EndUAPSecrecy

Ashton Forbes is offering $10,000 to anyone who can find this cloud photo online before May 19, 2014. If nobody can, he says, the MH370 "teleportation" videos can never be called debunked. Let me give his argument its best shot: if the photo can't be shown to exist before the video, maybe somebody built the photo FROM the video. OK. Let's be the forger. What we have to work with: a 720p YouTube upload. 1280 x 720, under one megapixel, 8-bit color, mashed through YouTube compression. It's a side-by-side stereo pair, so each view gets half of that. And there's a plane, three orbs, and a mouse cursor sitting on top of the clouds. What we have to produce: the original Canon raw files that photographer Jonas De Ro published. Canon 5D Mark II. 5616 x 3744. Twenty-one megapixels of 14-bit sensor data. Here's the to-do list. 1. Invent over 95% of the image from nothing. The raw has about 23 times the pixels of the entire video frame. That detail isn't in the video. It has to come from somewhere. 2. Erase a plane, three orbs, and a cursor, and fill in the clouds behind them perfectly. 3. Un-make a composite. The video background is two of De Ro's photos, flipped and spliced together. So from one flat image we need two separate photos taken 18 seconds apart, with the clouds shifted the way they would be from a moving airliner. 4. Go from 8-bit to 14-bit. The video has 256 brightness levels per channel. The raw has 16,384. And a raw file isn't even a picture yet. It's the unprocessed readout of the sensor, one color per pixel, before the camera does anything to it. We'd be reverse engineering what a sensor saw from a compressed copy of a copy. 5. Fake the camera's fingerprint. This is the fun one. Every digital sensor has tiny manufacturing flaws, so each pixel responds to light a little differently from its neighbors. That pattern is fixed for the life of the sensor and unique to that one physical camera, like rifling marks on a bullet. Forensic examiners call it PRNU (photo-response non-uniformity) and use it to tie photos to cameras. An independent analysis found the same fingerprint across De Ro's whole series. A 720p video cannot contain the fingerprint of a 21 megapixel sensor it never passed through. That information simply isn't in there. 6. Produce the rest of the roll. De Ro's files are a numbered sequence from the same flight and the same camera, including frames the video never used. 7. Match the weather. The cloud formations line up with what satellites recorded over Japan on January 25, 2012. 8. Get a stock texture site to play along and say they've had the files since 2012. Shrinking a 21 megapixel raw into a blurry 720p video takes about four seconds. Going the other way is unscrambling an egg. And the Wayback Machine? The site blocked crawlers. Not being archived is not evidence of anything. "Nobody archived a stock photo site in 2012, therefore teleporting airliner" is not how evidence works. Keep the ten grand, Ashton. Admitting the videos are fake is free.