The fact that the insects look like rods at slow shutter speeds, as in the cave footage, but the human falling looks normal, has to do with panning. Even though the BASE jumper is falling at near terminal velocity (120 mph) he doesn’t appear to blur much.

     The cave wall in the background does blur quite a bit as the cameraman (professional cameraman Mark Lichtle) pans downward to keep the action (the jumper) centered in the FOV of his camera.

     Some insects are capable of extreme speeds, the deer blot fly has been clocked at over 60 mph and some scientists believe it can reach 90 mph. If in the case of the cave footage, you were panning (following the action) of a BASE jumper and an insect crossed the field of view at even 15 or 20 mph you could expect to get the same results as what we see in the footage taken at the Cave of Swallows.

      If you examine that footage at www.roswellrods.com you will notice that in each frame the jumper is pretty much centered in the field of view. Even if the video was shot at the “normal” 1/60 of second that is most often used for TV, or so I have been told by people who are professional videographers, the jumper wouldn’t blur much as long as the camera man continued to pan downward as the jumper fell. 

     However for an insect crossing the FOV the results would be much different, as the insect would blur crossing the FOV on video taken with a shutter speed of 1/60 of a second. Interestingly enough the data analyzed by Dr. Bruce Maccabee available on www.flyingrods.com with a link to Jose’s site was examined with the information provided by Jose Escamilla.

     The good Dr. assume the data provided was correct and so determined that the object was about 3 feet long and traveling at over 94 mph. If we take this data and divide both the size of the creature (3 feet) and the speed (94 mph) by a factor of 6, there-by reducing the size of the “rod” to a more believable “rodsect” (not rod-sex) we come out with a blurred insect image 6 inches long, representing an insect perhaps 3 inches long, and a speed of only 15.666mph, a very understandable and believable speed for an insect crossing the FOV fairly close to the camera. Quite a coincidence if indeed the object was an undiscovered rod as some people continue to maintain.

Michael Merchant
Rainbowrods@sightingcentral.com
 www.flyingrods.com