04:13 PM MST on Friday, July 16, 2004

By Scott Davis / NewsChannel 3 producer

Video of Mexican UFOs not a fake

Well, the analysis is done and the conclusion on the Mexico 11?

It's not a fake.

The Mexico 11 is a video showing a number of mysterious lights in the skies over eastern Mexico.

One of the world's foremost videotape analysts lives in Phoenix and says what you see in the video tape are unidentified flying objects.

Jim Dilettoso spent more than two weeks with the videotape.

Dilettoso studied the tape "frame by frame" studying each orb to find what he calls the "absolute center."

"So the first thing I did was to enhance the major passages of the video looking for any kind of structure because lights that bright, even on an infrared image, were going to, even for a fleeting moment, cast a light or make heat happen on some kind of structure," he said. "No evidence of structure at all."

The pilots who captured the sighting saw no structure either. In fact, they never saw the lights with their own eyes. They only appear on tape -- recorded with radar and infrared technology.

The pilots, on drug patrol over Campeche, counted 11 bright lights that appear to be flying along with them. When the video was released, some said the lights must be a phenomenon called "ball lightning" -- glowing spheres that result from a lightning strike.

"I've been collecting data in this area for 38 years and I have never heard of anything like this that's related to ball lightning," said Robert Golka, a world-recognized expert on nuclear science and ball lightning. He said what's on the tape is not ball lightning.

"Ball lightning has been seen to bounce on the floor and get smaller each time, each bounce, and then go off with a pop," he said. "Sometimes the whole thing goes at one time in an explosion which can damage things in a room. So if it were that type of phenomenon, I would say yes that would be ball lightning, but this is totally different. These things appeared, disappeared, followed the plane, were invisible to the human spectrum. This has got to be something different or a strange type of ball lightning that we've never heard of before but I kind of doubt that."

Dilettoso begins every project with the idea in mind that such occurrences could be a hoax, and then tries to rule it out.

"We have a number of frames where the light goes off, appears in another spot, moves, and then comes back and locks on again in the same place," he said. "This is happening while traveling at about 200 mph, while the plane is moving at about 200 mph and it's going on for over 30 minutes."

Dilettoso analyzed every frame of the 30-minute tape.

A computer model shows that the mysterious lights are three-dimensional, moving under their own or someone else's control, illuminated from the inside and like no other aircraft known to man.

"It's not like the dome of a car light or a headlight that's flat with light or slightly curved," he said. "This comes out in a complete half circle. That's the primary thing we found. It is kind of weird."

And, it's an unidentified flying object.