Bill Moore's photo of Sandia Labs - Real or Fake?

reply to post by spirit_horse


I had to play around myself because at first, I could only see what looked like 'sandy hills'. But it didn't feel right so I downloaded your image, enlarged it and opened it in Photoshop. If anyone has Photoshop, do this to the entire image: Resize 300% then go to filter - artistic - neon glow. Turn down the glow size to zero and you'll clearly see these buildings once you return to the image.



Looks like buildings to me.

White paint and take a picture that is over exposed. Hardly a camo

There was a thread on ATS which included pics of an entire city camouflaged, can't find it though.

You couldn't make out there's a city while flying overhead (plane or even satellite).

Originally posted by GeisterFahrer
reply to post by spirit_horse

 

I know - there are obviously 14 ninjas in that photograph.

I can see the snowdrift and it does not look like buildings to me. I can see the telephone poles.

You've never seen military camo then.

Your obviously ignorant on camo and how it works.

Google it and then come back.

reply to post by LucidDreamer85


You obviously didn't see the 14 ninjas

reply to post by GeisterFahrer


Ugh... For the last time there's 17 (seventeen!) ninja's there.

But seriously, don't know what's up with the picture or if what they claim is true. All I know is that I saw an image which was 'too bright'. Doing what I did helped me see (for the most part) what was beneath the over bright areas of the picture.

Originally posted by spirit_horse
That is pretty wild. I can see where the buildings are. I just wonder if they were painted white or sand colored, being in the dessert, and the black and white photo somehow didn't pick them up. You can see rectangular black 'windows or doors?' in there. Interesting concept if it is intentionally done. I never heard anything like that.

edit on 12/2/12 by spirit_horse because: (no reason given)

Black and white film did not have exactly the same color response and sensitivity as the human eye. It wouldn't be surprising if somebody came up with a paint which reduced contrast after being photographed with typical chemical processes.

"back in the day", all aerial surveillance was still with large B&W photo film as that gave the best resolution.

Today, it's not going to work so well against a sophisticated hyperspectral sensor system.

Come on... it's just "S4 Hangar Door" paint. The aliens gave us 500 cans of the stuff. Bob got three of them from somewhere, but the military stole two back. And the third one... well, Bob painted the can WITH the stuff IN the can, and now... well, now he can't find it.

Even "back in the day", they had infrared film, a precursor to multispectral or hyperspectral, so the netting scheme wouldn't work. But the caveat is they couldn't detect the camo in real time until they had IR imaging rather than just film.

The problem with analysis of this photograph is the quality is too poor to really draw conclusions. I learn towards bunk, but could be persuaded otherwise if the original film were presented as a tif with higher resolution.

The post about black and white film not having equal response to all colors is true as well. Kodak made "technical pan" film that titled towards red:
en.wikipedia.org...
The opposite of technical pan was Kodak orthochromatic. This film was not sensitive to red. But in the "modern era", most black and white film was Tri-x and then later Tmax.

Since the photo is old, I'm going to guess Tri-X was used. It has a decent spectral response. It goes well into the UV, but not into IR at all.
www.kodak.com...
So if Sandia was playing any tricks, it would be in the UV spectrum. Perhaps the netting had a phosphor that glowed in UV when exposed to sunlight.

Most photographers use a "sky/UV" filter to get rid of UV light since atmospheric haze is proportional to the inverse 4th power of the wavelength. [Translation: filter UV and you get rid of a lot of haze. I use a research grade 400nm filter when I shoot Groom Lake from Tikaboo to get clearer shots.] But it is possible whomever took the shot didn't have a UV filter, plus the cheap UV filters you get from the camera store don't really filter much UV.

Note that digital cameras have the opposite response. They are poor at UV and sensitive to IR. Of course, the photographers still use a sky/uv filter, but mostly out of habit.

Speaking of camo and Tom-foolery, Kim Dotcom had an inflatable T72 tank, but that didn't fool the authorities.
gizmodo.com...

OK, the tank came after his arrest, but the story is more entertaining the other way around.

Here is a patent application that is similar to what I described as how this could work:
www.patentstorm.us...

I say similar because this patent is attempting to add UV emitting chemicals to camo so that they match the environment, that is make a better match. But if you had a lot of UV emitted from camo netting, it could fog the film.

It would have to emit a whole helluva lot of UV to do that. And also UV-filters are readily available so that would make it kinda pointless.

I saw the buildings right away. Nice camo, but hardly perfect.