I’d say the inconsistent lighting that many have cited is part of the problem. But what gives it away for me is that Global Illumination/HDRI has a certain look that, if you post-process it correctly can be obscured to make the shot look perfectly realistic. But if you don’t know how to apply that post-production, the giveaways of being fake are more evident.
However, when I first saw the images, my first thoughts were “fake, HDRI” because I recgnised those tell-tale giveaways, but then on closer inspection I saw things that didn’t entirely fit that thought, such as some believable blurring, and positioning behind the power cables, that made it more convincing than my initial suspicions.
I still think it’s fake, as those things can be convincingly achieved, but not when so many other things appear to have not been thought through.
Taking this photo as an example, I’d critisize on these things:
• The color temperature in the shadows/blacks don’t really match. If you compare the darkest dark of the telephone pole, with that of the UFO, you’ll see the pole has a slightly more orange cast than the UFO (which is a bit more in the yellowish/green range).
• The longest arm/wing of the UFO is in an area that would be ever so slightly overexposed. I’d expect to see some bleeding of overexposure on the arm there.
• The sunlit side of the UFO would also be slightly overexposed, thus bleeding a little into all that detail of the body. It just seems too sharp when compared to the sunlit details of the pole.
Other than that, it just SCREAMS CGI to me… and I can’t really describe why. All that said… it’s a good job, and this guy will earn a decent living in the CG world.
I’ve seen all the other pics too, and he’s done a good job of compositing, color matching, bluring and re-introducing grain to really make it hard to argue it’s a fake. That’s the crazy thing about today, how easy it is to create this stuff if you have the skills. We’re not living in the days of a frisbee being thrown over a rooftop, shot with a polaroid anymore. Consumers have access to software, hardware and technology specifically designed to “fake” imagery, that just didn’t exist even 15-20 years ago.
I read with some mild interest – right up until I hit words like “invisibility,” “cloaking,” and “alien,” at which point I saw the Tinfoil Hat Brigade march nervously past.
I have to say that these are the most interesting “UFO” pics for a while. The fact that there are different batches of them, from different locations, showing different objects, is intriguing. I’m not going to respond with kneejerk scepticism – I think it’s quite likely that they could be real objects, combined with an exaggerated back-story (the invisibility, manoeuvrability, speed and so on). Whether they’re radio-controlled hobby things or some kind of commercial/military thing though, I wouldn’t like to guess.
This CARET stuff looks like the work of someone who has seen the pics and has too much time on his hands, however…
The diagrams toward the bottom of the screen represent a significant mistake by the hoaxer. They are clearly the product of a modern vector-based graphics application with text-to-curve fitting functions.
I’m wondering if this is a hoax that was already done and recycled. Only the first picture seems to have anything to do with the craft seen by “Chad”; I don’t recognize the objects in the other pictures at all. I’m thinking maybe this guy just took this “CARET” report hoax that someone already did in the past, copied the header, and made one additional fake page to tie it into the current hoax. To my eye, the border of the picture on that “inventory review” page looks too sharp compared to the other pages of the report. Nice job, though. The writing is good - it sounds quite coherent, and you can read the entire thing before you realize that he didn’t really say anything.
I like how he’s supposedly releasing this classified stuff without permission, but parts of it are blacked out. If they didn’t know he took it, who redacted it? Pretty stupid.
It’s rather too obviously all a hoax by one guy from start to finish, pretending to be different people. Notice how each photograph that was revealed has been progressively more elaborate? Because he’s been making these 3D graphic models and getting more ambitious with each step.
And each one of those photographs in the diagram collection is still, clearly, computer graphics.
There’s a lot of speculation over at Digg that this is viral marketing for Halo 3. Wouldn’t Bungie (or their marketing firm) be quite vulnerable to legal action brought by Premier Radio for essentially being duped into providing free advertising if this turns out to be the case?
I was thinking about the “CARET report” - this supposedly dates from 1986 and yet it is immaculately typeset, with justified text and several different fonts. I know it could quite easily have been done, but would some research lab really go to the trouble of presenting an internal document like that in the days before there was a PC on every desktop? I would expect a typed, or at best fairly basic word-processed, document.
Edit: and I totally don’t buy the Halo link. Having skimmed through the sites that mention it I can see no reason to suspect any link whatsoever. Plus, it would be pretty lame “viral marketing”.
Couldn’t we estimate the size of the object using Photogrammetry techniques on images 0016 and 0017? We should be able to get close approximations of the real height, bottom diameter, and top diameter of the telephone pole from real-world data. Then we can use the lines of perspective provided by the pole and power cables to pinpoint where the photographer was standing in each photo. Then we can use the parallax effect to gauge the apparent distance of the object.
I would love to do this, except I have no idea what I just said.