High-Res McMinville UFO Photos

Somebody requested a link to these babies (big babies!):

McMinville UFO photos

They really are quite good. Look at the detail on this enlargement/contrast adjustment:



Look at that "intake duct," or whatever it is. Nice.



[edit on 25-5-2006 by Enkidu]

Originally posted by Enkidu




Look at that "intake duct," or whatever it is. Nice.

[edit on 25-5-2006 by Enkidu]

You mean the string holding up the paper plate?

Sweet

The level of detail is excellent, but these sorry ol' things are dirtier than I ever imagined



Great work!

[edit on 25-5-2006 by rand]

Those white blotches make me think Fingerprint.
Is it possible they are thumb or other prints imbedded in the print?
The Mcminnville photos are still my best evidence.

Is this a joke?

People don't actually believe these things are real do they?

You can see the string holding up the UFO...

Originally posted by Goperang
Is this a joke?

People don't actually believe these things are real do they?

You can see the string holding up the UFO...

Actually these have been studied for over 50 years and have never been debunked.

Originally posted by bruise

Actually these have been studied for over 50 years and have never been debunked.

The perspective is all wrong, it would have to be a tiny ufo where it is., and also be flying at a weird angle, or a large ufo far away, but by the shading comparetive to the trees and house in the backround, this upject is close up.

And the most important part, is the hook and string partially visable on the top of the ufo.

* Also, I imagine they are claiming that the photos were taken around the same time of the same UFO, but if put the pictures together you can see it is at different time of the day.

On the first photo without the fingerprint you can see when its blown up the whole area around the UFO is like a white space around it but the rest of the picture its dark shaded areas. Doesn't look right.

I seen this photo in a few books and always wanted more info on it.



[edit on 25-5-2006 by helium3]

Originally posted by Goperang
Is this a joke?

People don't actually believe these things are real do they?

You can see the string holding up the UFO...

No, the only string in the photo exists in your mind, perhaps. The only thing resembling string is the cracks in the photo itself, from age and wear.

The photos have been studied by highly qualified professionals, and have never been sucessfully explained.

The object in the photos was judged to be 100 feet long, and the photos were taken in sequence. They were not done at different times of day.

Hmm yes.. studied for 50 years by experts and debunked in a day by ATS investigators lol. I really think that if that WAS a string (which is DOES look like) that in the last 50 years someone would have made a definitive answer on that

These photos look so fake.

Just to demonstrate how unreliable these photos are, here's my rendition of one of them, look to see if you can see the difference:
mywebpages.comcast.net...

Originally posted by longhaircowboy
Those white blotches make me think Fingerprint.
Is it possible they are thumb or other prints imbedded in the print?
The Mcminnville photos are still my best evidence.

They are indeed finger/thumb prints. The question now is how they got there. Were they on the print originally, or did they "develop" over time? Maybe with this new hi-res version we can get a better idea.

A lot depends on when in the process the print was made and whether it is just normal human sweat and oils, or if the person had some photographic chemical on his/her hands.

A dry fingerprint left on wet film or wet fingerprint on dry film can leave ridges in the emulsion of the negative which act as little lenses and show on the print as fairly sharp, fine dark and/or light lines, especially if a condenser light source is used for printing.

Emulsion on print paper is usually hardened enough to resist physical damage from wet fingers, but a person processing film and prints by hand usually has some sodium thiosulfate (fixer) soaked into the skin which can transfer onto the finished prints. That may later disolve the silver in the image leaving a blotchy fingerprint, brown and yellowish at first, graduating to white over time. That type of change is progressive, because sodium thiosulfate is stable and will continue to slowly diffuse through the photo emulsion forever.

The same can happen with just the acids and oils and salt on your fingers if they happen to get transferred to a print (or negative) which was not completly "fixed" to begin with, or which was not washed properly during processing. You've undoubtedly seen old photos which are faded out almost completely. Same principle, the finger sweat aggravating and accelerating the process.

Either way, it takes some time, and looks a bit like a coffee stain, lighter in the middle, with brown/yellow edges.

Alternately, the lab tech could transfer fixer onto either the film or the paper before processing; that would leave a blotchy but even-toned, sharp-edged fingerprint, showing as black on the print if it happened during film processing, white if it was during print processing. Think black or white ink.

There's one other way it can happen, and it should be of some concern here: potassium ferrocyanide was widely used in hand-processing b/w prints back in the day, and will also bleach a photograph and so show fingerprints if accidently transferred (despite the ominous name, it's relatively non-poisonous). In fact, photographers used to refer to potasium ferrocyanide as just "bleach". Bleach was a major retouching tool before electronics took over. A quick bath in a dilute bleach solution will selectively brighten highlights without flattening the shadows. A bit of bleach rubbed onto a dark, flat area will pop up the contrast quite nicely. At an extreme, it can be used to remove zits, lighten blemishes, remove unsightly branches growing out of your subject's head...and hide inconvenient wires and strings. I wish we had real color scans of these pictures: fixer problems show yellow traces, as I mentioned; one characteristic of bleach is that the effect is color-neutral, with no yellowing.

ThePieMaN noticed a lightened ring around the object in one photograph. It could be the result of dodging, but could also be an artifact of a bleach job. I haven't looked at it closely yet, but I have a good idea what to look for.

Dodging will generally look like a little cloud, fading out to diffuse edges, and the dodged area will have lower contrast than the area around it. Think airbrushing with white paint.

Bleaching will usually have sharper edges, and the bleached area will show higher contrast than the surrounding area; the area inside will seem like a flat-bottomed, round sided bowl (that' the only way I know to describe it). It's like using a wet eraser, if you can picture that.

But, to answer your original question, no, all these ways of screwing-up your photograph will not usually leave a physical impression on the final picture (Kodachrome and some other esoteric processes are another matter) although bleaching using a cotton swab or wad of tissue can leave very fine scratches on the surface, detectable with a strong magnifier.

(Can you tell I spent too much of my youth in photo labs?)

THE FINGERPRINTS ARE ON THE CAMERA LENS NOT ON THE PHOTOS, DURRRRR

Originally posted by laiguana
THE FINGERPRINTS ARE ON THE CAMERA LENS NOT ON THE PHOTOS, DURRRRR

There's only been one camera lens I know of which could resolve a fingerprint on it's front surface (Canon, I think, but that's been a few decades ago) and it was an uber-expensive super-fisheye, and, if I remember correctly, was a c-mount movie camera lens.

All other camera lenses will not resolve anything actually touching the lens surface; even macro lenses have a normal close-focus distance, at furthest extension and minimum aperature, of several inches. The camera in the McMinville case was a fixed-focus box camera capable of taking pictures in clear focus over a range of approximately 6 feet to infinity; any fingerprints on the lens would have diffused light over the entire image area but not have appeared on the film.

In these cases the photograph itself cannot be analyzed - the negatives have to be analyzed for fraud, which have been done numerous times.

Here are a couple links for more information:

www.mcmenamins.com...

www.rense.com...

Originally posted by zerotime
In these cases the photograph itself cannot be analyzed - the negatives have to be analyzed for fraud, which have been done numerous times.

Yeah, the analyses always amused me. They had the negatives in hand for quite some time, apparently.

So why, then, instead of just analyzing the negatives, didn't anyone do the one sensible thing here: give them to a competent lab technician and have some decent enlargements made?

From what I see of this case, we're all still poring over a dirty, mishandled, poorly-made snapshot (even worse: highly compressed jpegs of marginal scans of that crappy snapshot) instead of discussing the 8x10 glossy close-ups that should exist. Give us just one half-decent blow-up of the object, and an uncompressed tiff to pass around the conference table, and maybe it wouldn't take sixty years to figure it out.

Let me just repeat that in another way:

In sixty years nobody ever made decent prints from the original negatives.

Ten minutes with an Omega D-4 and a quart of Dektol would go further toward solving this thing than all the nit-picky technical analysis anyone could throw at it.

Awesome find Enkidu. Thank you

Way Above