Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

“Feb. 25, 1942: Searchlights converge on an unknown object in the skies over Los Angeles. During the early morning air-raid alert, more than 1,400 anti-aircraft shells are fired.

The incident, now referred to as the Battle of L.A., occurred less than three months after the Pearl Harbor attack and two days after a Japanese submarine shelled an oil facility near Santa Barbara.

The next day, on Feb. 26, The  Times published a photo page with a retouched version of the above searchlight photo and seven other images of damage from falling anti-aircraft shells.”

Do you hear that sound? It’s one “classic” UFO case falling apart in the most basic form. In an article by Scott Harrison published by the same LA Times, we are informed that an original, unretouched negative of the famous image was recently found at the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive at UCLA, and that:

“In the retouched version, many light beams were lightened and widened with white paint, while other beams were eliminated.

In earlier years, it was common for newspapers to use artists to retouch images due to poor reproduction — basically 10 shades of gray if you were lucky.

Thus my conclusion:  the retouching was needed to reproduce the image. But man, I wish the retouching had been more faithful to the original. With our current standards, this image would not be published.”

Previously, Tim Printy had already delved into the whole Battle of LA case in his SUNlite Vol..3 No.1, where he had already speculated the famous image could have been retouched. He also noted that another photo of the Battle of LA published on LIFE magazine shortly afterwards didn’t show anything at all:

As it turns out, just like the original unretouched LA Times image.

Printy’s article also goes into the very small detail that most promoting an UFO link seem to ignore, that the Battle of LA happened a couple of days after an actual Japanese attack on the west coast.

Interestingly, and quite amazingly, all the panic that night may have started with a  weather balloon. One of the major cases before the word UFO was even coined involved a weather balloon.

Believe it or not – and if you do read more about the historical context, it actually is quite believable – fact is that the only physical evidence for an alleged alien spacecraft that night has just vanished.

As it was never actually there.

UPDATE 03/13/2011: A looping animation between the original and retouched versions:

I don’t know where this actually came from (click for more images), but 1) It’s a nice Photoshop job, and 2) It’s a reference to the real experiments by Soviet Dr. Sergei Bryukhonenko, who kept disembodied dog heads alive for short periods of time.

On a probably related note, I did find the source for this other puzzling image:

"Their last solemn moment, before we buried the gate and the truth with it. Pyramiden, Spitsbergen 1928".

It’s part of an ARG, Mysterium Magnum.

Which probably has nothing to do with the cyborg dog, but both may be related to ARGs. Or viral campaigns. In any event, Photoshop, nice Photoshops. [via Nerdcore, Eduardo Lisboa]

UPDATE: From the comments at BoingBoing, the source for the cyborg dog, actually “The Kollie”, is an art project by “hotshkin”. Click for the full gallery:

A representation of an impossible scene, Escher’s Waterfall has just been made real, at least on Youtube.

What do you think? I first thought it could be a very clever perspective trick, such as the Escher for Real series or the ball rolling uphill illusion.

But on watching the video in higher resolution, the shadows and reflections, I suspect it is yet another damn good CGI job. Damn good.

Speaking of which, the Jonathan Post video has been solved, it was the superb work by a pair of Brazilians, Luis Carone and Daniel Dias. CGI work, that is.

Here’s a 32 year-old Carl Sagan speaking about flying saucers.

Fascinating bit of history. In that same year, the young astronomer published the book “Intelligent Life in the Universe”, along with Soviet Iosef Shklovskii. In that book, a scientific collaboration during the Cold War, Sagan and his Soviet fellow would delve and speculate into questions that unfortunately have not changed very much half a century later.

This is both because they were visionaries – the ubiquity of exoplanets was by no means a given in the 1960s, much to the contrary – and also because we still have not made contact nor found any conclusive evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Sadly.

This book is also very notable because, even before one Swiss guy exploited the idea, Sagan and Shklovskii analyzed seriously the idea of gods as ancient astronauts. Even a famous Sumerian tablet with several planets is discussed, decades before another alleged “expert” made a lot of fuss about it.

Now, back to the video interview, the man besides Sagan is also very notable, and not only because of the eypatch (due to an automobile accident) or the fact he lights up a smoking pipe. He’s Thornton Page, a noted astronomer and previously part of the Robertson panel on UFOs. Most importantly, along with the same Carl Sagan, he would promote a UFO symposium on the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

That’s right, in 1969, one of the most representative institutions of science, the one that actually publishes Science, held a symposium about UFOs. Paul E. McCarthy has a very interesting dissertation on the backstage of this episode of UFO, and science, history: Politicking and Paradigm Shifting: James E. McDonald and the UFO case study. [hattip to Leonardo Stern]

Tesla would be proud, as a century later this is a twist on the demonstrations he himself performed with his Tesla coils.

Tesla coils above which the two fellows with full conductive suits stand just to shoot lightning from their heads and hand. Science guarantees the electric current will pass through the fine metallic suit, and not the body of the brave electric guys, though in reality loose connections may tingle, or a little more than tingle. The Lords of Lightning “feel little tingles to thumping shocks inside the suit”, not to mention some ozone that must be produced.

And for what? Because this is amazingly awesome. [via New Scientist]