DaveC426913 said:
Hang on. Your conclusion is non sequitur. While it is notable that the tree and object seem to be differently in focus, there are myriad reasons for this that do not result in a complete dismissal of the eyewitness account - which utterly contradicts your interpretation.
Eyewitness accounts can't really be trusted given the number of proven hoaxes (eg, loch ness, crop circles, flare-balloons...) that pervade this type of thing. Especially not when the eyewitness account is the
only piece of evidence that doesn't have a direct explanation. In this case, an anonymous report of "I heard something...I took a picture...I think it was a plane" is not exactly convincing to me.
The circle of confusion in the image for the tree branches is ~4.5 pixels, and for the object it is ~10.5 pixels. The fact that these two numbers are different means that the objects are at different distances. If this were an airplane, one would assume that the distance of the object was greater than the tree.
However, that's not optically possible. As the distance of an object approaches infinity the change in size of the focus of confusion approaches zero, as illustrated by this animation:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptable_circle_of_confusion" , we can write the circle of confusion radius c as
c = A*abs(S2 - S1)/S2*f/(S1-f)
But in the same image, all of these are constants except for S2 (distance of the object), so for the purposes of the discussion it can be simplified to
c = k abs(S2-S1)/S2
where S2 is the distance of the object being imaged. The thing about this function is that c asymptotically converges quite rapidly to S1 as a function of S2. In other words, objects more distant than S1 have a very limited effect on increasing the size of confusion. That is why, for example, other very distant objects like the con trails still appear in focus in this image. If S2 is closer than S1, the size of circle of confusion increases very rapidly. This is the only way to explain the very large factor of 2.33 in the relative size of focus of confusion, and is conclusive proof that it is not an aircraft, but rather a small object in the foreground of the tree.
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/4353/cocobi.jpg
Most people should not need to resort to math to come to this conclusion, though, because our brains are naturally capable of interpreting this type of information. This is why when you look at the whole image (not just the cropped part around the bird) it is quite obvious that the fuzzy object is close to the view, and a rough estimate of scale can even be perceived...