Friday, June 29, 2007

The Drone photographs


The last few nights I have had some free time (for a change) to simply relax and do whatever the mood strikes me to do. This doesn’t happen as often as I’d like and probably not as often as should be. On Wednesday night I happened upon some recent reports coming from the UFOlogy world regarding a series of sightings of a new variety. If you don’t follow the UFOlogy world here is the scoop.

A series of photos have been released by what appears to be 3 different people, who took the photos at different locations and within a very, very short time frame of one another. The photos are quite sharp and appear quite convincingly real. The photos show objects that are being described by UFOlogists as “Drones”, and their appearance is appropriate given the name. The photos do not show the hallmarks of being PhotoShopped, at least on a casual glance and the objects in the photos appear to me, in my opinion, to have a certain physical “weight” that is lacking in PhotoShopped images.

What I mean by physical “weight” is a certain quality that seems amiss and unnatural in CGI or photo editing suites. When you look at a special effects laden movie, say Spiderman, doesn’t the action seem “off” because the computer created people don’t seem to have a physical presence in reality? Maybe it’s the speed in which the characters move or the quality of only being a series of points in a grid in a computer program. There is just a quality that feels more unreal than it looks real.

These photos do not have that feel about them. There isn’t a sensation of unnatural depth like we used to see when people would fake film-based photos. They just seem to have a quality of realism, depth and presence, which is quite natural in the “feel” of the images. There has been an anonymous explanation for these drones released on a web site that is purportedly written by an engineer who claims to have worked on advanced projects that are virtually identical to the drone images.

While I can’t say I am bowling over with excitement about this story I can say that my interest has been piqued. Something about the speed of this story developing, the information that has been released and the circumstances of the events seems both right and wrong to me. Not since the Phoenix Lights has a UFO story captured my thoughts as this one is.

This could, as so many high weirdness stories, turn out to be an elaborate hoax. So many hoaxes collapse simply because the inertia of the story brings too much info to the forefront too soon and the weak aspects of the story simply cause the whole story to collapse. The Aussie Bloke postings are a prime example of a story folding after the weight and inertia cause the weak foundation to give way.

I’m going to keep watching the story and see how it progresses. The story is either scripted or it’s not and scripted stories begin to show the veneer of fiction and creative writing quite soon. Until then…keep watching the skies.

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