--- title: "We Filmed Fourteen Known Aircraft Through An Infrared Pod. All Fourteen Were Tic-Tacs." dek: "Ninety minutes on a wildfire-mapping aircraft, $6,800, and a mid-wave infrared turret. Beyond thirty kilometres every aircraft we filmed rendered as a featureless lozenge with the same aspect ratio, 2.7 to 1, whatever it actually was." kind: explainer (Explainer) desk: Off-World author: Ambrose Teague and Dr. Ilse Vantongeren (fictional) published: 2026-08-18T09:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/fourteen-aircraft-one-shape tags: infrared, optics, ADS-B, aerial phenomena, point-spread function, method genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # We Filmed Fourteen Known Aircraft Through An Infrared Pod. All Fourteen Were Tic-Tacs. *Ninety minutes on a wildfire-mapping aircraft, $6,800, and a mid-wave infrared turret. Beyond thirty kilometres every aircraft we filmed rendered as a featureless lozenge with the same aspect ratio, 2.7 to 1, whatever it actually was.* A King Air 350 with nine people aboard sat thirty-one kilometres off our right wing on the evening of 31 July, straight and level, doing 270 knots. On our recording it is a white lozenge. No wings, no tail, no exhaust plume, hard edges, faintly rounded ends. We know what it was because we logged its transponder at the second of filming. Its identity, type and altitude are in the file published with this story. It is clip 4 of fourteen, and all fourteen look like that. > **Figure:** Where the lozenge is made — see https://theyburied.com/article/fourteen-aircraft-one-shape ## What we hired Ninety minutes on a wildfire-mapping aircraft out of Redding, California, at a disclosed cost of $6,800. The aircraft carries a mid-wave infrared turret — a gimballed camera in a ball under the nose, sensitive between three and five microns, of the general class carried by the military pods whose footage gets argued about. It is not the same pod. It is the same physics, at a smaller aperture. Marisol Ekwueme-Trask flew the sensor. She has 2,900 hours on it, mostly finding fire fronts through smoke, and she picked the targets out of whatever traffic happened to be in the area. ## The fourteen Two business jets. Three turboprops in regional airline colours. One four-engined air tanker. Two light singles. A medical helicopter. Four airliners at cruise. One military transport on a published low-level route. Under about fifteen kilometres you can see what they are. There are wings. On the tanker you can count the engines. Beyond about thirty kilometres, all fourteen are lozenges. ## Two point seven to one We measured them the dull way. Long axis and short axis of the bright region, taken at half its peak brightness, on ten frames each, by two people who were not shown each other's numbers. Every aircraft came out at 2.7 to 1, plus or minus 0.2. The four-engined tanker and the single-engined Cessna give the same shape. So does the helicopter, which has no fixed wing at all. ## The shape belongs to the camera Dr. Perdita Anselm-Okoye designs infrared optics, had nothing to do with the flight, and was sent the raw clips and the turret's published specification without being told what we expected. Her answer is arithmetic and it takes about a page. A 110-millimetre aperture working at four microns cannot resolve anything finer than roughly forty microradians. At thirty kilometres that is 1.2 metres on the ground. A twelve-metre aeroplane is therefore a few blurred pixels, and what is on the screen is not the aeroplane at all — it is the instrument's response to a point of heat, its point-spread function, stretched a little along the direction of the scan. The automatic gain stage then takes that soft blob and hardens its edge, because its job is to make faint things visible, and it does that job on everything indiscriminately. "The lozenge is the camera's handwriting," she said. "You are not photographing an object. You are photographing what this optic does to any hot thing at that range. Nine people eating sandwiches in a King Air will do it. A wildfire will do it. Venus will do it." > The lozenge is the camera's handwriting. > > — Dr. Perdita Anselm-Okoye ## What this does not explain The shape. That is the whole of what we have accounted for, and this desk is not going to let the easy finding stand in for the hard one. It says nothing about the motion, which is the claim that actually matters to anybody arguing about this. Worse than that: two of our own fourteen clips contain apparent lateral jumps we have not been able to explain. In clip 9 — the medical helicopter, at 38 kilometres — the lozenge moves roughly eleven of its own widths to the left across two frames, then comes back three frames later. In clip 12 the same thing happens once, smaller, on an airliner at 44 kilometres. The transponder shows nothing unusual. The helicopter was flying a straight line at 130 knots. We think it is the turret: a gimbal re-centring step, or a frame dropped in the recorder and reconstructed by the encoder. We think that mainly because we cannot think of anything else, which is not a reason. We have not reproduced it on the ground, and Ekwueme-Trask, who has flown this sensor for eleven years, says it is not her gimbal and gives a specific reason. Her reply is printed below in full and it is the best thing on this page. ## What we could not do Clause 7a of this newspaper's [standards](/standards) says we do not report a measurement as a measurement unless it has been taken on two independent instruments, one of them not chosen by the reporter. We measured on one turret, hired by us, on one evening, over one valley in northern California. We are reporting it anyway, and saying so here, in the same size type as everything else. ## Sources (invented) - Vantage Aero Survey, Wildfire-mapping operator, Redding, California — Chartered at commercial rate, $6,800; invoice published with this story (31 July 2026) - Marisol Ekwueme-Trask, Airborne sensor operator, 2,900 hours on this turret — Interviewed in the aircraft, and twice afterwards by telephone (July–August 2026) - Dr. Perdita Anselm-Okoye, Infrared optical engineer; no involvement in the flight — Sent the fourteen clips and the turret's published specification, and asked what she made of them (August 2026) - Automatic dependent surveillance broadcast archive, Public position and identity messages, 31 July 2026 — Retrieved from a public archive and matched to our timecode by ICAO address (August 2026) - The turret manufacturer, Written questions, twice — Asked for the automatic gain curve and the dynamic-range compression parameters (5 and 19 August 2026) ## What we could not confirm - Clip 9. The lozenge moves about eleven of its own widths sideways across two frames and comes back three frames later, on a medical helicopter the transponder shows flying straight at 130 knots. We think it is a gimbal re-centring step or a dropped frame. We have not reproduced it on the ground, and the sensor operator says flatly that it is not her gimbal. - Whether any of this carries across to the military pods whose footage is argued about. Ours is a civil turret with a 110-millimetre aperture. Their apertures and gain curves are not published in enough detail for anyone outside to compute what we computed here. - The aspect ratio beyond about sixty kilometres. Only four of the fourteen were that far out, and the measurement stops meaning anything once the bright region is under six pixels across. ## Right of reply **Marisol Ekwueme-Trask, airborne sensor operator** (Replied 20 August 2026. Printed in full and unedited, including the part about our headline.): > I flew your flight, I picked your targets, and I agree with your optics. So let me be precise about what I am objecting to, because it is not the physics. > > The physics is correct and it is not new. Anybody who has operated one of these for a season knows that past a certain range everything is a blob and the blob has a shape, and the shape belongs to the ball under the aeroplane. I have said that to student operators for eleven years. I said it to your reporter before we took off, which is presumably why you hired me. > > What I object to is the sentence your readers will actually leave with, which is not any of the sentences you wrote. > > You have shown that the shape is the lens. You have then written a section saying, honestly, that this accounts for nothing about the motion. I believe you meant it. I also believe that section will not survive your headline by more than a week, and that in a month this story will be cited by people who have not read past the first line as proof that the whole business is a camera artefact. > > Here is what I have. Two thousand nine hundred hours behind this turret. I know what my camera does to a Cessna at forty kilometres, because I have watched it do it several thousand times, and I can tell you the difference between my gain stage misbehaving and something in the frame moving, in the same way a radiographer can tell a scratch on the plate from a fracture. > > Twice in eleven years I have recorded something I could not account for. I filed on neither, because filing costs me and explains nothing, and I would ask you to sit with that sentence for a moment, since it is the actual mechanism by which the record you are all analysing gets made. > > And clip 9 is not my gimbal. You have written that you think it is a re-centring step. A re-centring step moves the whole frame, including the terrain, and in clip 9 the terrain does not move. I told your reporter this on the telephone on 11 August and it is not in your story. It is now. > > I would rather you had published the fourteen clips with no conclusion at all and let people count pixels. That is a worse newspaper story and a better piece of evidence. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.