The
UNEXPLAINED

Mysteries of Mind Space and Time

Computer processing of photographs of UFOS creates striking and bizarre images, while revealing subtleties that are difficult to discern in the originals. WILLIAM H. SPAULDING, director of Ground Saucer Watch, explains this new research technique

Top: a swirl of vivid hues is a 'computer eye view' of a glowing disc seen over Colorado. USA (inset). The colours represent different brightness levels in the original image and forcefully portray detailed structure in the UFO and surrounding sky. The lines on the coloured image are 'drawn' by the computer as it makes measurements on the picture.

MOST PHOTOGRAPHS of unidentified flying objects are disappointing. They are blurred, lacking in detail and uninformative at a casual glance. Often they lack the context of landscape or everyday objects that would enable one to judge the size and distance of the UFOs. The few that are sharp and clear usually turn out to be fakes.

It is the task of the ufo photo analyst to sift through this mass of low-grade material, weed out the frauds and the misidentified aircraft, birds and astronomical objects, and call attention to the small residue of photographs that resist all attempts at being explained away.

Traditionally, ufo photo analysts have been limited to a few techniques of study. By measuring shadows they may be able to show that the picture consists of a landscape shot combined with a picture of a model taken under totally different lighting conditions. By studying the focus on the UFO they may be able to show that it is much closer to the camera than the witness claimed, and is therefore much smaller than it appears. By enlarging details they may be able to reveal the presence of a tell-tale 'Frisbee' trade mark. More frequently they can identify the shot as showing some natural object - even that sceptics' favourite, the planet Venus, seen under unusual atmospheric conditions.

But all too often the label 'unidentified' has remained on the photograph because there was apparently too little information to resolve the question 'What is this mysterious object in the sky?' Yet even in the fuzziest photograph there are many subtle clues hidden away. Now a powerful new tool, the computer, promises to disclose them.

One UFO investigation group, Ground Saucer Watch, has applied the computer to the analysis of UFO photographs on a large scale. Ground Saucer Watch was founded in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, in 1957 in order to bring a high level of technical expertise to the study of UFO reports. The group wanted, in the words of a statement made then, to 'see positive scientific action taken to end the elements of foul-up and cover-up in UFO research'. A network of 500 scientific and engineering consultants assists it in this task.

Now the computer is available as an aid. It enabled Ground Saucer Watch, in a study of 1000 photographs that had prima facie plausibility, to reject all but 45 as misidentifications or hoaxes. Here are some of the techniques that are used to sift such quantities of material.

The pictures were analysed with a Computer Eye, manufactured by Spatial Data Systems, Inc. It uses a television-type camera that scans a picture and breaks it down into nearly a quarter of a million tiny 'pixels' (picture cells), in an array consisting of 512 columns and 480 rows.

Although the colours of the photographs provide important information, they do not come into our computer analyses. The scanner 'sees' only a black and white picture. The scanner measures the brightness of each pixel and assigns it a rating on a 'grey scale' from 0 (completely dark) to 31 (bright white). So the whole picture is reduced to a quarter of a million numbers, which are stored in the computer's memory. They can be recalled and used to build up a black and white image, a direct copy of the original, on a television screen linked to the computer. But they can also be manipulated in countless different ways to generate new images, which reveal unsuspected information in the original picture, or display it in unfamiliar and striking ways.

At the touch of a button the computer operator can do most of the things that the photo technician can do only at the cost of several hours' work in his laboratory.
The computer can instantly enlarge any selected detail of the picture to full-screen size. There are limits to the degree to which this can usefully be done. The picture becomes coarser as the mosaic of pixels becomes more evident. This begins to happen when the picture has been enlarged by about four times, in height and breadth.
The computer can 'stretch' the contrast, brightening the light areas and darkening the shadows, so emphasising the detail in a murky original. (This is what you do to your television picture when you turn up the contrast control.)

Above: an x-ray photograph of a flower. Lighter areas represent thicker tissues, which absorb x-rays more strongly than the thinner areas. Careful study is needed to see the details
Below: a computer- processed version of the picture above, in which edges separating light and dark areas have been enhanced. Some UFO pictures can be similarly clarified

Like an artist with a taste for poster paints, the computer has transformed the x-ray flower picture on the opposite page into a bold pattern of colours. All the detail below is present in the original picture, but is now presented in a form that is more easily 'read' by the human eye and brain

Enhancing the image
Measurements of distances and angles on the image become extremely easy. Crossed lines can be superimposed on the picture and moved at will, to identify points of interest. The computer can measure the positions of those points and instantly calculate distances and angles.

All this makes life easier for photo analysts, and enables them to plough through much more material than before. But the computer can also easily accomplish a number of feats that are impracticable, or even impossible, for the photo technician to perform. For example, the computer can enhance the edges of the features seen in a photo. The effect of edge enhancement is illustrated here with a picture that is a little more conventional than a UFO photo. The x-ray picture of a flower is in black and white. Each shade of grey carries information about the flower - its thickness, and hence ability to absorb x- rays, at that point. In this negative image, the brighter areas correspond to thicker areas of plant tissue. There is a great deal of delicate structure to be seen in the petals and the central pistil.

But the eye's ability to distinguish shades of grey is limited. The result obtained when the edges are enhanced is also shown opposite. Areas of uniform shade in the original are represented as a medium grey in the computer-processed picture. Wherever the original increases in lightness (from left to right) the computer draws a bright line, while where there is a transition from light to dark it draws a dark line. The result is arresting. The flower's structure, which was lost in the subtle, veil-like x-ray image, is now laid bare in a tracery of metallic clarity.

Edge enhancement has little relevance to the indistinct forms visible in many UFO pictures. However, it is revealing when applied to UFO imagcs showing faint detail; these are generally dark objects seen against the daytime sky (see page 674). But another technique, colour coding, can extract information from the brightness pattern in the original pictures. It exploits the fact that the eye can distinguish colours far more readily than it can distinguish shades of grey.

To colour-code a picture, the computer is linked to a colour television set. Each pixel is assigned a colour according to its brightness. Thus, in the x-ray picture of the flower, the darkest areas are shown as black. The darkest shades of grey (the thinnest parts of the flower) are rendered as shades of violet and red. Increasingly light areas are shown as shades of yellow, green and blue. The lightest areas (the thickest parts of the plant) are rendered as white.

The result is a gaudier flower than nature has ever created, with all the details of structure leaping out at the eye. Radiographers use this type of colour coding on x- ray pictures to improve their view of the interior of the human body.

Astronomers and space engineers apply the same techniques to the photos they take with ground-based telescopes, and to the television images sent back from space satellites and probes. In the original picture, brightness levels may represent the actual brightness of a planet's surface, or the temperature of a gas cloud in space, or the intensity of radio waves from distant galaxies. The patterns in the computer-generated image will represent this information in terms of colour. So, though there is a superficial resemblance in these different types of picture, the information they give is totally diffcrent in nature.

Top: a tantalising glimpse of a UFO. An American motorist, Norman Vedaa, saw a brilliant disc and stopped his car to photograph it. It is visible near the top centre. The second picture (inset) was taken within a few seconds, and was the original of the processed UFO images elsewhere in this article. The disc flew off at high speed
Below: measurements of image brightness made by the computer. The measurements are made along the left-hand line. The fluctuating line at the right shows the brightness; it curves to the right where the photograph is brightest. The curve helped to prove the disc was not a lens flare, weather balloon or aircraft

An ambiguous message
What does the procedure reveal specifically about UFOS? The brightness pattern of light and dark in the photo image of a UFO is a complex and ambiguous 'message', involving the shape of the object, the amount of light it may be emitting at each point, its intrinsic lightness or darkness if it is being seen by reflected light, the effects of glare and atmospheric haze, and so on. Emphasising the pattern by the colour-coding technique often reveals the true form of the object immediately. A broken, uneven density may indicate a cloud. A cylindrical shape with protruberances may appear, indicating an aircraft body and wings partly hidden by glare. The contours of a 'daylight disc' (meaning any daytime UFO) are revealed, and often turn out to be suspiciously like those of a camera lens cap, a pie plate, or a hub cap.

Ground Saucer Watch has employed these techniques on thousands of photographs. Take as an example the two famous 'Colorado pictures' overleaf. They ,how a single UFO sighted and photographed at precisely 6.20 a.m. local time on 28 August 1969 by Mr Norman Vedaa and his passenger while driving north-east on State Route 808, approximately 70 miles (110 kilometres) east of Denver, Colorado. Mr Vedaa described the object as yellow-gold, tremendously brilliant, oval in shape, and soundless. He said: 'The object was bright, hard to look at and appeared to hover momentarily. The object's glow . . . was producing a reflective light on the clouds below. ..' Two colour transparencies were taken and do indeed show a bright yellowish glow with well-defined edges, back-lighting the clouds.

The colour-coding technique was used on the Colorado photographs, and the result is reproduced on page 641. Again, lighter parts of the original are represented by white, blue and yellow, while darker parts are represented by red, violet and black.

The light vertical lines in that picture and in the one below are just a different way of showing brightness information. The computer has taken a 'slice' down the picture along the left-hand line. At the right, it has plotted a graph of the brightness of the scene along that line, shown by the fluctuating line. Thus the 'bump' in the wavy line represents the bright centre of the object.

The computer also speeds up the detailed study of light and shadow at any selected region of the picture. Ground Saucer Watch has a 'library' of data on the proportion of light that is reflected by each of a large range of materials. In some photographs of UFOS seen by reflected daylight, everyday objects, such as trees or houses, are visible, with which the UFO image can be compared. This may enable the analyst to make a tentative judgement about the composition of the UFO.

We can compare the contrast in the light and shadowed areas of the UFO image and in landscape features: if there is a serious discrepancy, a composite picture or a model close to the camera is indicated. Essentially the same method can be used to estimate the degree to which atmospheric haze veils the UFO image. The more distant the object is, the lighter and less contrasty it will appear because of light scattered by air molecules, dust and water vapour. This often allows us to make an estimate of the distance of the UFO from the witness.

Careful measurements on the sharpness of various features in the picture are also a valuable indicator of distance. In fact, the annoying fuzziness of most UFO pictures - which are no worse than most holiday snaps in this respect - can be turned to advantage.

Sometimes the image of a UFO in the sky is beautifully sharp. while all ground features more than 50 feet (15 metres) away are slightly out of focus. This shows that the object is close to the camera - and so must either be a fake or be piloted by very little green men. Making comparisons of focus is a traditional part of UFO photo analysis, now greatly facilitated by the computer.

Left: a colour-zoned image of a giant star system reveals the detail latent in a black and white picture (left), itself the computerised average of five photographs. The galaxy, a mass of billions of stars and vast quantities of gas and dust swirling in a spiral, is 40 million light years from us. The coloured image shows its spiral arms extending as far as its companion elliptical galaxy at lower right. Further image processing revealed extraordinary ray-like structures surrounding the spiral galaxy. Astronomers realise the value of the computer in extracting information from their photographs. Scientific UFO study may benefit equally

In its study of the Vedaa pictures, Ground Saucer Watch was able to rule out more and more explanations that seek to reduce the sightings to causes that are well-known and understood. This was no weather balloon, flock of birds or daylight meteor - the brightness distribution was that of a disc. It was not an aircraft hidden in the glare of reflected sunlight - it was too bright for that, and not a trace of tail or wings could be found. Lens flares, reflections from clouds, mirages and other atmospheric effects are all ruled out: the Sun is in the wrong position for them. The object was three-dimensional in form, and it was certainly a long way from the camera.

Objective research will progress with the aid of modern technology, of which the computer is an important component. In the near future photo analysis will be carried out by more sophisticated computer programming, in conjunction with more powerful 'hardware' - faster computers with bigger memory capacity, working with scanners that can break the original image down into yet finer detail. Soon it will become virtually impossible to fake a UFO photograph. Then, perhaps the UFO mystery will be solved.

On page 674: what the computer has found in 'the best UFO photographs ever taken'

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Reproduced from THE UNEXPLAINED p641