[crapbasedufos]

It’s that time of year again!  The days are getting longer, barbecues are becoming ubiquitous down neighborhood streets, and there is a little something in the air... FROM SPACE!

Incase you haven’t figured it out from the title, this is of course referencing the Trent UFO photos, taken on a farm near the small town of McMinnville Oregon, home to amazing wine, the Spruce Goose, and... me.  Every year this time of May is celebrated the anniversary of two of arguably the most famous pictures of a flying saucer ever taken.  The Trent photos:

These two photos were taken on May 11th, 1950 by Paul and Evelyn Trent, on the outskirts of McMinnville Oregon.  It is claimed by many UFO enthusiasts that these photos have never been, and cannot be “debunked” and that no scientific research has ever yielded results contrary to what eyewitness reports say.  Looking at these photos, that seems to reason. Taken by a farmer, on his farm, with no obvious signs of a hoax, even I’m a little intrigued by these photos.  On the surface they look legit. 

It is because of this we have the annual McMenamin’s UFO Festival in McMinnville Oregon!  

It is the self proclaimed “second largest alien festival in the united states.”  It’s a celebration of the unknown, of UFOs the world over and of course, our favorite little green grey men!  People from all over come to check out the parade, events and speakers.  This year’s lineup is especially interesting, and if you can make it out by this Sunday, tickets are on sale here. You can come out to hang with your fellow UFOlogists, or skeptics.  Take in the sights such as:

Alien! 

Uhhh

These ladies...

KAPLA!

Ben what have they done to you!?

And finally, this...

So I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, especially one that looks so fun and is held in my home town, but this IS a skeptical blog after all.  All harmless fun aside, lets look at the claims that inspired the second largest alien fest in the United States.

Let us take a look at the actual research that has been done with the photos, and some of the things we can rule out.  One of the main arguments is that this has to be a large object far away.  In fact, even the Condon Report suggest that it is a shiny object, likely tens of meters in diameter far from the camera.  This is based primarily on measuring exposure levels on known objects in the photo, like the shed on the left and the ground.  This is all well and good, but hardly hard evidence, luminosity can be changed given the right materials and lighting conditions.  I’ll leave that one alone, it’s probably the best evidence for the authenticity of the photos.

Next we look at the position of the photos.  What makes this case so great, and both helps and hurts it, are unlike a lot of UFO pictures, we have two photos showing the same craft.  So already that lends credence to the claim... but, unfortunately, the devil is in the details.  It’s obvious by the photos that Paul Trent changed position between the photos.  He apparently stepped to the side, why?  The camera he was using is what’s called a “Universal Roamer”

This camera was made shortly after WW2 and, even at the time, wasn’t the best camera.  For one, it didn’t have indexed film winding, meaning, after a photo was taken, one would have to manually wind it and watch for a frame number printed on the film stock through a window on the back of the camera.  This made advancing to the next frame time consuming and not an exact science. This tells us that there were up to a few minutes between each exposure. Ok well that explains why it appears the craft moved between exposures. Another aspect to look at is the angle.  They are both low angle shots, meaning the camera was positioned lower to the ground than one would expect.  The initial thought is that framing a picture of the UFO from a low angle would put more sky around the UFO, keeping it from being obstructed.  Ok, but that also forces our brain to do some weird things, its a forced perspective.  Think about the moon on the horizon, seems large huh?  But when it’s surrounded by sky it appears small.  Now this, like most things, is more complex than it seems, and Phil Plait can explain much better this phenomenon than I can, but for argument’s sake, the reason the moon looks smaller higher in the sky is because our brains have no point of reference.

So, framing the UFO surrounded by sky might make something small and close appear far away and large.  One thing to keep in mind about the Roamer, is that it has 2 view finders.  The eye level view finder, for taking pictures at eye level, and a waist level view finder, so you can take photos at... waist level... This might explain the low angle of the photos... however, the waist level viewfinder is about the size of an aspirin tablet and flips the image, not very advantageous for taking pictures of UFOs that are moving.  Why take the photo like this?  In the below breakdown, Joel Carpenter analyzes the positioning of both photos from a 3rd reference photo taken in 1967.  Please check out his site for a much more detailed explanation.

So why step to the side and not forward?  Stepping forward might get you a better shot of the craft, it might give you more time to take pictures.  According to their testimonies, Paul and Evelyn watched the craft for some time, Evelyn even had time to go into the house and call the neighbors, who came out of their house right away but alas!  The craft moved too quickly.... wait... what?  Ok so this was 66 years ago, times were slower, memories fade... but really?  One second the UFO isn’t moving then BOOM!  Gone.  Well I guess THAT fits with UFO mythology... Using photoshop, I just quickly put one photo over the other, without changing scale.  

As you can see I only changed position. It is evident by the pictures that the UFO didn’t move further away from Trent very quickly, maybe side to side, but not further.  The Condon Report says an estimated 8% or less.  

Ok so what’s all this mean?  The Condon Report was inconclusive, it doesn’t suggest there was any photo manipulation or processing problems.  No dodging or burning artifact.  Nothing to do with the camera or the film stock.  So that leaves us Trent.  Two photos, two angles, one UFO.  It was implied by Joel Carpenter that Trent took the photos in an absurdly cumbersome manner.  It was deduced that the object was both moving slowly AND fast.  And it was surmised by the Condon Report that the object was metallic.  

Now, I know what you’re thinking:  we haven’t ruled out something hanging from a string.  Well, I’ll have you know that, there is nothing in the photo to suggest it was hanging from anything... aside from the two very prominent power lines running through both pictures...  

Here is what I think, and what most actual investigators have come to hypothesize:  It’s a hoax.  This is a small shiny object hanging from a string, blowing slightly in the wind, or perhaps pushed. More specifically, a 1939 Ford pickup mirror:

Ok well this isn’t an exact match, but some of these are pretty darn close:

See anything familiar about those shapes?

Now this is hardly conclusive, but it does make you think.  The leading hypothesis is this is a truck mirror, minus the mirror, so just the hollow case, with the mounting rod still attached, coming out the “top” of the UFO, and also probably where the strings are attached. 

 A relatively cheap hoax, you can pick one of these up today for about $12.  

So in the end, all this publicity and parades and the McMinnville UFO festival might all be based around a simple hoax involving an old truck mirror, but at the end of the day does it really matter?  The festival brings people together and opens up people’s minds.  I don’t think Paul or Evelyn Trent could have imagined this 66 years later, but here it is.  Personally I think it’s a hoax, the evidence, albeit flimsy and speculative, is good enough for me to be comfortable categorizing it as such.  But it is amazing that these photos have endured, and if they help even one kid look up towards the sky and wonder about our place in the universe, and whether or not we’re alone, isn’t it worth it? If that kid is anything like me, he’ll look up and think “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.” - Dr. Carl Sagan

Most of the information in the post, including the Trent photos, were sourced from Debunker.com

[crapbasedufos]

Ok well this isn’t actually from space... and also NOT a UFO!  I know I know, but I thought this week I’d highlight a cool new tool that ANYONE can use to help them figure out if a photo has been digitally manipulated! It’s called Forensically, a free tool from Jonas Wagner, a coder and hacker of some note.  He’s developed a slick piece of software that, using algorithms and a bunch of other stuff he explains in more detail on his blog, can take an image and detect “cloned” parts of the image, different noise patterns and even pull the meta data out of the photo!

Check out his tutorial video for a quick rundown of how it works!

I’ve also been playing around with it myself.  I created this image below from a landscape picture and a UFO picture I found on google image searches.  

Looks pretty legit right?  Is this the unmistakable evidence we need to put UFOs to rest forever?  ... Nah.  So this isn’t the best photoshop job in the world, but that’s not exactly what we’re after.  We want to look at the app and see how it’s going to help us prove technically why this is a composite of 2 images.  For this I found using the “Error Level Analysis” function was probably the best, although the “Noise Level Analysis” works well, too.  Here is a screenshot using the “Error Level Analysis” function:

The “Error Level Analysis” essentially shows you degradation in generations of JPEG compression.  The algorithm for compressing a JPEG essentially throws away redundant, repetitive, or similar data to save on file size,  If you have 2 blues that are only 1 shade off, it might actually just compress this into 1 blue hue.  That’s where you start getting these blocky structures, or artifacts, in the image above.  Because this is a composite, there are 2 different generations of compression happening, one was compressed more than the other at some point.  This is inevitable when dealing with 2 sources.  To me, it appears the landscape photo is compressed more than the UFO I pasted into it.  So even though it’s 1 picture now, it still has 2 different build structures and compression histories.  

Here you can see the edge of the UFO magnified against the sky.  it’s easy to see the structure of the image now.  The UFO seems much less compressed and the background has much more uniform blocky compression.  If this were a REAL picture, the compression would be the same across the board.  

Another function is the “Noise Level Analysis.”  Every camera has what’s called “digital noise.”  It’s practically unavoidable.  Its just artifacts that are written into the image.  It’s like grain on film.  If one image was taken by a different camera in a different spot on a different kind of day, then it’s very easy to see 2 different grain or noise structures in a digital image, like so:

This method essentially drops out the image and keeps only the grain.  Obviously the detail in the tree and grass confuse it a little and create a little tighter noise, but it’s pretty easy to see what’s happening.  The UFO’s grain is COMPLETELY different.  But the most damming evidence is it’s shadow.  here it shows as a dark splotch.  Since this was merely a blurred shape layer in Photoshop, there wasn’t a lot of grain, so the smooth grainless areas were taken away and turned black.  If this had been a real shadow, it’d be the same color here as the tree’s shadow.  

Pretty awesome, really.  However, it’s not fool proof and really only works (with good reason) on digitally manipulated images.  What about optically and in camera manipulated photos?  Well, lets take my most famous UFO photo I took at Griffith Observatory, the one with 2 silver spray painted paper plates hanging on fishing line:

 Lets see what happens when we throw it into Forensically:

Error Level Analysis

So you can see the “UFO”, or paper plate, is degrading at the same rate as the rest of the photo.  It has the same white fizzy edges as everything else.  

Noise Level Analysis

Again, only looking at the digital noise in the photo now.  Notice how it builds white blocks around all the edges, they match on the building and the “UFO.”  This just helps to demonstrate digital photo manipulation versus in camera trickery!  Since this paper plate was IN the shot along with everything else, and this image hasn’t gone through any digital manipulation, Forensically doesn’t really help us a lot here, aside from telling us there was no digital manipulation.  It can’t even detect the fishing line!

Try the app out, it’s a lot of fun and you might be surprised by what you discover... 

[crapbasedufos]

So this is the UFO picture that Facebook wants taken down!  Or, well that’s what some would have you believe.  Actually I’m fairly certain Facebook does’t care.  At all.  And guess what?  You may have figured out by now this ISN’T a UFO!

It’s claimed that the above picture was taken at a lake in Australia!  It seems to show a lightning storm and hovering over the lake is an obscured brightly lit ship of doom!  Or… a lamp shade reflecting on the glass in a log cabin on a lake in Jackson Hole Wyoming…   Skeptical Blogger Mark OConnell has a very nice write up about the process in which he, teamed up with a few other skeptical musketeers, not only proved this isn’t a UFO, but actually found pretty much where the photo was taken!  

Well, how do we know it was actually taken in Jackson Hole Wyoming?   There are no discerning qualities in this picture that…

Oh… well there’s that.  Ok, smarty pants, what makes this shape a lamp shade?

Ok but how do we KNOW this was taken with THAT lamp shade in THAT location?  It’s not like there was a cabin on the lake or…

Well Facebook should definitely take it down then!  This picture has gotten WAY too much attention!  

Most of the information here was taken from Mark ODonnell’s post, Reddit, and Rachael Dunlop! 

[crapbasedufos]

Women are at it again, folks!  First they want to be part of the space program, now they’re just showing up willie-nillie on whatever planet they choose!  I am of course talking about this little sweetheart:

What you can’t see her?  Try squinting?  Ok, let me zoom in a bit...

Further?

See her now?  If I go further I’ll have to blur out her breasts.  The is the woman taking the internet by storm this week!  Now, I do consider myself a feminist and I believe women everywhere from all walks are capable of incredible feats but... really internet? Really?  This is the surface of Mars.  Thats right, Mars.

What we have here is just another case of pareidolia.  The effect of seeing significance in an otherwise random or insignificant scene.  Sort of like when you see things in the clouds.  So why am I talking about this?  If it’s just pareidolia, what’s the big deal?  The big deal is this was reported on and posted by one of the biggest news outlets in Los Angeles, ABC7!  That’s the big deal. Originally this picture was posted by NASA’s JPL, a photo taken from the Curiosity rover on Mars.  Awesome, Curiosity is taking tons of pictures and sending back tons of data everyday, that is a feat of mankind!  What is not a feat is anomaly hunting. Someone with way too much time on their hands sifted through all the publicly released NASA photos and came across this gem. Soon after, they posted it to my favorite UFO sensationalist blog: UFO Sightings Daily.  Usually it would stop there, but for some reason, today, it didn’t.  This was posted in the Science section of ABC7′s website.  The Science section, albeit as a “distraction” but... Science section.  They even cited UFO Sightings Daily as a source.  

My biggest beef with ABC7 isn’t that they had an article about this, my main question is why didn’t they take the route the UK based “Independent” news site took and ask the really hard hitting questions:

Why is she striking such a powerful pose?

Isn't that a bit of precarious place to stand?

Where did she get those clothes?

What does she do for fun?

Did she understand the finale of True Detective?

That’s real journalism there!  And I do suggest doing what they say and looking at the pictures while playing the “X-Files” theme... it’s great!

So lets think about this objectively, all joking aside this DOES look like a woman on the surface of Mars.  Mostly because our brains are hard wired to fill in gaps in otherwise chaotic information, so we see a pile of rocks mixed with some light and shadow and see a woman.  If you’re a straight American male, this happens to you often.  But lets dive deeper.  What if this was a woman?  Is she an alien?  A ghost? I like to look at this image and try to imagine how tall she is, It’s hard to judge scale in this photo.  Looking at the terrain it would seem she’s an average sized woman, she’s 5′9″, 140 pounds,  brunette,  perched on a cliff in a desert.  How do we judge scale?  Seems legit to me... 

Oh.  Well this is interesting isn’t it?  This is another photo taken by Curiosity in an area called “Hidden Valley” ... sounds like salad dressing, should have named it “Sudden Valley”... anyway, I’d like to point out these sand dunes.  Well they look like sand dunes... but they’re not very big are they?  We can clearly see one of Curiosity’s wheels in the bottom right and those are obviously it’s tracks.  Incase you aren’t aware of Curiosity’s specifications, she’s only about the size of an SUV.   Like a Toyota Highlander.  So those sand dunes are only about 6-8 inches hight TOPS.  So when judging scale in the woman photos, keep in mind these sand dunes.  My guess is that woman is only about 8 inches tall.  Also a pile of rocks.   

[crapbasedufos]

A few weeks ago nearly 30 million LAlians were witness to the largest scale UFO invasion in the history of Los Angeles.  The stunning photos below were taken from various areas around LA and, in my opinion, offer the most iron-clad evidence of the existence of extra terrestrials!  From SPACE!

Courtesy http://katemarzullo.tumblr.com 

Courtesy Will Turner (Although I haven’t ACTUALLY asked permission)

The lights loomed in the sky for hours on the night of Friday, March 13th, signifying the arrival of our new other-worldly overlords.  Onlookers noted that the lights spanned an astounding 28 miles!  Seemingly making it’s way from the Santa Monica Pier, all the way inland to Dodger Stadium!  Although this was clearly an invasion force of ridiculous proportions, the objects in the sky appeared not to be moving.  At all.  This is of course due to the cloaking and light manipulation devices each craft is equipped with.  If it weren't for the sporadic cloud cover in LA at the time, their invasion might have been totally missed.  Why they were heading to Dodger Stadium?  Beats me.

Soon after these photos were leaked to social media sites such as Facebook, Myspace, BookFace, Myface and OkCupid, some people claimed that these were merely searchlights mapping the course in the air for the opening ceremony of the LA Marathon.  This is clearly a coverup of the truth.  To add to the misinformation, these photos were quickly posted by LA’s liberal and highly suspect news corporation, ABC7.

Photo by Ma Brothers.

Photo by nancyuille

These photos taken at Griffith Observatory in LA, as well as thousands of others, seem to show these searchlights matching up to the spots in the sky.  All of these photos, these thousands of photos taken by thousands of people, are CLEARLY fabrications.  With today’s airbrushing technologies, such as Terra-cotta’s “PictureShop”, it’s absurdly EASY to make anything you want, as demonstrated below by a photo of me at Griffith Observatory.  Believe it or not, I have manipulated this photo to have some of the same “searchlights” that so many claim to be part of the LA marathon ceremony.

Seamless.

[crapbasedufos]

People in northern Brazil were in for a spectacular light show October 15th, 2014.  It was reported that around 10:20 pm witnesses saw a UFO streak across the sky and explode over Recife, Brazil.  This resulted in a number of traffic cams as well as spectators getting video of the event.

Many thought that this was caused by a UFO, however it seems more logical and probable explanations are quickly stamping out the paranormal. One explanation was an exploding power transformer, although me being someone who lives in a big city with a massive appetite for power, I've seen my fair share of exploding transformers.  This one seems a bit bright for being seemingly so far away.  I was willing to accept this as a possibility, albeit remote, until I read the google translated story from the local paper's site.  Here they offer up what I believe to be the actual cause of the bright lights; the Orionid meteor shower.  This is an annual shower that happens when Earth travels through a debris field left by Halley's Comet, and it just so happens to be that time of year.  The shower can be seen emanating from an area close to the constellation Orion.  

This photo was taken by the NASA All Sky Meteor Camera in Arizona on October 12th, 2014.

Like most ammeter astronomers, I've also seen a few meteor showers in my day, and none of them created anything nearly that spectacular, however this is probably the best explanation of what was seen in Brazil, and even earthsky.org admits at times large fragments can break off and burn up spectacularly.  Either way, what a show!      

[crapbasedufos]

Plates over New Mexico!

On October 9th, 2014, these 5 photos were posted to Latest UFO Sightings.net.  They depict a supposed UFO captured on a Polaroid camera in April of 1962 by an Air force Captain stationed in Albuquerque NM.  The article mentions no names, and gives no other information about the person taking the photos.  In fact, there is barely an article at all:

My wife and I found these 5 incredible daytime disc polaroid photos in an old photo album belonging to her grandfather, who was a captain in the air force and was stationed in albuquerque NM from 1961-1965. the man seen in the picture pointing to the object is my wife’s grandfather. i scanned these photos in and blew them up and they are very compelling. If it was a hoax, it’s a good one.

Looking at the photos, they do look stunning.  I'm a fan of old photography and also old UFO stories.  They're from a simpler time, a time where UFOs were merely flying saucers.  However, maybe because of that, these photos look strangely familiar.

I look at the random orientations of these and can't help but think what we're all thinking: These were just thrown into the air. There is really no way to tell scale in these photos, but they look like small objects close to the camera.  Maybe Frisbees, maybe hubcaps?  Likely 2 paper plates glued together then spray painted silver.  Just a guess. These remind me of my own photography, and the image I'm using for this very blog.

For these we did exactly that. Paper plates, spray paint, broom pole and fishing line.  I'd take the plate and spin it on the line then raise into the air while a friend took the pictures.  As you can see we had varying degrees of success.  I spun it for two reasons:  One, I was hoping the centrifugal force would keep it more stable, but also add a slight wobble, but also to blur the fiber in the paper.  This would give it more of a steel look and hide the fact it was a paper plate. 

We had a lot more control on ours than it seems these guys had in 1962.  I'd be curious to see how many Polaroids didn't end up in the family album.  Though I feel these are just an old hoax, given that we have no idea who took the photos and that they look like terrestrial objects thrown into the air, it still captures my imagination.

[crapbasedufos]

UFO caught on tape!

Sorry about the lack of posts this month, I've been busy.  Today as I got to my office however, this UFO was caught on tape!

[crapbasedufos]

Could I Get a Lenser, Please?

So I stumbled across this video on youtube from user Streetcap1.  Seems they like to scour the ISS live feed for anomalies.  On September 2nd he came across this little beauty:

This is presumably a view captured by one of the cameras on ISS.  To my knowledge I believe there are 5 cameras on the live feed, and it switches every few minutes.  My question about this is:  Why the tall “iPhone-esqu” shot?  The ISS feed is in glorious 1080 for us to enjoy.  Why is it so grainy?  What camera is this from?

Ok ok, well lets ignore that for now.  Point is, Streetcap1 claims that there is a cigar shaped UFO in this video.  At the site UFO Sightings Daily it’s said that the line near the top right corner is a UFO:

The cigar UFO is back! This long golden UFO was seen behind the space station this week. The object moves with the space station, matching its speed and orbit. Streetcap1 of Youtube caught this craft near the ISS and it leads us to wonder...are the UFOs near the space station so often because they are invited guests? Meeting aliens in orbit at the space station is an excellent way to hide their existence from the public and other countries. SCW

Let's pretend that this IS a UFO. The statement above says this is the best way aliens can visit and also remain secret.  Yeah, but… you got this video, supposedly, from the ISS live feed.  A public, FREE, video stream that anyone in the world can watch 24/7.  So are you saying that NASA forgot to take this UFO out?  I mean if it was SO important to NASA to keep their meetings with aliens a secret then why let that slip on the live stream?  Why have a live stream?  That’d be like putting cameras in the Pentagon.  The reason we have this footage is not because NASA messed up, no, it’s because this is NOT a UFO. 

Most of you are probably guessing what I’m about to say, and you’re right.  This is nothing more than a flare refracting through the lens and the CCD in the camera separating out the color.  You see this all the time with low resolution video, a bright highlight with a red underline and blue overline.  Yes I just made up “overline.”  You can even see it in other parts of this video, in fact, it's around every highlight.  It’s simply a flare hitting the camera, then refracting through the glass. 

Above is the same video but I sped it up 20 times to better show movement, then at the end of looping it 4 times I play just the ending at “real time.”  Notice how the ISS rotates, the shadow on the left side moves across the structure, and at the end of the video the overall image gets darker.

This tells me the ISS might have been moving into the dark side of the planet, and thus less sunlight was hitting the ISS.  On another look of the sped up footage the camera seems to be compensating for low light by changing its aperture.  Those flashes you see are just that.  Notice that when the station over all gets brighter, so does the... “UFO.”   At the end of the video I believe the ISS is beginning its trek into darkness and thus the image will eventually become pitch black. It just so happens that the flare also gets darker at this point and fades away.  Unless this is a cloaking mechanism, I believe this is just reflected light off of some object in the frame, and it goes dark when its no longer lit.

If you watch the ISS live stream for any length of time, say an hour, you’ll see the station go into darkness.  At these points the lighting changes become very apparent, and personally I feel like this is the best time to watch it!   Reflected, refracted then color separated flare, or UFO?  NASA coverup gone wrong, or optical illusion?  In the film business, we’d see this and ask for a “lenser.”

LENSER- "A flag that operates with much the same purpose as a matte box -- to shield the optics of the camera from a light source." -  CVisual.com

[crapbasedufos]

Clouds spotted from ISS

They're clouds.

This is a screen recording of the live ISS feed. It claims these 3 clouds are UFOs leaving earth.  No, they're just clouds.  This is called "anomaly hunting." 

Sorry for the short post this week, have big things happening in the other aspects of life!

[crapbasedufos]

Freeway lights spotted over Houston, August 12th, 2014

So I have to admit this one was tricky. On Tuesday morning August 12, 2014, a local (to Houston Texas) DJ by the name @djnayyz posted to his twitter this video and some pictures of a UFO. KPRC Channel 2 in Houston ran this report.

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo playerYou can see pretty clearly in the video what they're talking about.  I must admit, looking at the stills I was kind of at a loss to figure out what this might be, it was only upon watching the video that I was able to build a hypothesis.  Judging by the pictures I thought: Maybe its lanterns?  Maybe they're flares released by jets?  There is a base near Houston.  I kept wondering what was in the sky that could cause this.

Then I re-watched the video closely, in the video that's shown in the news report, you can clearly see the lights moving at a different rate as the background clouds.  When the car is riding smooth it looks erie with the lights blinking in and out of existence, but when the car hits a bump. the lights move across the clouds, seemingly at the same rate as, oh I don't know, the glass in the door.  This is a reflection.  Is it dash lights?  Something else in the car?  I was going to simply end it at that, like maybe it was street lights or other sources in or behind the car reflecting onto the glass, but then I stumbled upon this from Openminds.tv:

Even a friend of DJ Nayyz, who goes by rawlopz, replied to one of the pictures saying, “Hahah good one @djnayyz that’s actually the reflection of the highway lights on the glass door I can’t believe you fooled the news well they believe what ever  you tell them.! @djnayyz (sic).”

Though I don't subscribe to Openminds or their philosophy regarding UFOs, it does bring up a good point, and a great picture: This is a Houston street lamp.  Funny it has the same amount of lights in the same configuration as the UFO.  Ok well this explains the video maybe, and the blinking on and off lights was probably just trees and other obstructions passing between the lights and the reflection.  Ok, but what about the pictures?  These light poles aren't that high in the sky?  Maybe it's forced perspective, optical illusion... or no, it's Photoshop.  For instance, my picture I took 5 years ago of the LA skyline, with a little Photoshop work today and voila!

It helps that all the pictures are such low quality, digital artifacts resulting from low light and compression really help to hide photoshop and optical illusion technique.  In fact, I feel my own picture here doesn't look nearly as authentic because I took it with a PowerShot with a 15 second exposure, low ISO.  SOOO that means there is almost no digital grain or noise, and the shutter was open long enough to get a nice quality of light. It only took me about 2 minutes to fake this UFO, and I wan't really trying.  Someone who is actually trying to perpetuate the UFO myth might take maybe... 5 minutes to hoax a picture.  That's real commitment there!  

At the end of the day though, these pictures and videos are every bit as ambiguous as all the other UFO pictures from the last 60 years. When will we get a high quality picture of a UFO that's not fake?

[crapbasedufos]

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... yeah it's a bird.

On August 5th, 2014 a UFO was reported over a lake in Venezuela. The original source is in Portuguese, but I'm sure google translate will help us out here:

An alleged unidentified flying object (UFO) was spotted in the city of Uiramutã city located within the Raposa Serra do Sol in Roraima northern sky. The record was made by landscape Tetsuia Eda, 42, the last day at 14h 12 A physical consulted by G1 states that the image may portray shadows of clouds.

The photo records a gray oval object and supposedly through the clouds. According to the landscape, at the time the image was made there were birds, or planes in the sky. "I was next to a waterfall and took the photo with a camera phone. The sky was totally clean," said Eda. The landscape adds that the supposed UFO did not realize at the time that took the photos. "Just saw the object when I showed the picture to a friend. He showed me and I was surprised," he said. According to the physicist of the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR), who examined the photographs, Miguel Campos, it is not possible to confirm the presence of a UFO in the photo. "Say what appears in the photo is hard, but I'd vote for a cloud that is being shadowed by a higher. Hence the darkest point in the image," the expert explained.

The image in question shows a nice serene lake with a bird UFO flying through the frame.

  According to the man who took the photo, at the time the image was made there were birds, or planes in the sky. "I was next to a waterfall and took the photo with a camera phone. The sky was totally clean,"  

So there WERE birds and planes in the sky?  So what makes this so special?  Maybe the google translate got it wrong.  He goes on to imply he didn't see the object before he took the picture, with his camera phone.  Well I'm no expert on camera phones, but I can tell you when I'm taking photos with my iPhone there is a slight delay in the image after hit the button.  I feel like it's plausible that a bird, or even an insect, flew across the frame during this short but noticeable delay. You ever try to take a picture of a bolt of lightning?  It's hard huh?

BUT not everyone is saying this is a UFO, or even a bird at that rate. According to the article, Miguel Campos of the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR), this is simply a dark cloud.  Fair enough, but may I ask what meteorological trickery is happening here to make it SO much darker than the other clouds?  Also, if we are to believe the photographer this object was not seen before (and I'm assuming after) he took the picture.  If it weren't so much darker I'd accept that explanation, but it just doesn't seem plausible.

What are the odds this is a reasonably fast moving small object close to the camera, and not a ridiculously fast big object far away?  My bet is it's a bird, plain and simple.  Here I have a photo I took myself that, like the photographer in Venezuela, I didn't notice an object in until after I looked at it later.  I'm fairly certain in my own photo here this is a bird.

Well.. ok well this DOES look like a UFO.  I mean it has light and shadow and a saucer like shape.  I could see someone getting it confused with...

Oh.  Yeah it's a bird.  At Disneyland.  I guess in the strictest sense of the word these are BOTH UFOs, as in I don't KNOW they're birds so who knows, maybe they are extra terrestrial?  YOU DECIDE! 

[crapbasedufos]

Speaking of Pareidolia, the first pictures from of Comet 67P are starting to come in!  Last week, after a 10 year journey, the Rosetta Comet Chaser arrived in orbit around the comet and is starting to send back data and pictures.  Where astronomers and astrophysicists see an icy rock flying through space, others see faces, supposedly carved into the comet by aliens.  This is a classic case of pareidolia.  The first image is from Universe Today  and the second, pointing out the characteristics of an alien face is from a blog post on UFO Sightings Daily.  Looks like a rock to me, but I'm going to hold judgement until we land on the comet, which is a part of the NASA / JPL mission plans so maybe we can get a better shot of its nose...