UFO Hunting in the Photoshop Age

Kenneth Arnold in Washington State. This is Greg Gigeon, history professor at Penn State, talking about one of the first major UFO sightings. The pilot reported seeing nine strange objects flying in a tight formation. They were flat and roundish, and he'd never seen anything like them before. Newspapers get hold of it and take it up, and uh, that's where the first time the phrasing of flying saucers came from.

UFOs quickly became a pop culture phenomenon. In Washington, ghost like objects dart across the radar screen at the CIA traffic controls under at National Airport for several hours, traveling more than one About as long as there have been reported encounters, people have been faking them too, but recently something has happened that changed it every bit as much as that flight in and that's digital technology, cell phone cameras,

social media, and especially video and photo editing software. These programs, like Photoshop, they're capable of making celebrities look thinner, lighting look better, and anything seemed possible, and UFO researchers started to realize they hadn't seen anything yet. Hi, I'm pg at Cary and I am Astin Weinstein. And this week on Decrypted, we're taking a look at what it means for society when it becomes nearly impossible to tell whether

a photo or video has been manipulated. It's part of our ongoing look at the unintended consequences of technology, where we're examining how Silicon Valley's best laid plans can go awry. Programs like Adobe Photoshop offer huge new possibilities for artists and designers, but it also means that government's dishonest news organizations, even UFO hoaxers, they can change their perception of what's

real and what's not. Stay with us. Today's UFO craze has some of the same characteristics of other fake news trends. We're seeing today distrust of the government, slickly produced videos, and irresistibly wild content. It's stopped. It looks like it's stopped in the sky. It's not a plane, dude. I've always loved these weird internet communities. So I started poking around on YouTube watching some the videos. I quickly realized that there's so many types of UFO videos. Many of

them are your straight up UFO sightings. Could be I don't know, it's totelings, so I don't think it's a popular Also, it looks weird, guys, I look making the shop a really who crew worked? Could? These videos are shaky? They look like they were shot on somebody's cell phone. And this one we can see the roofs of some houses and a dark cloud in the sky, and near the top there's a white flashing light that's moving fast. There are some other niche subject areas to like a

bunch of accounts that focus on space weather. I saw some that allege a hidden secret beneath Antarctica PA. You wouldn't say you're an expert in photoshop for photo manipulation or video manipulation. That I would not, So I wanted to see what you thought one of these videos and whether they could trick you sort of. I'm gonna play a video for you called UFO, filmed a farm in California by a channel called UFO Seekers. Seekers was headed out again to see if we could catch anything flying

through the area. Okay, it's a dark sky, there's nothing there. Oh, yes there is. There's a dot of light that just shot across the screen. Okay, it looks like a star, except it's like bouncing around. So be it? Is it convincing? I mean, I would say so. My head tells me that maybe I shouldn't trust what I'm seeing, but I

can't tell whether the footage is real or not. As I was clicking through YouTube watching some of the videos, it didn't take long before I was watching videos that mixed these UFO sightings with talk of government cover ups and dubious scientific claims. So there's no question that conspiracy is a sort of a the sam and a plot that's Greg the history professor, that is a part of

the UFO phenomenon. And so from a very early stage, there's this idea being circulated that groups of actors there are people behind the scenes who are who know no more than they're letting on. Prominent conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones from info Wars have talked about UFOs with their audiences. So image giant spaceships landing their doors open and tentacles all come out or pods all come out. Let's say it's wireless, but tentacles are scarier because we're designed, you know,

for tentacles and teeth and things attacking us. So let's go without an allegory. And one of the biggest UFO channels on YouTube and account, called security m ten, also mixes UFO sightings and conspiracy theory. Security ten has one point eight million subscribers and its videos have been watched nearly half a billion times. Aside from just the black budget, there is another even deeper, underground black budget that has been and continues to be used to fund this operation.

Not to mention that some of this technology used is a result of reverse engineered alien craft. Furthermore, as I've always said, and it's not just me, many whistleblowers everything, as these fakes go viral, they're already having consequences for global affairs. We know, for example, that North Korea has doctored images of its military capabilities and images of politicians seeming to do things that they in fact did not do, becoming more and more common by the day. UFO spotting

wasn't always like this. You can create fakes camera if you know how to do it. That's Bruce mccabee. He's kind of a godfather of view of OO spotting. He talked to me about cases in New Zealand and Mexico where he investigated alleged UFO sighting days when they only have black and white if you do it yourself quite easily. One of the most common types of thanks to think

about is a so called double exposure. But since the days of detecting fake UFO sightings by looking for double exposures and other signs of dark room trickery, there's been a revolution in editing technology. We wanted to talk to one of the people who's taking advantage of the medium and who's inside the modern UFO community. Well, I'm Heathcliff Spencer of Petis and I'm from the Netherlands and my

full time job is Heathcliff Spencer. Peters runs a channel called the Lions Ground, which has about seventy thousand subscribers on YouTube, and quite a few of his videos Heathcliff is standing in front of a backdrop that looks like he's on a spaceship, and his videos have titles like bizarre UFO shaped cloud over Moscow, caught on camera or strange white bright orb over San Antonio. What is it?

This YouTube channel makes exciting both fectual videos about u f O, secret societies, paranormal experiences or stories and everything in the BOO framework. You hear me, you see me? And Heathcliffe says he started making videos after a few things in his life went wrong. So how did you end up homeless? Wrong? Little friends, But he says he

tapped into a community of counterculture YouTubers. Eventually, he says, he made it into a full time job, and that's different from the older generation of UFO researchers like Bruce mccabee, who pursued this on the side most of the time. Yeah. I noticed that a lot of the videos I was watching had ads running on them. Every time someone views one of these ads, a small amount of money flows back to the video creator. Some of the bigger accounts

like Securit Team ten also use Patreon. That's a website that lets people set up payments to content creators so viewers can directly support someone's work. I discovered the audiences for these videos are very engaged. Heathcliff's page has a very active comments section, and he told me he gets some of the material for his videos from his audience. How often do you get sent examples of a UFO, a siting or what have you? Oh? Not much, I think between the TWN and the twenty per day per day. Yeah.

I asked YouTube what their policy was on these UFO videos. They said misinformation is not against their community guidelines even if it goes viral. For a video to be removed, it would have to be considered harassment or hate speech, or violate some other guideline. YouTube spokes first and Jessica Mason did say that advertisers can opt out of showing their videos on paranormal or cult topics like a denial

of the moon landing or a UFO citing. So unabated by YouTube, these videos spread and there are other forums to like Facebook and Reddit where people can discuss UFOs, aliens, all manner of paranormal activity. So perhaps it's no surprise that UFO siting is a way up compared to a few decades ago. The National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, Washington, which is not a federal agency by the way, says there were three UFO reports in the month of July

this year. That's down from about seven hundred and fifty sightings in July, but still way way higher than in the Obviously, the Internet makes it easier than ever to report a formal sighting. The Internet also makes it easier for these videos to spread, and crucially, it's a lot easier now to alter a photo to show evidence of extraterrestrial life, and it was when people had to double

expose their own film in the guard room. Part of the reason there's such a wealth of UFO videos right now is that these days it's easy to access a photo or video editing program. So we went to the maker of one of the most widely available programs to ask them what they thought of how their creation had taken on a life of its own. We talked to Adobe. I'm Steven Nielson, the director of product management for Photoshop. Stephen agreed that tools like Photoshop have made it easier

for anyone to manipulate an image. People are manipulating photographs well before photoshop, but photoshop and digital technology really enabled enabled higher quality result and made it much more accessible. But he said that while photoshop helped people make fake images, most people were creating images that were interesting and artistic. Also in the conversation was Victoria Nie. I'm the product manager for Motion Graphics and Visual Effects that Adobe. I

cover after effects primarily. Victoria agreed that yes, Adobe's programs have helped democratize fakery, but they can also be used to detective fake as well. These same tools that can be used to create uh create content can also be used sometimes to detect when something has been manipulated, and so there are things that you can do in both after effects and in Photoshop that will help you see that.

If you push the contrast, for instance, you can see that the noise in this part of the video is different than in this other part of the video, and so clearly these came from different sources. The problem is most people aren't photoshop experts, so it's very hard to detect good fakes. While it's true most of us can't spot a fraud, there are a few people who can. My name is Dan gel Lotos. I am a visual effects artist. Dean's worked on everything from big budget blockbusters

to History Channel programs. One day was working a show, I think it was a a show for the Weather Channel called Deadliest Space Weather and he started looking up UFO videos on YouTube, and he was shocked by how obviously fake many of the videos were. To his trained eyes. The hoaxers were getting away with lying to so many people, so he decided to debunk what he was seeing. I know a lot of people come to the subject of UFOs because they've had an experience that they can't explain.

The fact that there are people out there exploiting this genuine curiosity these people had is just galling to me. Dean started a YouTube account called the UFO Theater. He has about subscribers. He posts videos there every couple of months. Welcome fellow freaks to UFO Theater. I'm constantine. You know there are six point three million UFO related videos on YouTube, with more being at it every day. How do you know which ones are worth watching? How do you know

which ones are fake? That's why I'm here to tell you what's real and what's crap. Whenever there's a place, as we said, for Dean, most of these videos were easy to debunk, so I asked him to walk me through one. This video comes from the Securit Team ten channel. It's titled NASA cuts Live Space Feed HD UFO appears at I that's an old caps by the way, now, this is not the first time that we've captured a

faux phenomenon on the I S S live stream. However, it is the first time that we've caused something and recorded it from NASA's newly created live Earth Stream page. So we're looking at a feed that we're told in the video comes from NASA's High Definition Earth Viewing System. It's aboard the International Space Station. It's basically a big HD camera that's been constantly streaming the Earth since so

nothing seems to be happening in the video. It's dark, but you can kind of make out the curvature of the Earth, and there's a solar panel that's presumably part of the I S S that's off to the right. For a while, we're just looking at the Earth. Then the image cuts to a gray screen. NASA directly after that had put up a notice on their live stream page indicating that they would be disabling and taking down the live stream feed for good. Thankfully someone decided to

put this termination. The host of Secure Team, Tyler Glockner, says this is NASA censoring the image, but according to the NASA page in the video, this race screen is just what happens when the experiment is switching cameras or communications on available. That's when Tyler claims he captures the footage before it's censored and finds a triangular shaped UFO. All he did was he took some video that was

shot from the International Space Station. This is Dean again, and he just laid over a little bit of a a triangular shape UFO over the footage, and then he cut in this title card that says we've lost the feet. So he claimed that this was authentic video that showed that not only were there extraterrestrials out there in orbit around Earth, but that NASA doesn't want you to see them. We tried to interview Tyler, but he never responded to us.

Dean is a visual effects artist, so he's an expert in this stuff, but he's no match for the rising tide of UFO content, let alone the rest of the conspiracy theories and the fake news that's making the rounds online. When Dean's videos do really well, they get maybe twenty views, but that's only a tiny fraction of the number of people who watched the original videos. He tries to be bunk.

I asked Dan why he still makes these videos. I don't know how much of an impact I'm making, but I'm constantly getting, for lack of a better term, fan mail from people who say, thank you for for showing you that this is not real, and thank you for helping me be skeptical about what I'm seeing. It's a

good point. As a society, we're only just learning how to be skeptical of what we look at online, or rather, what we see online is becoming harder to discern from reality, and now artificial intelligence can make what's called deep fakes, which are incredibly convincing but totally fabricated videos of essentially anyone saying essentially anything. Recently, we've seen other tech companies pledged to regulate themselves better and contain the unintended consequences

of their technology. I'm thinking, especially if the social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, which have essentially been forced to change their product in the wake of election interference. When I spoke to Stephen and Victoria from Adobe, I did ask them whether it would be theoretically possible for Adobe to try and catch users in the act of creating a fake So there's really no way from a programmatic standpoint to detect why someone is making something. I mean,

you wouldn't want to. For instance, even in this case block it blocks satire, and yet that would be doing exactly the same kind of image manipulation with say current event video. Well, Photoshop does have a mechanism to detect whether people are using the program to make fake currency, but Stephen said that trying to do the same thing

for other types of content would be much harder. So Austin seems like just another instance of a technology that comes into the world with one purpose and creates this whole slate of unintended consequences. Right. In this case, the unintended consequence is that we really can't trust what we see online anymore. Yeah, I mean that's a good and bad thing in some aspect. It's good that we're less believing of things that are edited, but bad in the

sense that it negates some societal trust. I just worry that it feels a bit like a losing battle. I mean, we're already at a point where you basically need to be a visual effects artist like Dean to be able to spot what's real and what's not. And with the stuff you just mentioned about AI and deep fakes, it's

only going to get harder from here. The technology kind of feels at odds with human nature a bit that we want to believe things and we won't want to find things that are evidence to what we believe already. Stephen from Adobe mentioned this in our interview, and I think you probably what what is partially at play here

is confirmation bias. There is a natural human tendency to just look for confirming evidence, you know, evidence that that supports your your existing belief and discarding evidence that contradicts that believe So in the end, no matter how many videos you watch, you might not change your mind about basically anything at all, which means that trying to right wrongs and combat fake news is more important than ever.

But it's also just really really hard. That though leaves us with Dean in a spare time doing what it can, does it ever feel kind of fruitless or like you're marching upper River? Yeah? Well it is. It is definitely like um um trying to build out the ocean with it with a bucket. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Do you watch UFO videos on YouTube that you've fallen for a fake? Do you create fakes?

We want to hear from you. You can email us at Decrypted at bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at oust wine A U S g W E, I M, and I'm at Patari. If you're a fan of the show, please take a moment to rate and review us. It really helps new listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Pia Gadkari and Magnus Hendrickson. Our story editor was Ann Vandermay. Thanks also to Brad Stone, aki Eto, Emily Bus, Liz Smith, and Toford for us. Francesco Leavey

is head of Bloomberg Podcast. We'll see you next week.