And this is what you get for waking up at 5AM in the morning… Okay, I’ll bite. Here’s my analysis…
The first thing I did was save the image of that skydiver sequence matrix had posted, and then blow it up on my computer screen. I measured the skydiver’s relative movement to the background to make sure no frames have been skipped. After that, I examined the movement of the rod relative to the background, and discovered that it doesn’t move in the direction it is pointing at. In fact, it exhibits something similar to free fall motion at first, and then switches to a somewhat lateral movement later on. Keep in mind that the entire frame of the picture is moving downwards at up to 95mph (according to the site), and that the apparent U-turn of the rod has to be smeared out across a rather large distance (my rough estimate is 60-90 feet) if it’s as far from the camera as the skydiver. Just to show you what I’m talking about, I used simple cut and paste in MS-Paint to merge the pictures. The alleged positions of the rod are circled in red. Note that the first of the 17 frames has been discarded since the rod had not entered the picture yet.
http://www.geocities.com/zai_h/rod-mark.jpg
As you can see, of the 16 frames shown above, only the first 12 actually contain the distinct shape of a rod. The 13th frame is arguable, and frankly speaking, I can’t see an inkling of a rod in the 14-16th frame. Take a look at the original picture if you don’t trust me.
So what is it? I don’t know. It could’ve been any of a number of things, all of which are more plausible than an unknown rod shaped organism flying at extremely high speeds with a love for cameras and invisible to the human eye. This rod could very well be a strand of fiber falling down in front of the camera. A quick calculation, assuming the skydiver fell 100 feet, the camera was 200 feet away, and that the entire sequence spanned half a second, shows that a piece of fiber falling at a rate of 1 foot per second at a distance of 1 foot in front of the camera would have a good chance of producing this effect. Minute turbulences in the air or even the breathing of the cameraman could’ve caused this fiber to twirl the way it did here. Even a small fly wandering across the camera would be a satisfactory answer. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see a good reason to get that excited…
p.s. This whole rod thing is full of other problems as well. On the same website this skydiver sequence came from, there are also pictures of rods in air and water. Those wavy protrusions on the side of the rod seem to exist in both species, and that just makes you wonder how the same propulsion method can work in both environments. Furthermore, the protrusions are sometimes matching on both sides of the rod, while at other times they are not. In the camera tests within the still photo archive, the rods are never shown at the same time with any of the test objects, so you really can’t tell whether the specs for those pictures are actually as claimed. Then there are those photos that really go over the top, like this one. Is that a sunset in the background? Either that rod was right in the face of Mr. “John Bro”, or it was ten times the size of a Boeing 747 yet still invisible to the naked eye. And we have this, which looks like anti-missile chaff or some kind of decoy or even flying debris to me. Just the apparent lack of credibility of this site makes me want to write it off as a hoax…
