How Do You Stage UFO Photos and Videos? Let us Count the Ways.

The "perspective illusion" is utilised to great effect in a bunch of the methods already mentioned. I think one of the best examples is the Billy Meier hoax. Are you aware of the method David Copperfield used for his "vanishing the Statue of Liberty" illusion, Mick? Its incredible.

My personal favourite example of a "thing on glass" hoax is the infamous Antonio Urzi series of videos. He just happened to be filming from beneath a "skylight" type window, which just so happens to sit at a horizontal angle, allowing Urzi to place buttons on the glass and film from underneath. Minor lateral movements of the camera caused a wonderful parallax effect, making the UFO appear to move.

Urzi, a fashion designer, and still active, would have had access to beads and buttons. I think I even found one of the beads he used.AntonioUrziA.jpgurzi saucer.jpgUrzi Buttons.jpgUrzi Debunked Tibetan Prayer Beads.jpg
 

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This thread reminded me of an accidental "UFO" captured when my daughter was throwing pebbles into the water at the beach a few years ago. Just needed a slightly more regular saucer shape :)

1185.JPG
 
Building miniatures is another possibility, you still need some way to suspend your object but could use fake trees in the foreground to give a false impression of scale. Around 4:30 here -
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIF8JMefC0I&t=260

(In fact there's another technique going on in that one - shoot in the dark with an illuminated object, which could be on a stick or a string, whatever).


Ok, these UFOs of "plasma", "light" etc, courtesy of Carlos Diaz need to be scrutinized.

Well-known UFO-folks like Jaime Maussan and Jim Dilettoso have endorsed this Mexican guy and his alleged "UFOs" for more than a decade. Nowadays there are DVDs being sold about the whole thing, it's everywhere. The "Diaz" UFOs have become a modern staple, mainly because nobody has yet really bothered to debunk them.

I have a couple of own thoughts about it, I grew skeptical after about 20 seconds. Then, after having carefully been looking through the available material...

First of all, the look of the alleged UFOs themselves:



It's clearly a smallish, semi-transparent object, that is being lit-up. My first thought was a lamp, and even though my Spanish kinda sucks I still managed to discover that some of his own countrymen, other Mexicans realized it looks an awful lot like the hand-blown glass lamps from a shop near Diaz' residence:



This Diaz also recorded several videos of the alleged UFOs, one is included in the post I quoted (Max Phalange's). It looks like reflections of such a lamp in a mirror, the jittery movements are so mirror-like it's uncanny. Like he just accidentally nudged it a few times.

Mr. Diaz also claimed that he flew away with these aliens. He said that he ran outside with his camera in hand, and managed to take a few handheld shots of the alien "ship of light" before he was whisked away to a secret cave somewhere. He kept filming in the cave, but the new footage didn't look handheld. When being asked if he filmed this segment with a tripod, given how stable it looked, he claimed that the aliens suddenly gave him a modern camera-compatible tripod.

...Because according to him, aliens fill up Mexican society already, they walk among them and blend in. So obviously they know about human camera gear. Him being handed a tripod isn't strange at all.

And these DVDs are for sale everywhere...
 
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The "perspective illusion" is utilised to great effect in a bunch of the methods already mentioned. I think one of the best examples is the Billy Meier hoax. Are you aware of the method David Copperfield used for his "vanishing the Statue of Liberty" illusion, Mick? Its incredible.

My personal favourite example of a "thing on glass" hoax is the infamous Antonio Urzi series of videos. He just happened to be filming from beneath a "skylight" type window, which just so happens to sit at a horizontal angle, allowing Urzi to place buttons on the glass and film from underneath. Minor lateral movements of the camera caused a wonderful parallax effect, making the UFO appear to move.

Urzi, a fashion designer, and still active, would have had access to beads and buttons. I think I even found one of the beads he used.AntonioUrziA.jpgurzi saucer.jpgUrzi Buttons.jpgUrzi Debunked Tibetan Prayer Beads.jpg
SO GLAD TO SEE THIS. I've been doing a deep dive into UFO's over the past month. It is astounding to me how much complete and utter bs is out there. So far, all I have learned is that there are a HUGE number of people in the world very happy to blatantly lie and commit blatant fraud for...money? Attention? Whatever. It is disgusting to me. Hoping to spend quite some time on metabunk, and see what, if any, claims MIGHT be worth believing.
 
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I have to tell that I once did an ufo-fraud. I did it with a 3d-software. I just wanted to see if they would believe. Then I explained that it's not true and how I did the images. But someone of them still kept insisting that "you have special skills" and that I someway would "spiritually" be connected to something to be able to do the images. It was horrible and I had to stop talking with them. Lesson learned. Not even as a joke do stuff like that.
 
I have to tell that I once did an ufo-fraud. I did it with a 3d-software. I just wanted to see if they would believe. Then I explained that it's not true and how I did the images. But someone of them still kept insisting that "you have special skills" and that I someway would "spiritually" be connected to something to be able to do the images. It was horrible and I had to stop talking with them. Lesson learned. Not even as a joke do stuff like that.
I admit I thought about creating an elaborate hoax many times. Never did, basically because of the reasons you mention.
But, I still do have the urge to create something that is just impossible to debunk. This is for sure not difficult, I am convinced. But as I have a lot of other important things in my daily life, I guess I will pass.
 
I'd encourage people not to create fakes, except as illustrations (i.e. labeled as fakes, or having obvious tells embedded in it, like @Edward Current's flying saucer in his fake WTC7 video) because all it does is piss people off, gives you a reputation for dishonesty, and sometimes get accepted as real, and adds to the bunk.
 
I'd encourage people not to create fakes, except as illustrations (i.e. labeled as fakes, or having obvious tells embedded in it, like @Edward Current's flying saucer in his fake WTC7 video) because all it does is piss people off, gives you a reputation for dishonesty, and sometimes get accepted as real, and adds to the bunk.
Fair points!
 
While it seems laughingly silly to most of us today,
the cardboard + hatpins methods behind the Cottingley Fairies somehow fooled millions for over 50 years
On the Cottingley Fairies, an interesting source is this old segment from the BBC's Antiques Roadshow. (Assuming that it is correctly ascribed to Series 31, it was filmed some time in 2008 or 2009.) Remarkably, it features the daughter and granddaughter of one of the original hoaxers. (Or so they claim, and I don't see any reason to doubt it.)


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WX1BhKxSYQ


The daughter is clear that the original photos were faked, and that her mother eventually admitted it, with the exception of a later one (shown in the segment) which she still insisted was genuine. The later one is less obviously faked than the earlier ones. The 'fairies' were relatively small and said to be only visible after the photographs were enhanced (or enlarged) by whoever developed the film in London. Could it be that the developer was playing a practical joke? Or just giving the customers what they seemed to want?

Incidentally, I don't think the 'expert' (Paul Atterbury) is right to say that at the time of the hoax (around 1920) photographic evidence would have been accepted at face value. Various kind of fakery were well known, especially the use of double exposure to show ghosts or the 'ectoplasm' of spiritualists. As the Wikipedia article on the case mentions, there was plenty of skepticism expressed at the time.
 
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