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mcDonald UAP Toolkit

mcdonald is a frame-by-frame analysis toolkit for measuring the kinematics of an unknown object in a single-camera video.

"Science is in default for having failed to mount any truly adequate studies of this problem."

— James E. McDonald

Status: early test version (0.2.7), tried on Linux and macOS; Windows is next.

Install

  1. Prerequisite: make sure ffmpeg is installed: brew install ffmpeg (Mac), winget install Gyan.FFmpeg (Windows), sudo apt install ffmpeg or sudo dnf install ffmpeg (Linux).

  2. Install mcdonald (needs Python 3.10 or newer):

    python3 -m pip install mcdonald
    
  3. Check your setup, which also provides instructions on what to do next:

    mcdonald setup
    

When a newer version is out, mcdonald-gui offers to update itself when it starts, and the command line prints the command to update with.

New to Python or the terminal? docs/install.md walks through each step in detail.

Use

mcdonald has a graphical interface and a command-line interface. The software is intended to be driven by human users and/or AI agents.

The graphical interface is designed to prompt human users through the steps of analysis. To start the graphical interface:

mcdonald-gui

The command-line interface is designed for developers, advanced users, and AI agents. To start the command-line interface and see a summary of options:

mcdonald

Prompting an agent

You can invoke an AI agent to assist at any point in the analysis, whether before or after a human has looked at the video. Here is a sample prompt that you can pass to your favorite command-line AI model:

Please use the mcdonald toolkit to analyze the PR144 video released under PURSUE. Run mcdonald readme to get started.

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Jacob Haqq Misra. Released under the BSD 3-Clause License.

Release files for mcdonald 0.2.7

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