I don't follow these things closely and my question is carefully scoped to ask ONLY about the type of aircraft equipment used and what the various gray levels in the images indicates.
In CNN "The Point" Video Barack Obama just said something very interesting about UFOs by Chris Cillizza, there are three snippets from videos which are described as follows:
In April 2020 when the Pentagon released three videos of what they called “unidentified aerial phenomenon” which amounted to a huge break in the government’s acknowledgement of their existence...
Below are cropped screenshots from my linked video, presumably from the three videos mentioned. The unidentified phenomena all appear as small black objects, sometimes with a lighter "halo" against gray backgrounds. If for example these are thermal infrared images, one might naively suppose that the black tone indicates a temperature far lower than anything else in the field of view.
However
- Sometimes thermal infrared images are inverted so that cold is white and hot is black. Why are the clouds white and Australia black in weather satellite infrared images? and also this comment that images are sometimes inverted to make a bright object of interest easier to see when analyzing.
- In some imaging systems (showing my age), tiny spots that are too bright and saturate a system can cause much larger and more prominent black areas to appear.
Question: What equipment produced the three recordings of unidentified areal phenomenon released by the US Pentagon in 2020? What does the black tone of the spot in question actually signify?
update: Screenshot from CNN's Retired US Navy Chief explains tech witnessed in UFO aircraft sighting around 00:13
shows a switch between opposite tone scales in the middle of a video clip, clearly the same clouds and object, just flipped in sign:
below left: Himawari-8 IR1 image from Central Weather Bureau showing hotter Australia represented with darker grayscale level (click for full size), right: Source "...illustrate(s) the artifact of a dark area around a bright area" (vidicon)