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Your Favourite UFO Photo

Aerial parachute flares according to skeptics...
https://www.inquisitr.com/1818634/twin-ufo-vero-beach/

https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/2us8t9/ufos_over_vero_beach_explained/
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/2ul6f1/twin_ships_witnessed_vero_beach_fl_it_looks_so/
from another REddit page
"I hate to break it to everyone, but these two lights are artillery Illumination rounds. They are fired into the air via ship canons or artillery tubes. They hit a specific altitude and burst into action. There is a parachute associated with them but would be hard to see. If not a parachute, then a platform for slowing the round that is carried by the winds until burn out. I have dealt with them too many times in Iraq, and Afghanistan. I have 22 years as a retired military aviation officer, and 6 years as an over-seas contractor in two different war zones. I say this to keep the integrity of the group as I do believe there are UFOs to be found and reported, however, this sighting can be easily explained. Keep up the search...."
 
Parachute flares can be pretty freaky if you've never seen them. I saw one through some trees on a dark night when I was in my teens, and it was quite a sight. I didn't know anything about them, but saw a bit of a smoke trail and then made out the vague outline of a parachute. Then I realized I was driving right next to the boundary of a huge army fort. The "globe" appeared to be hovering, from inside a moving car.
 
I am amazed that nobody has mentioned the 4 photos taken by the Brazilian Navy off Trindade Island in the South Atlantic (16/1/58) :
http://ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/trindade58.htm#pics

There were no less than fifty eyewitnesses on the deck of the ship from which these pictures were taken.
The weirdest thing is that none of these witnesses have ever come forward. Captains, explorers, scientists, spear-fishermen - nobody. The Blue Book investigators looked for them but failed to find any.
The commanding officer, Capitao-de-Mar-e-Guerra (CAPT) Jose Santos Saldanha de Gama, had not seen the object and was noncommittal. The executive officer also had not seen it but, arriving shortly thereafter, had formed the opinion that those on deck had seen it. The captain had reported that his secretary, a LCDR, had seen it but this officer when personally questioned avoided discussing the matter. Later, it was learned that the photographer was accompanied to the darkroom by an officer who waited outside the door while Baruna developed the negative alone.
Only one person has ever come forward to say that he saw the saucer, and that it looked like the photos; Amilcar Vieira, a personal friend of Baruna's. So maybe there was something there? Or were they in league?


Perhaps neither of these alternatives is correct.
https://ufo.com.br/noticias/trindad...ephew-claims-that-the-photos-are-fake-part-1/
Baruna's nephew says yes, it was a fake, because Baruna had already run out of film by that time. Some of the people on the ship had noticed a strange cloud formation, and he snapped his empty camera at it, then faked the images in the dark room later. Vieira and other witnesses (if any) may have seen a strange cloud formation, but the faked photos have become 'conflated' with what they saw in their memory, and now they only remember the faked saucer.

Note that this is the theory put forward by Baruna's nephew, not by me. I do generally agree with the theory of conflation, as it explains many features of various cases; but I wonder why Baruna's nephew has chosen this explanation rather than a straightforward collusion between Baruna and Vieira. Perhaps this is the explanation that Baruna himself came up with - he knew that the photos were fakes, and yet there was at least one person who claimed to have seen the 'saucer'. Only conflation could explain this.
 
Here are a set of high-resolution scans of first-generation prints of the 1950 Paul Trent photos.

https://archive.org/details/TrentHighResScans

Back in the late 2000s, I traded e-mails with one of Trent's daughters trying to set up a phone interview with her. At the time, she was looking to regain possession of her father's negatives, which turned out to be in the possession of Bruce Maccabee (who has since returned them). Initially she agreed to talk with me but then, without explanation, she stopped responding to my e-mails.

The Trent children must be in their 60s or 70s now. I think they know the truth about the pics but they're not talking (or, perhaps, no one has yet met their price).
 
I'm sure I read in the FT that it had been admitted the Trent UFO was an object (hubcap?) suspended from the wires overhead. That's certainly what it looks like. Can anyone back me up on this memory?
 
I'm sure I read in the FT that it had been admitted the Trent UFO was an object (hubcap?) suspended from the wires overhead. That's certainly what it looks like. Can anyone back me up on this memory?
In the first high-res scan, I noticed a very fine white line stretching across the picture and passing through (under) the UFO.
It could have been a scratch, or it could have been some fine nylon fishing line.
You have to zoom right in.
 
Skeptics have been saying for years that it was a door mirror from an old truck. However, there is no real evidence that definitively shows it was an object suspended by a wire. Bruce Maccabee's analysis says the photos seem to depict a large, distant object. Trent's own relatives have said he wasn't smart enough to perpetrate a hoax.

Paul and Evelyn Trent both died without recanting their story. As noted, their kids may know more but, so far, they've said nothing to indicate their parents were liars.

As for the scans, the photos from which they were created show years of manhandling by untold sets of hands. There is no way to know whether the scratches and lines you now see were part of the original image.

PS - I traded emails with Dr. Maccabee yesterday and he says he never had the opportunity to talk with the Trent children. However, he did reiterate that, based on his analysis, the photos depict a large, distant, and very real object.
 
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I don't think you have to be a genius to hang a door mirror from a bit of wire.
 
In the first high-res scan, I noticed a very fine white line stretching across the picture and passing through (under) the UFO
Yes...but, intrigingly, if you follow that line across the photograph to almost the extreme-right of the print, as viewed, it passes through a smudge/deviation point, which is more-consistent with a photochemical devlopment traction scratch on the emulsion, rather than being a physical suspension line.

This could explain the parallelity (and confident spread) of the evident white lines, but also excuse the critical discontinuity of the one that passes-through the unidentified object.

(nb the above comment is an impression, I've not tried rulering it....)
 
I don't think you have to be a genius to hang a door mirror from a bit of wire.
No, but to photograph it in such a way as to fool 60+ years of intensive photographic analysis takes a bit more doing. Add to that the fact that the two photos were in the middle of a film roll with other family photos. This would indicate there were no test shots that got thrown away.
 
Why would there need to be test shots? And it's only fooled those who wanted the object to be a UFO, anyone who's seen a Hollywood movie of old where they used a matte painting or perspective trickery (like in Darby O'Gill and the Little People) will know how easy it is to make an object look further away or nearer. You don't even need a Hollywood budget, just stick a paper cut-out to a window like one famous photo did, et voila, one UFO pic. Or indeed hanging a door mirror from a wire.

Obviously I'm playing devil's advocate here. How he got it up there is another matter. His possible motives another matter still.
 
Thanks @EnolaGaia. They certainly would be some weird-looking clouds. I'm not 100% sure what I'm doing, but I've done an experiment which would seem to indicate that the object is at the same distance as parts of the background.

I've overlaid the two images. I've made them different colours and set the composite mode to 'difference' as otherwise the picture is too unclear. The distance between the two images of the object is comparable to that of other background features, meaning the distance is also similar.

I'm probably going to embarrass myself by being the only one reading this thread who needs to ask this question :bear:, but:
What does overlaying the images do, why does it show distance of the objects?
:parapet:
 
I'm probably going to embarrass myself by being the only one reading this thread who needs to ask this question :bear:, but:
What does overlaying the images do, why does it show distance of the objects?

The available photos happened to have been taken as a stereographic pair to be viewed with a stereoscope (a popular device during the 19th century; of which the best known 20th century example is the View-Master):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope

To get the stereoscopic / 3D effect you need to have 2 photos taken from slightly different perspectives, so as to mimic the separation of your two eyes.

Given a pair of images created as a stereoscopic pair, one can overlay them to see how different the positions of a single object may be within the combined image. The degree of disjunction between objects in the overlaid images indicates how distant the object was from the camera.
 
NOTE: The George Stock / Passaic sighting and photos now have their own thread:
George Stock Sighting / Photos (Passaic NJ; July 1952)
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...k-sighting-photos-passaic-nj-july-1952.69778/



I've been told you don't have a thread for this, George Stock in Passaic, NJ, took 5 photos of a UFO flying around his home on Valley Brook Avenue in 1952. He was a businessman and a friend was with him.

Here's the story:

https://www.openminds.tv/ufo-new-jersey-1952/7087


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Here is one my high school friend's dad took. I think of all that he took this is my favorite one, but there is one he took that was on the hoax wall a the Roswell Museum. I can't find that one.

PaulVillaUFO1.jpeg
 
Here is one my high school friend's dad took. I think of all that he took this is my favorite one, but there is one he took that was on the hoax wall a the Roswell Museum. I can't find that one.

PaulVillaUFO1.jpeg
Your high school friend's dad was Paul Villa?
 
Your high school friend's dad was Paul Villa?
Yes. He was a very interesting man. He used to tell a lot of interesting stories but he never mentioned the UFO's to me. I found those later. My dad remembered when he was talking about his experiences but he didn't believe him.
 
Sensible fella.
Not really, my dad had his own experiences and bought all kinds of abduction and ufo books in the 70's. In fact it boggles my mind that he would be so harsh about someone he knew who talked about similar experiences.
 
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