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

Originally posted by fooffstarr

Originally posted by Palasheea
top photo -- congestion photo
middle is Mr. Zero's photo
bottom lare photo is Jeff's reproduction
there are differences

Indeed there are.

There is one building that has several bright white lights on it's corners in the reproduced and congestion images, but the lights aren't in the UFO photo.

If it is a hoax, would they go to the trouble to take those lights out?

Because it isn't any trouble at all to take the lights out. It is very easily done and a person editing a picture like this wouldn't think twice about it.

I just wanted to interject to say, keep this in mind.

originally posted by lost_shaman
If this picture was taken from a Jet waiting for takeoff, then that would explain why the two images are taken from a very similar vantage point looking down the same runway.

I downloaded a copy from a link here that said it was the 'original' but the file name is not original as far as what one would get right from the phone. My question is, is this file the actual original image as received by ATS? If so, it of course has been renamed, prior to sending it in. Now this does nothing in itself to support or disprove anything, my point is, the best possible 'original' would be a copy of the file right off the card from the phone, without any changes including the filename. There would likely be little if any EXIF metadata attached to a cellphone image, but having that actual image file might also have indicators of the actual source for example that it was actually from a certain brand of phone. Some metadata can be faked, other types would be more difficult, but passing these images through any software changes things. Most times metadata gets stripped out or altered. Phone images are so small, there is no real need to put them through Photoshop, they are JPEG's and could be sent directly as an email attachment.

While it might be pretty difficult to prove much from a cell phone quality image, there are other things that can give some clues as to the origin. Was the image as received by ATS renamed or did it have a filename consistant with any particular phone?

Originally posted by photochopz

Because it isn't any trouble at all to take the lights out. It is very easily done and a person editing a picture like this wouldn't think twice about it.

Fare enough. As you can see i have little experience in photo editing myself, i'm just trying to point thing out someone else may have missed.

So, in your opinion, is there any evidence to say that the lights HAVE been taken out and it is the exact same photo? Or alternatively, does it seem to be 2 separate images taken at the same location?

We have seen first hand that a pic can easily and quickly be manipulated, and that a new member with no previous experience ( on this site) can come on this site and post a photo in a very short time. We now have direct proof of this. But is the pic a hoax? There probably won't be a firm conclusion with everybody in agreement. I would start a thread about who would be motivated to place disinformation on here, but we can't trace the person who posted the pic. Someone already has us chasing our tails...

[edit on 1/25/07 by cosmo dag]

Okay, lets just say for debate sake that the photo is real. Besides the UFO in question, what else could it be?

George Noory said he thought it was a blimp. Thats a joke.
Some say it could be a reticulated cloud.
Maybe a water drop on the outside of the window of the airplane (not on the lens)

Any other ideas?

[edit on 25-1-2007 by amongus]

oops, I thought you were talking about the lights in the sky earlier. here is one with the lights taken off of the buildings.



I'm absolutly %100 positive that the "UFO" pic was made from that other picture. Its the same picture with a few minor edits added to it. I could completly reproduce this "ufo" picture from that original in about 5 minutes very easily.

[edit on 25-1-2007 by photochopz]

Before we all get carried away here thinking we know how easy this would be to hoax, let me tell you this:

I've been "doing this" (looking at UFOs and the like) for 20 years and when I saw this picture I instantly thought "bleh! cheap hoax! Not even worthy of consideration" Then my common sense kicked in and I sent it to a couple "friends" who are experts. The rest of this day has BOGGLED MY MIND.

Like I said on C2C tonight, I have learned more about digital imagery today than I ever thought I could much less would.

What seems like a simple "edit/clean up/add" is FAR FROM IT. When I here this from four of the TOP EXPERTS IN THE FIELD in the WORLD I believe them. When they are gracious enough to show me WHY I shut up.

Let's see where this goes, but for cryin' out loud let's GET PAST the "cheap hoax" idea, IT IS NOT. IF it's a hoax, it is a HIGH LEVEL job PERIOD.

That being the case, (I'm NOT saying it is for certain) then we need to find out:

WHO and, most importantly, WHY...

Springer...

Originally posted by cosmo dag
We have seen first hand that a pic can easily and quickly be manipulated, and that a new member with no previous experience ( on this site) can come on this site and post a photo in a very short time. We now have direct proof of this. But is the pic a hoax? There probably won't be a firm conclusion with everybody in agreement. I would start a thread about who would be motivated to place disinformation on here, but we can't trace the person who posted the pic. Someone already has us chasing our tails...

[edit on 1/25/07 by cosmo dag]

If I remember right, Springer said that they posted from behind a proxy server. However, couldn't the mods check the email address that was used when the person first signed up and try and track them that way?

Something tells me it'll be a dead end with nothing conclusive either way. And even if they were able to track it, would it matter? If this was a Government operation, Im sure that they'd be smart enough to erase all traces.
But on the off chance that they screwed up and we were able to prove that an altered image was used to try and discredit the UFO Truth Community by members of our own Government... imagine the doors that would blow open.

Originally posted by Springer
What seems like a simple "edit/clean up/add" is FAR FROM IT. When I here this from four of the TOP EXPERTS IN THE FIELD in the WORLD I believe them. When they are gracious enough to show me WHY I shut up.

Let's see where this goes, but for cryin' out loud let's GET PAST the "cheap hoax" idea, IT IS NOT. IF it's a hoax, it is a HIGH LEVEL job PERIOD.
Springer...

No offense to you or your experts, but it doesn't seem that far advanced. photochopz has managed to show fairly well that it can be done.

Are there some aspects of this image that most of us don't know about? That it is clean down to the last pixel?

If your looking as to who posted that picture on here. The first place I would look would be your own members.
Remember; this is an internet forum and sometimes people take things way too far.

edit for stupidity. just noticed the runway lights were the same because of the different entry points to the main runways. So the patterns would always be the same. .


Hmmm

[edit on 25-1-2007 by amongus]

Springer. Did these experts know about the Google image? As I said before maybe the reason it looks so real is because it's very minimal editing to a very real picture with very real objects (planes). Any chance you could get them to come to ATS and answer some questions?

I honestly can't see us getting past this picture being a cheap hoax with all the information provided in this thread...the information provided so far anyway.

[edit on 25-1-2007 by d1k]

Springer -- there's no way any of us can duplicate the surface artifacts of Mr. Zero's photo in photoshop -- this is what's so perplexing about his photo.
It's easy to reproduce the artwork, but zoom into those repro's in this thread -- blow them up and compare them to 00000000 photo.... they are nowhere near his photo in this regard.

The surface artifacts in Mr.Zero's photo can only be acheived with a low quality camera. In my humble opinion.





[edit on 25-1-2007 by Palasheea]

Originally posted by Palasheea
Springer -- there's no way any of us can duplicate the surface artifacts of Mr. Zero's photo in photoshop -- this is what's so perplexing about his photo.
It's easy to reproduce the artwork, but zoom into those repro's in this thread -- blow them up and compare them to 00000000 photo.... they are nowhere near his photo in this regard.

Thats because the people making the repro's in this thread didn't take the time to do the ground work. I've spent a total of 2 minuted editing pictures for this thread.

Of course a person trying to pull of a hoax is going to probably spend several hours making adjustments to the picture.

We are never going to reproduce the ufo pic exactly but it is very easy to take that original and make a different but just as convincing ufo pic.

Originally posted by Tiloke
If this is the congestion photo with a ufo edited in, than that picture was heavily edited. With so many changes made to the picture, there has got to be SOME evidence of tampering.

And thats my point. It's a high end job if thats the case, cuz we aint seeing any evidence of it.

I just got off the phone again with David Biedny, and we talked our last about this for the next couple days. We're gonna go over it with a fine tooth comb over the next week or so I suppose, but he's told me he believes it to be genuine photo.

I did forget to mention (or did i?) that we did some single channel work on the shot and discovered that there is some sort of air/atmosphere disturbance around the disc...thats only apparent in those channels. Not only that, but there appears to be some sort of appendage on the bottom left of the UO...again, only visible through LAB mode and specific channel adjustments.

This is, and we both agree, too much for someone to fake...it's too deep, and it's why we say that if it's a fake it's a top level job. Those kind of findings only visible though channel and alternate modes, just doesnt equate to a guy faking it in photoshop or whatever.

In the end David put it best, you only have so many pixels to look at, and how far is someone going to go.

The photo I posted referred to as the congestion shot, David doesnt believe to be the same image as the UFO one. He's pointed out those differences and I do see them, but as I said I have a hard time with reflections and alignments...BUT if the shot was taken near or on a commonly used thruway, then it'd make sense. We've established that it appears to have been shot from a connecting runway segment.

I'm going to bed with the notion that at the very least we've established that the congestion shot and the UFO shot were taken near if not exactly in the same well traveled spot. Past that, we just need more time to go over this.

But things are adding up in the direction of a genuine shot the more we look.

More to come I'm sure. G'nite all.

[edit on 25-1-2007 by jritzmann]

I admit that I agree with Springer that we should start shifting towards the who and why aspect of this story. This does smack of a disinformation tactic only in that we're here debating the technicalities of digital image manipulation instead of trying to track down a witness or other source of proof. I must admit that I would like to know what is so sophisticated about this pic that would make it so hard to produce, ( I know about audio- I don't know crap about digital video ). If you think about it, this is a pretty classic diversion set-up.
JR was posting the above while I was writing, so a few of my questions here are answered about the sophistication of the pic. I just want to say that I myself am glad to be associated with a community of thinking, objective people here.

[edit on 1/25/07 by cosmo dag]

Originally posted by amongus
...George Noory said he thought it was a blimp. Thats a joke.
Some say it could be a reticulated cloud.
Maybe a water drop on the outside of the window of the airplane (not on the lens)

Any other ideas?

I'm with you on the blimp, amongus, and

I think it's 'lenticular' cloud , and those usually are caused by windflow
over a large feature, such as a mountain.
I would guess that kind of flow would not occur over a multi vectored
wind area, such as an airport.

Known meteorologically as altocumulus standing lenticularus, lenticular clouds result from strong wind flow over rugged terrain.

www.cisl.ucar.edu...

And wouldn't a water drop show signs of gravity and be more of teardrop shape, or at least bottom heavy?

I beg to disagree with you. I don't even think hours of fussing with a repro of Mr. Zero's photo will ever even come close to the surface artifacts on his photo because once again, that can only be acheived with a camera.

Originally posted by jritzmann
I did forget to mention (or did i?) that we did some single channel work on the shot and discovered that there is some sort of air/atmosphere disturbance around the disc...thats only apparent in those channels. Not only that, but there appears to be some sort of appendage on the bottom left of the UO...again, only visible through LAB mode and specific channel adjustments.

Hot air from the engines and landing gear?