An example of the difference between a debug engineer and most other people.

Back in 2019 a woman caught a strange video sequence on her CCTV camera.  She took it to the "news" media, got her 15 minutes of fame and then it faded quickly, as things tend to do with the herd.  Granted, the first watching of the video is comical at first, thus leading non technical minds to just ignore it.  Worse still, some people on YouTube wasted 10 minutes of our lives doing their own useless observation studies on a partial video which somehow conveniently chops off the last 1-2 seconds of the video.  They of course miss all the important stuff.

If you watch the coverage on most TV channels, they show the shortened video but on the video linked above, which happens to have the time stamp 4:44 on it, they show the whole thing.  Watch it and consider what you see.  The first thing you should do is clear your mind of preconceived notions, including multiple people saying this looks like dobbie from Harry Potter, it looks like a kid with underwear on, etc.  I agree, all those things are true, but does focusing on these unactionable things give any more insight into what's going on?  If not, look past them.  Let the sheeple get caught up in the snap judgements and instead, single step through it frame by frame, taking time to notice any little thing that might be of interest.

Notice, I did not say that "doing so would prove XYZ".  An engineer does not seek to confirm his preconceived bias on a subject.  He instead evaluates the data as it is available.  So, now that you slowed it down, what did you see that would make you interested in looking into this further if you had the chance?  Notice again, I did not say "that would prove this or that".  Observe, categorize, and store.  Don't jump to conclusions like the unwashed masses.

Here are a few things I found which I thought were interesting taken as a whole:

1) whatever it was, it walked rapidly up to the corner of the house, paused, and then continued walking.

This frame was taken right from the beginning of the video.  Notice that the circle blue and circle red areas are brightly lit.

A couple of seconds into the vid, we see the red area suddenly go dark with a shadow cast on it.

Obviously there is a low lying light source which is shining up because of how long the shadow is cast.  Note that the blue area circled above had no such shadow.

If watched at full speed you can see that shadow pause for a moment before continuing.

The moronic TV station thought it was very important to put up their weather bar, thus obfuscating potentially important data, but in the red area circled below we begin to see the shadow moving into the left side of the picture.

In this next snapshot a few frames later, the shadow is no longer seen on the right side in the blue but a shadow is now fully visible next to the car.  If you single step through it at this point, look at the side of the car.  The presence of a body changes the light being reflected off the car.  Why is this important?  BZZZT.  Wrong question.  It's too soon to get to conclusions.  It's only important to notice, categorize and store information right now.  Maybe it will be useful and important later, and maybe not.  But get all the data before you make that determination.

In this next snapshot below, the subject has moved fully into frame.  Its shadow is clear to see in front but we can also see a reflection in the car window as circled in red.  Notice the front left fender before moving onto the next snapshot.

While the ditzy reporter woman is talking and 99.9 % of the viewers are watching as if it is a show or a spectacle to be consumed rather than studied, the next snapshot shows that the white surface of the subject is casting a clear reflection on the front left fender of the car.  So one thing we do know right now is that this was not photoshopped.  The photoshoppers never get the shadows right.  By the way, you should have the vid open in a browser so that you can step through. For Youtube, the ">" key means single step forward and the "<" key means single steps backwards.

The subject still has a clearly visible shadow in front of it.

After a few more ungainly steps that most apparently think were done for the purpose of humor, the subject stops walking, faces the front of its body in a particular direction, extends its arms from its sides by a few inches and stands still for in this position for exactly 4 frames.  This looks like 15 frames per second video, so he's standing unmoved and unchanging for about 250ms (1/4 second).  I'm blowing this picture up because it's important to see that his shadow in front of him is still visible, but more importantly, his reflection is now clearly visible on the front left part of the hood.

From this point, you can see the subject begin to fade from the picture until its gone at the 5th frame.

Going forward, I digitally zoom in for the next 5 frames.  Here is Frame 1:

Here is frame 2.  Not only has the object become 20% transparent, but coincidentally some kind of circular artifact has begun to appear in frame.  Also, keep an eye on that reflection in the front fender from his white suit.  It is fading as well...

In frame 3, the circular object (which is now materializing stronger as the humanoid is fading) is getting brighter and a bit more defined.  Remember, this is happening across several frames.  Again, the assumption is that this is a slow 15 fps cctv camera so assume 0.066 or 66 ms per step.   The body is still opaque at this point and is still casting a shadow.  But the reflection on the car is diminished even more.

In frame 4, the humanoid is almost totally transparent and the shadow is quite faint.  The circular object, however, has gotten brighter and might be starting to appear to be a ring of small spheres.

After frame 5, the humanoid is gone, his shadow and reflection are gone as well.  But the ring artifact is brighter and looks even more likely to have a spherical construction of some sort.  In addition, one additional sphere was added to the ring exactly when the humanoid disappeared.  This is clear to see when single stepping through.

The ring remains visible yet unchanged from the picture above for exactly 1 more frame and then it disappears from the picture all at once (i.e. just blinks out, as opposed to fading out like it faded in).

Here is a side by side of the important part.  When "dobbie" is still fully opaque and visible, his white reflection on the car is clearly also visible.  But 5 frames later no dobbie and no reflection.

There is not enough data here to conclude anything yet foolish people MUST have closure so they MUST make up some story about it being the camera owner's child even though she says she was inside with the kid at 4:44am.  In another vid on this subject, the mom is interviewed and the kid denies being dobbie multiple times even when the reporter tries to coax laughter.  I think most kids would have broken down and given some kind of indication of guilt at that point but  I did not sense deception in the kid even though he did like getting some attention.

This is where most media will stop and with a soulful pause ask what do YOU think?  I for one don't really care what other clueless people think.  The data is the data.  Something very unusual happened here and I do not claim to know what it was.  And what was unusual was not the dobbie image but rather the fact that he simply faded from view in real time on camera like just got beamed up.  That said, I do not think it was a child walking around with underwear on his head at 4:44 AM.  

IFF you noticed something in the video that I failed to mention, please bring it up in the comments and don't feel stupid about doing so.  Whatever you bring up will either be a fact or it won't.  Nobody but a fool is ever embarrassed about facts.

By the way, there are a couple other things worth mentioning about the vid.  First, yes, I noticed the reflection in the house window when dobbie walked by but could not use it as more evidence in the fade out observation.  

Second, yes, I noticed that the house has a black mailbox out front whose box you can make out even when dobbie has not entered the picture yet, but whose pedestal is very faint.  But when dobbie makes his big right hand step in front of the vehicle, suddenly the pedestal/stick is visible.  By the time dobbie has carefully positioned himself pointing at the mailbox, the mailbox base is fairly visible.  But when dobbie disappears and the ring is still visible, the mailbox base has again disappeared at the same exact time that dobbie disappears.  Does it mean anything?  I don't know.  But it's the careful observation that is important as the first step to understanding anything.