MrsGood wrote:
not amused wrote:
lens flare without a doubt
Yeah being a camera boffin my-self i agree
ABC’s viral lens flare
« Thread Started on Oct 3, 2012, 6:52am »
Last Friday, ABC’s Good Morning America decided to do a Great Taboo story on the cheap. It aired a piece by east Texas affiliate KLTV about an alleged UFO captured by Google Earth cameras in tiny Jacksonville, Tex. It was a whimsical little jellybean that cost nothing to produce. The accompanying ABC blog post indicated another similar UFO had been located on Google Earth in New Mexico.
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/files/2012/10/pinkufo2.jpg
ABC's Good Morning America made a whoop-de-doo about this lens flare, which led to a worldwide blogosphere phenomenon/CREDIT: Google Earth
The dual-UFO story went viral, from The Daily Mail in London to The Pakistan Daily Times. Although critics tendered lens flare as a possible explanation, one “UFO expert” declared “Without question, this is a legitimate craft. It is not a reflection or anything like that. That’s nonsense. I’m actually quite surprised that this is not getting more media attention.”
Actually, it’s hard to imagine how the thing got this far. Within minutes of being shown the Google images, our Herald-Tribune photo chief Mike Lang noodled around the Google Street View imagery and found yet another lens flare “UFO” in Texas — only, it was on the ground, not in the air.
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/files/201...onville2-300x146.jpg
Hey look! On the ground -- it's another pink UFO! This lens flare, complete with parabolic distortion, turns up in Tyler, Tex., just north of Jacksonville/CREDIT: Google Earth
Same damn thing. Pink, too. And it took just a few minutes to find it.
The vacuous GMA segment ran one minute 46 seconds. Granted, not a long time. But if ABC wanted to give its five million viewers a legitimate Texas UFO story they’d never heard before, here’s the script:
“Four and a half years after an unidentified flying object without a transponder closed in on the no-fly zone around President Bush’s ‘Western White House’ in Crawford, Texas, the U.S. Air Force has yet to release radar records of that event.
“The UFO, described by eyewitnesses as a massive solid object illuminated with lights resembling welder’s arcs, was tracked by Federal Aviation Administration and National Weather Service radar as it headed on a southeast bearing out of Stephenville, Texas. The incident, which occurred during the early evening of Jan. 8, 2008, was reconstructed by the Mutual UFO Network using federal records released under the Freedom of Information Act.
“Shortly after the UFO appeared over Stephenville, witnesses reported seeing jet fighters on afterburners in the vicinity. A spokesman for an air base near Fort Worth initially stated the military had no planes in the area that night. But less than two weeks later, after MUFON filed its FOIA requests for radar data to several federal agencies, the Air Force conceded it had 10 F-16 jet fighters operating in the region on the night in question. The FAA/National Weather Service records plotted 2.8 million radar returns during the UFO event. Those records not only corroborated eyewitness accounts of the UFO’s flight direction, they also tracked the F-16 flight paths as well. As the UFO prepared to enter restricted air space over the Bush ranch, no jet interceptors were in the vicinity.
“Unlike the FAA and the National Weather Service, the military told MUFON in 2008 that it had destroyed the radar records in question. This is the first time ABC News has bothered to acquire a no-comment from the Pentagon. Coming up — global reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ‘Total Recall’ autobiography …”
Come on, ABC. This takes less than 1:46 to read. And it doesn’t cost a dime.
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/13311/abc...al-lens-flare/?tc=ar
Billy Cox writes De Void, the mainstream media’s lonely UFO weblog.
When not tapping out De Void, Billy is a general assignment reporter for the Herald-Tribune.
I like the articles by Billy Cox
