Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Mike Smith has already compiled a summary about the video, concluding that “it seems safe to conclude that this video shows something being officially tested at White Sands – maybe some sort of top-secret missile – but certainly something that was expected, something that eventually made its way to Maussan, who then began promoting it, perhaps a bit dishonestly, perhaps just prematurely, as the crash of an extraterrestrial craft”.

But there’s also the investigations of Chilean investigator Rodrigo Fuenzalida, published on La Nave de los Locos in January 2001, “Crónica de un misil anunciado“:

We started to conduct several analyses. The first of them was to watch it repeatedly and in slow motion the impact, after which we discovered that what looked like a compact bright structure was something completely different. It’s rear region showed movement similar to that of a flame. Also, a tenuous smoke trail could be seen. Everything seemed to suggest that what was allegedly a lenticular and luminous UFO was actually a big mass of flames, expelled by some kind of structure. After a compression of the image, we could see the body, that indicated more clearly the hypothesis considered from the beggining. Everything pointed to a military test.

… After presenting my hypothesis in TVN news … some members of AION associated with the army contacted me. We conducted a new analysis on air, this time inviting the defense analyst Roderick Bowen, who presented some diagrams and photos of missile tests that showed exactly the same effect. Mario Pizarro, AION member and Army instructor, identified the missile as an SEII, used during the Gulf War.

I couldn’t locate more information on the SEII missle, nor any video of a missile test where the rocket bounced. But it should be no surprise that missiles are capable of bouncing on the ground, given that some are designed to penetrate meters of solid concrete.

It’s just a shame countless hours have been wasted on this video just because its original source is a sensationalistic quack who wouldn’t clarify where and how he got it, as that would certainly reveal exactly what it was.

The 35-year-old Barzolff is a professional animator who attended one of the most prestigious art schools in France and has a decade of experience with computer graphics and commercial animation.

It took Barzolff a total of 17 hours to make both the Haiti and Dominican Republic videos. He did it all by himself using a MacBook Pro and a suite of commercially available 3-D animation programs, including Vue 6. The videos are 100% computer-generated. …

To prove that he was truly behind the videos, Barzolff agreed to provide the L.A. Times with a new spacecraft video. Called “Proof,” the video depicts a small version of one of the spacecraft floating above a Paris street. As the camera pans over, the viewer sees two elderly women at a cafe. One of whom is holding a remote control device. Humorously, of course, this video makes use of computer graphics as well. …

Barzolff stressed the videos were not intended as a viral marketing ploy. His movie is still in the idea phase, and he created the hoax strictly as a “sociological experiment” — in
other words, just to see what would happen. What happened far exceeded his expectations. …

Barzolff called the results of his experiment “entertaining, thrilling, completely addictive, and a little scary.” The scary part, he said, was that in spite of the evidence, “many people refuse to believe it’s a hoax.”

LA Times: It came from outer space (reg required)

Read a the text of the article on UfoUpdates. It’s the same spaceship indeed, and a very humorous proof of authorship. The spaceship is actually extremely detailed, which couldn’t been seen very well on the original videos. If only he had taken the task of creating different palm trees…!

The CARET story has been keeping the internet abuzz, where you can read a lot of interesting discussion on the OpenMindForums or AboveTopSecret. It was originally sent to C2C and Earthfiles.

Now Carlos Relva, a fellow Brazilian of the Enigmas da Humanidade website just sent me this huge find: apparently on the “X-Men: Evolution” animated series there was a ship extremely similar to the CARET “drones”.

And the important thing is, the episode featuring that ship, as far as I could check, was aired in August 2, 2003 ”Target-X” was aired on September 13, 2003. The original “Chad” drone images were published in May, 2007.

Check below a short clip of the ship:

You can find more clips here (between 02:40 and 03:20), here (02:25~02:40) and here (right at the end).

Relva tells me he watched the episode and noted the similarity, but also says that he remember having read about that on some other place he can’t remember (can anyone find it?).

Regardless of who first discovered it (and as far as I know, it may have been Carlos Relva himself), it’s amazing to find such similarity.

It seems that this ship in X-Men was from the secret and rogue government group that created Wolverine, related to the “X-23″ character introduced in the episode, so it also fits. Could it be that the CARET drones are indeed a viral, but for X-Men, Wolverine or something?

Given that it was originally thought that they were a viral for the Transformers movie (or even for the Halo 3 game), and those weren’t confirmed — and so far, have been pretty much disconfirmed — we may also doubt again that it’s a viral for X-Men… whatever.

But at the very least, the hoaxers were inspired by this ship, from the concentric ring, to the spikes above it, even the arms, which in this “original” are folded down (more similar to the “Big Basin” drone).

You could already tell the hoaxers were geeks from the fact they tried to mix ufology with Sillicon Valley culture (PACL-PARC), but who would have thought they were fans of “X-Men: Evolution”?

UPDATE: I watched both episodes where the character “X-23″ is featured, and contrary to what I assumed first, the ship was featured on his second appearance, episode “Target-X”, aired September 13, 2003. Good thing is, I captured all the scenes with the ship:

The similarities to the CARET drones are obvious. A basic disc, or even ring, around which there are lower arms, and topped by spikes. Even the natural landscape background for the X-Men ship is similar to those where the CARET drones were featured.

Once again, considering the CARET hoaxers are very probably computer geeks, capable of creating quite nice computer models; and who also tried to mix ufology’s conspiracy theories with Silicon Valley culture, it just fits that they would be inspired on an nnovative design by an animated TV series like “X-Men: Evolution”.

Take a look at the image above, and answer quickly: is it real? If it’s not, how was it made/faked?

The first thing I thought when I looked at it was how fake it looked. Surely another 3D computer model. Nice detail for the birds, though, there’s one flying right in front of it.

But if you click on the image, look at the full megapixels version and read its filename, the truth may surprise you.

That disc is real. It’s not flying, as the trick here was that the support was crudely erased with Photoshop, but the fake looking disc is actually real. I’m told by a reader that the structure is for the pigeons. Nice lesson on how your eyes may be wrong, even when they are “skeptical”, huh?

Here’s another interesting one. The image below wasn’t altered in any way, and depicts a 100% real scene. And there were indeed those hundreds of witnesses there.

Click on the image for the original. Can you guess what it really is? The answer will be posted as an update for this post tomorrow.

[images sent by Ringo on alt.binaries.ufo.files]

UPDATE: And the image above is… of two F-18 fighter planes crossing each other. Ta da! I’m told they must be the Blue Angels. These real images that, nevertheless, are not what they look at first sight remind the best UFO photo ever.

That’s actually the second video created by the author, the first one we showed here. All made after the biggest UFO sensation on Youtube ever.

If you take a look at the video channel of the author of the video above you may see how he created many other CGI videos of common airplanes. Did he create the original Haitian/Dominican UFO videos? Probably not. Another spoof also had the same features, and it was made by a Japanese guy, who does not claim authorship for the originals.

So we have at least two people that within days made similar copies of the original videos and also shared them on Youtube.

The Japanese guy, “Wancoco“, gives some details. He used Vue 5 (not the more recent Vue 6), and “the time for rendering [the video on a computer] is about 11hours (720*480px,300frame). But for editing is 3 hours“.

The fact that even the previous version of the software, released in 2005 as far as I can tell, already allowed anyone to create such videos suggests the only thing that was stopping this avalanche of fakes was an easy way to share them.

Youtube is not only for cats playing piano, it seems.