Jerusalem UFO Video - Digital Processing Effects Prove the Hoax

My Blog post of Feb. 3 contains my initial comments upon seeing the sequence of videos of 'balls of light' allegedly photographed over the Dome of the Rock, atop Jerusalem's Temple Mount. At that time, a hoax was strongly suspected, but not demonstrated, except in the case of the "Mississippi" close-up video, which uses a well-known photo as a background.. "Why bother?", the philosopher might ask. "The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. Unless it can be shown that there is practically no way such a video can be faked,  it doesn't prove anything, and so it doesn't need to be debunked." True enough, but when dealing with the public, it helps to be able to go from "this video proves nothing" to "this video is shown to be a hoax."



We can now state with great confidence that the original video, seen above and posted to YouTube on January 28 by user "eligael," is a hoax. When examined by expert eyes, those who are familiar with video editing software (unfortunately, not me), point out the effects of the digital processing software, proof that the video clip has been through a program to modify it from its original state. Using such a program, the knowledgeable user can insert more or less anything into the video, and make it look at least somewhat convincing.



The proof is fairly easily seen the the video above,posted to YouTube by user HOAXKiller1 on Feb. 5. This user had posted several earlier videos attempting to make this point, but they were not so useful in showing exactly what the problem was. I refer to one of them in my earlier post. But with this video, I think that HOAXKiller has succeeded, showing quite clearly the effects from the editing.

The hoaxer has used something called "Motion Tile" effects in the processing of this video. An artificial camera shake is introduced, to make it look like the video was taken using a hand-held camera. But what do you show, say at the extreme left edge, when the camera moves to the left? You don't have anything at all to the left of the left edge of the picture (although you would if the camera were really shaking). I'm reminded of a time when I was singing in a choral rehearsal of Puccini's Tosca in a small opera house. In the Second Act, the chorus is offstage singing a religious hymn, when Scarpia suddenly slams the window, cutting off the sound. One bass had a problem: "What do we do if he's late closing the window?" (A reasonable concern in live theater, perhaps). The director smiled and said, "Then you keep singing." The joke is, of course, that the choral part ends at that point, so even if Scarpia doesn't close the window, you still have nothing to sing.

You might solve the problem of "nothing to show" by filling in with blank space, but that would not look realistic. So a "mirroring" effect is generally used. You create data beyond the edge of the frame by mirroring data at the edge of the frame, along all four sides. Watch HOAXKiller1's video above, and you will see this happening. First, we are clearly shown where the mirroring occurs, in the first minute of the video. Next, we see an excerpt from an instructional video for using a video editing program. It is a tutorial involved with adding or removing camera shake.  It explains how to use "motion tiles," with "mirrored edges." This same process was used during the creation of the original Jerusalem UFO video.

This proves that the video did not go directly from the camera to YouTube, but made a stop in between inside a sophisticated video editing software suite. Which is obviously where it picked up its image of the "UFO."