Is Monkeywerx just bad, misleading, or doing something else?

Observations I've made upon closer inspection combined with further information

This piece will build on my earlier post. I started having a lot more questions.

In the earlier SITREP Monkey posted, you can see that the detachment from BART12 occurs at 0228 to 0229 hours (check around 12:23 of that video and look in the bottom right corner). Now, on Monkey's website, he posts the detachment time is 0328 GMT. Bornholm is GMT+2 and currently they are in DST. It's not clear why his Skyglass time in the video differs from the posted time on his website, especially since Skyglass is showing the time UTC and he’s stating the time GMT.

In that video, Monkey shows in Skyglass the P8 moving along its flight path after detachment, then shows its circling, only to cut away at 12:41 of the video as the P8 descends. The video shows this occurs at 0257 UTC. When he cuts back to the flight path at 12:49, he shows us a static image and describes the bump where he believes the P8 deployed its payload. The static image shows the P8 leaving the area, and Monkey says this is its exfiltration. Look at the bottom right corner of the static image: it shows 0709 UTC —you can see this at 12:50 of that video just to the left of his head, but you can also see the static image yourself at his site.

I watched the sequence from 12:35 to 12:42, even using frame advance within YouTube to observe things more closely. Something is not adding up right for how the plane is moving. I’m not a Skyglass user, so I can’t say what’s going on, whether the things observed are artifacts of the software or something else, but I notice odd movements of the plane in between the time increments as Monkey moves the image around.

Just as the plane appears to be flipping its orientation (around 12:41) Monkey says “They’re going down range now, their altitude is descending” (Even the way Monkey says ‘descending’ sounds off, but that’s likely because his attention shifts to what window he next wants to open), that’s when he cuts away to something else, tells us we’re now going to look closer “at that actual image.” But if he has access to the flight path of the P8 to include the bump, why not also advance the plane along the flight path he was just showing us and then show us the bump as it happens, which would also give us a time when the bump occurs (within an 80s window)? Why cut away to the static image instead? And why cut away particularly at this moment when the plane is descending rapidly?

At any rate, before the video cuts away when we’re looking at the plane descending, I notice that the plane doesn’t appear to move much in a horizontal direction. Shortly after it turns westward at 12:41, you can see what appears to be the spline going straight down relative to the ground position. In the upper right, I notice it says “Last Load 39 : 2 Showing MIL: 2” then as the plane flips orientation and its tag reverse, the upper right switches briefly over to “Last Load 0 : 0 Showing MIL: 1” before it changes back, connects the spline, and then the scene cuts to black. The time in Skyglass is 02:58:45. You can see in the upper right that the plane is traveling at 388kt (if I’m understanding Skyglass correctly). Is the plane descending straight down or at an angle? At 388 kt, the P8 in 80s will move about 16 km or nearly 10 miles. It can’t be traveling straight down, so there needs to be lateral movement.

If the exfiltration occurs immediately after the P8 bumps on its flight path, this means the time of the deployment can't have been that long before the exfiltration. I do not know how well to estimate the distance the plane has traveled from the bump to its position in the static image (due to the tilt of the image and no ground marking for its position), but you can see in the static image the P8 is traveling at 415 kt, or about 470 mph or about 760 kph. Here goes a rough estimate: using Google Earth, the distance from the southern Bornholm Blast to about where the P8 appears in the static image to be around 150 km. It'd take a P8 traveling at that speed only 11 minutes or so to traverse that distance, so if the static image shows the P8 exfiltrating at 0709 hours right after the bump, then it was around or before 0658 hours UTC that the bump occurred.

It's not clear why Monkey doesn't show the P8 moving through the bump in the flight path if he has access to that data, why he switches from playback of its descent but then switches to show us a static image instead. I notice that he doesn't actually state when the bump occurs (neither in the video nor on his website), but talks instead about his own experience with what happens when a plane releases its payload to explain why there is a bump.

It’s also not clear why Monkey doesn’t explain what’s happening for those three-and-a-half to four hours (or so) between the last time he’s showing us of the P8 circling and "beginning its bomb run” and the static image of the P8 exfiltrating. If you listen to his explanation of the bombing run starting at 13:24, they “run down range,” “then they do their little turn-around” and when he says “they start coming back,” his cursor hovers over the area where the earlier flight path was cut.

Notice the hard angle and the area he’s pointing at and listen. He says they execute “a little dovetail again out on the route,” while pointing at the hard angle turn in the spline. Then he says “They spin here and then they come in” and starts moving the cursor along the spline to the bump, where he describes it as weapons release and the plane ascending due to the reduction in mass. At no point in the SITREP does Monkey give the audience the impression that there’s actually a large gap of time in between the refueling racetracks with the initial circling near the southern blast site and then the later beginning of the bombing run bump with exfiltration. He makes it sound as though it’s one long continuous sequence, but it isn’t.

Probably the best place, though, to insert that large gap of time is precisely when he cuts away from the flight path as he’s letting it playback to show us “that actual image” of a static scene.

Summarizing: Sweden records the first explosion occurring at 0003 GMT. Monkey on his website says the P8 begins docking with BART12 at 0210 GMT, but his video (see 10:34) shows the rendezvous occurring around 0120 UTC. This means the P8 arrives on scene nearly an hour-and-a-half after the first blast but performs its “bombing run bump” nearly seven hours after the first blast. Go to his website, and there is no “data point” or “fact” provided at that site for when the bombing run bump occurs. He does state the P8 “exits the area just prior to 0700 hours” and “at 0709 hrs GMT the Navy P8 returns back to the United States.” No explanation offered there about the missing time or the fact that the blasts, as recorded by the Swedes, did not occur “at the same time” as the P8 being in the area

Compare all of this now, to the recently published Reuters information:

According to the data, several minutes past 0100 GMT the plane flew south of Bornholm heading to northwestern Poland, where it circled for about an hour above land before flying at around 0244 GMT to the area where the gas leak was reported.

It came as close as some 24 kms (15 miles) to the reported leak site, circled once and flew towards the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, a frequent focus for surveillance, analysts say.

Polish, Swedish, Danish and German ministries of defence were not immediately available for comment.

There is flight data missing between 0339 GMT and 0620 GMT, but on its way back, around 0700 GMT, the plane flew some 4 kms north of the reported leak site.

Reuters used a partial flight map from U.S.-based tracking website Radarbox complemented by data provided to Reuters by Sweden-based Flightradar24 to reconstruct the P-8's path.

Flightradar24 data showed the plane taking off and landing at Reykjanes peninsula in southwestern Iceland, where Keflavik Air Base is located along with reported P-8 hangar facilities.

Now look at the graphic provided by Reuters:

Monkey says the P8 came from the US, but Reuters documents the flightpath is from and to Reykjanes, Iceland. Who’s wrong on this point?

Just underneath the larger red circle, the one closest to the southern leak site, you can see the grey track of the P8 leaving the scene. Notice that it shows a lateral movement of the plane: it is traveling WSW, then turns northward, then turns southward, then flies near the location of the southern blast. What Monkey describes as a bump the Reuters image shows is a curving correction first north and then south and then slightly again northward in the flight path, where it then leaves the area and travels back to Iceland.

Now here’s something else weird. Go back to 10:12. Here, Monkey says we’re watching a P8 coming inbound. But look at the top right corner: it shows VVHG725, a Sikorsky MH-60R, ICAO address AE4FE2 —you can search using this information and see why that helicopter has been looked at by many people around the leak time frame. This information remains on screen until 12:04, when it switches over to [NA] [NA] AE6851, which Monkey cites on his site as the P8’s HexCode and says “is NOT listed in the aircraft database.” But the information SkyGlass reports about the previous helicopter remains on the screen for about two more seconds (during the frames of 12:07 is when it switches). Looking even more closely in the frames of the 12:04 second, you can see that Monkey’s cursor jumps from just left of Pila on the screen into the Flight History box, while the time increment that had been ticking in 80s increments jumps from 01:49:25 to 01:52:05. There is a brief amount of recording that’s skipped over, as though the movie has been edited. What explains that?

Do you see why I have questions?

Military hardware, logistics, and so on are not my specialties, tradecraft, or lived experience. However, I think that if some knucklehead like me can start pulling on threads and unravel just a few of the claims made by someone who purports to be an expert and gets paid money for claiming these things, then rather than just take the claims at face value, a person needs to start taking a more critical perspective on what the expert claims. Hell, take multiple perspectives and keep gathering multiple sources of confirmation or disconfirmation. But at the very least, recognize that if you’re paying money to support someone, you need to at least be getting your money’s worth —unless you’re being charitable.

Because either he’s wrong but doesn’t know it, or knows he’s wrong and continues along anyway hoping not to get called out for it, or knows he’s deceiving people and will continue doing so until he corrects himself. “If it looks like a duck” applies even to Monkey, doesn’t it?

Any which way, the things he is claiming happened do not appear that way from another perspective.