Debunked: Diving Triangle UFO Photos from Reddit [Fake]

Mick West

Mick West

Administrator
Staff member
5p3gmpocsw771.png

One of a set of four photos (attached in zip file, original webp, converted to PNGs).
Source:
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/o9a39j/here_ya_go_guys_deleted_pictures_from_the/


What looks fake to me is the grain. It looks like the photoshop "Add Noise" filter, which adds noise at pixel resolution, rather than some actual film grain. So you get lots of random short lines.
2021-06-27_22-09-53.jpg


Here, I've recreated it on the left, with the "photo" on the right.

By comparison, here's a crop of photo I scanned in at 600dpi
2021-06-27_22-15-02.jpg


Film grain is there, but fuzzy, not pixel aligned noise.
 

Attachments

They are all mirrored in post, the numbers down the bottom are the same

They are square cropped, but the vignette is fairly even if they were taken at 4:3 then scanned and cropped the vignette should be less on one side and not so even?

Splash show motion blur yet triangle doesn't show much at all, mainly seems to have been evenly blurred
 
Okay whilst the 2 island shots waves don't match, there seems to be match between the waves in the second island shot and the 1st zoomed in shot.


 
Ravi said:
And formerly those on Reddit claimed that these craft can enter the water without resistance. It is hilarious.
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Yea, it is disheartening how easily a bunch of people on the internet can become so guilable by engaging in a sort of virutal "make believe" group play.
 
I am a hobbyist compositor/VFX guy and I couldn't let got of the hunch that it was a whale surfacing. I was persistent and it took about an hour of searching with a transparent sticky note app. You are not going to simulate a water splash just for a set of UFO pictures - you are going to grab a couple of reference pics and photo bash it. It took about an hour of searching. I endlessly searched the same thing with the Trepang pics (years ago) but came up empty. A few of those splash pictures look like a lot like whale jumps, so I had some background searching for whale pics in that debunk attempt too.
 
jarlrmai said:
I'm curious as to what steps you took/how you found the image? I mean it's compelling it just seems oddly fortunate to stumble on a close match.
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I don't know who found it initially, or what method they used, but I searched Google for "sea splash whale" and it didn't take too long looking through the returned images to find a match.
 
flarkey said:
I don't know who found it initially, or what method they used, but I searched Google for "sea splash whale" and it didn't take too long looking through the returned images to find a match.
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To be fair you had whale to add as a search term based on the OP here, I guess you could think "what causes splashes in the ocean?" and add whale. I'm interested in whether this was done.
 
One thing that puzzles me is the vignetting. The datestamp in some of the images is skewed, which suggests that the images were taken with a compact camera shooting 35mm at the standard 3:2 aspect ratio, and then cropped square for some reason. e.g. the sides were chopped off and the images were rotated a bit.

In which case the edge vignetting would have been cropped away. But these images have vignetting in all four corners, as if they were shot with a Holga or something using medium format film. I reckon the vignetting is artificial.
 
Ashley Pomeroy said:
One thing that puzzles me is the vignetting. The datestamp in some of the images is skewed, which suggests that the images were taken with a compact camera shooting 35mm at the standard 3:2 aspect ratio, and then cropped square for some reason. e.g. the sides were chopped off and the images were rotated a bit.

In which case the edge vignetting would have been cropped away. But these images have vignetting in all four corners, as if they were shot with a Holga or something using medium format film. I reckon the vignetting is artificial.
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Very good point. It looks actually quite severe as well. I cannot imagine a prof camera system would perform so poorly (bad optical design), so I agree it might be artificially added "nostalgia effects".
 
It would be interesting to me, as very much a non-expert in photo analysis, to know what it would take, in this day and age, for an alleged UFO photo to be accepted as genuine (or, if that's too strong a word, let's say unhoaxed). I'm not suggesting for a moment that these 4 are real btw.

Let's assume that I really were to take 4 photos of a wing-less, tail-less, trans-medium craft entering the ocean at high speed, and I show them to you, metadata and all. What would they have to do/contain/achieve in order to pass muster? Is there a set of gold standards? Is it even possible to truly verify a photo these days?

Again, as a non-expert, I'm thinking of how realistic those Tom Cruise deep-fake videos look, and, in my mind, I'm imagining that spoofing a still image must/might be far easier. I'm also imagining the day when someone appears in a compromising photo situation, a la Matt Hancock, and decides to brazen it out, truthfully or not, by simply saying: "They're completely fake." How would one prove the genuineness of a photo?
 
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banditsat12oclock said:
It would be interesting to me, as very much a non-expert in photo analysis, to know what it would take, in this day and age, for an alleged UFO photo to be accepted as genuine (or, if that's too strong a word, let's say unhoaxed). I'm not suggesting for a moment that these 4 are real btw.
Click to expand...

Not possible IMO. A photo or video simply isn't enough evidence to "prove" anything but it could theoretically be compelling enough to warrant further study. It's like if you somehow took a very clear photo of a supposed ivory-billed woodpecker... would the scientific community accept that the bird has escaped extinction? Probably not, but if the photo were compelling maybe there would be enough interest to facilitate a study to prove what it purports to show.

The rub here is that there are zero photos or videos of UFOs compelling enough to warrant study. Even if there were, the nature of the "phenomenon" prevents it from even being something that can be studied scientifically. If the thing you want to study can't be predicted or replicated it is very difficult to study it. This even comes into play with natural phenomenon we know exist. We know ball lightning exists but there is exactly one, very poor, video of it and we basically know nothing about it.
 
Looking at the first image of Mick's photo's it looks like a slice of pumpkin pie. Can we call this the Pumpkin Pie Incident?
 

Attachments

  • 5p3gmpocsw771.png
    5p3gmpocsw771.png
    1.4 MB · Views: 435
Question, looking at these photos they seem really fake. Who do you think is more likely to post hoax pics, UFO believers trying to reinforce their agenda or practical jokers trying to get the UFO believers to bite?
 
Alphadunk said:
The rub here is that there are zero photos or videos of UFOs compelling enough to warrant study.
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Being a Devil's advocate for a moment, I suppose people would say the Heflin photos are, as one example, compelling enough, and that the Calvine or Westall photos would be worthy if only the MoD and RAAF respectively would release them, but it's subjective, so point taken.

Even if there were, the nature of the "phenomenon" prevents it from even being something that can be studied scientifically. If the thing you want to study can't be predicted or replicated it is very difficult to study it. This even comes into play with natural phenomenon we know exist. We know ball lightning exists but there is exactly one, very poor, video of it and we basically know nothing about it.
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Again, I suppose one could make the case that difficulty of study doesn't mean that it isn't real. As you say, ball lightning is apparently real, yet neither of us has ever seen it. One could, arguably, use that same argument about alien spaceships, I suppose.
 
Just wondering about the frame that contains the most detail of the triangle. I see some "lines" or at least a pattern on the side of this "craft". What was the idea behind this from the hoaxer I wonder, to mimic reflections from the sea?


triangle.jpg
 
Trailblazer said:
Off topic but do we actually know that? I don't think its existence is proven at all beyond hearsay and legend.
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Still OT. I consider myself so far beyond skeptical I'm downright dismissive (I won't believe in aliens visiting earth until I'm invited to a tea party with them), but I would consider myself an eye witness to what I can only describe as, and suspect others would describe as, "ball lightning". It might not be exactly the same cause and exactly the same effect that other people have described with that phrase, but I have no other term for a small bit of lightning that just hovers/drifts for a few seconds, seemingly unaffected by the rest of the storm that's going on around it, so "ball lightning"'s what I'm using, and that definitely existed, and even though it was almost exactly 24 years ago with only minor research I could probably pinpoint my spacetime coordinate to within about 50m and about 10 mins. (Viz. about 10m behind and to the left of the main tower for the main stage at Roskilde 1997, about 2/3rds of the way through John Fogerty's set, and it was high up and to the left. And before you ask, no illicit chemicals were involved, and I'm not even slightly offended by anyone feeling tempted to make that quip, it's almost obligatory!)
 
Trailblazer said:
Off topic but do we actually know that? I don't think its existence is proven at all beyond hearsay and legend.
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How does hearsay & legend have a published spectral analysis?

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.035001

Ball Lightning is a great reminder of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" - along with the giant squid & red sprites.

That doesn't take away burden of proof - Russell's teapot analogy still applies. But it does expose the flaw in "if X was real, we'd have clear photos/videos of X by now" style reasoning. Earth is absolutely massive. The atmosphere is 50x bigger than all its oceans combined.
 
OT or not it's an interesting discussion. I think the natural phenomenon hypothesis to explain various sightings is one of the most interesting yet it is routinely dismissed, or not even considered, by skeptics and true believers alike. When I hear wild claims about acceleration without visible propulsion it's hard not to immediately think about ball lightning or other plasma based phenomena.
 
LorentzHall said:
How does hearsay & legend have a published spectral analysis?

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.035001
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That assumes that what was recorded on that fuzzy video was the same "ball lightning" that has had near-supernatural powers attributed to it (passing through walls/windows, exploding on contact, etc etc). From the evidence of that video alone it could just be a fireball caused by something being ignited by lightning. (Which in a sense, if their proposed explanation is correct, it is.)

I don't doubt that fireballs after lightning strikes are a real phenomenon, but I think a lot of the "ball lightning" mythos may be exaggerated.

(As an aside, when I was 7 or 8 years old we spent a holiday staying on a farm in rural Cornwall. I remember the farmer telling us about his encounter with ball lightning that chased him across his farmyard some years earlier. That was the first time I ever heard of it and I always think of that old man when I hear about it.)
 
Trailblazer said:
I don't doubt that fireballs after lightning strikes are a real phenomenon, but I think a lot of the "ball lightning" mythos may be exaggerated.
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I agree with you and our inability to prove this assertion is pretty interesting. We have a general idea of what "ball lightning" is, how it forms, and how it behaves but no one has really figured out how to rigorously study it scientifically.

I suppose the same could be said of animals like the Giant Squid. We have a general idea of its life cycle and can make some educated speculations about it... but at the end of the day we really don't know all that much and aren't likely to learn much more anytime in the near future.
 
Trailblazer said:
near-supernatural powers attributed to it (passing through walls/windows, exploding on contact, etc etc).
Click to expand...

Neither of these claims need be supernatural.

In a 2016 article titled Relativistic-microwave theory of ball lightning, physicists from Zhejiang University (a research university in China's equivalent of the "Ivy League") write:

External Quote:
In interference experiments of low-power microwave in metal cavity[46], generated fireballs in air are observed to pass through a 3 mm ceramic plate intact. This is a direct result of the ability of microwave passage across dielectrics. The microwave bubble resembles a laser cavity. According to laser theory[47], the internal standing wave will not be disturbed if a glass plate (~5 mm) is much thinner than the wavelength of microwave.
External Quote:
The microwave bubble decays silently once the internal radiation is exhausted. When it is strongly disturbed or pierced by a conductor, the leaking radiation can launch a shock wave like an explosion.
Alphadunk said:
but no one has really figured out how to rigorously study it scientifically
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Its rarity & short duration make serious study of it remarkably difficult, but its existence & nature does not does not depend on our ability to study it.

Trailblazer said:
but I think a lot of the "ball lightning" mythos may be exaggerated
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What a hubristic thing to say about something so poorly understood - something many scientists refused to even accept was real at all until recently.

When we have a cohesive, well accepted scientific theory (be that in 10 years or 100 years) we can make such statements, but not yet.
 
For all it's fake, this was very nicely done...It's entertaining in a way 'Gimbal', 'Tic-Tac', 'Go-Fast' et al just aren't (plus it took some real skill, dedication and effort to make, all of which seem utterly absent re: the current 'flap')...Maybe we should have a 'Fake UFO's As Art' subforum?
 
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