PHOTO & ENLARGEMENT OF UNKNOWN WHITE OBJECTS.
Description: Note: I am a photographer and was out making random landscape photographs in the Fish Creek, WI rural area and made this capture of a small rural church. I did not notice the four (4) white objects until after I used a white balance process in Photoshop. As I zoomed in to see if the objects were lens flare I began to think this may be something more. I asked other skilled photographers about whether or not it was lens flare, etc. and all said they did not think so. The formation of the objects was also interesting to note. Question: Do you know what this photograph has captured?
Response From Witness: I believe I was looking somewhat north with the morning sun coming from the right. I had the lens flare cover attached on a high quality lens (55 mm) The shutter speed was 1/1000 at 400 ISO and F8. Lens flare needs to strike the lens in some way. I do not think that happened. But like you I am not totally sure. The 1/1000 speed would be fast enough to catch objects at high speed while my eye was in the view finder focusing on the church.
If you have any other thoughts please do let me know. This is interesting to me as the shape of these objects were very similar to the one object I saw a number of years back.
Note: I agree with the photographer and I don’t think that objects are a lens flare. At this point I don’t have an explanation. Given the fact that the photographer had a lens flare cover attached it is highly unlikely that the anomalies are due to lens flare. The anomalies are most likely real objects. The photographer may be right that the objects were moving too fast to be detected by the human eye given the fast shutter speed (1/1000 seconds).
Update – Feb 1, 2015: Photo Analysis Report From Dave Mason: I tested the photo and due to compression the photo is marked as edited. Large genuine photos that are down converted from TIFF to JPEG are indicated as “edited” by JPEG inspection software. The EXIF data confirms the camera is a Pentax 645D which has a 40 MP CCD imager. Compression is required in order to share the large images produced by this quality large format camera. The Huffman histogram statistics did not detect anything suspicious. The data is well within normal values. If someone were to Photoshop an image, the complex Huffman scale reference will flag it with obvious numeric values. I have experimented with photos using genuine referenced images and using minimal Photoshop work to confirm the Huffman scale high sensitivity. Also researching the photographer indicates a well known and respected individual. It would be completely out of character for this individual to produce a hoax and risk their reputation. The objects were indeed moving extremely fast as the EXIF data confirms 1/1000 shutter speed. Measuring the distance traveled in 1/1000 second confirms the objects crossed the entire horizontal field of view in just 1/13 of a second (0.077 second). The atmospheric attenuation and cloud reference indicates the objects were at least 1/2 to 1 mile distance and therefore confirming great speed. It’s conclusive that the objects could not have been birds or man made aerial crafts. There is no symmetry to confirm it was common camera/lens anomalies. The solar light source is in a position that confirms and eliminates a lens flare explanation. One explanation could be that the aerial objects werea simultaneous launch of four large high speed missiles. Obviously it’s unlikely at that location as well as being implausible.
Given the data analysis, and the integrity of the photographer, I can conclude the photo is genuine.
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