Universe Today
We've yet to see an authentic and convincing UFO video, and this one takes the cake. It is
completely
fake. Not one thing in it is real. Seriously. If you haven't yet seen or heard about the "UFO Over Santa Clarita" video (above), it appears to be footage taken from a handheld camera, shakily taking shots from within a moving car. Then a spaceship darts across the sky, and the gasping filmmaker stops the car, only see a huge hovering mothership grab the first ship and disappear.
The filmmaker, Aristomenis "Meni" Tsirbas,
revealed to Wired
that, as many suspected, the video was fake. But impressively, absolutely
everything
in the film, from the car's interior to the sky to the UFOs, is not real. It is all CGI (Computer Generated Imagery).
"The video is 100 percent CGI through and through,"
Tsirbas told Wired.
"The electric towers [seen alongside the road] are 3-D geometry and the sky is a 3-D dome that has a texture map on it that's a combination of painting, volumetric clouds and photogrammetry."
Tsirbas has now produced a new video showing the breakdown of the CGI, and it's quite impressive:
"The point of the video was to prove that CGI can look natural and convincing," Tsirbas told
Wired in another article.
"Everybody assumes the background and car are real, and that the UFOs are probably fake, especially the over-the-top mothership at the end. The general reaction is disbelief, so I usually have to prove it by showing a wireframe of the entire shot to prove that nothing is real."
Tsirbas has worked on movies such as
Titanic
and
Hellboy
and several
Star Trek
television shows. Wired said Tsirbas and his team spent about four months mimicking the look of an accidental extraterrestrial encounter captured on a smartphone.
As impressive as Tsirbas' handiwork is, what is most perplexing is the reaction to the video by some of the UFOer crowd.
"But the most unusual comments come from a growing chorus of people who insist that the announcement of the hoax is actually part of an elaborate government plan to cover up the fact that the video is real," Tsirbas said in Wired. "I even received a mildly threatening personal e-mail from one of these people."
Go figure.
