Is this a ginune ufo pic?

Ok...long time lurker, first post here.

I was working with this older guy late one night and he was showing me pictures of his computer of his cabin he owns in southern Colorado that he plans to retire to. There were over a 100 photos showing his cabin and various picutres of the surrounding area. He can these few photos which were the pictures of the view off his front porch which over looks a few mountions. Well as he was flipping through the pics, this peticular one caught my eye, and I asked him what that object in the sky was... we both looked hard and could not figure out what this thing was. It didn't appear in any of the other pictures which were takin within minutes of each other. The object has some pixalation around it, i don't know what that means, but the mountains do to.. so im assuming that the camera used just had bad resolution. Its a UFO to me cause I can indentify it, so opinions?

Smoking gun if you ask me. Solid proof right here.

I just did a simple blow-up of the object and it pretty clearly looks like a rudimentary cut & paste to me.





[edit on 11/27/2007 by Noscitare]

Originally posted by stang56k
The object has some pixalation around it

Which is the first sign of a cut and paste job. I'm not saying it's not real. I'm just saying I don't believe it is.

Aha! Noscitare already beat me to it.



[edit on 27-11-2007 by kleverone]

The pixels being around the object is NOT an indication of a cut and paste job. If you zoom a digital image, you will see pixels surrounding all objects. Zoom onto the trees around 400% and you will notice that the trees have pixels surrounding them also, some of the trees pixels are also perfect squares just like the 'ufo'.

My conclusion, yes it is an unidentified flying object since there is no way of telling exactly what it is by the picture. But that doesn't mean aliens are in it.

reply to post by hikix

Even when the area of pixelation is in the shape of a rectangle (as with this image)? I would've thought that to be a pretty clear indicator of human artifice.

Originally posted by hikix
The pixels being around the object is NOT an indication of a cut and paste job.

I entirely disagree, in this case I believe it is very clear.

If you zoom a digital image, you will see pixels surrounding all objects. Zoom onto the trees around 400% and you will notice that the trees have pixels surrounding them also, some of the trees pixels are also perfect squares just like the 'ufo'.

Acutually they are not "just like the 'ufo'" because the 'ufo' doesn't need to be zoomed 400% to clearly see the pixelation.

My conclusion, yes it is an unidentified flying object since there is no way of telling exactly what it is by the picture. But that doesn't mean aliens are in it.

I'll give ya that.

reply to post by Noscitare



Spot on.

Clearly an alteration and or addition.




Nice pic, though... background.

Well if you guys actually are right, and I'm still sticking with my story (for now). Than thats a pretty lame hoax.

Dude, the guy that I got it from barely knows how to check his email let alone crop # in with photoshop or something. Im not saying there is aleins in it ether I just wanted some people that are used to debunking this type of thing to tell me if its moisture on the lens or somthing to that nature. But, the reason I didnt think that it was moisture or some other anmoly was, no other picture he had has this object in it, so....


[edit on 27-11-2007 by stang56k]

It does look like a cut and paste job. Not saying that it is, but it looks like the top of one of those mountains cut, rotated 90 deg. and pasted into the sky. The pixelation is normal, but not perfectlly shaped into a square.

btw, theres somthing that is dark in the top middle of the sky too.

Slightly off topic but may be related.
When streaming video content, you usually get pixelation when an area of the screen has changed from the previous frame of video. Streaming data that represents stationary background objects that hardly ever changes may be repeated for several frames. For example, a video of a talking head will have the mouth area updated every frame and the pixelation here will be different than that of the still background.

My point and question is this:
Is it not possible that digital cameras may perhaps utilize the same algorithms used by streaming digital video cameras?

This might explain why the pixelation around the trees is different that the obvious pixelation around the object.

This may be proof enough that the object was actually moving.

Well, if it's not a cut and paste job, then 999 times out of 1,000 it's going to be a bird. And of course it wasn't seen when the photo was taken, because we pretty much ignore birds. It's only when the image comes back and there's some kind of blurry thing in the sky that we think it's some kind of "UFO," whatever that means.

Real photos of anomalous flying objects (i.e., not birds or weather phenomena or odd aircraft) are extremely rare. I would guess that there are less than a half dozen taken each year. Sometimes none.

Catching a real UFO on camera is an incredible fluke and often accompanied by other aspects, such as a strange, dissociative feeling, as if reality is unraveling. General weirdness sometimes called "high strangeness." If the photographer didn't experience this, chances of it being a real freak UFO are a lot smaller.

My vote is that if it's not a fake, then it's a bird.

When I looked at the zoomed photo posted, I would have said it was a cut and paste too. But since it only takes a few seconds to drag the original pic onto the desktop and open it in Win XP's standard pic viewer and zoom in, that's what I did. The mountains display the same kind of sloppiness and bleeding of texture into the entire JPEG square pixel grouping matching the style and look of that around the "UFO". So it's safe to say it's not a cut and paste. However as mentioned above, it may be a motion-blurred bird.

anyone else notice the lack of exif data?

i mean shouldnt there be SOMETHING there?

just wondering, photo editing isnt my specialty.

reply to post by kleverone


Hey, let me explain how jpeg comrepssion work. When it compresses an image, it takes areas with the same color and make it as one square area. Thats why jpeg images often has square areas. In this case the image could be original, and not copy paste. If you look closer on the image, the compression has done its job with the squared areas, when it ends u with the "ufo" bit, it cant make out the "common" compression color and leaves the image area in tact.

Stang56k writes:

Dude, the guy that I got it from barely knows how to check his email let alone crop # in with photoshop or something.

Well, as Damocles pointed out, there is no EXIF data with the photo. Given that, do we really have any evidence as to just who took the photo? Are you truly certain that your co-worker would've been unable to figure out how to do this? The first time I ever tried cutting & pasting in a photo it took me all of about 30 minutes to figure it out by myself with no tutor other than Microsoft Paint's help files.

btw, theres somthing that is dark in the top middle of the sky too.

I didn't notice that at first. But now that I look at it, it appears to be just some sort of dark blur. And did you notice that when you zoom in on it that it does not display the same sort of pixelation as the other object?

Elhardt writes:

The mountains display the same kind of sloppiness and bleeding of texture into the entire JPEG square pixel grouping matching the style and look of that around the "UFO". So it's safe to say it's not a cut and paste.

I'd have to disagree here. While there is some bleeding pixelation where the sky meets the mountains it is not the same as that rectangular patch of pixelation plunked down in the middle of a pure, unpixelated blue sky.

tep200377 writes:

Hey, let me explain how jpeg comrepssion work. When it compresses an image, it takes areas with the same color and make it as one square area. Thats why jpeg images often has square areas. In this case the image could be original, and not copy paste. If you look closer on the image, the compression has done its job with the squared areas, when it ends u with the "ufo" bit, it cant make out the "common" compression color and leaves the image area in tact.

Well, if this is the case (that JPEG compression (and by extension digital photography in general?) will inherently make a photograph appear to have been manipulated) then I think that the use of digital photography needs to be reconsidered, at least for the use in capturing images of objects which are claimed to be paranormal.

I'm now going to wander into some heavy speculation: If what tep200377 writes is true then we might need to ask some deeper questions as to the development of digitization in general. Why is digital taking over from analog? Is the world of our human senses (what we might refer to as "reality") digital or analog? Have all of these digital recording media which are possibly inherently faulty methods of recording the world, been pushed on us for the very purpose of preventing us from accurately determining what an unknown image is?

Thanks.

Originally posted by Noscitare
Well, if this is the case (that JPEG compression (and by extension digital photography in general?) will inherently make a photograph appear to have been manipulated) then I think that the use of digital photography needs to be reconsidered, at least for the use in capturing images of objects which are claimed to be paranormal.

I'm now going to wander into some heavy speculation: If what tep200377 writes is true then we might need to ask some deeper questions as to the development of digitization in general. Why is digital taking over from analog? Is the world of our human senses (what we might refer to as "reality") digital or analog? Have all of these digital recording media which are possibly inherently faulty methods of recording the world, been pushed on us for the very purpose of preventing us from accurately determining what an unknown image is?

Its due to size, simple as that. You dont have to read a conspiracy into it.

Taking a 10mpix picture with uncompressed BMP would weigh in at like 20mb+. A JPG would be like 2-4mb (depending on compression). It varies from camera to camera how aggressive the compression is (and of course what setting its on).

There are cameras capable of taking RAW pictures, which are uncompressed. Well I havent looked into the format that much, but presumably uncompressed anyway. All DSLRs are capable of this but compacts are still poor in terms of support. Its only the cameras in between that support it, the "enthusiast" ones (such as the Canon G9 to name an example).

[edit on 28-11-2007 by merka]

reply to post by Noscitare


Just to demonstrate the squarish effects of pixelation caused by JPG compression, have a look at this picture. I just took it, zoomed in and took a screenshot. Notice the square field of pixelation around the glasses, a dark object sitting on a relatively monotone background.

Whatever it is in that mountain picture, it's flying, it's unidentified and it's an object.
I doubt it's extraterrestrial though..

peace,
tom