pantha: nice work.
jak: I did the same thing. For all the photoshop guys on here, if you do some unsharp masking of the planes themself -- I used about 176%, 5.8 pixels, and threshold setting 9 (i know those are crude, but they get the job done) -- the one thing you can conclude is that we definitely have only a single fin on the tail. At the start of the thread someone drew a potential second tailfin onto the plane, but the unsharp masked version makes it easy to see that that's not a real tailfin...basically, in the second image you wind up with some "blue bar" artifacts above and below the plane's edges after you apply the unsharp mask to it, and once you see that it's very clear that there's no second tailfin sticking out to the right. Here's my version of the plane from picture 2:
That means we can basically conclude -- which pretty much everyone seems to -- that whatever plane we're looking at is a single-tailfin plane. Other than that I'm not sure -- this version of the picture leaves the underside of the plane really unsymmetric, with the right side apparently much larger and closer to the camera than the left. It certainly looks like the bright part's just an accidental glint on something reflective, but to me it still seems like the plane might have been dropping something -- someone with more knowledge of planes can maybe explain this better than me, but without an explanation I don't feel like I can rule out the "it's dropping a bomb/dropping a missle" claim just yet. Maybe chaff or flares?
Some miscellaneous points: I don't think the moving clouds point to this being photoshopped -- I grew up in areas similar to that one and if you're at elevation the clouds change pretty quick; even on the ground that's not an unlikely amount of change in the sky over the course of fifteen-twenty minutes, so without knowing the backstory behind these pictures it's hard to use the clouds as evidence of photoshopping.
The picture does look photoshopped, however -- the sharp pixelization / not pixelized border is evidence itself -- and it also looks like the color saturation's been cranked up a bit. If the only modification was cleaning up the sky -- maybe to remove some text -- I'd want to buy this guy's digital camera; all the pictures I've taken have come out much flatter/less vibrant than that. So it looks like these pictures have been modified before they arrived at ATS...but how much and in what ways it's hard to tell.
I'm not going to comment on the orbs -- they look silly, and are too easy to insert via photoshop.
