More "Anonymous" Chicago UFO images

Hi Zee-

Bit-splicing I'm somewhat familiar with, but what I look at in regard to that is how much data would be viable based on compression and translation of the original image. DCT based compression and makeup of jpg's is going to essentially screw up the numbers behind the pixels, and render such a process highly questionable.
That, and there's the possibility of seeing artifacts based on compressed images DCT or not, that have the possibility of being misinterpreted as evidence of hoax. I personally wouldnt want to stand on that. Unfortunately alot of the imagery we get out of UFO reports is rarely such pristine data that isnt compressed. Raw uncompressed data...I'd be interested in what that process would show.

So in answer to your question, yeah it's an interesting process if we had uncompressed pristine data to start with.

(Just reposted this after joining up as first post went in anonymous.)

After going through this thread something intrigued me from the negative picture earlier (from Klaxmexalix).
If you 'invert colours' it using 'paint' you get back the normal picture and the round disc top-left is not the moon for at least 2 reasons:
1) The moon is always the same apparent size in the sky as the sun....think solar eclipse. The disc shown is a lot smaller than the sun image even if you consider the wash-out effect from rays.
2) The moon only is seen as full in the sky when it is opposite in the sky to the sun i.e. on the far orbit away from the inner Earth orbit. In the picture shown the sun would have to be between the moon and earth to show it as full!.....obv not possible.
Also it won't be a planet like Venus as this would show as a bright dot.....not extended like the pic shown.
So if it's a real picture (not faked) then it is interesting as to what the disc is.

I don't seem to be able to insert a picture of the invert, so i'll leave for someone else to do if they want......

[edit on 9-2-2007 by st1234]

Concerning the wtf-disc.jpg disc.

I suspect it is caused by the fact that the sun shining directly into the camera. I say this because I took some pic of lightning at night using a digital camera and noticed a lot a various colored dots in the image. I figured it had something to due with the intense light of the flashes.

Originally posted by roadgravel
Concerning the wtf-disc.jpg disc.

I suspect it is caused by the fact that the sun shining directly into the camera. I say this because I took some pic of lightning at night using a digital camera and noticed a lot a various colored dots in the image. I figured it had something to due with the intense light of the flashes.

Lens flare is a reasonable hypothesis, but I'm not sure. I see them all the time, and even tried to deliberately generate them. I've never got one so round and individual as that one, though.
Here's an example of lens flare with the sun as the light source, and with the moon.

Also, I agree that it can't be the full moon.

Anyway, here we have another image with no provenance or supporting data. The skeptics feel free to ignore these, and I can't blame them.

[edit on 9-2-2007 by disownedsky]

Ok... this thread went through 3 pages in one night... and now it hasnt budged an inch. Seems the moment we decided the original photos from LeSalle were highly credible, no one else knows what to say. Are we stumped here?

[edit on 10-2-2007 by damajikninja]

Originally posted by damajikninja
Ok... this thread went through 3 pages in one night... and now it hasnt budged an inch. Seems the moment we decided the original photos from LeSalle were highly credible, no one else knows what to say. Are we stumped here?

[edit on 10-2-2007 by damajikninja]

Yes. Until you establish the provenance and supporting information, there's not much point in much more investigation. It's not evidence - just intriguing. All we need is for this lady to privately contact one or more trustworthy investigators.

Originally posted by jritzmann
Hi Zee-

Bit-splicing I'm somewhat familiar with, but what I look at in regard to that is how much data would be viable based on compression and translation of the original image. DCT based compression and makeup of jpg's is going to essentially screw up the numbers behind the pixels, and render such a process highly questionable.
That, and there's the possibility of seeing artifacts based on compressed images DCT or not, that have the possibility of being misinterpreted as evidence of hoax. I personally wouldnt want to stand on that. Unfortunately alot of the imagery we get out of UFO reports is rarely such pristine data that isnt compressed. Raw uncompressed data...I'd be interested in what that process would show.

So in answer to your question, yeah it's an interesting process if we had uncompressed pristine data to start with.

I understand that the DCT encoding can be completely reverisble. Even if the original JPEG is crap. To be sure the higher quality image the better the results are, however in this paper by Dr. Nasir Memnon Binary Similarity Measure (if I'm intrepreting this correctly) he's basically saying there will be differences on the bit planes between the original and the doctored image.

Now before you rebuke me - theoretically if we docotored our OWN test image, and used BSM to compare our docotored image to a suspect anonymous image - and compared them using BSM/Bit-splicing, would it be logical to assume that if they were the same, then both are doctored?

And it has already been proven that members of this site can reproduce alot of the submitted images with some pretty good accuracy.

I think if you can compare an original undoctored to a doctored image, and if its different, the reverse will also be true, no? Compare a doctored to a doctored and if one is different, it *helps* (not 100%, but is more than we have currently) to prove it's validity.

Originally posted by disownedsky

Originally posted by damajikninja
Ok... this thread went through 3 pages in one night... and now it hasnt budged an inch. Seems the moment we decided the original photos from LeSalle were highly credible, no one else knows what to say. Are we stumped here?

[edit on 10-2-2007 by damajikninja]

Yes. Until you establish the provenance and supporting information, there's not much point in much more investigation. It's not evidence - just intriguing. All we need is for this lady to privately contact one or more trustworthy investigators.

Time will tell if the son of this woman who recorded these photo's will be available again to answer some basic questions that we have about these photo's e.g. type of cam phone she used -- or if he's got the original non-compressed photo's available...

At any rate, I've learned a lot from this discussion on these photo's and I want to thank Jeff and a few others here for your patience and having to re-explain a few things so that some of us, me included, have a greater understanding of some of the concepts and approaches you've brought forward in your analysis of these photo's.

English is my second language and sometimes when things are re-explained over again, especially when it comes to technical information, this helps me to understand those points any of you are trying to bring across at any given time.

I know my phone is only 2 years old, but has anyone mentioned the fact that when you take a picture (on my cell phone, at least), you have to hit "Save" before you take the next one? Then it does it's little animation of putting the checkmark on it (Verizon graphics) and it's saved and ready for the next pic. Then you have to line up the camera again to take the next shot.......

If newer cell phones don't do this, then my question is irrelevant.

I think it's important to find the model cell phone used because, if it were my phone taking those pics, there would be at least 5-10 second wait-time between each one to prepare/lineup/snap/save each shot.

Hydden

Here's another edit of the UFO photo, this time I isolated the red using photoshop, and used focusmagic's photoshop plugin to help focus it alittle better.

I think this photo is pretty compelling. It looks alot like a saucer / ufo photo and I'm thinking this rules out the 'blimp' theory, cuz...uh.. i don't know any blimp that looks like this -




And cropped / zoomed -

Originally posted by jritzmann
One thing I was thinking about, is that the supposed story is that the person who took these said they felt a static charge in the air. Seeing all these really clear shots ya wonder if the static might have had an effect on the shot itself.

Static charges are the worst enemy of electronics.

A static charge, when it finds a way of discharging, will destroy the CMOS transistors that are the base of today's electronics, including most of the cheap sensors in digital cameras.

Well, we should point out again that just because these photo's have a purple/blue-red wash, such chromatic aberrations ARE JUST as prevalent in many digital cam's out there on the market too -- not just photo's from some cam phones models.

For example, here's a link to a digital cam where customers are complaining about such aberrations showing up in their photo's take with it. In this case, the Fuji FinePix E550 Digital Camera.
Here's what one customer is saying about this camera:

Purple fringing, in my own experience, is UNBELIEVABLY BAD. Sorry. Reviewers suggest suitable printable image sizes for this camera, but I have blue shadows so bad that even on 6x4 prints it's conspicuous.

au.shopping.com...

I'm only bringing this up because such chromatic aberrations cannot be used as criteria(or can it? read on..) in determining if the cam used to take a photo was in fact taken with a cam phone when there are already many digital cam's out there that are showing the same kinds of color aberrations in their photo's too.

But having said this, because there are more cam phone model's coming out now that are taking vibrantly colored photo's, perhaps it's fair to say that because of the limitations in those adjustment controls on such cam's, we are seeing more photo's showing these purple/red-blue chromatic aberrations than ever before and not just from regular digital cam photo's where the photographer only used 'auto' and failed to calibrate things correctly.

So because of this, should we then using 'chromatic aberrations', as Jeff mentioned before, as one of those criteria used in determining if a photo has been taken with a cam phone or not?

Now that I know what photo's are looking like now taken by those more recent cam phone model's, I'm wondering if this is true? So far, it seems like this may be the case.












[edit on 10-2-2007 by Palasheea]

Hydden brings up a good point. My phone (about 6 months old) does not require me to save each pic before I take the next one, BUT I wonder when that started.

We have evidence here that 2 years ago phones did require this, did most phones require this back then? Additionally, even if the "mom's" phone required this it appears as thought there is several seconds between the shots unless I've completely misunderstood JRitzmann's analysis.

I would like to point out that THIS THREAD is a SHINING EXAMPLE of what we envision ATS to be.

THANK YOU... Every Member who has worked on this issue and participated in this thread is an ATS All Star in my book!

Springer...

I also agree, this is something that can help narrow down the phone mom used to take a photo.

exiftool tells us that the 4 ufo photos were taken at 75% quality @ 640x480 resolution. This makes me believe it's a bit older.
Then we bring into the fact that the phone may take 1-2 seconds between photos. This is significant not only in the fact that it establishes a quasi-timeline inbetween photos, but for one other more obscure fact -

It has to save the photo. Which means the cam phone has a type of flash memory attached to it, and does not have enough onboard non-volatile ram to store the images. For newer phones, the opposite is true. New phones have more onboard ram so it can instantly save a photo, while older phones had to save it to flash memory.

I think I might have a good fit for the type of phone used -
The Nokia 6650 -
Nokia Comparison

Only thing is the 6650 comparison chart says it has 7mb internal memory. *sigh* Everything else fits the bill for this phone. No Exif, 640x480, cute/small/lovalble. Anyone else have any suggestions?

Originally posted by zeeon


Only thing is the 6650 comparison chart says it has 7mb internal memory. *sigh* Everything else fits the bill for this phone. No Exif, 640x480, cute/small/lovalble. Anyone else have any suggestions?

My Motorola RAZR camera requires me to decide what to do with each image as its taken. It takes me at least 3 seconds to get to the "Store" option and select it. The images are 640 by 480 and of very humble quality.

Here's an example shot. The only processing I did was to rotate it in iPhoto.

Your phone has EXIF tags attached. So it's not a motorola razr.

Just to clarify,

We are looking for an older phone that can only capture in 640x480 (I think this is a moderate assumption given the evidence so far.)

A phone that that does have JFIF tags.
A phone that DOES NOT add EXIF tags.

A phone that does take video as well as pics is, IMO more suited than a phone that only takes stills.

And last but not least - do we think the phone had to save inbetween shots or no? The report said the object was moving fairly fast right? She took 4 photos, estimate a 3-4 second capture speed....well that would put us at (wait, let me do the math...3 seconds from first capture, x 4) would put us anywhere from 12 seconds from 1st to 4th photo to 16 seconds, IF the phone had to save each shot individually.

If it didn't save and she snapped one after another, I'd say that bugger was moving RIGHTLY Fast! So I think its a safe bet to say that given the report that the UFO was moving Moderatly fast, with a 12-16 second timeframe between 1st and 4th capture, the phone that took it had to save before the next shot.

Anyone else agree?

I agree zeeon! But what qualifies as an 'older' phone?
Lol, when it comes to technology, 'older' can mean as recent as six months ago considering how fast technology is moving these days at an ever increasing rate. It's Future Shock x 10 when you think about it. So what do you mean by 'older' in reference to cam phones?

But whatever the case may be, at the rate we are going now, I would imagine Hollywood will be soon be producing big budget, feature-length movies recorded entirely by cam phone's!!!

[edit on 10-2-2007 by Palasheea]

I think the hunt for the phone model is an impossible one.

Only knowing that it does not put EXIF data and takes pictures at 640x480 its not enough to find what model could be, there must be dozens of phones that fall in that category.

they new to much about flying saucers ...

it never ends!!

always out of reach ..just like the fake rabbit at the dog track.

for decades-we truth seekers ( and all the famous researchers . John Keel, McDonald, Keyhoe, freidman, Randle, Howe, Art Bell (he he), Ruel, and add infinitum) are always back were we started!!

Me myself, always seeing mind blowing things but can't prove a thing !! its a one man army of truth seekers!!

can there , will there ever be one person that comes forward with the Ultimate proof!!

Until then -were all still at the beginning of the investigation of stories and hearsay.

what a drag.

but fun to read about.

Ruff