When I was about 5-years-old, my dad made me a model Flying Saucer out of balsa wood, an old plastic breakfast-cereal bowl, silver paint, and plastic bottle lids (the latter for the "landing gear"). He then hung the Venusian scout-craft on our clothes-line and snapped the picture.
You can just see a bit of the clothes-line top right.
The picture remained in a cupboard at my dad's house for years, until he brought it over to me a couple of years ago on one of his visits to see us. I think it looks pretty good, and no sign of the wire (or whatever it was) holding it up!
There's a lesson here about UFO photos . . .
ReplyDeletepurrlgurrl:
ReplyDeleteYeah there is.
I think the important thing in this case of my dad, of course, is that this was not an exercise in hoaxing or fakery.
Rather, instead, my dad made the saucer for his young son, and we thought it would be fun to see how it looked on a photo. Nothing was ever done with the photo after. No-one ever claimed it be anything than what it was - a small model. And the photo just ended up in a drawer. As for the model, I have no idea what happened to it - lost, broken, thrown out, probably.
So, that's the important thing: making a model UFO and photographing it is not an issue if everyone knows what it is - a father doing something fun for his son. But it certainly does become an issue if someone knowingly uses that same photo as part of a deliberate deception.
Question: did your dad make this UFO model before or after he had his own UFO incident you mentioned some time ago at UFO Mystic?
ReplyDeleteNever meant to imply an intentional hoax, merely how easy and low-tech it can be to create a believable photo, even if only in fun.
ReplyDeletepurrl:
ReplyDeleteYeah, I realized you weren't implying that. My comment was really to demonstrate that people might make UFO photos for all sorts of reasons, that go beyond just deliberate hoaxing.
RPJ:
ReplyDeleteYeah, long after. My dad did his National Service (as it was called in the UK - or the Draft over here) from 1950 to 1953 and worked on radar.
His UFO encounter was in September 1952 during a NATO exercise called Mainbrace, when he was stationed at a Royal Air Force base on the East of England called Neatishead.
For several days weird targets were picked up on the scopes. Since then a significant number of other people have come forward with their own reports of UFO events during Mainbrace, such as this one (see the Comments section for more from me clarifying the nature of the story):
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/03/witness-to-the-weird/
As often happens when people have a UFO experience, they develop an interest in the subject, and that's what happened with my dad.
He bought (in the 50s) various books of the time like Keyhoe etc, and I know he has a few later books such as Blumrich's Spaceships of Ezekiel (I think that's what it's called), and maybe 4 or 5 others.
The model saucer was made for me when I was about 5, which would have put it at around 1969/1970.