In the last few days, looking at the whole Isaac / Chad ‘alien alphabet’ mystery has made me think more broadly about cipher mysteries. What I’m trying to do is to work out what the relationship between the different pieces of evidence are – but not just in terms of “A preceded B”.
Inserts
Generally, the practical problem with cipher mysteries is that the relationship between “layers” isn’t just ‘archaeological’, i.e. they aren’t just laid down one on top of the other. Very often we find ourselves looking at annoying evidence where one layer pretends (or, more charitably, ends up appearing) to be out of order. The term I typically use for this is “insert” (but please let me know if there’s a better word or phrase!), to denote something that someone has attempted to insert into the timeline.
In the case of Isaac / Chad, I can’t help but wonder if Isaac saw the strange diagrammatic detailing on the large cropped image released by Ty B and built his entire account out backwards from there, to try to insert his own (fake) account into the pre-drone-sighting timeline?
Remember, Isaac wrote (having disclaimed any connection with the drone observation people):
More importantly though, I’m very familiar with the “language” on their undersides seen clearly in photos by Chad and Rajman, and in another form in the Big Basin photos.
Yet Isaac also wrote:
It’s no surprise that these sightings are all taking place in California, and especially the Saratoga/South Bay area. Not far from Saratoga is Mountain View/Sunnyvale, home to Moffett Field and the NASA Ames Research center.
As far as I know, Saratoga was only properly identified as the location for some of the photos a long time after Isaac wrote this, so this section does conversely suggest that there was cooperation / coordination. It’s hard to read how these things all fit together.
Missing evidence, Google problems?
The presence of the higher-resolution dragonfly drone image in the Project Avalon set suggests to me that I’m in fact dealing with scaled-down versions of larger images, but where the EXIF data has been preserved across the scaling-down. And so I’m now hungry to find even earlier (and larger, and unscaled-down) versions of all these images.
However, I have to flag that I’m a bit concerned about Google. In the past, I’d be really confident that Google Images would find a whole load of images: but now it feels as though this whole part of Google’s search engine has been gamed by Pinterest and others (Japanese blogs seem to be good at this, oddly). Basically, I’m not even getting 10% of the results I used to get, and the quality of the results I do get has dropped right down too.
I’ve had similar experiences with Google’s main text search recently, where queries that I have previously used to find things now don’t work at all. Whereas I used to save query strings in my notes to help me find groups of related things, that strategy seems to be working less and less well over time. More generally, I’m finding it harder and harder to find things online, and for the kind of research I do, that feels like it is growing into a huge problem.
People may post endlessly about the death-spiral that Elmo’s Twitter has apparently entered, but I can’t help but wonder whether Google too is now entering some kind of mysterious end-of-life phase? Perhaps you’ve noticed this too.
What I’ve noticed is that Google has somehow picked up that I’ve done a lot of National Library of Australia Trove searches in the past twelve months. I Googled my mum’s accountant to get his office phone number and at the top of the search suggestions was a 1950s Argus article featuring him as an eight year old, lighting an Empire Day bonfire!! It was actually a very entertaining article! The police complained of headaches from the fireworks and put out a warning that someone was wandering around snipping young girls hair! People who won cake tins at a tombola stand began to wear them as hats when the rain began! Who knows what will turn up when I Google “Australian Taxation Office”!
@nickpelling: Random thoughts–
1. The inconsistencies you note above are exactly what police interrogators are trained to look for.
2. Something missing the drone photo descriptions. Chad, Deborah, Raj, and Stephen all report lots of extraneous information (Raj’s says his fiancé’s dad is a mechanical engineer)– but all are remarkably incurious about the size and elevation of the drone. Stephen sounds like a photo student (‘my assignment’), but omits any exposure information from his post. From this we guess that Issac is a detail oriented person who often misses the big picture.
3. Your investigation shows the drone photos were manipulated, but the data don’t indicate how. Almost certainly, Issac created the drones in a 3d modeling program, output them as raster files, and uploaded these into Photoshop, where he composited them with the background photos. We know this in part because the models share components. This indicates that Issac et. al. is probably a single individual, though he may have received help from others.
Note: the MUFON report indicates that Linda Moulton Howe scanned Ty’s photos, not Raj’s.
4. Taken as a whole, the drone photos show a progression. Earlier photos are low res, the lighting is unrealistic, and the drone is simple. The later photos show considerable improvement, suggesting Issac was learning as the hoax progressed.
It appears as if Issac was learning about metadata. The Chad metadata is entirely damning. The Stephen photos show an Adobe XAP block, but include (possibly hacked) camera data. The Ty photos were mailed as prints. They appear as if Issac decided that posting files was too dangerous, and decided to mail prints instead. Again, we suspect Issac was learning as he went along.
5. We glanced over the Drone Research Team forum briefly, and found something off. [Topic: Some (maybe new !) ideas about Isaac photos. https://web.archive.org/web/20220813121746/https://droneteam.com/drt/index.php?topic=222.0 ]
Gfamad initiates the discussion, and presents himself as a skeptic: ‘But I’m gonna raise some strange points about some photo, and I hope you will find the way to destroy my doubt.’
Then he raises a several points, finishing with one we noted in a comment a couple posts ago: ‘…in fifth photo of Chad (scannedimage-4.jpg), is it logic that the UFO is sharp and the tree is…well less sharper ?’
To this, Tomi replies: ‘The trees being less in focus could be a solid reason for the camera to have been set on autofocus. Please see this link: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-autofocus.htm’
And HPO (a forum administrator chimes in): ‘on lots of camera’s you can set the autofocus on “spot metering” mode, this way only the center of the picture gets in focus… the camera may have been an older analog SLR model with no autofocus option and the photographer had to adjust the focus manually through the viewfinder; it’s an scanned image after all.’
The problem is that both replies are red herrings. If you set the focus on the lens to ‘infinity’, typically everything farther than 10m will be in focus. Lens elements behave the same way whether the focus is set manually or automatically. They don’t behave the way you see in Chad’s photo, and scanning a photo will not affect this in any way.
Gfamad, Tomi, and HPO may all be entirely naïve, but the exchange sounds contrived– down to Gfamad’s post starting with objections that are easily explained away. The whole thing sounds like my dogs explaining why that chicken is missing: ‘On vacation. Expect a postcard any day now.’
While we haven’t seen enough to accuse Gfamad, Tomi, and HPO, it is entirely possible that Issac may have posted on the Drone Research Team forum. And as we can be sure that Issac uses multiple identities, he may have used tactics such as we see above. If he has posted under the same aliases on other UFO sites, he may well have given himself away.
6. At this point you may well suspect your humble servant as this very same Issac. We protest that this is entirely untrue. Throughout the aggregate of his posts, Issac has betrayed absolutely no sense of humor. Gentle reader, we assure you that every hoax perpetrated by us has been farcical in the extreme. This one is beneath us entirely.
Nick,
I agree that it’s becoming harder and harder to find useful information and images. Not too long ago, I could find quite a lot of out-of-the-way images in other blogs, and blog-writers were very kind about granting permission but even finding a blog is now very difficult, especially if the writer uses Blogger. I really wish there were filters, like ‘no pinterest’ images or ‘no stock photo companies’.
Quite often I have no option but to go back to an old post of my own and copy some illustrations from it.
LeifFraNorden: given that I own a Canon Eos Rebel XT and visited NASA Ames (I even have a shirt from the gift shop) in the early 2000s, I’m surely more of a suspect than you. 😁
I’d suspect the Drone Research Team members more if they didn’t all seem so determined to go round in circles (for the greatest part).
It feels like I’m not quite looking at the earliest layer of images here. Even the Coast to Coast AM page has JavaScript pop-ups for images that never landed in any webcrawl cache – but someone must have copies of them? etc
Diane,
You can exclude results from a specific site with the ‘-‘ operator, e.g.
voynich -pinterest.com
Googling
google search tips
will turn up a bunch of other things to become a power user.
Nick,
My sense is Google (and net search in general) went through a number of phases:
1) The early days — people used to doing Boolean searches in legacy databases like ProQuest or Lexis/Nexis had a definite leg up in getting the best results.
2) The “We’re from , and we’re here to ‘help’ you” phase — search engines started to try to figure out what you were looking for independently of how well you crafted your query, which definitely helps naive users but waters down the signal-to-noise ratio of the results.
3) The Sturgeon’s law phase — unfortunately, 90% of everything is c***, and if you index c***, then c*** is bound to show up in search results. This is tied into the bigger problem that page ranking algorithms are inherently poor at judging quality in a universe of content poisoned by large quantities of mutually interlinking low quality content. “Lots of other pages link to ” ceases to be a meaningful indicator of value or utility.
Karl
Karl – I’ve tried that. My search engine seems to ignore it completely. I say -pininterest and after maybe one or two, the pininterest turn up anyway.
Kind of you to reply, though.
Diane,
My fault for assuming you were using Google. Not sure what else you use, but If you’re using Bing, the syntax to use is:
“When looking for pages containing the term Wikipedia but not Wikipedia.org
wikipedia -site: wikipedia.org”
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/forum/all/how-can-i-exclude-a-domain-from-a-search/b4b7dc4b-6c90-490f-a847-30b416318658
I was reading this a little while ago and thought it may be of interest to those on this post:
Unidentified Floating Object: Edo Images of Utsuro-bune
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/utsuro-bune/