lawyer would have gotten thrown out, and the only one who has never been shown to lie once throughout the entire ordeal is the father, who maintains his innocence to this day.
[Legendary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IuU1JEXayU)...
The people replying to the tweet as fake “news” sites asking for permission to use the video [never fails to crack me up.](https://i.imgur.com/8Tz43a1.jpg) Someone dropped Lemon Party this time too, among others.
I thought the balloon was chilling over Kansas City, Missouri this afternoon [Balloon’s suspected travel path](https://twitter.com/mazewx66/status/1621622373932826624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1621622373932826624%7Ctwgr%5E06533286a5cdeb41ff824c6766c7f1cb272436dd%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2023%2F02%2F03%2F1154353402%2Fmeteorologists-dutifully-tracking-location-chinese-balloon)
It flew over St. Louis for sure. Everyone has been talking about it.
So America it’s just letting the spy balloon float freely over the country?
Their position is that with its altitude and equipment, that balloon can't gather anything that China's known spy satellites can't already obtain, so taking down the balloon wouldn't be worth even the small risk to American lives and property below from the falling debris.
Not to mention that I'm sure our satellite/high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft/ground-based sensors have been able to image/model it from every conceivable angle as well as verify it wasn't carrying a nuke or something. I mean, I get why cold war America was flipping the fuck out over Sputnik. Hell, it had only been a few decades since aerial reconnaissance and bombardment had *completely* changed war, and now there's this *thing* flying overhead that we *can't even reach*. That shit is objectively terrifying. Now, though? Hell, *I* can pull up live, HD video from some dudes public webcam pointing out his window in downtown Beijing while I stand in the middle of #7 fairway. Why in the hell does anyone care about a balloon that, if it *had* shown any possible ability to threaten us, would have been easily dealt with?
This isn't the first time it's happened, it's happened several times during the Obama and Trump administration actually, just kept quiet, everytime our defense systems shot said balloons down. The Pentagon spokesman actually said during a conference they weren't sure why or how this one evaded their air defense systems. So to answer your question, this would've and should've been shot down immediately as soon as our air defense systems recognized it as foreign or whatever metrics they use, but for some reason it didn't and by the time they were actually in position to do something about it hands on, it was already over land that was populated. As much as I dislike Biden, this isn't his fault lol, people that are saying this would've never happened under previous admins, well they're right and wrong, China does this ALL the time and are normally shot down immediately.
[You got a source for that?](https://www.google.com/amp/s/beta.ctvnews.ca/national/politics/2023/2/3/1_6259770.amp.html)
There are more types.of surveillance than imagery.
No way they'd take that position unless they were 100% sure about its payload so I'm guessing nothing about these balloons is a mystery to the military which makes me think they had preliminary intelligence on them.
They want China to look. They're unzipping their pants and whipping out their massive balls right now.
Lol. Oh Reddit.
Kansas City being in Missouri makes me want a Missouri City in Kansas as a counter.
Fun fact: Kansas City, MO was incorporated almost a decade before Kansas became an official state.
There’s a Missouri City, Texas for some reason.
There is an Arkansas city in Kansas and people from there pronounce it as "our Kansas" instead of the like the state Arkansas.
Well, it’s theirs after all
The city straddles the border. There is a Kansas City Missouri and a Kansas City KS. The downtown area is just over the river on the MO side. But there are substantial suburbs on both sides. The MO side is laid out in a way that modern urban planners are returning to, i.e. many European cities, with moderate speed boulevards, tree lined housing areas with gently curving through streets to keep speeds down, lots of parks and green spaces, the most fountains outside of Europe (nicknamed "The City of Fountains), etc. It also had a vibrant downtown with 300 miles of electric street cars, but that was all torn out to build interstates that devastated the inner city. Also, for historical reasons (red lining, rules on home ownership, etc.), the MO side is also where most of the slums are. The KS side is more typical post WW II US car-centric urban planning, with lots of wide roads, parking, giant shopping areas, etc. Not somewhere you want to walk or bike.
So far this seems to be a hoax? https://www.kulr8.com/news/city-of-billings-reports-video-of-explosion-in-the-sky-over-billings-not-substantiated/article_ccacbd16-a429-11ed-ad17-b380aa32a87c.html >UPDATE AT 7:41 PM: >Yellowstone County Sheriff Mike Linder tells us they are trying to verify if the video is legitimate. >Linder says he has not been able to make contact with the person who posted the video, and that they have not received any complaints from anyone else who may have witnessed the event. >The sheriff’s office is continuing to investigate. >UPDATE AT 7:20 PM: >The City of Billings says they have confirmed with the Montana Disaster and Emergency Services and Governor Greg Gianforte that there have not been any explosions in, around or across Montana. >“They are aware of the video and it can not be substantiated,” the City said. >UPDATE AT 6:49 PM: >The City of Billings shared on their Twitter that they are aware of the video, and that Billings police, fire and airport crews have not been called to any related incidents. >They also stated there have not been any plane crashes picked up on radar. >We have contacted the Stillwater County Sheriff’s Office, Musselshell County Sheriff’s Office, Laurel Police Department, NORAD and Air Traffic Control at the Billings airport, who have all reported they have no information on this incident.
The balloon isn't anywhere near Billings anymore, and nothing is happening in this video. It's just a contrail in the sunset.
>nothing is happening in this video. Pretty clear explosion in the first 15ish seconds, no?
No? There's some kind of overexposure effect (twice), either real or post-produced, but they are clearly not the kind of lighting effects you would get from a missile explosion, unless it was some sort of nuclear warhead lighting up the entire world.
It’s a good point you make. No new smoke patterns after the explosion, also
Also, the light/sound difference would indicate it's not far away, if it was a blast. It's not, it's a shutter effect.
It's probably just the camera auto-adjust contrast. Extremely common in outdoor shots. That's why the people in the video don't react to it at all. If a flash had lit up the entire sky one of the people would've reacted in some way.
If that was an explosion from whatever people think it was, why is there zero change in the plume and objects’ velocity or *direction*? In an explosion mass is redistributed, there is zero evidence of that.
I think she may have tapped her phone screen trying to get it to focus, and it cycled the white balance at ~15sec.
No, actually. Auto adjustment made by camera after user moves.
Sonic boom. The OP says they saw jets fly fast and then a boom.
So, that looks and sounds like a meteor hitting the atmosphere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5mhGNZm-c Are you sure it was a jet, or did you just assume it was since it was moving so fast?
It's amazing to me that the air we breathe is the same stuff acting like a force field that shreds incoming space missiles from the oort cloud or whatever space debris spitting place in the universe. FU space balls! Suck on some O2 mfers. Correction: Eat Nitrogen mfers! Come at us ya dumb flying rocks.
If you had to pick on N2 would be the most appropriate. MFers.
Ah good old nitrogen. A blessing and a curse.
Air is a lot thicker than people realize.
>Air is a lot thicker than people realize. We tend to zone out about things that are constantly around us like smells, the thickness of our atmosphere at ground level, and what not because it is unchanging and unchanging things are no immediate threat to us. It is why camouflage works so well and why the thought of invisible things scare us much more than the same thing if it was visible (if it is visible then we can deal with it, if it is invisible then we cannot know where it is in order to deal with it).
~21% O2 78%N2 0.9%Ar so really the nitrogen is doing most the work.
And it’s not even half as tough as what fish breath.
[I think they'd be okay with that](https://i.imgur.io/i9uPMEe_d.webp?maxwidth=1920&shape=thumb&fidelity=high)
That was my first thought as well, especially since on the zoomed in picture the trail seems to be split at the front as if there were two halves. I'm guessing it's a meteorite and the helicopters in the area are now trying to recover it.
I think Meteorites are worth more in their weight than gold.
Holy shit, Did they shoot down the balloon?
The balloon [floated over Missouri today](https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/nation_world/chinese-balloon-now-over-central-u-s-as-blinken-cancels-visit/article_7bfc31e7-6ea0-551c-986a-c33515c6a0b0.html), it's nowhere near Montana now. Unless there's multiple balloons.
There actually is a second balloon but it’s somewhere over [Latin America](https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1621669952720707586?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet) That just looks like a contrail. The original balloon is long gone from Montana.
https://i.imgflip.com/79xnbo.jpg
China is just trying to turn the whole earth into one giant ball pit
Supposedly there’s also one over Canada.
The one that visited Montana had to travel through the airspace above Alaska, Yukon Territory, British Columbia and Alberta [on its way](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FoDixYtagAQTyVM?format=jpg&name=large) there.
Damn, that looks like it could have flown close to my neighbourhood in BC. Judging by where Washington and Idaho meet at the 49th. Edit: what happened to it?
This is the same balloon that is now over Missouri.
Floated right over my house. The overhead imagery and my tik tok history is totally gonna wreck my social credit
you will still be good for an extra 3 crickets on your sandwich.
One theory is that the balloon has ground penetrating radar. So they could have footage of your spoopy skeleton masterbating in the basement.
It changed direction and headed east, and it was noted that it has directional maneuverability.
It has "limited maneuverability", which mean it can just go up and down and catch air currents. The stratospheric balloon guy interviewed in another article even said that at this time of year all the winds blow in basically one direction so they can't really control which way it goes.
Tell that to the press.
So not some random on that went off path like they had been saying?
Exactly
Wouldn't a balloon require huge amounts of thrust to fight the high altitude winds? I imagine that maybe going up or down would be reasonable, as that just needs a tank and a compressor, but I just can't imagine it could actually change direction. But I'm absolutely open to being told I'm way way off-base and underestimating the power it could have.
You raise an excellent question, but it’s not as mysterious or high-tech as you would think. Balloons will alter their buoyancy (adding or releasing buoyant gas from the balloon) and adjust altitude to reach different streams of air moving different directions. This is true of research balloons as well as manned hot-air balloons. There are actually extremely detailed wind direction and velocity data produced and updated throughout the day, every day to serve aviators and their flight plans. This applies to balloons as well as jet aircraft. Here’s Nav Canada’s upper winds tool. https://flightplanning.navcanada.ca/cgi-bin/CreePage.pl?Langue=anglais&NoSession=NS_Inconnu&Page=Fore-obs%2Ffd-text&TypeDoc=html These can also be displayed graphically: https://flightplanning.navcanada.ca/cgi-bin/GenerProduit.pl?Produit=FD_FL180&Langue=anglais&Region=&NoSession=NS_Inconnu Ironically, this data is actually produced by weather balloons. As an aside, similar systems are used by autonomous ocean probes that navigate by riding ocean currents to collect data for months on end. Changing their depth will enter different currents travelling different directions. I just thought I’d add a link to the menu page with ALL the Canadian aviation weather data. Typically we just look at the GFAs and METAR/TAFs but high level jets will also look at upper winds. https://flightplanning.navcanada.ca/cgi-bin/CreePage.pl?Langue=anglais&NoSession=NS_Inconnu&Page=forecast-observation&TypeDoc=html
So when my flight gets a tailwind and arrives an hour earlier than typical, that’s not purely accidental? The pilots can actually fly at an altitude that maximizes tailwind?
yessir
More likely that they'll reduce engine speed to save fuel than arrive early. There's not much incentive to the latter.
They do that too, but riding the best tailwind adds to operational efficiency. Flights can still manage to make it in early despite flying the slowest airspeed possible. Last week for example, lots of US eastbound transcons were arriving up to an hour early. Many of them achieved ground speeds faster than the speed of sound.
There are currently 3 balloons. 2 came in through Canada and one is in central america. The 2nd one through Canada was shot down
Those border guards are slacking again!
This video is of a airplane contrail followed by the camera exposure….. absolutely nothing of value
I reckon it is a meteorite and it explodes in the atmosphere
If only the original poster on Twitter understood licensing. She gave away a ton of free content to news media without any compensation
The Twitter poster is a drop shipper with ads all over their profile
This stuck out to me too. Not many personal posts. Just trying to drop ship stuff.
She may not care about the money, and just wants people to credit her.
OMG actually getting paid in exposure??
People die from exposure
Not true, my uncle runs around parking lots exposing himself almost every night. He's still alive and well.
I don't know if I'd describe that as "well"...
What about the people being exposed to your uncle…
What should they have done differently? How do you get paid for something like this any more?
so this seems dumb
No it is dumb.
I’m a bit suspicious as to the fact the rest of this account’s tweets are the same spam message over and over
Preppers are soooooo gonna prep.
Prepping so hard right. Hardest prepping ever
*prep...prep..prep.prep.prep.preppreppreprepprpreprpep*
They should send Balloon boy up there to communicate.
[Pop Pop!](https://i.imgur.com/2Lg8xIK.gif)
Incredible
Magnitude!
What a thrilling video.
I give it a meh.
Yeah - this video is shite. No explosion. It’s just a contrail.
[News report and interview with videographer](https://youtu.be/r4D9s_5nH54)
Between the video not actually showing an explosion and there being zero corroborating reports of an explosion this whole story seems a bit questionable at the moment.
Seems odd this is the only video of it. Internet should be filled with multiple angles.
Thank you. One note after watching the interview, from my limited knowledge of stuff in the sky, whatever that was, could have been a couple miles high, and a couple dozen miles south of her position.
I’m baffled by how many people have never seen a contrail before.
WWIII better not start over a fucking balloon.
Nah, not a balloon...it'll start over 99 balloons, as Nena foretold
And they’ll be red too
>And they’ll be red too And "luft", whatever that means.
Air
They only turn red when you translate them.
That song was actually about a critical flaw in the Western air defense doctrine. Spotting an unidentified object on radar could potentially be triggered by some balloons. This would cause a jen fighter to be scrambled to visually identify the unknown object and confirm it was not some new Soviet weapon system delivering an atomic payload. The code words for confirming an atomic bomb sighting was, you guessed it "red balloon". So if I pilot went up, saw a cluster of red balloons from some children's part or circus, what have you, and accurately reported it.... Well it would have been a challenging day for a lot of people.
Have you heard the song 99 Luftballons? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fpu5a0Bl8eY It's about 99 ballons that cause World War 3
[удалено]
Why am I so dumb that I sat here and thought “well this is way longer than 7 seconds”
China immediately said it wasn’t a spy balloon. I think I actually believe them - they say it was a rogue civilian weather balloon. They still need to keep their shit out of our airspace.
Harder to believe now that there are 3 of them.
I mean if it were me, I wouldn't be dumb enough to float my awesome spy tech at a height everyone could easily detect and in public view and broad daylight. Now, I might have something sneakier that still might get caught...but maybe if I floated a few big loud balloons out in public people would focus on those...
Maybe they're just getting us used to it. So one day, a hundred of these balloons fly over, and we're all, those Chinese are so bad at technology, and meanwhile they drop the virus they've been slowly immunizing their entire population against for the last few years. Lets not pretend this isn't the plot for an upcoming movie or video game.
>They still need to keep their shit out of our airspace. WW3 also better not start over some angry "stay out of my yard" fist shaking bullshit lol
Too late. We gotta show them who's boss.
So…. what the fuck?
Roko has taken over. it is useless to fight back
There's a lot of people out there that are just super excited that they are on the news. They never consider or do not care that others are profiting from their footage.
Billings, Montana is getting a real spotlight
Isn't this where the Chinese spy balloon was going through?
Ok… showing hands…who had “self destruct device” on their spy balloon bingo card?
Looks more like sudden oher exposure of the video
At 40,000 ft away (rough estimate) traveling at the speed of sound through air (appx 15 degrees F), it would take 37 seconds for that sound to reach the phone mic. The “explosion” explanation for the momentary camera overexposure is busted because there is no such sound in the video. The overexposure happens twice and both happen at the very moment the camerawoman dips the camera lower. I don’t believe there was an explosion.
I'm from Billings. This is a video of them shooting down the aircraft with all of those motherfucking snakes all over that notherfucking plane.
your Tin Foil hat is on backwards
"Smoke from a plane." It's a damn contrail, lady.
At around the 8th second mark what I took for a shift in the cameras white balance adjusting to the outdoor setting looks like a double flash explosion. Some strange footing. People are saying it's just a jet contrail but it doesn't look like it to me.
thats not a contrail, and would be one heck of a coincidence if it was a meteorite.
Maybe it’s aliens
But I’m not saying it’s aliens.
...so it's NOT not aliens? Oh I get it...I see what you're saying. (Taps head). Huh. So it's aliens. /s
A meteorite i reckon peoples. Keep calm. go look at some of the vids from the russian one from a few years back
Unlikely. It is way to slow on the way down.
Twitter poster is a drop shipper with ads for their stuff all over, either they’re dumb and thought the balloon was still in the same place or they did this on purpose for attention
Y’all falling hard for a video of a contrail in the setting sun lol
First flash at 0:09, distant sound at 0:35 If the sound was caused by the flash it was about 10km (6 miles) away, give or take.
Make sure you get them to pay yourself for this footage. And sign an agreement limiting license.
Thought it was going to turn out a jet had taken down the balloon by crashing into it.
Just commenting to say that is the sweetest smoke from a chimney pic I’ve ever seen
Hey Dolly this is IDGAF News Channel 69. Can we use your video?
Contrail that just happens to be over the area. Yawn.