Separating Fact from Fantasy

January 30th, 2010

Separating Fact from Fantasy

Written by:Jimmy
Published on January 30th, 2010 @ 07:53:09 pm , using 826 words, 319 views

Remember the probes? UFO hovering over Melbourne, Australia.
Photo by Podknox

So many strange things happen to me that I'm mystified by people who make things up. The motivation behind creating a false story often has nothing to do with money or fame. Sometimes people just want attention and excitement and pretending a strange event happened is a way to get a taste of that. What happened recently concerning the dark pyramid UFO supposedly filmed over Moscow both at night and during a daytime flyby that lasted for hours, is a good example of a fraud that many people want to believe. Probably the motivation is internet fame, with some commercial interest behind that, although I'm not at all sure how getting hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube converts to cash, except for YouTube.

Fakes have become very good in recent years, no longer limited to blurry photographs and models suspended from wires. Good photo-shopped imagery is hard to distinguish from the real item, but in most cases it's still possible. When it isn't, other factors usually reveal the truth, as has happened with the Russian pyramid film. What struck me about the videos in the beginning was the lack of reaction in the Russian populace.

People continued about their business as though nothing was happening -- except for the film crew, who were busy filming the giant spacecraft rolling about in plain sight. That's a clear signal something is wrong with this picture, and it's something many other people noticed right away. Had this event been real, cell phones would have been aimed at the ship from all directions and snapshots would have flooded the internet. People love to take pictures and people love to talk. None of that happened. Now the rumors are building that in private over a hundred people have reported the sighting to Russian police. That may be true, since there probably are at least a hundred people in Moscow crazy enough to think they did see the pyramid, even if they didn't.

Follow up:

Fake UFO hoves over Meersburg, Germany.
Photo by Stefan-XP

In any large scale event witnesses immediately come forward and governments do respond with information or active suppression, either of which does get reported to the rest of the world eventually. The recent example would be the spiral over Norway, which was witnessed and photographed and immediately publicized by ordinary people as well as news agencies and professional astronomers. That's how any major event hits the world now -- everyone present takes a cell phone picture and texts somebody about the amazing thing they're watching. If this mass reaction doesn't happen, something's wrong.

The events which are most difficult to decipher are reports or photos contributed by isolated viewers. Some professions carry automatic reputations for accuracy in reporting, like policemen, and others don't. Any critique of these reports is bound to be influenced by the beliefs of investigators, who either want to believe or disprove what has been said. To me the reaction of many professional investigators and journalists to these isolated reports is very disappointing, since many take the reports seriously even when there's no reason to do so. As an experiencer myself I tend to filter out more reports as false if they bear no resemblance to the things I know, so I'm prejudiced in my own way. There are many things I haven't seen, and I'm pretty open-minded about them but always critical.

Recently the best stories come from China and involve mass UFO sightings, not individual sightings. Photos and videos have emerged for some of these events, although the quality isn't all that great. Photos of glowing objects in the sky aren't very conclusive and the nature of the object obscures most details. The mass reaction does show that something real happened, although exactly what happened isn't known.

Over the years, the photos that seem most likely to be real shots of UFO's also are the most commonly faked -- the domed saucer ships that everyone instantly recalls when thoughts of aliens arise. Though many of these photos do show evidence of fraud, a few of them stand out as possible real evidence. If this type of ship persists in photos over many years, the likelihood that a few of the photos are real does increase. If photos show strange variations from that standard, that's another mark for fraud.

Until something extraordinary does happen, in plain sight of hundreds of thousands of people with cell phones at the ready, I'll continue to be skeptical of most sightings. If someone shows me a picture of an acorn-shaped ship silhouetted against a blue sky, I vote for acorn, not for spaceship. There's no reason to play with contrast unless the author intentionally obscures detail. Evidence has to be good, or it's worth nothing.