If the time they report is approximately right, it's a photo taken by a teenager with a hand-held camera very late in the day, certainly with a heavy cloud cover and perhaps even after sunset.
Agreed, they are expecting the Daily Record to run the story (and maybe a nice cheque in the post) but instead they get a call from the RAF who now have the negatives. If the call was unexpected then you can imagine their panic as they tried to get their narrative straight and not tie themselves in knots.
Let's remember, this is a recollection from 30 years ago by an octogenarian. There is nothing in the original report about any of this, just a redacted name:
If this is a hoax or spoof, then so is the back story.
IF the part about ringing up the Hotel and being put in touch with the young dishwasher is accurate, it could be the only part that is. It could also be that Linsday called the witness directly and upon hearing that he supposedly worked at the hotel, his memory has since confabulated that together to "he called him
at the hotel". If that's the case, the hoaxer just told him this back story, though maybe he was expecting to tell it to the photo editor, not the RAF.
Even if he did call him at the hotel and he was a dishwasher, that doesn't mean he took the picture. If our hoaxer also worked at the hotel, or frequented it, he could have easily made an offer to the underpaid dishwasher: "Oy, Neal, I'm trying to get a few photos in the big fancy paper and they may call here to ask about it. I'll give you 10 bob to tell them this little story and another 10 if I get some money from the photos."
Linsday, according to his interview, only spoke to him once by phone. He never saw him, never met him and never went to the hotel as far as we know. All we have is what he remembered from 30 years ago.
I'll repost this from the Patterson-Gimlin film thread (bold by me):
External Quote:
According to Loftus, who has published twenty-four books and more than six hundred papers, memories are reconstructed, not replayed. "Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality," she has written. "It is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape, expands, shrinks, and expands again, an amoeba-like creature."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/how-elizabeth-loftus-changed-the-meaning-of-memory
Much of the Loftus article is about the backlash she recieved for working on Weinstein's defense team, but it does talk about her research.
What's the deal with absolutely nothing in the image appearing to be in focus?
I'm no photographer so have no idea how easy/difficult that is to achieve.
But the deep mistrust instilled in me tells me that that would be a good trick if you want to hide the real distance of objects.
Indeed, my thoughts also. Keep the waters muddy.
The photo expert, Robinson, says the craft is in focus the most and because of the depth of field being what it was, the close up fence/trees are out of focus as is the far away jet:
Though how sharp is relative to the other things in the photo:
I guess the craft is the least out of focus. He also says this about the film stock:
So, we have an experienced amateur using expensive film stock. But the part about needing a lab isn't exactly correct, as he says "only few hobbyists" could process it at home.
A little digging around on some photo forums shows that Illford marketed a home XP1 kit, just for home development of their XP1 film, maybe as far back as the '80s:
https://www.photo.net/discuss/threads/xp1-vs-xp2-development.64616/#:~:text=
One can still find them on ebay today:
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/224686715680
All the makings for a hoax are right here. At least it doesn't sound like a poor dishwasher just happened to snap a shot with an expensive high end specialty film.
If I'm going back to my darkroom days (35+ years) and I wanted to create this, especially if I had seen the Puerto Rico photo, I think I would have hung the model from the tree in an area where I knew jets practiced low flying, which according to Flarky they did in near there, and waited. Or, maybe easier, I would have hung the model and made multiple shots till I got what I wanted, then in my darkroom or in camera add the jet. Being in the UK, I add a Harrier instead of a Tomcat. A very out of focus Harrier.
