O'Hare Airport UFO Sighting -- UPDATE: Photos & Analysis

Originally posted by Mezzanine
Ive been posting here for about 6 months and I probably wouldnt have been able to post that picture without spending some time figuring it out.

depends on your level of computer literacy though.
it seems bleeding obvious to me (hit reply and the add image button is fairly obvious).

if your a computer person, i think it would take a matter of a few clicks to figure it out.

[edit on 24/1/07 by lbennie]

Now the anonymous post have another pic that has the same background as the 00000000 picture, but with a different ufo. I wonder if it preceded the ohare photo? Circus time...

The work that several ATS members have been doing on this thread is, simply put, unprecidented by anything I have seen before. A very impressed thumbs up for everyone coming together to try to get to the bottom of this image!! So much that Springer coing on c2c to talk about it? Wow. . .

Now, can someone help me find an online radio station that carries c2c so I can listen?


Nice work everyone!

Thanks for the hints. On most sites one could figure this out.

Anyway, my point was this: there are two image placeholders in the original
photo. For this reason I believe the original O'Hare image posted by '0000000'
is a fraud.

Save this image and blow it up. See the image placeholders ???

img256.imageshack.us...

Hope this works.

just curious but why does it say on the poster 0000000 that he was on 51 minutes ago but his post was at "posted on 1/23/2007 at 08:29 PM (post id: 2898150)" yet people are saying he hasnt posted again?

basically what im saying is i think he was on here again seeing what is going on.

[edit on 1/24/2007 by homeskillet]

Hello everyone.

As we get bigger and bigger, I've not been posting as much, being content to work at providing a great big giant soap box for our members, than standing on it myself.

Also, I'm being more and more careful not to create a situation where my opinion might be confused as an "official stance of AboveTopSecret.com"

That being said, this is my person opinion...

When I first saw the image this morning, my first reaction was... "WOW! This is something!"

Now, with what appears to be the source image being surfaced by our awesome members (Deny that damn ignorance!), I do not believe this is an image of what was seen at the O'Hare airport.

I do believe something fantastic was witnessed by several people that day. But it's not the image posted by Mr. Zeros from his proxy.

That being said, it appears as though a fair amount of effort went into carefully creating an image that might be first widely accepted... then eventually break down under close scrutiny.

But that leaves us with an interesting question... why?

Being "conspiracy theorists", we know why... "someone" is attempting to discredit the coverage of this event and eventually the event itself.

I'll leave that thought in your capable hands to contemplate.

Originally posted by Diode
Save this image and blow it up. See the image placeholders ???

can you explain what an image place holder is?
i can see the marks, just having trouble figuring it out.

Originally posted by roadgravel
Now the anonymous post have another pic that has the same background as the 00000000 picture, but with a different ufo. I wonder if it preceded the ohare photo? Circus time...

whaa?
please explain



[edit on 24/1/07 by lbennie]

[edit on 24/1/07 by lbennie]

I will be brief with my comment. You guys are doing a fantastic job with this. This is an important story, please don't let it slip between the cracks.
I second the motion that I need a webcast of C2C to hear Springer tonight. Anyone know where to find it? You guys are kicking some arse!!!

SkepticOverlord great post! The question of Why? is even more important than finding to truth in my opinion because who would want to do this to the human race? How much are they getting paid, if any, and who has hired them, if anyone?

All very important questions alone indeed!

You guys can listen to the show on Canadian radio here:

www.cjob.com...

..and click on the Listen Now button.

exactly skeptic

this person was obviously trying to make this image look legit for long enough so that it's accepted, hand in hand with the event itself, so that in the future when it is proven a hoax, everyone will assume the event was a hoax.

if that made any sense at all.

i usually dont

jritzmann thanks when are they going to talk about it again?

There not now.

Diode, guess you were the person posting the pic in the anonymous posts section. Did you just create that pic using the 00000000 picture.

Originally posted by imtim83
SkepticOverlord great post! The question of Why? is even more important than finding to truth in my opinion

Actually... I'll go a step further in this case...

Thanks to the work being done here, it may actually turn out for the better that we revealed a hoax than showcased what could be an actual shot.

1) It shows how we have matured and are self-policing the UFO community

2) It makes it harder to pass off hoaxes on ATS

3) It raises questions about the possible source

I think the question of "why" the disinformation, comes with a lot of things.

1.If this pictures is a real dis info, presenting a a fake picture, what would it discredit? The event itself? How?

2.If the source of this hoax (if it's really a hoax) if it comes from "shadow guys", would not they resort to a more effective way than producing a hoax just to create more confusion? I believe that they have far & much better capability than we can ever imagine that just this.

3. We may also look back in the past on several suspected disinformation items that went to the public. Is there any similarity? Any recognizable Patterns?

4. What will be the benefit to the "people or shadow group" who want to cover up the real event? Would this hoax make their job of covering up much easier? If yes, how?

I can come up for more questions here to really look into the "why" of the dis info. But let's get more opinion from other ATS members.

Originally posted by Palasheea
I just thought I'd post this information so that someone here can make sense out of it.

I took the 000000's UFO photo and I blew it up 315% (see top image with the UFO in it).

Then I too jritzmanns' airport congestion photo and blew that one up 947%.

If you notice, the UFO photo was obviously taken by a webcam or a cellphone cam. Look at the surface artifacts of that photo as this alone is a dead give away. You can't reproduce this surface effect except with a low quality cam.

Now look at the photo that jitzman found in google's images. You can see that it started out as a hi-rez photograph taken by a hi-end camera. Those white dots were added to that photo and you can see that clearly because of the very well defined pixelization around those 2 dots -- but we are not focusing on that now anyway.. just look at how different these photo's look in terms of surface artifacts. Even when jritzmanns' photo was blown up 947% you are still not getting anywhere near the surface artification that's in the UFO photo that's above it because it was not taken by a webcam or a cellphone cam -- but the UFO photo was.

The UFO photo does not appear to be tampered with. You can see very clearly that any kind of tampering on a surface like that is going show up very clearly on even casual analysis.

[edit on 24-1-2007 by Palasheea]

Blocking Artifacts

The well defined pixelization around the lights in the congestion photo has another explanantion besides being added in or tampered with -- and that is "Blocking Artifacts". Blockin artifacts ar ethe 8x8 blocks of pixels which are caused by the limitations of the jpeg compression format.

When a photo is compressed into a jpeg format, the jpeg works in 8x8 pixel squares, one 8x8 area at a time. The compression algorithm "sees" the flat blue sky as basically a homogeneous blue field, thus there is very little "Blocking Artifact" effect in the sky, since the overall average color of the sky is blue. But once the jpeg compression gets to resolving the small white dots, it does so in 8x8 blocks. The small white dots throw off the "average" color of the blue sky, so the JPEG compression software gets confused and "messes up" some of the blue sky pixels around the white object. This happens, as I said, in 8x8 squares of pixels. Count the "odd looking" pixels around the white object. you'll see that it's a 16x16 square, or four 8x8 blocks arranged in a square.

And, BTW, since the sky in the UFO photo was a less-than homogeneous gray color, the blocking artifacts are much noticable (again you will see that they are in 8x8 blocks of pixels)

Here's a website that explains these jpeg compression artifacts:
ai.fri.uni-lj.si...
and BTW, concentrate on the jpeg part of that article, not the jpeg2000. Jpeg 2000 is a whole other technology that is designed to eliminate blocking artifacts.

and another:
www.techweb.com...
this one may start with an advertisement (which you can skip) - my apologies

Are there any digital media professionals that can help me explain this better...I'm sometimes not very good at explaining.

The bottom line is that the odd looking pixel around the bright object are completely consistent with what would be expected of a jpeg compressed photo of the lights from planes landing at an airport. It doesn't necessarily mean the congestion photo was tampered with

But again...if the UFO photo turns out to be fake, that does not mean the the O'Hare incident didn't happen. I will still stay open minded. (open minded to both sides of the discussion, that is.)

edit to add a clarification.

[edit on 24-1-2007 by Soylent Green Is People]

I know I'm a little late on this and it's probably been said already, but...

Originally posted by AgainstSecrecy
edit: it's a poor fake...look here:
img259.imageshack.us...

do you see how that one was made up? right...copy and paste

If you're referring to the discoloured pixels around the lights. That's called .jpg compression. That's not a sign of tampering. When you edit/manipulate an image, it doesn't magically make distortions around what you added. It's just the side effect of what happens to an image when it has a decent amount of compression applied to it.

[edit on 24-1-2007 by jra]

Wow, amazing work people.

To think, i was the first to post about the photo and by the time i got back it had already been discussed to death

I'm with the hoax side of things at the moment. As i said when i first checked it out, the object itself doesn't seem to have been edited in, but that means nothing if it is indeed a slanted, degraded version of an original photo. The artist is far beyond my ability to figure it out if that is the case.

What time is the show on?

Thanks for the information about the blocking artifacts and I'll look over those webpages you have provided for us on that.

But I do know that those artifacts also occur when pasting images on top of others but we are not even talking about the congestion image in terms of those lights in that photo --

it's UFO image that I'm focusing on and I'm very interested in finding out those processes the hoaxer used to get that congestion photo to look like Mr. Zero's photo (his photo/image).
Did he in fact use that congestion photo for his UFO photograph?

I would like to see someone here duplicate those processes to get the same image that Mr. Zero came up with using that airport congestion photo.











[edit on 24-1-2007 by Palasheea]

Originally posted by Palasheea

I would like to see someone here duplicate those processes to get the same image that Mr. Zero came up with using that airport congestion photo.

[edit on 24-1-2007 by Palasheea]

that sounds like a challenge

ill see what i can do