UFO Updates
Wednesday, 18th May 2005 by James Turnbull
Thanks to everyone who commented on the original UFO find, although we're still not sure what they are, there's been some interesting developments.
Ian Pottinger and jher were the first to find that there are in fact eight of these UFOs over Florida, at the following points
One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six - Seven - Eight
and Tensus used keyhole to map the points showing that they make a very neat grid.
Yoshino and jher later noticed that the UFOs are not limited to Florida but can also be found over L.A.
One - Two - Three - Four - Five - Six - Seven - Eight - Nine - Ten - Eleven - Twelve - Thirteen
and Tensus again mapped the points, which appear in an almost straight line.
Things the UFOs are definitely not...
Space debris or another satellite?
Derek & Tensus discovered that the close-up images of Florida are taken by AerialsExpress.com at an altitude of 17,500 feet so are aerial photos and not satellite images.
Marks added to obscure famous peoples homes?
While there's no doubt the whitehouse photos were processed for security it is very unlikely these UFOs are intentional 'cover-ups' due to the neat grid layout.
Water towers?
The UFOs are just too big to be water towers (and there's no shadow).
Anomaly produced by the stitching software?
Shi Ju says
Definitely they’re NOT marks for picture stitching. In most stitching software (like for making panoramas) the algorithm comes down to finding sharp and contrasting details and aligning those spots with each other.
Things the UFOs still could be...
An alien spacecraft?
It's still possible!
A weather balloon?
Tm says
The "Grid" is centered around an airfield, common launch points for weather balloons.
Although Klem says
All currently used radiosonde devices (weather balloons) are latex, yellowish beige to transluscent
and Jello adds
The object in question here does not cast a ground effect, therefore does not exist in the air.
A 'lenticular' cloud?
Patrick was the first to float this idea and the images he posted do look similar to the UFOs, although it is unlikely clouds would form in neat grids.
Condensation on the lens?
Possibly the current forerunner for most likely explanation, Stuart said...
Condensation inside some sort of housing would be my guess. If the drop were directly on the lens it would be effectively invisible. Put it a few inches/feet away and have the camera shooting with a very deep depth of field (as you would with a small aperture) and it would look just like that anomaly.
Something else?
Possibly one of: Peppermint, baseball, Vogon ship, crop circle, planet, thumbtack, ballbearings, smoke, pond, swamp gas, golf ball, satellite, flying ninja, space junk or contact lens as others have suggested!
Yes. At first, I thought it was a really interesting clue as to the origin. But, think about it, how could it be so? The picture was captured and resized. How could the capture have two different pixel resolutions? It couldn’t.
Hey, I found a new orb in the LA group. It’s faint, but it is in exactly the right place to line up with the 4 other orbs over San Bernadino.
http://home.supernet.com/~jacksmountain/images/San%20Bernardino.jpg
View Placemark
These 5 orbs line up within 300 feet north-south, and are spaced between 2.65 and 2.73 miles apart.
Deepthroat Chakra, what I meant about the expanded orb was that the background has a coarser color resolution than the orb. For example, the background looks like 256-color resolution while the orb has 16-bit or 32-bit color resolution.
The pixel size is the same.
OK, that was the clarification I needed. You really did mean color when you said color… I’ll try not to misunderestimate (goofball word courtesy of GBush) you again.
Looking…
DC, I think I know what you mean. Everything else seemed to be working for me, even my hotmail account, which is usually the first thing to act up when things get flaky around here. Go figure. As far as my…associate up thread, I was not willing to watch my posts get quarantined while others were having no trouble, so I got some guy to post the basics. I see most of my messages have reappeared from digital obivion now, too. Hmmmm.
For those of you who are still open to the possibility of UFOs: In all the reports I’ve read, there is no mention of a UFO casting a shadow. True, the big triangles block out the sky at night, but the objects under discussion don’t fit that category.
On the other hand, there are lots of UFO reports describing saucer-shaped objects that spin and wobble, which could account for the motion-blur effect. Also, such UFOs are often described as generating some kind of luminous atmospheric disturbance most akin to a plasma cloud. In the daytime, the “mirage” effect of this atmospheric disturbance can also lend to the appearance of a silvery object.
Does this mean the objects are flying saucers? Of course not. They may well be, but we haven’t finished exhausting all other possibilities. I’m especially interested to hear replies from Google and the aerial photograph outfits.
The point is that you cannot rule out flying saucers based on the fact that they seem to defy ordinary physical laws. That, if anything, lends credence to the idea, because that’s a hallmark of UFOs.
Remember: These things ARE UFOs until someone identifies them.
mj, did you find this faint object by brute force or because the spacing of others implied it might be there?
I think possibly even the color resolution is alos illusion. Hardly definitive or scientific, but I sampled the colors in the object and a strip outside of it and got 3707 in the object and 15904 in the strip. The uniformity of the object’s color allows you to see the color gradations as being very fine, whereas the surrounding landscape is a mishmash and looks coarse. This test, even if done better, proves little one way or the other. But, if you look at the big picture, it definitely has greater color depth than 256. In fact, I just captured a small section of the Lytle Creek area image and it has 28844 colors.
Oh, OK, goom. I’m the clueless one. I’m quite relieved that someguy was a friend and not an IT manager that had nothing better to do than to sit around and see who’s screwing off online. The fact that you couldn’t post but obviously someone else at your same location WAS made me think you were busted. Never mind.
DC: Cool. Yeah, it’s the old hall of mirrors the disinfo people are famous for. Make that infamous. Once you enter, you quickly learn that logic is not always your friend, so who do you trust? Which is entirely the point of the demented game. What I dislike the most is the fatuous idea the practitioners have that they are smarter than everybody else because they manage to pull off the deception, when all they are really doing is a sophisticated form of vandalism. It is corrosive to civilization, and catastrophic for some individuals.
I found something new,
Look at this image again: http://home.supernet.com/~jacksmountain/images/San%20Bernardino.jpg The distance between those ufo’s are the same. I’ll call this distance “X”.
I followed the ufo line to the West direction from this ufo (left ufo): View Placemark and stopped untill I’ve reached the “X” distance.
I saw this white line (in the middle of the image, looks like a comma): View Placemark
When I moved again to the west with the same distance again I found the same line: View Placemark
And again, to the west direction and same distance: View Placemark
Again same distance and direction, hard to see but it’s in the middle of the image on a roof: View Placemark
So all these lines have the same form and size, and are located on the same line as the ufo’s with the same distance between each other (distance “X”). Excually, instead of an ufo u see a white line.
At0miC
Deepthroat: I found the faint orb because the spacing of the others implied it should be there. I also checked several other locations fore and aft of the others at appropriate spacings, but nothing else turned up.
Again something new, remember this again?: http://img169.echo.cx/img169/2920/ufo55bg.jpg The 3 ufo’s with the white line were on the same line and had the same distance between each other (distance “X”)
I started from this ufo (most right one): View Placemark I moved with distance “X” to the east and I found that white line again: View Placemark
So my conclusion about this and my previous post (please read my other post above too) is that distance “X” is the size of each photo that has been pasted to each other, or whatever like that. So in each photo, you can see the white lines back. The lines would be fibres or something like it that was on the lens, scanner or whatever it could be. For example a hair which is a good example because a single hair is smooth, so it could reflect light, sometimes. The reflected light will make that Orb effect.
At0miC
Atomic, that’s very interesting. Those commas look similar to the pigtails you found yesterday, only they curve the other way. Yesterday’s orb pigtails were in a line with the ones you found today. All these curved lines look like dust or scratches on a scanner bed, but the orbs are a different animal.
BTW, if you scroll left about one or two frames from the last comma you posted, there’s another orb!
If you keep going east from At0miC’s last link, there is all sorts of junk on the scanner or whatever. Here is one of the more obvious bits.
View Placemark
So if that’s really a satelight error…
http://netpat.club.fr/video/sts80-1.mpeg
Then what the hell?
Although I still don’t believe it’s a picture error, there’s too many things like people’s etc, linking to it as well as errors. Then there’s stuff like that. So I donno, I don’t think it’s an error still 😡
Although I do agree it is possible that someone could have pasted that there in photoshop but then that would be some extreme measures having to do that with all the zoom out pictures as well.
shrug
As for the zoom levels, going back to Goomerator’s earlier find of the purple target: View Placemark
You’ll notice also a very bad stitching job, the bottom-left quarter of the map is darker, a bit fuzzier and not aligned properly (in spite of the target!) You can zoom out at least four times and still see this join and the target. By zoom level 5 (1 being the closest) the purple target is a small fuzzy blob you can just make out. By zoom level 6 it’s gone (although you could arguably claim that it’s still there).
Which suggests that Google are not using different photographs for the closer zoom levels. Seeing as someone people seem to believe that they are? maybe I’m mistaken.
I find it odd that the target appears right at the edge of a really bad stitch.
ASMODEUS718’s finds though, are really weird… wow, upside-down writing? The black tabs with targets on must be part of the photographic process, but surely someone would clean that up? I guess they didn’t feel like bothering for the very edge of the map. Not quite the same shape or style target as Goomerator’s find either…
My guess for the target that I found last night is that it’s put there to mark the bad match so someone can find it and clean it up. Maybe the software does “default” matches like that frequently, and some actual people have to fix them one at a time, and maybe that one was missed. I dunno, just a guess.
The stuff that ASMODEUS718 found is much harder to rationalize. Early on in this little game, it crossed my mind that we might eventually find little smiley faces or cartoon drawings of cute little aliens poking their heads out of trap doors on landed saucers. I still haven’t ruled out cloaked Vogon ships, either.
First of all I must say that it has been quite some discoveries people have made during this discussion. Excellent work indeed.
If you hold all the discoveries together that has been made here, and especially the later ones made by Atomic, I think it is indeed worth to consider the possibility that this is an impurity on the scanner or lens (as suggested by atomic).
I compared one of the images from Florida (by the lake) with one from Microsoft’s TerraServer (1999), and the sphere wasn’t present on these images. This may not help much, but at least it doesn’t reject the.. miscopy-theory (I don’t know what to call it).
I think you guys may have cracked this one, the only question that remains, is what exactly the spheres are in origin. Dust? Liquid? Metal? Optics?
Well, the other ideas presented are interesting as well (except the alien-spaceship-golfball-etc. ones), but the miscopy-theory is presented with quite an amount of convincing evidence at this point.
okay, I was SOOOO tired last ni, er.. this morning when I finally went to bed, after being absorbed in this “conspiracy” for over 7 hours! had I not been so tired, I would’ve looked more into the upside down writing that I found up in the Alaska/Canada area of the map (see my previous post from this morning for the links). it says “RMK TOP 15” followed by some numbers. well, if you go to Google and type that in, it comes up with a bunch of sites relating to aerial photography and I guess that is the type of camera used. I didn’t bother to thoroughly research it, so I’ll leave that up to the pros in that field that are participating in this thread. anyway, just leads me to believe that the targets/blobs are in fact some kind of markers for when they stitch all of the individual photos together. just a guess, though.. I don’t know. BTW, there were some strange things over in Africa as well that I saw this morning, but I was so tired I didn’t keep the link, so I will try to find that again.. they were about the size of cars, and they were dark, and in packs (herds of elephants, maybe?) hell, they could’ve been trees for all I know.. like I said, I was tired. FYI, you can zoom in pretty close on some other continents and some of the landscapes are pretty cool to look at. oh well, enough rambling for me. just remember, the truth is out there..
Scott aka Asmodeus718
Whoa! The Zeiss RMK TOP 15 is one high-zoot camera!
Heh heh, I made out the lettering this morning, and wondered what it might refer to. Never thought of just doing a search…D’oh!
To summarize the California data found to date, there are 21 aparently related artifacts in an East-West line stretching about 0.65 degrees of longitude, or 35.5 miles, from Glendora to San Bernardino. The maximum North-South displacement from the East-West line is 0.08 degrees of latitude, or about 1500 ft. There are three types of objects, a blurry blue orb and two curved lines, called commas and pigtails. The curved lines are clearly due to dust or scratches on the scanner or camera lens, whereas the orbs appear to be digitally added to the pictures. The artifacts repeat every 2.75 miles, indicating that the scanner/camera took pictures about that wide which were digitally stitched together to make a world-wide composite.
The 21 artifacts can be divided into 3 groups as follows:
Group A Latitude—-Longitude—–spacing———Type 34.13895,-117.826395———————comma 34.13893,-117.682436——8.25 miles——comma 34.13948,-117.586488——5.49 miles——comma 34.14001,-117.537371——2.81 miles——comma 34.14013,-117.489080——2.76 miles——comma 34.13956,-117.441305——2.73 miles——comma 34.14032,-117.393959——2.71 miles——orb 34.13950,-117.346516——2.71 miles——faint orb 34.13926,-117.300521——2.63 miles——orb 34.13895,-117.252885——2.73 miles——orb 34.13877,-117.206107——2.68 miles——orb
Average spacing between objects: 2.73 miles. The spacing between the first two objects is 3 times the average spacing, and between the second and third objects is twice the average. No artifacts were found at the intermediate locations, probably due to the difficulty of picking out the commas from the background.
Group B Latitude—-Longitude—–spacing——-Type 34.14308,-117.829667——————–orb 34.14232,-117.736005——2.68 miles—–orb 34.14218,-117.639016——2.77 miles—–orb 34.14236,-117.590307——2.79 miles—–orb
Average spacing between objects: 2.77 miles
Group C Latitude—-Longitude—–spacing——–Type 34.13871,-117.843679——————–orb 34.13754,-117.749974——2.68 miles—–dark orb 34.13686,-117.652266——2.79 miles—–orb+pigtail 34.13500,-117.604018——2.76 miles—–orb+pigtail 34.13711,-117.555889——2.75 miles—–orb+pigtail 34.13822,-117.506729——2.81 miles—–pigtail w/o orb
Average spacing between objects: 2.75 miles
Group B is offset from Group A to the West by about 1100 feet, and group C is offset from Group B by another 2500 feet to the West.
The commas and pigtails are clearly extraneous, and the orbs are not part of the real pictures because of their regular spacing, the fact that their shading in many cases is opposite to that of objects on the ground, and because their fuzziness is not duplicated in any of the objects seen on the ground. I suspect that the orbs are digitally added markers related to the stitching or to mark areas that need cleanup. Hopefully, Google or the company that prepared the images will let us know why the orbs are in the pictures.
I think the orbs in those photos might be waste dumped from passenger airliners. Since they are in a straight line they might be dumping the waste in small amounts at intervals. I’m not sure if they even do this, but I’ve heard of ice balls crashing through peoples roofs before. The orbs are probably just toilet water waste turned to ice Yuck!
Also they could have taken out and put things in the pictures.
I’m afraid we will never know for certain.
Certain areas for example like Nevada, Roswell aren’t in there. So you can’t go searching for Area51.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=218186
I think I might be wrong about airliner waste dumping
Nice summary Mountain Jack, I still think those “commas” and “pig-tails” are fibres. The commas in group A for example, on many places the Orb has been changed to a comma. Excually instead of an ufo u see a fibre, or whatever it could be. The distance between those commas/orbs should be the same distance as the surface of the scanner/lens/picture or whatever could be possible. That’s why you see those firbres and orbs back around the same distance. Anyway the fibre could have reflected light and could have made that Orb effect. And many fibres are very smooth to relect light.
I think this is the best solution for now, but that’s just my opinion. The chance is much and much more bigger that you will see a flying airplane instead of an ufo, dumped ice, ping-pong balls or flying ninja’s. And because the regularity of the orbs/fibres it won’t never be possible that those Orbs or any other objects have really been there in the air when it has been photographed.
At0miC
There is a certain degree of tranluceny from these “UFO’s”. I think it’s fair to say that these are clouds.
He’s right… I can’t believe that fact escaped us all this time.
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page953.html?theme=light
:O
they’re translucent because they’re out of focus. they’re out of focus because they’re very near to or on the lens.
i also want to point out that things that are very high up don’t cast shadows, some people here seem to think they should be casting shadows.
Er… any opaque object between the sun and earth will cast a shadow. “High up” has nothing to do with it. Even the moon casts a shadow when it crosses in front of the sun.
noknok, that is true up to a point, but the higher an object, the more light is reflected underneath it by dust particles in the atmosphere so that shadows can disappear.
hi: and what a great day this is to me..i saw that thing you have in your’e photo…back in the spring of 2003..honest too god!! i saw that thing.. i work for a shredding company and one day me and the driver of the truck i was in was out on a daily run.well, we had a stop at a rehabilataion unit on a farm land in new jersey.while up in the truck we were shredding inportant papers nither one of was doing much talking you know,haveing both side doors open on the truck being it was around 80 degrees outside. i lean up against the door and was just admireing the beauityfull landscape this rehab center was sitting on.now mind you it was a clear georgeus day. and for some reason i just started too stare at the sky.when i looked up,i shouted too the driver look!!! he came over and look at where my hand was pointing. he said nothing and i said nothing.we just stood there and forgot about our job.then the thing thats in your photo seem to back up and back up and it faded out.this guy looked at me and said…what do you think you saw? i said what do you think it was? he said aw..it was just a fadeing star…yeah right!! i know what i saw and it’s in the picture you guys have on this site..i saw that thing hoover for about 2 minutes,he saw it and stood right there with me and did’nt say a word just like me.what we saw that day was the same grayish color but shinning.
The orbs are NOT objects parked in the sky (not UFOs, balloons, clouds, etc.) over which the photography aircraft flew while taking the pictures – else the orbs would appear at least slightly oblong in some direction due to the speed of the aircraft, and the out-of-focus aspect would be more exaggerated in one direction. The orbs are NOT lit by sunlight, but appear to have both blue and gray lighting sources which are 180-degrees apart, and are almost in a flat horizontal plane. In 12 cases the blue light is to the north with the gray light to the south, but in 7 other cases the blue light is to the south. The combination of the two light sources produces a blue-gray band in the middle section of the orbs. The light-gray edge of the orbs is in all cases except one within 10 degrees of a true-north or true-south alignment, but ground shadows of trees, poles, and buildings varies from S20°E to S60°W, and in NO case is aligned with the lighting on the orbs. The white strings / threads / lines seen on many of the photos have nothing to do with the orbs, but represent lint or other debris within the photo-making equipment (a common occurrence); this status is evident by the fact that the white images are repeated ever so often in the photos. Therefore, the orbs are part of the photo printing process, but they were present only for the printing of a limited number of photos.
Also in people’s photos and videos these U.F.O.’s remain stationary in the sky as you can see in their videos the wind movie the trees would permit them not to be a weather baloon as they all point at it.
Moving the trees*
I used to be a pilot of a recon tornado. Those Blobs are clearly dirt or tiny tiny drops on the scanning device. The regular patterns confirm this. Also you must now that those super-high resolution scanners work with rotating drums, so dirt or drops are eventually shaken off. That is why they are only on a few scans.
How comes all images are perfectly centered on the “UFO’s” It is obviouse it is a disturbance from the lens maybe
View Placemark
giant “X” carved into the earth.. this is somewhere near Tonopah, NV and my last post was from the Nellis AFB area.. just hovering around Area 51, scoring the area for more strange sightings..
Scott aka Asmodeus718
Recon Pilot, I certainly don’t disagree with the prevailing view that these things are artifacts introduced at some stage of the processing of the aerial photographs (in fact. I came to the conclusion that that was the most probable explanation long ago), but if we are still pedantically searching for the precise cause of the blobs, then it seems to me that some of the objections that were applied to the condensation drop on the camera lens theory could also be applied to your accidental drops on the scanner theory. For example, aren’t the photographic frames scanned sequentially from the roll of film in the order that they were taken, and if so, why don’t the blobs appear in predictable order (without gaps) in the finished scan? And why are they at different heights in the scans (or latitudes – there are three identifiable bands – in respect to the terrain that has been photographed)? And, finally, how did this identical phenomenon manage to occur during the scanning of two completely separate aerial surveys in Florida and California and then only for certain areas of each survey?
At0miC, mountain jack, and Deepthroat Chakra
Have you looked for similar scanning blemishes (i.e., of the hair/scratch/lint type) in the Florida photographs to see if there is any consistency with the LA photographs? I am afraid that I don’t have the time to do it myself.
Good questions, all. No, I haven’t checked FL photos for blemishes. The clincher for me was having a couple photos showing the same geometric relationship between two obvious artifacts and the blob. It establishes the blob as not being part of the original image but introduced later by whatever means.
Instantly takes my interest level down, but not to zero. It would be nice to know what causes this. The theory that rings most true is reflection from a fiber causing a ‘lens flare’ in the scanner. There were a couple of places in the CA photos where I noticed a diagonal line formed by pairs of blobs, followed the diagonal line further and found a dimmer blob about twice as far out as the previous spacing. Very lens-flare like. Of course, if the third one is outside the boundary of a single scan, so much for that theory.
This is not a common thing as many here have claimed (as they offer widely diverging, mutally exclusive expert opinions) or it wouldn’t be raising such a fuss.
Asmodeus, that “X” is the Bonnie Claire Airport. See
http://www.topozone.com/map.asp?z=11&n=4117374.00010285&e=483677&datum=nad83&u=5
See also
http://www.airfields-freeman.com/NV/Airfields_NV_S.htm
I can only speak of the “LA” images. Each “UFO” is in the flight path used by private “Civilian” aircraft. The majority of the ones around the 210 freeway are on the VFR, (Visual Flight Rules), corridor used by pilots going to Cable Airport, the world’s largest privately owned, public use airport. This is a very busy airport with a large amount of traffic which would account for the higher concentration of “UFOs” in that area. The reason for the straight line is that if we fly further south, we get into Ontario International Airport’s control area; if we go further north we get into the mountains.
The previous posts thinking that condensation on a lens cover was at the right focal length to blur were, I believe thinking in the right direction, but, from the wrong side. The reason that the “UFOs” are only seen up close is that they are small aircraft, (Cessnas, Pipers,, etc…), flying at the right altitude to blur in a picture focused on the ground, yet not close enough to the camera to disappear from the shot. If you search the sightseeing pages for aircraft, they are almost always close to the ground; I have yet to find any aircraft at cruise altitudes.
Additionally these aircraft are slow enough to show up in the photos. Why are there no pictures of airliners at cruise altitudes? Because they are flying 20,000+ feet further from the focus plane of the cameras at 300-400 mph faster speeds.
Go ahead research it!! Find out the flight corridors used by light civil aircraft, I will bet that you can find many more “UFOs” where you have high density traffic, at altitudes of 1,000 to 3,000 feet AGL, (Above Ground Level), of low speed aircraft.
Let me know where and when you find them.
See Cable Airport Here: View Placemark
Well I don’t see a plane in this one: View Placemark
I still believe in my ‘comma’ and ‘pig-tial’ aka fibre theory.
@Pygar :
I recommend you read up how a drum scanner works. The images are not necessarily scanned sequentially from a roll. Many commercially available drum scanners take one image at a time which has to be manually put onto the scanning drum. If you read up how normal drum scanners work you will see that all your points can be answered. I just dont have the time to explain it here in detail. Drum scanners with roll feed are so expensive and complex that to my knowledge only the military uses them.
FWIW – I’m convinced now of it being some sort gunk on the scanner. I’d emailed the original entry to several organizations, including the American Society for Photogrammertry and Remote Sensing (www.asprs.org) hoping for some commnets. While I would have liked to see some linkage to an explaination, I think redneck_pixel_farmer’s explaination is the closest to reality.
ASMODEUS718 – I can relate to the addictive nature. Awesome find in Alaska. When I was looking in that area before I never found anything high res, but the “RMK TOP 15” text is indeed a pretty cool find. As I mentioned on the original thread, most these photos are taken with a Carl Zeiss RMK Top 15 Aerial Camera. I’m also curious if you found anything of interest in Alaska – I spent some time trying to find the Alyeska pipeline (yes that is spelled right) but couldn’t find anything. Those high res shots seem to be in the right area.
Time to waste some more time (curse you!).
I am of the opinion that those areas are the locations of military bases and or government facilities which are being protected.
Either that, or it is lens condensation. I am a multimedia artist, and I often have to reproduce the effect of a drop of water on an object. The color variations and degree of color degredation around the edges signify that it is a water drop on a clear surface. Blue appears because the sky is reflected, for the same reason that the ocean and lakes are blue. They are the sky’s mirror.
But, I really would like to think they are aliens.