A Completely Fake UFO Video

santa-clarita-ufo-screenshot.jpg

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.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com