A recent report of a UFO in my neck of the woods has gotten my attention.

I found this on OpenMinds.TV

Black blob UFO photographed in Washington

Posted by: Alejandro Rojas December 13, 2013

A UFO described as a big black blob was photographed over the town of Ellensburg, Washington on Tuesday. The witness says it “expanded and contracted like some kind of jagged, geometric puffer fish.”

Debbie Hulbert submitted the photo to the Daily Record, a local newspaper. Hulbert says she and her husband spotted the object at 4:30 pm. They say it hung in the air at about 1000 feet. The couple and their neighbors watched it for awhile trying to figure out what it was and took a few pictures.

My first question about this is when was this taken? The article says 4:30, but around here, at this time of year, by 4:30 there is not this much daylight. Sunset in the Seattle area today is 4:19. So, I went over to Foto Forensics website, where you can upload images for analysis.

Here is the first image:

and the results of Error Level Analysis, or ELA

Here is the close up of the object:

And its ELA:

And for reference the tutorial image from Foto Forensics, and its ELA:

And what Foto Forensics has to say about their example:

A real, camera-original picture, should have a lot of white, almost like noise, over the entire picture. As the picture is repeatedly resaved (not copied, but actually loaded into a program and saved again as a JPEG), high frequencies and fine details are removed. With each resave, more frequencies/details are lost until the picture cannot get any worse (returning a black ELA picture).

In this picture, the background is completely black, but the person is not. That means that the background is at a different quality level compared to the rest of the picture; the background was digitally modified. In this case, it was enhanced to make the white look brighter.
Seeing Red
With ELA, all edges should be at about the same error level. Similar surfaces should all have similar error levels, similar coloring should have similar error levels, similar patterns, etc. But that isn’t the case here. For example, her red headdress has a different intensity compared to the back of her dress, and she has one red strap that is much brighter than anything else. Even the red dangles from the hat are much brighter than the hat itself. The hat dangles appear brighter than the armband (photo lower left). Interestingly, the red bead in her hair (middle of her back) has a much lower ELA value.

Based on this, we can tell that the red in the hat was brightened, the dangles and one strap were reworked, and the original red color was probably darker — like the red bead seen in the middle of her back.

Seems clear the “UFO” photos have been tampered with, and at that point even if they were for real, they are no longer valid evidence of anything. Most likely they are just fake. The local Daily Record news paper at least made an effort to debunk this story.

The chief instructor at Midstate Aviation at the nearby Bowers Field said he had not heard of anyone mentioning spotting something strange in the sky that day.

The Daily Record had to take it upon themselves to solve the mystery. Upon closer examination of the photograph, they concluded the object was “balloons, trash bags somehow filled with helium or trash bags full of balloons were likely culprits.”

All in all, a pretty clear case of hoax carried out by someone who thought they were the only clever ones around.

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