How to Recognize Fake Photos, Videos and Stories.

Does anyone know any program for proving fake alien, UFO pictures? What about stories? Sure there are those stories saying "I was Abducted by Greys last night in the middle of the woods" which you can tell are fake by just reading the title . But what about the credible stories? Not all the stories can be true because 1 conspiracy overwrites another and not all conspiracies can be true (Same with aliens). So if anyone knows how to prove stories wrong ( Without a program duh!) and photos of UFO's and aliens fake just by sight or using a program post them in this thread. Don't U2U them to me cause like that other members won't be able to get an advantage from this information ^^ .

You can check many of the stories and photos on www.snopes.com for their legitimacy.

[edit on 4/17/2005 by infinite8]

Yes, there is a program which, if installed and configured properly, will provide you with most of the requirements you're looking for, i.e., the ability to determine whether a picture, report, or story is valid or invalid; true or false.

It's called your brain.

I believe anyone with intelligence enough to feed and clothe himself can do what you want a program to do, simply by using his brain properly.

It doesn't require you to go back to college and get advanced degrees or anything like that, although some technical education would certainly help. It doesn't require you to search the Internet for the Real Truth, most of which isn't, anyway!

What is required is two things.

The first is common sense; the ability to turn on your BS meter when you see an outlandish claim and see if it really passes the "does this make sense?" test.

Look at the "chem-trail" hoax for a minute to get an understanding of this. Scientists have know for years that gases like water vapor will operate is very exact ways under certain conditions. It's at this temperature and pressure they will freeze, at that temperature they will melt, at this temperature and humidity they will sublime, and so on. Scientists have also known for years what the upper atmosphere is about, since they've been sending testing equipment in aircraft, balloons, and satellites aloft to measure the conditions and are doing so right now as we speak.

When a person denies all the basic science and years of observation in favor of an assertion that someone (we don't know who) is doing something (we don't know what) to aircraft contrails so that they will fall on us (we don't know where) and make us sick and/or miserable (we don't know how) in order that ... (we don't know why), it's pretty obvious that his BS meter is missing a double-A battery or one of the leads is not plugged in.

Furthermore, in order for such an assertion to be true, one has to buy into a bunch of other beliefs, most of which also don't make any sense, either.

Now is the time, Azure Twilight, for us to turn on our BS meters and ask the one question that the scam artists and hoaxters hate to hear: "Does this make any sense?"

The second thing we need is a more difficult one to acquire: training yourself to believe in what is, not what you want it to be. I am sometimes reminded of a two-year-old out digging in the back yard all afternoon, who cries when his mother calls him in and says that he can't bring his hole into the house!

Many people, for a variety of reasons (most of which I do not fathom) have a need to believe certain things for which there is no hard and fast evidence. For many of us, those beliefs are called religion; for others, they are called Spaceship Guys, Atlantis, the Hollow Earth, or "Chem-Trails". Understand that 99 percent of the people who tout such beliefs are, right or wrong, sincere in them; only a few, like the TV evangelists, Jeff Rense, etc. don't believe, and are using the acquiescence of the True Believers to earn themselves a living without working for it.

But regardless of sincerity, many people on this board -- and society in general -- believe stuff because they have a psychological need to, not because of any evidence. If you can avoid these two pitfalls, the bane of thinking humans everywhere, then you will undoubtedly be able to get rid of 99 percent of the assertions which fill society, the Internet, and this board as the rubbish they really are.

Good luck in your endeavors!

Edited to say:

I can't believe I forgot to mention www.snopes.com... ! The other poster is absolutely right. Barbara Mikkelson and Snopes is the best first line of defense against silly rumors around!



[edit on 17-4-2005 by Off_The_Street]

Thanks for the info Off_The_Street. That will help me with the stories plus i don't belive in a "Hallow Earth" cause it is Phsyicly impossible . I was wondering about any imaging programs for photos. Interesting reply.

Azure, I am not an expert in photo-manipulation, although I did take a course last year in Photoshop 7 and use it to enhance my own photos ( members7.clubphoto.com... ).

I have heard that one way to tell if a photo has been manipulated is to open it in a text editora nd look for something like "photoshop" in the header. Perhaps someone else could provide you with more information than I could; however, the person who is presenting the photo maybe just shopped it for contrast or unsharp mask.

The second thing we need is a more difficult one to acquire: training yourself to believe in what is, not what you want it to be.

I can't agree with that more. Most of the consipiracies, rumors, theories, whatever are because people want to believe something, or let their emothions get in the way of logic.

If you want to learn how to spot faked photos the best advice I can give you is to buy Adobe Photoshop and use it to make fake photos. You can go to websites like Worth 1000 and enter daily photoshop contests.

Aside from that, study how film and CCD's work, especially CCD's. When you look at a picture, keep that in mind. Know how to spot lens flare, an out of focus object close to the camera, hot pixels, etc. Look at the lighting of the object compared to the suroundings- do they match? Does the object seem to have a different light source striking it than the object does? Does the object cast a shadow one way while the rest of the picture shows shadows going in a different direction? Look for reflections on the object from other objects in the photo. If you see a photo of a shiny metallic UFO hovering low over a cornfield, but you can't see any of the colors of the corn reflected in the bottom of the UFO, it's probably fake.

These are just a few guidelines, but should give you a basic understanding. I highly recommend getting Photoshop and learning how to use it. Worth 1000 is excellent for that. Once you learn how to create your own images you know what to look for in spoting other doctored images.

ahem. let me add my two cents

I saw the worth 1000 statement and had to post.

I enter alot of contests on worth 1000, and a key to doing good in the contests is, like a good alien/ufo picture, a good source image.

Anyone with photoshop skills can render an image to look near perfect, and theres many things that can be done to further enhance the realism.

Source images can be altered to look older, look worn, faded etc. You can add noise to simulate conditions such as darkness. It can all be faked with a little time and effort.

Spotting a fake that has no apparant issues is much harder. I posted numerous photos on here and immediately get reports that they are fake, obvious photoshops, yet THEY NEVER GIVE THEIR EVIDENCE. If you want to prove something is fake, show us.

As for opening up the image in a text editor etc, that too can be faked. It is possible to edit an image in a hex editor and edit out unwanted text or exif information. exif information can even be edited right in photoshop/psp (with limitations) but it can all be edited with a hex editor.

Ive used a hex editor to hide messages in photos and send them to others. simpy open up the image and replace the text in question (exif lines) with something you want. As long as you use the same amount of characters (letters etc) it WILL WORK.

Try it if you dont believe me.

Debunking an image can more easily be done with things like incorrect lighting in source images...... just like on worth 1000.

things like focus, contrast etc, should be matched and not obviously off.

example having a dull ufo and a super bright background.


Looking into the history of the area the photo is taken is one of the best bets. As with the recent idaho photo, looking into the history of the land can tell you alot.

Using common sense is the best bet.

I just hate people that bash a photo and provide no further comment.



[edit on 17-4-2005 by Dulcimer]

Dulcimer, I defer to you; your knowledge of the internals of Photoshop certainly surpasses mine.

Where is your site? I'd love to see your pictures!

I mainly enter the contests for fun, I dont really enter to win, in fact ive only came close! lol.

Heres one entry I did for a color contest (alter the color of an object)

www.worth1000.com...

From there you can link to my other entries. Most I enter in a few minutes. Ive never really sat down and spent alot of time with an entry.

Anyone wishing to learn about photoshop, check out the tuturials there, or search photoshop tuturials on google.

Here's a meta-list of baloney detector lists:
www.autobahn.mb.ca...

And Wikipedia, of course:
en.wikipedia.org...

Here's my list of "This Page Is Full Of Baloney" signs:

• Source of knowledge is Mysterious Tablets found in a remote area guarded by Ancient Monk who helps the Intrepid Hero translate the tablets. Tablets and monk then vanish, leaving Intrepid Hero in possession of Book Of Ineffible Truths ($19.95 at most bookstores)
  
• Extraordinary claims about aliens, etc, that are "trust me I wouldn't lie" stories.
  
• Hidden military bases. I lived on military bases for a third of my life. You can't hide all the equipment and supplies and everything else coming in and out of the area.
  
• Claims to find flaws in famous physicist/mathemetician/scientist's work
  
• Solutions to mathematical mysteries by someone who has no working knowledge of calculus and wouldn't know a tensor from a scalar.
  
• Almost everything involving Tesla.
  
• Killer planets/comets/stellar bursts
  
• Sitchin and Velikovsky and Rael and Lieder.
  
• Pages that start out dissing scientists (not that some scientists don't come up with woo-woo theories and not that there aren't a few loose screws out there OR that there are controversial theories that later come true. But when someone starts out griping about academia rather than focusing on content and evidence, it's pretty well certain that there's no real evidence that would hold to any examination.)
  
• Claims which involve scholars magically mistranslating Mayan/Incan/Olmec/Egyptian/Sumerian/Abyssinian/Hebrew/Greek/Hindu (etc) writings
  
• MOST of the "new age" Native American stuff.
  
• Incredibly Ancient Civilizations that vanish without leaving any traces (except, of course, lost books of philosphy (available everywhere for $29.96)) Civilizations (even the most primitive ones) leave traces. Lots of traces.
  

Other "Snopes-like" pages:

REALLY good page on antiquities
www.antiquityofman.com...
www.catchpenny.org... (Egyptian pages)
And don't forget to check out the JREF
www.randi.org...
And the Skeptics Dictionary:
www.skepdic.com...

Faked videos:
Check to see if the story is similar to a movie plot. We've seen a lBot of scifi movie clips passed off as The Real Thing.
Video of Mysterious lights with no reference (could be anything, including someone's mom with a flashlight)
Alien interrogation videos particularly if they "take place" in a dark room (so you can't see the flaws in the puppet.)
blurry and jittery videos, particularly if recent (most vidcams have autofocus and some jitter control)
Blurry and jittery digital photos. There was one of an "alien" around here that when you enlarged the photo showed the "legs" of the alien all streaky and blurry (thanks to using Photoshop, of course).

Bad Anatomy Department:
You should know what basic skeletons look like. Limbs don't bend in a gradual curve unless the creature has NO skeleton. This is highly unlikely in anything that is walking around in our gravitational field.

There's more, but that would do for starters.


[edit on 17-4-2005 by Byrd]

That's cool Dulcimer.

Here's my best entry www.worth1000.com...

I won first place in a beginner contest with it. My best in the advanced is third. I've entered two photography contests there and got a star for one of them.

In addition to snopes... the Skeptics Dictionary:
www.skepdic.com... is one of my faves....

one my esteemed colleague Byrd left out...

In lieu of explaining how or why something works, they say something along the lines of "our tiny human brains couldn't comprehend it", etc. etc. We are a sentient species and could certainly comprehend a "dumbing down" of an advanced concept. What kind of superior intellect wouldn't be capable of dumbing it down to our level? That's what you'd have to ask yourself.... (i.e. the Lacerta files are a good example of this)

Peanutbutter and Dulcimer, you guys are good.

I guess, for the photo to be real, the aliens must be the right shade of grey!