Recently we have received numerous photos and videos of apparent objects near the sun. While it is not the mission of Out There to do more than visual grading of videos, Mr. Strieber is concerned that our posts might spread fear during a time of so much very real change. Therefore, he has asked me to post this opinion from one of his video experts, a professional who has been in the field for thirty years:
"In reference to the image you sent me, the brightness of the central area is too great to register any meaningful shapes on the camera’s sensor, which is already fully saturated. But if you look at the convergence of the lens-flare lines, they converge at one point, not two. The clouds seem to be responsible for the extended area of brightness. This also appears to be a widescreen (16×9) video, squeezed horizontally into a 4×3 frame, which would further extend the bright area vertically and would account for the narrowness of what would normally be a wider "X" in the lens flare.
"If a professional photographer or videographer wanted to shoot a picture of the sun, they’d put a heavy neutral-density filter (kind of like a smoked glass) over the lens to bring the sun down to a level that the sensor or film could accommodate, and then stop the lens down as far as possible. That would get rid of the flares, and it would clearly distinguish the sun from the clouds.
"But apart from any technical issues, the bottom line about all these videos is that if there were indeed a "second sun" everyone on the planet would be able to see it with the naked eye. And if there were any odd celestial body in our neighborhood it would have taken long enough to get here that the entire professional and amateur astronomy community would have known about it definitively for quite some time."
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