Aletho News

The Infamous Video of an Aircraft Exploding in Air at High Altitude and the “Big Chutzpah” Construct

By Doug E. Steil | Aletho News | November 7, 2015

Only a day after the Russian Metrojet airliner Flight 9268 went down, killing 224 people, a short video went onto the Internet on YouTube, purporting to show the explosion of the Airbus 321-200 aircraft in mid-air, at roughly 30 thousand feet elevation. This video was immediately ridiculed because the group claiming responsibility for bringing down the airliner, ISIS, which was said to have presented the video as proof, did not have the sophisticated military capacity, according to intelligence analysts, to shoot down any aircraft at such an altitude. Yet the video did not show a missile approaching the jet, nor did the group claim to have shot it down in such a manner. It simply showed an explosive burst, consistent with a bomb being detonated, and heavy black smoke trailing the aircraft as it subsequently descended.

Even though a civilian style aircraft, with two engines mounted below its wings, can be discerned, and no such video had previously been seen — nor were there reports of any civilian aircraft with such features having exploded in mid-air during daytime — the video was denounced as a fake (computer generated imagery) nonetheless, perhaps because the video quality was poor or not sufficiently specific, which was suspiciously indicative of an attempt to obfuscate any confirmatory information.

A dose of skepticism is certainly legitimate when being presented with such videos, which may be intended to convey false political propaganda. However, since no compelling proof of the imagery not possibly showing what was claimed has yet been presented, the authenticity cannot be completely discounted. Indeed, this question is currently a point of discussion on some technical forums. What appears to be the case is that the shaky nature of both embedded videos — a second version appears at 20 seconds in the 32 second video — both came from two mobile phone camera recordings that were taken of a screen playback of the explosion. It has also been suggested that the imagery was actually shot from another aircraft following the fateful jet from farther below. Though this was likely the case, it would not necessarily invalidate the claimed authenticity of this particular jet being shown.

It should be noted that a professional quality video recording, filmed through a heavy zoom lens mounted upon a camera on a stationary tripod, would provide investigators with sufficient information to calculate a small circle on the ground from where the shots were most probably taken, which would likely not be in the interest of the perpetrators or co-conspirators. If, for the sake of argument, one presumes the authenticity of what was being filmed, then the most interesting and compelling proof of a desire to obfuscate and mislead comes from the obvious image reversal, which is particularly evident during the first second. The sky to the left of the screen is bright whereas, in stark contrast, it is dark on the right side, though exactly the opposite should be the case because the jet was then flying northward at a track of 340° in the morning, shortly after sunrise.

The ground track in the eastern portion of the Sinai peninsula during the final minutes of flight was exactly parallel to and 40 km away from the border between Israel and Egypt. The mid-air explosion occurred west of the highest mountain in the Negev Desert (Har Raman, 1035 meters), not hard to make out on a topographic map of the area. The impulse of the explosion and its aerodynamic effects then changed the heading of the aircraft by more then 15°. When viewing the video through a mirror to correct the image reversal, one sees that the vantage point of the camera is behind, below, and to the right (east) of the aircraft’s flight path. When one accepts the notion that the incident was filmed from another aircraft, pursuing the Airbus in roughly the same direction, then one must logically conclude that the video was taken from within — or just slightly outside of — Israeli airspace, likely by a surveillance drone, operating in the southern region, north of Eilat. One would expect Israeli surveillance drones to operate here on a regular basis because this region, at the northernmost part in the Gulf of Aqaba, is strategically important; the borders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, and Egypt nearly converge here.

While the notion of a military drone operating near this particular region on a Saturday morning may not be unusual, what certainly should raise some questions is that the Russian Metrojet aircraft — assuming, as before, that the video is not a fake but authentic — would have been pursued and filmed (surveillance operations would be more interested in what happens on the ground rather than pursuing a civilian airliner emitting its tracking data by beacon and not posing a potential threat). Even more worthy of question or inquiry is that these modified (second-hand) video versions of the on-board explosion and descent of the aircraft would be loaded onto the Internet the next day, allegedly by the ISIS terrorist group, which has been publicly exposed to be in an alliance with Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia in the Syrian battleground.

While the concept of the “Big Lie” is based on the idea that (nearly) everyone will believe a major fabrication that is completely untrue because these heavily conditioned people couldn’t possibly imagine that their government would dare lie to them so blatantly about something so important, viewers of the video may have been subjected to the opposite phenomenon, namely “Big Chutzpah”, the raw truth presented right in your face in such a brazen way that (nearly) everyone will still refuse to believe it because these people cannot possibly imagine that the Israeli government would dare to actually do something like that.

November 7, 2015 Posted by aletho | Aletho News | Egypt, ISIS, Israel, Metrojet Flight 9268, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United States | Leave a comment