Mendel
Senior Member.
I'm ok with that. I'm not ok with "hundreds".
Calvine UFO Photo - Reflection In Water Hypothesis
- Thread starter Space_Raider
- Start date
Ann K
Senior Member.
I'm not a statistician, but if six consecutive pictures were taken, isn't the probability just 1/6 that the first one of those six happened to be in position number one on any particular strip of six negatives?
Scaramanga
Senior Member
But with a roll of 24 negatives, you are effectively having 4 attempts at it. When the film is cut up, your first UFO pic just needs to be negative 1, or negative 7, or negative 13, or negative 19.....and you can get it snipped up with all 6 photos on one segment.
That is pretty much the same as rolling a dice 4 times and trying to get a 1 in one of those rolls......which has a pretty good chance ( 52% ) of happening !
Mendel
Senior Member.
No, you don't. Once you roll the dice, that's where the pictures are, you can't move them elsewhere afterwards. As 2 people have already explained to you.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
Yes, the start frame has to be 1, 7, 13, or 19. But no.....that does not mean the odds are 1 in 6.
It means you have four attempts at getting the first number in each of a sequence of six.....because the 24 exposure film is divided into four segments.
It is mathematically identical to rolling a dice four times and hoping to get a 1 in one of those attempts, for example. Your chances for one roll are 1 in 6.......but across 4 rolls it becomes 52%.
Just treat each segment of 6 pics as if it were a dice. You are rolling the dice 4 times...hoping to get a 1.
( NOTE : It might seem as if its the same as getting one of 1, 7, 13, or 19 out of a bag of 24 numbered balls....but it isn't. You are not having ONE attempt at getting one of them right....you are having FOUR attempts at getting one of them right )
Scaramanga
Senior Member
Sorry...but yes you do. I have just explained it above. Your disagreement does not alter how maths works.
It's pretty straightforward. Each strip of 6 pics is identical to a dice. You have four of them. You want to get a ONE out of one of those attempts. Odds are 52%
The mistake of thinking it is 1/6 lies in thinking you only have one attempt. You don't....you have four.
QED
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Scaramanga
Senior Member
Yes, it is 1/6 for one strip....but there are four strips. You are effectively having four goes at getting it right. As someone mentioned there were also 36 negative varieties, that would give even more chance of getting it right than a 24 exposure one. You'd then have 6 goes at getting it right.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
Your maths is horribly wonky. The chance of 6 (consecutive) negatives all being on 1 strip (of length 6) is exactly 1/6. The number 4 does not enter into the calculation. Your calculation seems to be assuming independence of the events, whereas there's no reason to suspect such independence. I think my assumption of them being consecutive photos - the exact opposite of independence, once one photo's positioned, the position of all of the others is fixed - is far more likely.
What would your calculation look like if you assumed a film of length 6000 frames, which would be cut into 1000 strips of 6 frames? Would your expression have 1000 as an exponent anywhere? If not, where did your 4 exponent come from?
Scaramanga
Senior Member
Yes....it is 1/6 for ONE strip. But you have FOUR strips in a 24 negative film. You have FOUR attempts at getting it right.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
JMartJr
Senior Member.
Of course, the odds change if you shot a whole roll of UFO and developed it yourself, so you could cut out the best run of six... and recall that if there is no good run of six, you can toss that roll and shoot another... odds get close to 100% if you are reasonably careful.
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Mendel
Senior Member.
Yes, it's the same.
How often does the photographer take the 6 good pictures? Once, or 4 times? If he takes them 4 times, then he has 24 good pictures on that roll of film, and all the strips are perfect!
Consider: why would the chance that the sequence of 6 pictures starts on {1,7,13} be different than the chance it starts on {2,8,14} or any of the other 4 options? So these 6 options have to have equal chances.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
Lol...being condescending does not make my point wrong.
Strictly speaking, in a roll of 24 negatives there are only 19 positions where a sequence of 6 can start. But the important thing is that as far as the eventual snippets of 6 negatives are concerned, position #2, for example, is identical to position #8 and position #14. Position #8 is in position #2 in the snippet. That is the crux.
That is why each snippet of 6 negatives is effectively another attempt at starting with the #1 position....and why I am right.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
Because the positions on the eventual snippets of 6 negatives are the same. Position #4 is identical to position #10, for example. It is the same position on the snippet. This is the bit you guys are struggling with. When the 24 pics are divided into 4 lots of 6, there are then only 6 positions in each snippet. Positions #10 and #16 both become position #4 in the snippet....for example.
There thus are only 6 positions that any sequence of 6 could start on any snippet....and we have 4 snippets. We thus have 4 goes at getting it right. It is the fact that the relative positions on each snippet are the same that makes this so. You guys are thinking 1 to 24....but there really IS only 1 to 6 once the film is cut up.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
It's actually quite scary that at the moment I seem to be the only person commenting on the matter who actually understands maths.
The crux of the whole matter is that we are ultimately not sticking with positions 1 to 24 but dividing into four segments each with just 1 to 6. Thus...position #16 and position #10 become position #4 in every snippet....for example. There is no 'position 16' or 'position 10' in the final cutting up.....just four lots of position #4.
And, of course, four lots of position #1....which we've effectively had four goes at getting.
Here endeth today's lesson in maths.
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Ann K
Senior Member.
Nope. One in six chances no matter how many strips there are. Your understanding of statistics is as bad as your understanding of the optics of reflection. The number of strips does not enter into it at all, because we are not specifying which of several strips has the pics, just "a strip".
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Ann K
Senior Member.
As I already explained, that would require that a strip starts with number one, but that is by no means certain. Two or three, plus some blank space, is just as likely to be on the first strip, so the first full strip might begin with some other number. There are six possible positions on a strip in which your series might begin, so there is still a one in six chance of the first one of the series beginning at the start of a six-negative strip.
That's true for the scenario described, where a film processor snips them into the size that will fit in an envelope, but of course if the photographer developed them himself he could cut them wherever he wanted.
Give it up, Scaramanga, better mathematicians than you are on the case. I don't consider myself to be one of them, though.
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Mendel
Senior Member.
Sigh.
4/19 =21% is the chance for 6 sequential pictures to align with a strip, assuming the roll of film had no 0 and 00 positions.
For 36 exposures, the chance is 6/31=19%.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
What ? Are you serious telling me that no matter how many strips of 6 there are....the chances of ONE of them having the sequence start at position #1 is still 1 in 6 ? You are confusing the chances for one strip with the chances across multiple strips.
So I have a million strips....that should absolutely guarantee one with a start place at #1...yet according to your understanding of statistics there's just a 1 in 6 chance of it.
It's sort of like telling me that because there's a one in 7 chance of it raining on a Sunday, that there's still a 1 in 7 chance of it raining on one of a million Sundays.
Scaramanga
Senior Member
Lol....it's odd how no-one sighed when it was originally claimed that..
"If that's the case, it would be a remarkable coincidence that all six "UFO photos" just happened to end up on the same strip" https://www.metabunk.org/threads/calvine-ufo-photo-reflection-in-water-hypothesis.12572/post-339272
Yet it has been shown one way or the other that it would not be a remarkable coincidence at all. Which was my original point.
Ann K
Senior Member.
Oh, silly me, I wasn't considering the situation where my roll of film had six million exposures on it.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Doesn't matter. If you take a million pictures on your digital camera, and then pick a sequence of 6 consecutive pictures at random, the chance that the first file number of this sequence n satisfies "(n-1) is divisible by 6" is almost exactly 1/6.
Note that @Scaramanga ignored my diagram.
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Mendel
Senior Member.
Because @Andreas did not repeat his argument 6 times and then claimed to be superior to everyone else (which was what netted you the sigh). I countered his point on the next post, and that was it.
He never wrote,
Your claim of >50% chance never got sighed at. That was a simple error. But this statement was not.
Haha, this turned into quite a discussion—and not really on the main topic. Maybe we should just agree to disagree and move on to the more important discussion instead. After all, it doesn't really matter where the negatives ended up on the potential slides since we don't even know if that's what happened.
That said, I can't resist making one final point about the statistics—because it is important to get things right. Comparing this to rolling four dice doesn't really make sense. When you roll a die, you have a 1/6 chance of getting a 1. But the probability that no photos had been taken before shooting the first "UFO picture" is never more than 1/24. And as @Mendel has already pointed out, the number of slides isn't really the issue. The key question is: what's the probability of starting at one of four specific positions on the camera roll? There are four positions where all six shots would end up on a single slide, and 20 positions where they wouldn't. Given those numbers, the probability that the number of shots already taken happens to be one of these four just isn't 50%.
But again, my main point was simply that the discussion about how the photographer might have tried to hide the remaining photos (which may have shown the process of setting up the hoax) might have a simpler explanation. If the negatives were cut into segments of six, handing over one full segment wouldn't seem suspicious. But cutting into the negatives and clearly trying to hide the other photos might have raised suspicion—unless he had a good explanation.
Mendel
Senior Member.
he'd only hand those photos to the newspaper that he intended to sell to them. feels absolutely unsuspicious to me.
FatPhil
Senior Member.
No, the fact that you are completely and utterly wrong makes you wrong, no matter how audible your laughter is.
If you're not prepared to put in any effort to correct your glaring mistake, we're done here.
jackfrostvc
Senior Member
If we use the aircraft length = to the length of a harrier jet.
With that, has anyone tried to roughly calculate how far away the jet is in the picture?
With that, has anyone tried to roughly calculate how far away the jet is in the picture?
FatPhil
Senior Member.
It's possible to start the sequence at positions 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24 too. You'd hit the end of the roll rather than the scissors, but that's still a failure to get your 6 shots on one strip.
Mendel
Senior Member.
Yes. Still, "the last 6 shots" have to be somewhere.
Perhaps I'm thinking too much like a skeptical UFO investigator, since asking for the entire roll of film or the untouched SD card is the first thing you do when investigating a case. But obviously, a random journalist wouldn't necessarily think that way. A MoD investigator probably would, though.
That said, do we actually know what the photographer told the Daily Record when he contacted them? To me, there's a huge difference between reporting a UFO sighting as a news story and simply trying to make some money by selling a bunch of "spectacular" photographs. If it was the latter, then it's hardly surprising that the story never made it to print. Explaining it by suggesting that "perhaps the military convinced the Daily Record to drop the story" seems completely unnecessary. It's far more likely that the magazine just wasn't interested in paying for some random blurry pictures. It's also possible that after being interviewed by the MoD, the photographer decided not to go through with the hoax and simply refused to let the magazine publish the pictures.
Either way, both of these explanations seem much more plausible than the idea that the military took the case seriously and actively prevented publication.
I tried asking an experienced photographer I know who is well-versed in analog photography. But according to him, it's impossible to say since we don't know for sure what camera or lens was used. Was the image cropped, etc.?
No expert so forgive me I have missed something but nowhere does it state 6 negatives were in a strip - just that there were six of them, they could easily have been individual and nowhere does it state whether the negatives were continuously numbered or not.
So isn't any conjecture pointless.
So isn't any conjecture pointless.
Mendel
Senior Member.
that was my point in post #1075
if the negatives were not consecutively numbered (see the small numbers near the edge of the film strip posted above), then, given the narrative, this would've stood out as suspicious to the photo editor and the MoD analysts. Therefore it feels safe to assume they must have been consecutive. But the photographer would only have sent these particular pictures to the newspaper, as these were the ones for sale. They need not have been on a single strip.
John J.
Senior Member.
Re. all the debate about starting points of negative strips on rolls of film,
we have no evidence whatsoever that one such strip was given to the newspaper.
We have evidence that six negatives were provided.
We don't know if they were joined. Photographs can be reproduced from a single negative, the strips (usually of 6 exposures, at least for 35mm in the UK) are a product of the process used by many high-street developers that most people used to rely on to get their photos developed. Length of strip was (I once read) dictated by the size of the envelopes often used by the developers -e.g. in the UK, the pharmacy chain Boots.
If the claimed backstory is authentic, which must be very questionable indeed, it might seem fair to assume that the photos were consecutive exposures on the reel of film, but overexposures, fingers drifting in front of the lens, accidental exposures (particularly when trying to snap something at short notice or when excited) all occur. To me anyway!
John J.
Senior Member.
Andrew Robinson, senior lecturer in photography at Sheffield Hallam University, performed his analysis at the request of David Clark, PDF attached (version 5.0, June 2024).
FatPhil
Senior Member.
I had always presumed the 6 came from the contact print:
Of course, that's a function of the paper size you use, which is a complete zoo - photographers either love standards, or hate standards, depending on your point of view.
John J.
Senior Member.
I don't know if this is relevant,
under "C-2 - Film Type" Andrew Robinson wrote (pages 8 and 9 of version 5.0 of his analysis, PDF in post 1118)
His rationale for this conclusion seems reasonable to me, but whether it's correct or not I have no idea.External Quote:
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