Does anybody remember this photo:
No? I posted this authentic picture of a flying saucer back in Spring this year. You can click here for the full story, in JSVB Post #760.
Since then, I have been deluged by exactly zero invitations to lecture, to late-night television, or even the news, no phone calls, letters, nocturnal threats from the MIB's, e-mails or even remarks from friends or spouses. I was surprised. I figure the contemporary world is so blasé about the paranormal that everybody takes visits by extraterrestrials for granted. Who hasn't taken a picture of a flying saucer? No doubt everybody has shaken hands with ET by now. There are so many reports of things in the sky, it's a wonder we can even see the sun for all of the stuff that is in low Earth orbit. Executive summary: public response equal to or less than completely underwhelming. Bleh.
Well, I promised that I would divulge the complete story behind the UFO photo. Since we are still close enough to Hallowe'en, I figured I might as well get this out of the way.
First, as I had mentioned, this picture is completely optically real. There are no Photoshop edits or insertions. What you see is what the camera saw which is what the naked eye saw that day. Except... upside-down. We invert the picture to see the original shot:
Now the tree branches are obeying gravity correctly, but the "sky" is inverted. That is because the sky is water. You are looking at an almost perfectly still shoreline shot from on top of a cliff looking downward. The sky is reflected in the water, which is roughly six inches to a foot deep. There is a smudge just below half-way: that's a tidal pool. The flying saucer is a mound of sand that children had built into a large sand castle. When the tide came in, the castle was reduced to something like a large baseball mound. in the water, I thought it looked like an alien spacecraft.
Here is the same mound of sand the next day, taken from the ground level and with the tide completely out. There's even a kid trying to build it back up again:
There are a few take-aways that remain from my UFO experience. I will likely never ever get a photograph of a real flying saucer. And if I did, it appears the best way to bury the evidence would be for me to post it here on JSVB. Lastly, there's some paunch in a Ramones shirt in Hollywood right now that's making a seven figure salary dreaming up exactly the same visual effects that I do, only I'm not that paunch.
Again: bleh.
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