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Your Paracast Newsletter — November 5, 2017


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
November 5, 2017
www.theparacast.com


Kevin D. Randle Revisits the Socorro UFO Landing on The Paracast

The Paracast is heard Sundays from 3:00 AM until 6:00 AM Central Time on the GCN Radio Network and affiliates around the USA, the Boost Radio Network, the IRN Internet Radio Network, and online across the globe via download and on-demand streaming.

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This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris present outspoken UFO researcher Kevin Randle to discuss Encounter in the Desert: The Case For Alien Contact At Socorro. Says the publisher, "The UFO landing at Socorro has been wrapped in controversy almost from the moment that police officer Lonnie Zamora watched a craft descend and land. Zamora saw alien beings near the craft and a symbol on its side but was told that he shouldn’t mention either. [This book] reveals, for the first time, exactly what he saw in that arroyo in 1964 and what an examination of the landing revealed to investigators." During this episode, Kevin will address such questions as whether there were other witnesses, and claims that the sighting was the result of a hoax.

Chris O’Brien’s Blog: Our Strange Planet

Kevin Randle's A Different Perspective: A Different Perspective

After The Paracast -- Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers on November 5: Gene and special guest Kevin D. Randle present a humorous conversation about claims that an alien/human hybrid race is being bred to take us over. Kevin gives a reality check on a Roper survey of how many Americans have been abducted by UFOs, and how the results were manipulated. He talks about the best UFO photos, saying that the ones that provide the most detail may not be authentic, and also delivers an update on the alleged Ramey memo, and whether it is in any way relevant to the Roswell crash, or is it a red herring that’ll never be resolved? The discussion also focuses on simultaneous radar/visual sightings and the perceived technology of UFOs.

Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Check out our new YouTube channel at: The Official Paracast Channel

Are Genuine UFO Photos Hiding in Plain Sight?
By Gene Steinberg

In the early days of the modern UFO era, there were a small number of photographs that appeared to represent what so many people were seeing. But the images weren’t always altogether clear; sometimes all you had were lights in the sky or blurry flying things with no discernible shape. So investigators would depend on eyewitness testimony, particularly multiple witnesses, with which to buttress the story.

Unfortunately, the photos and movies that provided the clearest images were often fakes. Some were extremely clumsy, worse than the cheap special effects in a low budget sci-fi film. One notorious example was the Lost Creek UFO hoax from 1966. Hatched by Gray Barker and Jim Moseley, the “craft” consisted of a model held aloft via a fishing pole placed in front of a car.

While Moseley occasionally presented the film as genuine during his lectures, his close friends knew the truth. Later, he confessed to this and other pranks in his autobiographical book, “Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist,” coauthored with Karl Pflock.

Since I had experience as a photographer, I wasn’t fooled for a moment, even before Jim laid out the details of its creation to me. I couldn’t imagine how anyone might be fooled, but I suppose people desperate for evidence of UFO reality might overlook its obvious flaws.

But one of the best UFO photos out there is the one illustrating the Lubbock Lights in Texas, taken on the evening of August 30, 1951. The photographer, Carl Hart, Jr., then a college freshman, observed the UFOs flying in formation overhead. Five photos were taken with a 35mm camera before the strange lights were gone.

Photos of lights in the sky don’t reveal much, but multiple witnesses reported the silent procession of lights. While efforts were made to find conventional explanations, the case remains unsolved.

If it was just the photos, however, it probably would not have garnered so much serious attention.

Now in those days, taking photos wasn’t such an easy process, unless you had a Polaroid instant camera that produced photos that, essentially, developed themselves. Otherwise, you had to send the film to a laboratory, or a local photo finisher, to perform the developing process. Some hobbyists would do it at their homes or offices, as I did when I was a teenager.

At least there was a negative that could be examined by experts seeking evidence of possible fakery.

Nowadays, hundreds of millions of people have high quality digital cameras in their pockets or purses, included in smartphones. The best of the breed, from Apple, Google and Samsung, can produce photos and videos that come close to professional quality. iPhones, for example, have actually been used to shoot scenes for motion pictures and TV shows.

With so many cameras around, you have to wonder why there aren’t loads of credible UFO photos to be had, but there are remarkably few, because it’s so easy to create fakes.

Smartphones will usually include some basic video editing software, and some of it, such as Apple’s iMovie, can be used to deliver simple productions that are almost professional in quality.

Even sophisticated special effects have become easier and easier to create in the digital realm; it’s all about manipulating pixels in clever ways. If you are more ambitious, you can check out such apps as Apple’s Final Cut Pro X and Motion. Although both are used by professionals, together they cost less than $350. Plus the price of a Macintosh computer of course (they start at $599 for the Mac mini).

What this means is that creating fake photos or videos of UFOs isn’t terribly hard to do. You can Google or YouTube hundreds or thousands of them. Many are far more detailed than even the best traditional photos in the old days.

Indeed, The Paracast once interviewed someone who ran a YouTube channel loaded with alleged UFO videos, most of which were obvious fakes. It appears that maximizing Google advertising income was far more important to them than presenting possibly genuine evidence of the phenomenon. There was no interest whatever in vetting this material before it was posted.

The larger question, though, is that why there aren’t more UFO photos these days with so many cameras available. Part of the problem is that people are busy looking down at their smartphones, not up. So it doesn’t matter what might be flying overhead.

A more serious dilemma is separating the real photos from the fakes. As I wrote above, it’s not difficult to produce seemingly authentic fakes, and lights in the sky could be most anything at all. As with the UFO photos of old, it is very much about having credible witnesses to the event, the more the better.

At the same time, if it’s so hard to tell the real from the faux, would it even be possible to know if there’s a genuine UFO among them? Indeed, photos and videos of real UFOs might already be online, only they might not be recognized as such. If seemingly authentic fakery is so easy to produce, how do the real photos stand out?

Imagine all that potential evidence of UFO reality hiding in plain sight. Or is it possible, as some of have suggested, that the real flying saucers left Earth long ago, and the sightings that still occur all have conventional explanations?

But what about a live broadcast of something from out of this world landing somewhere? It’s the wet dream of so many UFO enthusiasts.

Even then, there will no doubt be people who will doubt its reality, that it’s all just a reality show presented for someone’s benefit, perhaps to sell lots of advertising. I once thought that, even if the President or another world leader appeared before live television accompanied by a genuine entity from another planet, that person’s opponents wouldn’t believe it was a real event.

Maybe I’m being half serious about it, but that’s the world in which we live. Before we decide if we can handle the truth, we have to decide if what we see, or photograph, is what’s really there.

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