are there cases where UFOs are invisible to photography?

reply to post by LestatG


I wish I had seen something that definitive. I saw something once that might have been a UFO, but it also might have been something ordinary like a helicopter or balloon. What you saw is hard to explain - especially with a second witness and photos (albeit blurry).

I'd trust the evidence my camera gave me a lot more than I trust my own eyes.The latent image that falls on my retinas will be gone the instant I turn away or the object has moved and the only way I will know it was there was by a collection of electrical impulses stored in my brain that can be vaguely re-assembled into some sort of image that will degrade over time.This image can never be extracted from me to be able to show it to other people to prove it happened,hence the popular phrase "photos or it didn't happen".

The same image falling on the image sensor of my camera will be converted into exact electrical impulses and then into computer code where it will be stored on a non degradable format where it can be converted into a 100% perfect rendition of the original scene 10 seconds or 10 years later.Unless you delete the photo or the data gets corrupted during a conversion to another format,the image can never change.How a remote object can intercept the electrical impulses from the sensor or when the processor has converted it to code that apply just to it and nothing else is impossible to comprehend.The electrical signal and data inside the camera is at too low a level to be picked up at anything more than a few inches away from it,and to over write it with the replacement data without physically being plugged into the device (have aliens caught up with USB technology yet?) would need so much power it would fry the CPU in seconds and any other electronic equipment within range.

My eyes and anyone elses can be affected by many different factors that may not be known about by others,or even myself.We can look at the code that makes up a JPEG any amount of time after the image was recorded and still be able to tell if it's been manipulated or not.

The book "sight unseen" by Budd Hopkins, Carol Rainey, John Mack and others deals with instances of these things being seen by the naked eye but not being able to be caught on conventional and digital media. It also deals with various aspects of the technology seen such as being able to "freeze" time and/or people and cross into other dimensions.

This book is well worth a read and I recommend it. I myself can't think of what kind of tech could cause these weird visual anomalies.

Originally posted by johnthejedi24
The book "sight unseen" by Budd Hopkins, Carol Rainey, John Mack and others deals with instances of these things being seen by the naked eye but not being able to be caught on conventional and digital media. It also deals with various aspects of the technology seen such as being able to "freeze" time and/or people and cross into other dimensions.

This book is well worth a read and I recommend it. I myself can't think of what kind of tech could cause these weird visual anomalies.

Thanks I added that book to my wish list.

I guess people on here are only interested in what you have to say if your answer proves the existence of some sort of conspiracy.Take the trouble to sit down and write a technical explanation that covers the actual science behind it and not urban myths and they're not interested.I won't bother in the future after two of these in the space of a week have been ignored.

I have a friend that is a retired cop, and was burned by a beam of light from a UFO in the 70's. He says he seen another UFO a couple of years ago and had time to get his digital camera. He could see it with his eyes, but when he pointed the camera at it, and looked into the view screen. He couldnt see the UFO at all. He went ahead and took a couple of pictures of it, but they did not show up in the photos at all.

I tend to believe him because he is not the type to lie about things. Here is a link to his encounter in the 70's

www.ufocasebook.com...

Originally posted by Imagewerx
I guess people on here are only interested in what you have to say if your answer proves the existence of some sort of conspiracy.Take the trouble to sit down and write a technical explanation that covers the actual science behind it and not urban myths and they're not interested.I won't bother in the future after two of these in the space of a week have been ignored.

Sorry for not responding. To be honest, I thought what you said made sense, so I didn't know what to say other than to agree (which seemed pointless).

I was curious what you meant about detecting tampering in a JPEG image. Couldn't I simply convert the JPEG to something else, do my edits, and then convert back to JPEG? There is probably a tool to forge a photograph with an image and date. I think the tricky part would be getting the optical effects correct - like focus, shadows, and reflections. But a rendering program might make that feasible. (For example, I could render a flying saucer in some CGI trees that roughly match some real trees. Then I could cut and paste my shiny flying saucer from the CGI background into a real background.)

Originally posted by Aylien
I have a friend that is a retired cop, and was burned by a beam of light from a UFO in the 70's. He says he seen another UFO a couple of years ago and had time to get his digital camera. He could see it with his eyes, but when he pointed the camera at it, and looked into the view screen. He couldnt see the UFO at all. He went ahead and took a couple of pictures of it, but they did not show up in the photos at all.

I tend to believe him because he is not the type to lie about things. Here is a link to his encounter in the 70's

www.ufocasebook.com...

Thanks, that's exactly what I was curious about. I wonder if the view screen on the camera was optical or if it was an LED? If it was an LED view screen then it means his eyes or mind could sense something that the electronics could not sense. (Or I suppose it could mean it was a hallucination.)

reply to post by cloudyday


Film photos have always been admissible in court as evidence,but only recently have digital photos also been allowed.This was because a JPEG is always manipulated by the camera so is never actually the latent image.The RAW data that leaves the sensor has what ever amount you choose of sharpening,brightness,contrast,saturation etc added to it,but even if you switch off all the in-camera image processing just compressing it into a JPEG alters what was originally there.Using RAW images shows exactly what was seen by them image sensor and can never be altered,you have to convert them to JPEGs when they can be saved with what ever changes you want to make to them.
It could be said that every time you're shown a JPEG,it could be a fake (photos and it still might not have happened:lol.There is software I can't remember the name of right now that can analyse the hexadecimal code that JPEGs are stored as and can easily recognise any discrepancies that will reveal manipulation on a bigger scale than just sharpening or cropping etc.

The problem with JPEGs is that every time you open one in an image editing program,make even minor changes and then save it again,you lose quality.You only have to do this 3 or 4 times and it can be visible to the naked eye without the need for special software,if you want it to be as un-detectable as possible you have to do it from a RAW image and do it all in one hit before saving it as a JPEG.
The rendering programs are good,but only as good as the people who use them.Look at the famous scene from the first Star Wars film some 30 years ago (the dog fight in front of the Death Star),even the mighty Industrial Light & Magic couldn't get it right.Yes it would be possible to do it like that and as long as you understand perspective and how light and shadows etc work,you will convince some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time.But don't forget that if is sharp and in perfect focus,there'll be a Ninja death squad knocking at your door within seconds of showing it on the internet because it HAS to be a fake.

reply to post by Imagewerx


Hmmm, that is interesting. I bet there is software that can check an image against a camera model and settings to insure it is possible? For instance a sharp edge due to cut and pasting my hypothetical CGI flying saucer probably would raise red flags. The software performing the cut and paste might need to understand the image processing settings and model of the camera to get it perfect.

The conversion to JPEG will always be done using the same algorithm,as far as I'm aware the imaging device will never leave any sort of signature apart from it's very visible EXIF data.This will always be changed when edited with programs like Photoshop,so the absence of certain parts of the EXIF will be the smoking gun in this case.
The quality of the lens and other camera settings such as F stop,shutter speed,ISO etc can also have a large effect on the final image which I doubt if any known program could account for all of them,there's just too many variables.
I remember seeing a UFO photo a few years ago taken with an obviously cheap lens,something which gives easily visible chromatic aberration (a purple fringe around high contrast objects).Other objects in the photo such as a house against the sky had the purple fringe,while the high contrast UFO didn't.This to me meant the image of the UFO wasn't taken with the same lens.

reply to post by Imagewerx


It sounds like manipulation of images would be hard without leaving some clues (unless the hoaxer knows more about photography than the debunkers).

It was a digital camera, he says was 5 megapixel.

Originally posted by cloudyday
reply to post by Imagewerx

 

It sounds like manipulation of images would be hard without leaving some clues (unless the hoaxer knows more about photography than the debunkers).

Not just hard,but impossible.The code that makes up the image will always be altered if you know what to look for.

Originally posted by Aylien
It was a digital camera, he says was 5 megapixel.

In my limited experience with digital cameras there are two kinds. For the first kind (like my Nikon D70) you hold a sight in the camera close to your eye to aim the camera. I think that eye sight is entirely optical. For the second kind you hold the camera away from your face and aim it through an LED screen on the back. So I'm assuming your friend was using the second type of digital camera, but I wanted to be sure I'm assuming correctly. I know your post specifically said "view screen", but I wanted to be sure it wasn't actually a optical eye sight like my Nikon.

The human eye is amazingly sensitive to light, it may be possible to pick up just one photon!
Most camera cannot handle low light conditions and as noted already you need a zoom lens to resolve distant objects. So eyes in general are a lot more sensitive than cameras.

You need to understand how light works aswell. Look into it people.

Originally posted by ManInAsia
The human eye is amazingly sensitive to light, it may be possible to pick up just one photon!
Most camera cannot handle low light conditions and as noted already you need a zoom lens to resolve distant objects. So eyes in general are a lot more sensitive than cameras.

You need to understand how light works aswell. Look into it people.

Are you aware of sensitivity to frequencies outside the range of a typical camera? I have a suspicion that a sufficiently bright source that is just outside the visible range of light might be visible to some people.

I have a POSSIBLE explanation for this-dynamic range.

In this case dynamic range is the difference between dark and light (the very darkest and the very brightest) visible at the same time.Our eyes can cope with a much greater dynamic range than even the very best modern digital cameras can (film was always better until recently).If we go outside on a bright sunny day,we can see detail in the shadows,the midtones and in the highlights.If we take a photo of that same scene with a digital camera and expose for the midtones,the shadows will be dark but will show some indistinct detail and the highlights will be the same and will have something vaguely recognisable in them,while only the midtones will be recorded properly with all detail intact.
If we expose for the highlights,the brightest parts of the scene will show all detail,the midtones will be slightly underexposed while the shadows or dark areas will be almost black with no visible detail.
If we expose for the shadows or dark areas,the midtones will be slightly over exposed while the highlights will be blown out with no detail at all in them.
We can adjust an image in Photoshop or similar to bring out detail lost in the shadows,it will be noisey but will be an improvement as we will see more detail.We can't do this with over exposed images because when the image is VERY bright and blown out,the detail just was't recorded by the sensor so can't be restored by turning down the levels in P/S.

Soooooooooo................maybe the images in this case were over just exposed?A photo of a small bright object in the sky on a bright sunny day taken taken from a moving ship by someone not an expert in using a camera would more likely be over than correctly or under exposed,meaning the object really was there when the photo was taken but was lost in the blown out part of the photo.

Also,what's the story about the Nimitz and the rolls of film,I've not heard this one before?

Originally posted by Imagewerx
...

Also,what's the story about the Nimitz and the rolls of film,I've not heard this one before?

edit on 3-2-2012 by Imagewerx because: (no reason given)

The Nimitz case came from a book I was reading "Grass Roots UFOs". John P. Timmerman from CUFOS spent many years in the 1980's and 1990's handling a UFO display that new shopping malls would use as an attaction during their openings. During these years visitors would sometimes spontaneously describe their own experiences with UFOs and Timmerman recorded these conversations on tape. Some of these accounts became the source of the book. So unfortunately that paragraph quoted in the initial post is all there is without asking the author for more detail. It's not clear from the book if the photography failed for explainable reasons or unexplainable reasons. I know the sailors on the Nimitz would have been using a film camera in the 1970s.

But the quote from Aylien earlier in this thread seems to be a clear case where the electronics couldn't see as much as the human eye. Maybe the dynamic range limitations you described would explain that.

Originally posted by PsykoOps
A camera records the same light a human eye detects.

As Imtor pointed out, this is actually not correct. As he or she pointed out, certain cameras/sensors can record parts of the spectrum that human vision is not sensitive to.

To add to that a bit, and just as important IMO is that not all camera systems are as sensitive to visible light. It depends on the camera system, and crucially the sensor (or film) and the lens/aperture.

Some camera systems are simply more sensitive to light than others, and specialized cameras can be many time more sensitive to light than the human eye.

Conversely, the opposite can be true, and it is in the case of older cameras, if we are talking cutting edge vs cutting edge.

In answer to the OP's question (could a camera fail to record what the eye sees?), as a photographer of over 14 years trying to photograph all kinds of natural atmospheric phenomena, especially meteors, I would say, yes, definitely. It's easy to underestimate the ability of your camera system to record faint light sources, and cameras of yesteryear were not that sensitive compared to today's cameras.