Almost immediately after Dirk posted the “UFO Photographed Over Colorado!” article yesterday (8th Dec 2010) he asked me to have a look at them and sent me the two full-sized images he received via email with the witness report. After a quick inspection it was obvious these weren’t the originals as somewhere between retrieving them from the camera and forwarding them to Dirk they had been opened and resaved using Adobe Photoshop. We know this because the analysis of the compression characteristics in the meta-info detected Photoshop IRB, which basically means that when any image is saved by Photoshop it strips the standard EXIF data and writes its own format of meta-information called a Photoshop IRB resource, a signature if you like.
However this isn’t just opening and resaving the image we’re talking about as the data showed that the “ Save for web ” feature had been used which lets you optimise images for viewing on web-pages, but it also showed that the quality was *060* which is the mid-range (high) setting. And as the background image appears to be legitimate I suspect that the reason behind decreasing the quality was to disguise any anomalies caused by editing the image.
I realise that with some imagination this could possibly be explained away as a user error so just to be sure I resized the two images by equal proportions and numbered them *1* & *2* as you can see below.
Now have a look at the following animation, I placed the image labelled number two over number one and decreased the transparency to zero with no other modifications, and then increased the transparency in increments of 25% (four times in total).
The witness stated:
“There were several lights that first started as a circle, but then transformed into a triangle them disappeared. It lasting [sic] for only a minute if that.”
Now have another look at the above animation but this time watch the fixed (landscape) lighting at the bottom of the image and you will see that it doesn’t change in the slightest:
If the images were taken a minute apart in the circumstances described by the witness then the chances of the camera not moving AT ALL in this timeframe is frankly impossible, because remember that this is allegedly at the roadside, mid-journey whilst travelling to a poker-game and in the space of 60 seconds, so I think it’s safe to assume a tripod setup is out of the question. Especially for the first image but even if this was the case then it means that the camera-angle didn’t change by even a millimetre in the minute between the first and the second image being photographed.
Or more believably this is just the same background image with anomalous lights pasted onto it then saved at a lower resolution to disguise the fact.
I then stripped the colour from the images and inverted them so you can see the shape of the spheres more clearly and by doing so it becomes apparent that each sphere is identical.
Not just similar, but identical right down to the spikes on the halo, although admittedly this is not instantly noticeable but upon closer inspection you can see that the beginning of the spikes are there and again they are located in exactly the same place on each sphere.
Here is the second of the images with three random spheres numbered and highlighted:
And here are the same three highlighted spheres side by side for comparative purposes:
If you look at the shape of the spheres and in the top right quadrant and you can see there is a slight dip giving the sphere a slightly tilted oval appearance and that it is exactly the same for every sphere , every little deviation from a true circle is the same on every other sphere and on both images. Obviously this indicates somewhat indisputably that it’s the same sphere pasted several times (onto two identical background images) and then simply arranged into a pattern of the creators choosing.
“While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.” (Lewis Hine)