From Ufocasebook:

“Unknown Flying Object Captured in Hawthorne, Florida, Photograph

Hawthorne, Florida – 04-25-10 – Sunday morning we awoke at 8 AM, and made ourselves some coffee and walked down to the creek, which was only a few yards away from our cabin, the witness stated. I started taking pictures of our surroundings and some mirrored reflections of some cypress trees in the water. After we arrived back home in Jacksonville, we were anxious to view the over 400 photos we took during our vacation. When I took this photo I was drawn to the reflection in the water and did not notice anything unusual until I uploaded it to my computer.

This photograph is the only one that shows something abnormal.”

Check the link for the full image. Now, you will notice that it’s not only the UFO that looks strange. Then you may realize the report mentions that the photo in fact depicts mirrored reflections in the water.

Then you may want to flip the image. Then you may immediately recognize what this UFO is.

The answer, after the jump.

Read on: Unknown Flying Object in Florida… (42 words)

© forgetomori 2010. | Permalink

They are being promoted as “the most significant UFO videos of all time”, including “two extraterrestrials [that] were caught on tape in Istanbul”. And perhaps the most amazing thing, or the dead giveaway, is that those videos have been captured not once, but several times since 2007.

Summer and springtime in Turkey, 2007, 2008 and 2009, and there comes a man named Yalcin Yalman with more of these “most significant UFO videos of all time”.

Now, Chilean researcher Andrés Duarte publishes an excellent analysis of the Kumburgaz videos and comes to the conclusion that they must be mainly of yacht side windows reflecting light at night: Los ovnis de Kumburgaz son ventanas de lanchas.

Stay with us for a summary in English of Duarte’s analysis.

Read on: Kumburgaz, Turkey “UFO": Yacht Window Reflections (1,174 words)

© forgetomori 2010. | Permalink

“One of the most highly celebrated and controversial series of photos in the Blue Book files are those taken by an official photographer aboard the Brazilian Navy survey ship, Almirante Saldanha, off Trindade Island, some 600 miles east of Rio De Janeiro”.
[J. Allen Hynek, The Hynek UFO Report]

Hynek criticizes the mocking remarks by the reporting officer regarding Martians and the harsh criticism of the Brazilian government and military. I don’t know much about Martians and tend to agree the sarcasm was undue on an official report, but as an ongoing many years research on the Trindade Island case has shown to me, the Blue Book report is right on the target and fully justified in all of its other conclusions.

Regarding the photographer, for instance, the report mentions that:

“This gentleman has a long history of photographic trick shots and is well known for such items as false pictures of treasure on the ocean floor. Another time he prepared a purposely humorous article, published in a magazine, entitled "A Flying Saucer Hunted Me at Home," using trick photography.”

Amazingly, these hoaxes by the photographer have been downplayed by supporters of the case. For more than half a century, most people didn’t even see these hoaxes. In 2008, thanks to historian Rodolpho Gauthier, we finally publicized Barauna’s joke with flying saucers, and now, through the pages of Tim Printy’s SUNlite, and again thanks to the work of Gauthier, we reveal the details and images of his treasure chest hoax.

The article is embedded above and can also be downloaded.

Once presented with Barauna’s trickery of flying saucer photos, believers claim the joke was in fact a serious, responsible public service promoting critical thinking in which the photographer took part. Very well. It could be so. His treasure chest hoax, however, was part of a deliberate play to deceive, and we have Baraúna first lying, denying the hoax, and decades later, finally confessing “it was indeed a trick”.

That the man who captured one of the few authentic photos of real UFOs was a lying hoaxer of treasure chest tales and proud creator of flying saucer images cannot be downplayed. It’s a serious problem for the case that automatically leads to considerations of how he could have hoaxed the Trindade Island case.

Believers would then mention that the Trindade Island case is not supported solely by the photos or the photographer’s character and that he could not have hoaxed all of the other corroborating evidence.

About that, our still ongoing research may give a different perspective. It will be published soon, but meanwhile I recommend the readers to our already published analysis, and I repeat the statement that all of our research has led us to conclude that the Blue Book report is right on the target and fully justified in all of its conclusions.

Except for Martians, of course.

© forgetomori 2010. | Permalink

“Nuit Blanche, City of Paris
Mirror ball, 1000 mirrors, 7.5 meters in diameter.
The spectacular view of the starry sky has long been a source of delight and curiosity, but the abundance of artificial light in urban areas produces a glow that covers the stars in the firmament. The largest mirror ball ever made was suspended from a construction crane 50 meters above the ground to render the starry sky to the citizens of Paris for one night in the Jardin du Luxembourg during the Nuit Blanche event.”

It’s a work by artist Michel de Broin, and if you’re a hardcore UFO buff, you may have had an instant association with the “Battle of Los Angeles”:

There are more images on LifeLounge, including this one which is a photomontage with the classic UFO photo:

Why didn’t Broin mention the Battle of LA when there is this image clearly referencing it, I don’t know, but it’s definitely a fun piece of art.

As for the Battle of LA in itself, the famous photo does seem to show at first glance a classic flying saucer profile while the searchlights seem to be stopped by something we would assume was solid, but that may be misleading as the photo is certainly taken with a long exposure, as can be seen by the many shell explosions recorded on it.

Was there actually something solid there? Bruce Maccabee thinks so. But then, don’t you think it’s quite a coincidence that the object would have approximately the same width that all the searchlights combined seem to wrap around exactly?

I suspect the famous photo and the apparent solid object could actually be the result of the movement of the searchlights, explosions and smoke from the explosions captured in a relatively long exposure at night. Maccabee considers the idea, but discard it with quite reasonable arguments.

Then again, they are not that conclusive. It’s an unsolved, intriguing case, that could be smoke, could be an alien spaceship, could be… something else.

And now it’s art. [via MAKE]

© forgetomori 2010. | Permalink

“March 25, 1989 – Purportedly the above-top-secret infrared photo taken from the Soviet Phobos II probe, showing an object approaching the Martian moonlet. Estimates say the UFO was approximately 15.5 miles long.” [UFO mag, vol 7, n 1, 1992]

Long before our War with the Moon, the Soviets had already packed “a very powerful laser” to be fired at the Martian moonlet Phobos. “All went well”, UFO mag’s Don Ecker wrote, until March 25, 1989. “Something” turned the Soviet probe into a spinner and the unmanned craft then disappeared.

“According to Zechariah Sitchin in his book Genesis Revisited, the rumor going around was that the Soviet space craft had encountered a huge ‘UFO’ while in Mars orbit. In his book, Sitchin included a photo that the Russians released, which showed a large ellipse shadow reflected off Mars. Sitchin claims that the few photos Phobos sent back prior disappearing were never released by the Russians, and that they treated the entire matter as ‘above top secret’.”

Tasty mystery, isn’t it? And the solution involves some bleeding!

Read on: Phobos 2: a Bloody Soviet ‘Close Encounter’ (1,202 words)

© forgetomori 2009. | Permalink