Schoolkids video mysterious swirling ball of fire in sky

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It’s a kite with something on fire tied to it. Right height off the ground and right circular pattern.

Even for a yob, that would be an exceptionally bad prank.

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Yup, my first thought was “Whatever it is, it sure is flying just like a kite”.

Edited to add: it looks like the whole kite caught on fire at the end.

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Someone was testing that old Benjamin Franklin, kite and key experiment…

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To all the kite and drone on fire suggestions - flames don’t trail cleanly and evenly behind objects and linger in mid air for many seconds. This is obviously not flame. I could maybe see someone guessing Saint Elmo’s Fire, but anyone who thinks that is an active flame needs to stop watching Micheal Bay films.

I have strong reservations about the quality of the video. Whenever you find videos of unlikely or impossible physics on the internet, isn’t it amazing how so many of them are filmed in such unbelievably terrible quality? I mean, this doesn’t look like it was captured by a digital camera, it looks like a friggen camcorder tape.

Yeah, no. In my mind, either these schoolkids are capturing video with a camera phone that’s a decade obsolete (highly unlikely), or they decided to be “clever” and make a fake video of them acting out being amazed at something in the sky, then run it through their PC to add in the silly mystery light and slather the whole thing in a thick layer of digital noise to make it harder to spot the seams.

Good enough to fool their mates, yeah? Get a little bit of attention at school, impress their friends.

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I agree with most of your analysis, but “acting out being amazed”? I found bits of the dialogue too realistic. Q: “Are you videoing this?” A: “I’m trying to.”

After many nature hikes with wife, daughter and camera in tow, this touched me as a level of subtle verisimilitude unachievable by mere school children.

I don’t think you can call shenanigans on the kids making the video, but you’re right, it doesn’t look like a flying object on fire.

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Odd that you seem to think children incapable of subtlety in their trickery. Some children are quite precocious in their ability to convincingly deliver a line of bullshit. It’s a skill, like any other, and it’s kept countless unfortunate youths throughout history from starvation by helping them to oversell newspapers, or run “nickel and dime” cons, or just plain old distract unsuspecting marks long enough for a pocket or two to get picked, and countless other similar deeds.

This is almost certainly just an updated version of the Cottingley Fairies, merely using modern video editing software instead of perspectival framing trickery. It’s trivial to accomplish such acts these days, and the internet is crawling with evidence of that fact.

Quite clearly a kite with a burning tail. The low quality video is very low light compensation.
Cottingley Fairies my ass.

Here’s your answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bolzdDl5oug

It’s a RC glider with pyro. Got it from the comments on the “via” link.

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Unless they’re not kids, just little people dressed as kids. Or full-sized people doing that old bent-leg trick.

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Why is half the frame obscured by the figgin’ wall? Move over, get a better angle! Why not move closer to the window or door, or I don’t know go outside? I swear, it seems whenever people film “mysterious” things such as this, they don’t seem to try too hard to get a good shot.

If it really was something spectacular, I’d be trying to get a better shot.

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