UFO photo, Melbourne Australia 1966 - Unexplained or a hoax?

reply to post by elevenaugust


This looks pretty fake to me.

This UFO is flying sideways,
but i think it's shape is reported as seen before,
on those various UFO type - charts that can be found on the internet.

I just saw it the other day on that chart with the blue background.
Maybe someone can upload the chart?

It looks genuine to me.
(I'm talking about black and white image, don't know about the other one.)

Originally posted by hazchem
reply to post by elevenaugust

 

This looks pretty fake to me.

This was back in the '60's at the hayday of interstellar travel, crafts back then look like plates hanging off strings and were very mechanical in shape, long before our intersteller bretherin had invented superplastic forming and fusion bonding, their craft were very much belt and braces engineering, rivets and brass were were the material of choice and some extruded aluminium was just being used, well in Australia anyway. ( and photos were crap).

As Sci-Fi films, computers and CGI we able to imagine more complaex ships and filled our imagination with these, technology has moved on. Like us, they are now able to create much more complex shapes, indeed liquid metals and memory metals are now the rage and no longer will a hubcap launched overarm whilst your mate snaps away be accepted.

Hello ATS!

Old topic, I know, but I thought that you will find interesting what the two UFO researchers Keith Basterfield and Paul Dean have done for the 50 years anniversary of this UFO photo.

50 Years On... The 2nd April 1966 Balwyn, Australia Photograph - Revisited

They meticulously retrieved, archived and compiled all the relative stuff written over the years here and here, and even put a word about this very topic. This is really a great work that likely took months to gather and I do recommend to take the time to read this article.

Like I just said to Vicente Ballester-Olmos asking my opinion about this, I don't think that I can personally bring anything new on the matter, at the light at what was already greatly done over the years by many researchers. Then, not to intend to do a full analysis on this, especially due to the fact that the original is not anymore available; but here are some comments I might do anyway:

- I'll not put too much faith in the "jagged line theory" solely for "proving" a possible hoax. Indeed, I tend to agree with Bill Chalker when he said that such things can occur when old Polaroid film are used. However, I haven't found yet such a clear and neat (really like if it was cut and pasted!) jagged line in Polaroid samples on Internet. There exist some samples where there are similar separation lines (mainly in a vertical orientation) in the photo, but not that jagged. (source: Flickr group "Polaroid Fail!").



- IMO, the real "nail in the coffin" is rather what Dr Frieden said during the APRO UFO symposium in 1971: "strong doubt was cast on the Balwyn photo when Dr Frieden pointed out that a blurring effect on the chimney was not apparent on the object", and later "[...]all the points on the rooftop are vertically blurred, but that the object in the picture's points are less blurred and equal in all directions. This to him violates a basic property of optics, namely, the point spread function".
I totally agree with this as there's only one way to have such a difference in the blur direction and amount: that the object was moving exactly the same way (in the same direction and at the same relative speed) than the photographer movement during the exposure time, which is highly unlikely!
It's visually clearly visible that this blur difference is present and I'm somewhat surprised that nobody else than Dr Frieden haven't noticed that as well.

- Another thing to consider is the very important information given by Francois Beaulieu about the fact that Polaroid of that era were well-known for their ability to record multiple exposures on the same print; he even provided evidence that a special device was even produced in Austin TX for Polaroid cameras to give the possibility for the photographer to produce multiple exposure shots.





So, as a conclusion, I would say that this photo is suspicious, even if not 100% proven as a hoax.

Altitude and size seem to be low for me. I know it a famous photo that has been through a great deal of scrutiny, but it looks like someone launched a pressure cooker over 100 feet... There is just something about the perspective that does not work. -IMO-

a reply to: elevenaugust

The famous Westall UFO case where hundreds of kids and teachers saw a UFO fly around a school in the Melbourne suburb of Westall a few days after this photo on 6th April 1966!


coinkidink? maybe you have something here