Dear Flarkey,

Thank you for writing to us. I would be happy to address your concerns.

I understand why the identical six-decimal coordinate raises the question. However, those six decimal places should not be interpreted as an 11 cm geolocation accuracy. They are simply the coordinate precision returned when a point is selected in Google Earth or Google Maps. Numerical precision is not the same as measurement accuracy. At this latitude, six decimal places correspond to roughly 11 cm in coordinate spacing in latitude, but that does not mean the site was localized to an 11 cm square.

Our geolocation was not obtained by solving for that single point. We first identified the site by matching the broader terrain morphology in the released video with Google Earth and Google Maps, including the compound, the ordered sequence of wadi bends, roads, tributaries and surrounding ridges. In addition, I spoke to military personnel who had close knowledge of a U.S. base very close to this exact site. The coordinates I obtained were cross checked with them, including signs of military vehicles stationed on this exact site. The quoted coordinate, 11.388655 N, 43.139259 E, is simply a convenient ground anchor within that matched scene. It is not the sensor position, it is not the target position, and it is not a claim of centimetre scale geolocation accuracy.

We subsequently learned that Metabunk had published essentially the same geolocation earlier. As Prof. Loeb mentioned, we are not aware of your analysis, nor the numbers. Our literature search followed the usual academic channels, including arXiv, NASA ADS and the relevant scientific journals (ApJ, A&A, MNRAS), and we did not encounter a formal paper or preprint reporting that result. Informal forum and blog posts are not normally captured by those searches, which is why we were unaware of it. Now that it has been brought to our attention, we are happy to acknowledge and cite the earlier Metabunk geolocation if this work proceeds to journal publication, as is standard practice when parallel work is identified.

In addition you will notice that this is not a scientific paper, and therefore it does not hold any citations, nor does it have a bibliography. More importantly, the scientific purpose of our study is not simply to report latitude and longitude. The substantive result is the quantitative velocity reconstruction. We independently selected the terrain control points, stabilized and tracked the target, measured its motion at about 801 px/s, constructed the ground-plane and camera-pose solutions, performed the Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis, and derived the altitude dependent physical velocity. That entire quantitative analysis is our work. The geolocation provides the spatial reference needed to perform it; it is not the velocity result itself.

We would welcome your analysis and it would serve as a useful comparison. And as I mentioned, if this exercise would become part of a scientific publication, we would compare our velocity estimates, and object size constraints with yours. Please share a link and we will use it in the future.

If you intend to share this response publicly, please ask or inform me, and use my entire response in any quotes, you do not have my permission to use partial quotes.

Kind regards,

Devesh Nandal