Three Clear Photographs of Black Triangle over South Carolina

Those are indeed clear pictures!
I am no photography specialist but to me it looks ( i don't like to use the word fake ) staged.... Anyone out there how can verify the authenticity of this picture?

Nice post though!
S+F

I don't see how anyone can say anything definitive about this image. Saying it's "debunked" is ridiculous.

Having said that, I took the image and did a simple layer duplication in "screen" mode. What that means is you take the existing pixels and multiply them towards the light end of the spectrum. After a bit you start to see edges pop out. i was zoomed waaay in when I outlined the edges I started to see. The middle image is the screened image and the far right are the angles that I saw.

As far as pixelation is concerned or photoshopping... I see no clear evidence of such. If anyone knows anything about jpg compression, all hard edges will have a greater degree of pixelation due to the compression technique of the .jpg format. Having said that, once you have an image already in .jpg format and then you add something to it, a second compression layer can be picked apart and I saw no evidence of such.

Furthermore, the light are on the bottom of the craft suggest that it's high enough to capture the light ambiance from the horizon. A low object in such conditions would have almost zero.. or it would have been more complete on the underside.

My thought is that its really there.

I see no conventional design, no evidence of a craft that uses the air as a carrier and no evidence of a small object made to look large. splicing the image in a panorama can fool you because the spherical nature of a lens distorts the perception with the slightest angle change. Nature of the beast..

man or alien.. who knows but I think it's really there. if not, they did a great job of matching the tonal values of an object in such an environment.

b

OK, I'm ready to call this a pure hoax. The hoaxer forgot to turn off the anti-aliasing when he drew the filled shape with the pen tool in Photoshop (or its equivalent in other software). That white line around the edge is not from sharpening.

All I did was lower the exposure by 2 stops and threw a little fill light (changed gamma slightly) at it and the drawn shape becomes clear.

I hate this. I always open the threads about the triangles as I said before, they seem to be for real.

reply to post by Bspiracy

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You should spend more time studying focus in photographs. The first thing that pokes you in the eye is that the object is the closest to the lens if the edges are truly that sharp. That means either it was something very small or it was added to the photo. My humble opinion.

The thing that strikes out at me is that the noise on and around the craft is different from the rest of the image.its as if someone has tried to match up the image noise to make it look authentic.

humorous.. been in the photography field for over 15 years and worked in, for and contracted by some large players. I would love to disclose my name and history, but I've been attacked a few times for my opinions and am glad I've kept anon now. I've the seen the highest qulified experts on here proven wrong after "definitive" examinations.. It's why anon .jpgs are so annoying.

It's a pain to break apart, ul and show visually, but I'll make my point:

1.. a ccd on a digital camera works best when two objects have a distinct difference from one another.. in this case, the craft is about as distinct a color and shape from the sky a ccd needs to process a sharp image..

2: the treeline is immensely close in sharpness. Individual leaves can be seen. In such a shot, I would EXPECT the craft to have an extremely sharp edge in such a silhouetted condition. The pixelation size matches and the jpg compression matches from treeline to craft. In a thunderstorm like this, the wind has to be blowing a bit and I'm actually a tad surprised the treeline is so sharp.

3: the treeline is 1 stop "fuzzier" though.. if the focus is on the craft and it's above and beyond the treeline then voila' everything fits.

I respect your opinion though... it's all we have in such a case

b

If it was the old scrammy, aka scramJET ? then it would make noise noise noise, there for the name JET at the end :-)
But it could be a later and better version equipped with a anti gravity engine? perhaps?
And i also think that every picture presented here on ATS should be in real TIF format, so you can examine it properly.

[edit on 10-6-2009 by Kukulcangod]

I tried to address this earlier..

a .jpg is blocks of mathmatics used to describe much smaller block of pixels. When an object such as this is compared to the treeline below, it's inherent that the algorithm used is consistent throughout the image.

Meaning the closer the color tonal values, the less pixelation will be seen since it's easier to average the colors. Go through your picture collection and look for similar sort of shots.. trees next to buildings, powerlines etc.. hard edges will almost always have a "noisier" look to them than objects of similar values.

I gave 4 cents and now I'm broke..

b

reply to post by daniel_g

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WRONG, and it is a WEATHER BALLOON.

reply to post by Bspiracy

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You seem to have a pretty good understanding of this medium so I want to ask:

What are your opinions on the drawn outline and the "not turning of the anti-alaising" idea?

I have absolutely no idea what these mean, but they seem to be a popular idea to explain these photo's on this thread so far.

reply to post by Bspiracy

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I get what your saying on the pic where the point of the craft is in the light the compression looks similar.Basically without the original image I guess we won't know.

In focus with trees so.. small model or toy, plus for 3 frames and fully in focus, it ain't moving very fast is it?

During early testing usually the airframe is dropped from a carrier in glide mode. It's only much later when they start to test self-propulsion. As IgnoreTheFacts pointed out, it's possible if it is an X-43A, the craft may have cut engines to land, and with as low as it appears to be (we can't say with any certainty how low the object is without knowing distance from the viewer) this would seem to make some sense.

[edit on 10-6-2009 by Xtraeme]

Edited to add my explanation on anti-aliasing.. basically all that is is a way to smooth lines on a monitor or screen to look smooth. A display device uses square areas to show shapes. If you didn't find a way to smooth an angled line on your screen/monitor, all lines would have a stair-step look to them to achiev an angle. Anti-aliasing basically fills in the areas inbetween steps to make said angle appear smooth. Turning off anti-aliasing makes things look blocky and hard edged...

I don't know about the drawn outline.. anyone can post an image that has gone through their own processing. When sharpening, lightening or whatever other techniques is used, it depends on what tolerance values are applied.. I guess I could go into a long and drawn out explanation, but i can make a building have the same outlines with just a few clicks as the "drawn outline" shown earlier..

I'll go a step further with it. In the following vid I am using the default IMAGE > ADJUST > EXPOSURE filter in photoshop. I'll let you be the judge.

To me, this object fits in with the scene perfectly and has the 3d shape I outlines earlier. more light is on the nose and bottom far edge. The darkest area is the top edge where the shape is angled up and towards us which is the furhest from the horizon's light source.

take a look..

YouTube Link

b



[edit on 10-6-2009 by Bspiracy]

reply to post by Bspiracy

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You have put me back on the fence on this now!nice to hear an expert opinion for a change,I was also thinking earlier about the post about how they are not the original images could you give some opinions on that?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like the "sight" filter you're using is a simple convolution filter coupled with something resembling the following kernel:

0, 1, 0
1, 4, 1
0, 1, 0

In other words the plugin is computing the laplacian of the image using positive peaks. Assuming I'm correct, yes, the filter will behave somewhat similar to a find edge tool - isotropically revealing regions of rapid intensity change. However what you're really seeing is an approximation of the second derivative which is very sensitive to noise. That's it! This does not imply a person used a stencil and forgot to remove it.

Here's a good way to test this for yourself. Find a picture of a very high temperature flame. Heck I'll even provide a good test photo:



Now run your filter against it. Does it have a similar border? If so then the filter is just being overly sensitive and you should apply a gaussian smooth before the laplacian transform.

I'd like to point out that not only have the angle of limbs from the trees changed between pictures, so has the size. That means you would need to map these textures against the inside of a semi-distorted hemisphere (or scale the images to normalize the change in distance) to accurately calculate the relative height of the object to the camera between pictures.

[edit on 10-6-2009 by Xtraeme]

Oh for a telephoto lens! or even a zoom lens, I still use 35 film cameras, at least blowups dont get pixelated, the bane of modern photography.
[No, I have not photographed any et craft]

It doesn't matter matter here on ATS. No matter what photos you show, or videos, if the skeptics are not actually taken aboard a spaceship and shown the wonders of the universe, they will not believe. And if they are taken, they will believe they have had a hallucination.

well, i dabble in 3d as well and it's really not that hard to create a basic shape like this, throw in a light source, download a cheap texture and create something that could be thrown into this image. By no means am I saying this is 100% real.

People need PROOF. Closest to proof is an image that has all of the original info embedded within the file that describes what camera, settings used etc.. these are missing as I understand..

Even so, most "original" pics truly are jpgs like this and it's the closest some will ever get. The best "original" digital pic you can get would be in a RAW format. A digital negative you could say.. exposure values are in the file and I love em because I can fix issues I was too lazy account for in my original shots..

Next best "original" file type woulf be an uncompressed tif.. no compression means for every dot you see, there is a separate byte that describes that color...8 bits make a byte.. 16 bit images are becoming more common and harder to fake but it'll be a while before that's a household standard..

IMO, this is a 6 outa 10 file to have as far as "proof" is concerned.. An 8 for the actual clarity compared to what''s been floating around.

There is NOTHING that will satisfy everyone because unless you were there, too many sneaky people try to pull one over on people because.. well who knows.

So in answer to your question, people always want better & original files but we make do with what we have and in this case, I've shown you my points and I tend to believe this one is real given the way the entire thing falls together..

what it is though.. dunno

b