'Rods' or 'Skyfish' - Fact or Fiction? [Archive]

Julia

03-Feb-08, 18:04

Just wondering what other orger's think about the phenomenon of 'rods' or 'skyfish'?

Rods were discovered in 1994 with the advent of high speed video cameras. They appear on video stills as long objects with undulating fins along their side. Rods have been captured on video tape by many people as they fly through the air indoors, outdoors and underwater. The mystery is that there is no physical evidence of these flying animals living or dead as proof of their existence.

You can see some actual footage of 'rods' here... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=amnNgXRK_vo

bekisman

03-Feb-08, 18:18

Could be this?:
"Evidence points to the conclusion that they are mere tricks of light which result from how images (primarily video images) are recorded and played back. In particular, the fast passage before the camera of an insect flapping its wings has been shown directly to produce rod-like effects, due to motion blur, if the camera is shooting with relatively long exposure times. (In low-light conditions or even when pointed at blue sky, the automatic exposure programming of a video camera is likely to select the longest possible exposure time, which is 1/60th second per video field for NTSC format or 1/50th second for PAL format.)
This criticism points to such video being physically unable to capture a clean image of something which moves so fast relative to the camera. In particular, the "membrane" in a video frame of a rod is effectively a time-lapse of the wings of the flying animal in different positions over several wingbeats that occurred during the field exposure time, while the central "rod" is a time-lapse image of the body, showing the full distance travelled during the field exposure time.
The effect is especially pronounced with large, long-bodied insects which have broad wings and fairly slow wingbeats, such as mantises, grasshoppers and katydids, or completely opaque wings such as moths. On video equipment which resolves the two interlaced fields of a single video frame (which are captured successively and then displayed as alternating horizontal lines), the "rod" effect can be seen to alternate from one field to the other, producing the distinctive gaps between successive images . Similar results can be produced using standard film, if there is a long exposure and/or a stroboscopic lighting effect which lasts more than a single wingbeat. This is the technical evidence, demonstrating that one can produce "rod" effects at will if one uses the right equipment, lighting, and subject. Rods were the subject of season 1, episode 11 of The History Channel's series, Monster Quest. Near the end of the episode, a "rod" is captured simultaneously by a traditional video camera and a high-speed camera. While the video recorded by the traditional camera showed a brightly-illuminated "rod" with multiple undulating wings, the high-speed video clearly showed a common moth flying across its field of view."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(cryptozoology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(cryptozoology))