by John Shirley ParaScope Correspondent I've been haunted for more than a year. Haunted by a video. I wanted unassailable evidence for the existence of flying saucers. I thought videotaped or other photographic evidence, once the obvious fakes like Adamski and Meier were weeded out, might constitute something approaching solid evidence. And then I heard about Genesis III's Masters of the Stars. So I bought the thing at a MUFON meeting and screened it, and... was haunted. The video seemed to present startling taped evidence that flying saucers -- not just "UFOs," a term which contains too much ambiguity -- are real. I'd seen a fair amount of video footage, but this was the most convincing I'd ever seen. I work in movies and television, I know about special effects and how things can be faked, and while this showed none of the special effects earmarks I was familiar with, I'm not familiar with them all -- and the film, though tantalizing, was not 100 percent convincing. Dubious Source Adding to my uncertainty was the fact that the video was made by Lee Elders, who marketed saucer footage emanating from Billy "Hubcaps" Meier, an obviously fraudulent "contactee." This ought to wreck the video's credibility -- but it was possible that, being in the UFO business (God help us, it has most definitely become a business, more than an investigation) and always on the lookout for the best opportunity, Elders had stumbled across some of the Real Deal. Too, the footage was obtained, apparently, from multiple sources, coming from the broadly-reported flap in Mexico, summer of 1992, when, according to Mexican television and newspapers, hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens saw OVNIs, as they call them south of the border. The Masters of the Stars documentary is attributed to Lee Elders and Jaime Maussan, the latter referred to as the star of "the Mexican 60 Minutes." They do a great job of teasing our sense of wonder and of tying the various sightings into one over-arching event, which they then weave into a Mayan legend. Replete with Mayan imagery and suggestive montaging, this segment of Masters of the Stars informs us that ancient Mayan priests predicted that on July 11, 1992, a new sun would arrive, the "tiger sun" of Quetzalcoatl, which will herald the return of "the Masters of the Stars." And that's the summer that, indeed, a full solar eclipse -- allegedly the "tiger sun" of the prophecy -- cast its shadow down Mexico's central corridor. Anticipating the eclipse, a lot of people in Mexico were watching the skies. Video Boom Hence, a lot of people, before, during and after the eclipse, shot home video and, as Elders has it, recorded the arrival of the Masters of the Stars: the UFOs that, the film's narrator suggests, showed themselves strategically and deliberately, for some arcane purpose. Perhaps to fulfill a prophecy. Some of the UFO images in the documentary are ambiguous or flat-out unimpressive; right from the start some of them might well have been airplane lights or mylar balloons. A few others -- as a MUFON observer noticed, seeing a small part of the footage from other sources -- were probably, indeed, the planet Venus. One of the earliest sequences shows UFO investigators at a mountainside base camp much excited about strange lights in the sky, but their video of the lights is easy to shrug off as inconclusive. They could be helicopter lights, among other things. But there was a great deal more on the film, and several relatively clear shots showed a metallic, "hockey puck-shaped" object, and objects, moving in unnatural ways, darting behind clouds and coming back out, hovering; sometimes colored glows shimmered from their undersides. You could see the outline of the objects clearly enough to be quite sure they were not airplanes, or helicopters or balloons. In one sequence, two of them vanish, seeming to dematerialize before the eyes -- as some flying saucers have been said to do. And these objects were what haunted me. They were, I felt, one of two things: either clever hoaxes, perhaps digitized, or else they were flying saucers. They were the most convincing footage of flying saucers I'd ever seen. Professional Assessment Well, I wanted to believe. But I don't want to believe in a lie. So I bided my time 'til I could find someone qualified to scrutinize the film professionally, and I found him in late February, 1997: Scott Billups, one of the top digital special-effects men in Hollywood. Having worked on hundreds of commercials and big money movies like Jurassic Park and The Fifth Element, and more modest but intriguing projects like Roswell, Billups has got the inside track. When I visited his personal digital lab in the basement of his painfully-enviable Pacific Palisades home, he showed me a digital Marilyn Monroe he'd made -- Marilyn talking, slinking, pouting -- that was almost indistinguishable from video of the real lady. The guy knows his stuff. Scott Billups also has a long-standing interest in UFOs, going back decades. While in grad school, he was a believer -- in almost everything. He designed what he calls "the Cadillac of lie detectors" and took it around the country, testing psychics, UFO contactees, channelers, and gurus. Most of them turned out to be lying. No surprise there, looking back from 1997, but at the time Scott was a bit disillusioned. He went on to investigate UFO footage and learned every trick in the hoaxer's lexicon. Shotgun Ruse Billups had once investigated intriguing footage of a flying saucer soaring, coming down, then suddenly reversing direction -- apparently in defiance of known physical laws. Something about its motion during the change of trajectory made him suspicious; he examined the ground where it was filmed and found shotgun pellets. He confronted the filmmakers and they admitted they'd thrown a metal model of a saucer and then a man out of frame had hit it from below with a shotgun blast, making it miraculously seem to defy inertia. Since then, he's many times been asked to verify the authenticity of UFO footage and has done software design work on various classified projects involving some aircraft that, he says, "would startle you if you saw them..." But he won't say anymore than that about them. I asked Scott to watch Masters of the Stars with me in his digital lab. And he was intrigued by what he saw, but... well, I'll come to that. Split-Second Timing We were working with the handicap of having only the commercial video, rather than the original. But Scott was able to route it through his equipment and work with the images a split second at a time. The first thing one does, when looking at a purported saucer video, is to "image stabilize;" you motion-lock on one place, one reference point in the foreground or background, re-cropping so you can see the object in a short, defined frame. Then you line up the sequence of frames and look at them one by one. This particular technique is especially important these days in separating the fakes from the real. Many new cameras have no depth of field, resulting in a situation where, Billups told me, "no one can tell that the relative velocity is not relative to anything, really." So with this kind of video camera, you can't normally tell a thrown pie plate from an object fifty feet across. But with the image stabilizing software he was using, Billups was able to pick out telltales like "bounce" in the object -- the sort of bounce that comes from wire or springs or "your classic bamboo pole with thread." Hasty Endings Billups found the suspicious "bounce" in some of the UFO images in Masters of the Stars, but not in others. But often, as he pointed out, in the bounceless images we aren't given more than one "cycle" to look at -- the shot of the saucer doesn't last long enough for the telltale bounces to show up. In fact, that's the way it is in most of the more clear-cut metallic saucer images in the film: the shot ends with a suspicious haste. Scott's initial opinion was that many of the startling, closer objects could be suspended models, and the glow from the bottom could easily be reflected light from projection. One Good Zoom One of the most impressive sequences in Masters shows a UFO moving in a way that is anomalous for earthly craft -- and the camera zooms in on it, twice. Scott is impressed by the presence of "zoom" in this one. "If you see the camera zooming in," he tells me, "that puts the image at the top of the list." "As being more likely authentic?" I asked. "Yeah. If someone is looking through a lens at a flying saucer and they're not zooming in, you have to ask why. It's because if you zoom in, your depth of focus is greatly diminished, so the object must be big and distant to register. And if you zoom on something close to you, the background will seem to move in faster than the object..." And it then becomes obvious you're looking at a suspended model. "But this one is impressive -- that's a double zoom right there. Of the stuff I've seen so far, this is the only one that warrants a closer look." I was becoming excited. Were we near to confirming that this was real flying saucer footage? How to Fake a Zoom But Scott suggests a commonplace way to fake a zoom. The footage is projected onto a screen or a white wall, then another video is shot, zooming in on the image on the wall. When we see it, we think we're seeing a zoom made in the original. If you can get the original footage, you can magnify and use a "color wedge," like a spectrograph, to look at the background signature, for example the clearly identifiable signature of a movie screen's texture. Spectrum analysis may also show paint on the wall the image was projected on. Find that wall or screen signature, and you know the film has been tampered with. We didn't have the original footage -- but there was something else we could look for, and we were about to have a chance. Now came an initially convincing sequence in which a video graphics expert uses his equipment -- something called Nearest Neighbor, Billups tells me -- to do video magnification of some of the saucers. But suspiciously, this expert is never named and it's not clear that the objects magnified are in fact the objects in the before-magnification motion sequence. The object, before magnification -- not quite near enough or clearly defined enough to be called a "flying saucer" -- is seen moving along horizontally between two clouds. It vanishes behind a cloud then comes back out the way it went in, defying inertia; stops, goes back behind the cloud, comes back out -- and vanishes again. I asked Billups to look for any sign that the film had been stopped, reversed, started again to create the impression that the object was defying inertia, using projection and rewind. Manipulated Reversal He slows the sequence down, magnifies, runs it back, and forth, back and forth again and again -- then he laughs. "There it is -- see that de-focusing at that point? It's what you see if you'd done a rewind jog... you look for the anomaly of the frame changing focus as the object changes direction." Billups reproduces the sequence in a $50,000 piece of video equipment he has on hand, and the change of focus and rewind artifact becomes even more obvious. The image is of an airplane which had flown from one cloud to another. Someone had projected the image on a screen or wall, then filmed the projected image moving forward, then rewound to make it move backward, then forward again. But there were other objects in a related sequence that seemed to be eerily dematerializing. Scott chuckled and made a UFO image appear on his own digital equipment, then made it vanish for me, bit by bit. It looked exactly the same as what I saw on the Masters video -- and he had done it digitally. No Reference Points The close-ups of the objects in the sequence could be computer artifacts, or models; without a reference point, it's impossible to tell. The videographers had done nothing to convince us they were anything else. We find other "UFOs" in the film that are almost certainly earthly aircraft. A "UFO" from February 24, 1992, is just a plane flying at night. Later, the videographers use a split-screen to show a real weather balloon side by side with a tumbling aerial object, which they attempt to contrast with the balloon. Well, "sayin' don't make it so;" both objects look to me like balloons. Another object, we're told, is moving to avoid a plane -- but it's not at all clear that's what it's actually doing. And anyway, a helicopter would move to avoid a plane. I point out to Billups that one worrisome aspect of the documentary is that many of the sequences show UFOs for some time, a minute or two, but never show them departing. Is this because they were actually balloons? UFO "Conga Line" The "documentary" ends with one of the strangest UFO sequences I've ever seen: what appears to be a long line of the objects in a translucent tube. After awhile we see this aerial stack of objects break up their conga line like dancers spreading out to into a dance floor, where they bob for a while -- but we are never shown their departure. The narrator tells us they aren't moving like balloons, but to me, and Billups, they were moving exactly like balloons. The documentary then shows what we're told is a close-up of one of these objects -- which is a revolving, puck-shaped metallic flying vehicle. But we're only told this is a magnification of the objects from the aerial stack -- we have no way to know if it was that, or one of the other video artifacts in the film edited into this sequence. Chopper as UFO? In what may well be another fancy bit of editing, we see a formation of Mexican fighter jets flying over a parade. And we see an object below them which we're told is a UFO -- but it's distant, hard to see, and its motion is not particularly unearthly: it could easily be a distant news-cast helicopter, and a chopper is what it looks like to Billups. We're shown several planes which, the narrator says, have broken from formation to pursue the UFO, then we're shown the UFO vanishing into the clouds. The cuts seem to suggest that a UFO appeared, fighter planes pursued it, and it escaped them. And if that's what it shows, it's one of the most impressive, convincing UFO sequences ever to surface. But what we have, in the final analysis, is a series of cuts, as in a cheap action film, from one object to another -- there's no continuum, no smooth sequence. Just suspiciously clever editing. Scott was interested in a sequence showing an anomalous object looping and bobbing around (or behind?) a distant radio transmission antenna. Scott identifies a full cycle, ideal for image stabilization. He finds no "bounce," nor any other telltales -- but the trouble is, this object from this vantage point could be a mylar balloon or stunt kite. We can't tell how big it is or how close it is to the antenna. I remembered a supposed "UFO" allegedly filmed at Area 51 that was an obvious stunt kite. But this one went too high for that. Mylar balloons, Billups says, are a cause of many UFO reports, and they may flutter around power poles and lines and transmission towers due to static electricity or electromagnetic effects. The more I watch it, the more balloonlike it seems. Tale of a Video It seemed to me quite possible at the end of our analysis that events had happened something like this: Anticipating the eclipse, many Mexicans had videocams handy to view the sky that summer. Someone photographed a UFO (unfortunately something inconclusive), about this time, and, due to the publicity, eclipse watchers were also looking for UFOs; in this context, everything they couldn't identify in the sky, including mylar balloons and distance-blurred aircraft and lights at night, seemed like UFOs to them -- so they filmed them. Lee Elders likely obtained a lot of this footage from Jaime Maussan, and they struck a deal to make this probably-profitable video documentary. It's quite possible that to make the video sexier, Elders, or someone associated with him, projected ambiguous images on a screen or wall and tampered with them through re-photographing, rewinding and etc., then edited them provocatively with striking (but inconclusive) close-up images that are probably of computer graphics artifacts or models. Since there are no reference points on the close-ups, they could be anything. The Masters of the Stars angle was a perfect selling point, and they edited the whole thing together into one clever and haunting but inexpensive "documentary." When Billups was interviewing UFO folks years ago, and giving them lie detector tests, he tested Lee Elders. "I did it only out of politeness," he said, "since Brit and Lee seemed to me like obvious charlatans." "And what did they seem like after you tested them?" "Pure snake oil." I'm disappointed. But at least I'm no longer haunted. Not by Masters of the Stars. But there are other mysterious videos out there, and mysterious objects in the sky... there are always others. © Copyright John Shirley Nebula: UFOs & Extraterrestrials Nebula message board: Share your views