The UFO reddit

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/ufos by /u/kcimc on 2024-11-25 09:15:33+00:00.

This is a close reading of the imagery that was posted today in this video and in this followup video. In these videos, the YouTube creator Nathan receives emails from an anonymous source with "Leaked UFO Footage". This footage was ostensibly captured by classified ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) platforms. There are two emails that contain two different sets of images. I spent some time looking closely at the most interesting screen captures in this thread which I will indicate with numbers below. Here are some things I noticed, in no particular order:

1. Some images are clearly near-infrared (in the thread, images number #1, #2, #3 and #5). Others are clearly thermal imagery (the hazy boomerang, the ceiling fan). Most of the other images, including the silhouette images, look like thermal to me.
2. Some of the IR images show an apparently glossy (shiny) surface. Images #1 and #5. Others a more matte surface, like the asterisk #3
3. The apparent light source varies across the infrared images, while the thermal images have no apparent light source as expected.
4. Some images have no redactions, others have a single redaction (#4 spinning X), or 4 to 10 redactions. Many redactions are very thin along the edges of the image, which point to the analog copying process described in the email. Some redactions are blurs instead of black bars.
5. The images are not perfectly aligned in the original PDF, indicating they were probably scanned from a print out.
6. The edges of some of the images in the original PDF are not blurred, indicating a UI limitation of the blurring redaction tool.
7. The reticles have many different shapes and patterns. #1 and #2 have colored reticles while everything else is black and white. Some reticles are crosshairs of various sizes, sometimes with central boxes or circles, often with four lines at a distance from the cross, sometimes with a tracking box. To me, the black square is the only one that looks similar to reticles I've seen before. Here are two compilations showing US military drone footage: 1 2, and here are some other individual videos 1 2 3 I didn't see any clear matches to other reticles.
8. Some of the redacted text is semi-visible. For example #8 the hazy boomerang seems to say TEIRS or similar along the top. Or the text 0AZ on the left of #11.
9. Some of the clouds are legible as hazy high-altitude cirrus clouds. These clouds are not necessarily in front of our behind the craft.
10. Some images have more detailed sensor noise, while others seem to be more low-resolution or more compressed.
11. Some images, like the chandelier and the 1967 flying cross, appear to have aliasing artifacts and have been intentionally downsampled. This downsampling might actually be the result of Nathan converting a PDF to a PNG for his additional blurring redaction step inside Photoshop—I'm guessing this because the text was rasterized at a similar resolution to the images. This indicates that Nathan may have higher resolution images embedded in the original PDF file compared to what was shown on the video.
12. Some images like #10 (two plus signs) seem to have vignetting on the sides. Other images in the videos have similar vignetting and this may indicate they were captured on the same sensor platform.
13. Lots of slight asymmetries in the imagery, but also lots of alignment. The chandelier is almost perfectly aligned with the sensor. The cube is also almost perfectly aligned. The chandelier also appears to have an asymmetry, with the two main arms (top left and bottom right) pointing a different direction than the three other main arms? The very strange #11 which has the fuzzy saucer shape, or squashed iron cross shape, with the circle in the middle of the reticle—it is aligned with the camera sensor, and almost perfectly symmetric on both axes.
14. Most of the images have a 16:9 aspect ratio, but at least one (the white orb) is 3:2. This may indicate that image is from an older platform, since 16:9 is a slightly newer aspect ratio.
15. The second set of imagery has 4x3 images in a grid, with titles in Calibri. The font indicates that it was made on Windows. The landscape orientation and aspect ratio indicates to me that it was organized as a PowerPoint slide. There is a subtle drop shadow on each image.
16. There is apparent motion blur in some of the cross images that indicate spinning or other movement.
17. At least two images (hazy boomerang #8 and spinning X #4) are not strictly black-and-white but are slightly saturated.

I have a background working with digital media and computer vision for over 15 years, including experience with infrared and thermal cameras (in the very unclassified context of new user interfaces). But I hope the above observations could be mostly made by anyone.

I have some experience making computer generated visuals as well, and in my opinion none of these images are individually difficult to reproduce. But there is significant variety, which indicates to me that if these are hoax images, they would have been made very carefully. Here is how you could have most easily hoaxed this:

1. Acquire both a thermal and infrared (or color) camera.
2. Take images of everyday being tossed into the sky, during day and night.
3. Treat most as black and white, but a couple with a slight color tone.
4. Add overlay text, then blur some text and black out other text.
5. Add dozens of different reticles in different styles.
6. Export the images mostly as 16:9 but at least one as 3:2.
7. Print all the images out then scan them to create the first PDF. For the second set, organize the images in PowerPoint and export and send a PDF(?)

If these were made as CGI, I would be surprised if they were all made the same way since they have different noise artifacts, vignetting, materials, treatment of blurring, etc. I would expect more of an analog process working with hardware limitations.

In my opinion, this has the variety I would expect to see from a collection of images captured on different platforms over the years.

Edit: Yes, we all know about AI. I've been writing about how to recognize AI-generated images since 2018. I don't think that's what this is, but I would love to see attempts at making similar images with AI.