There are two things we hear a lot about photographs and videos of UFOs:

1. It is so easy to fake a photo or video now that they can’t serve as proof of anything.
2. If UFOs are real, why aren’t there more compelling, bulletproof photos and videos?

It would seem that these two questions are at odds, and to some extent I think they are. However, let me just deal with the first one now – are photos and videos useless?

Proof, Evidence and Truth

Let’s start with a distinction I think I have made before, but needs to be reasserted from time to time – that is there is an important difference between proof and evidence. I’m not splitting hairs here.

Proof is something we basically never get in the real world. In the abstract realms of mathematics and logic, we can prove a proposition, and if you have ever taken an abstract mathematics course, you know that proofs can be very hard to come by. Outside of mathematics, proof is basically not available, nor is it necessary, or even desirable. Some doubt, some willingness to question, is healthy. So, we should never look to a photo or video as “proof” of anything.

What we do ask for is evidence, and the more the merrier. As Christopher Hitchens once said, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

If you have more than one line of evidence, that is far more convincing than just one, and if you have multiple lines of  evidence that all converge on the same consistent set of ideas without serious contradiction, then we can, in time, reach a level that we call “truth.” Let me take the liberty of defining truth operationally  as some assertion (or better yet, a system of consistent assertions) about the world that you can act upon and think in terms of with confidence.  We tend to take our truths for granted, but they require generations of careful, hard work and emerge from many years of bitter controversy. It is also the case that some truths may one day have to make way for stronger, more powerful truths.

But let’s not throw the word “Evidence” around too carelessly. A video or photo isn’t evidence, unless we specify meaningfully what we think it is evidence of.  Actually, without a hypothesis in play, images are just a collection of numbers.

Is a photo or video evidence that Earth is being visited by non-human intelligences? I think that’s probably just a bit too ambitious, to be honest. In Unidentified Science #2, I spoke about the problem with the ET hypothesis, which boils down to the realization that there isn’t one.

Even if you have a good ET hypothesis – it’s possible –  to claim that any artifact is evidence for it, you have to be able show with near certainty that the evidence in question can not be faked or mistaken for something else, and that is usually just too much to ask.

Experts tell us that they can, given the time and effort, create an undetectable fake. I’m a little skeptical of this claim, but know of no reason why, in principle, it is impossible. However, note that this means that just because it could be faked, doesn’t mean that it is, since anything, in principle, could be faked.

So, let’s go for a less ambitious hypothesis: that the photo or video is evidence that what the witnesses remember they saw was real. What we mean by that is our assessment of the probability – our degree of belief –  that the witness saw something real increases, at least a little.  It is ONE line of evidence.

The Standards we insist on

However, before I am going to let a photo or video nudge my assessment of the case to a higher level of probability, I have to impose some standards that help us to keep error and deception at bay. These simple, but surprisingly rare conditions are not by themselves sufficient, but they are necessary:

1. A complete chain of custody. We need to know who took the image, the camera used, and that we have the image file straight from the camera. If the camera has an SD card, it will ideally be removed, placed in a labeled container, and locked up. There is some processing that goes on inside the camera, unavoidably, but the original image with no processing should be preserved.
2. We should know everything we can about the camera itself, the time and date, and camera settings when the image was taken. This is typically preserved in image metadata, and all the metadata in the image file should be intact, unmodified. Before publishing the report, we can redact any metadata private to the witness – for example, GPS coordinates of the witness’ residence will be obfuscated.
3. We need an interview with the photographer, as well as any other witnesses. We have talked before about the importance of the witness interview, and we regard it as very important to the entire case. There may be some rare exceptions, but we need as close to a face-to-face meeting with the witness as we can get, and possibly more than once.

Evidence?

Even when all this is properly squared away, it still doesn’t always work out. Sometimes, there is just not enough information in the images to tell them apart from images of ordinary objects such as planets, birds, or balloons. There are also imaging artifacts like lens flares (very common), sensor contamination, or dust orbs. Some images are too overexposed or too out of focus to help. Other times, videos will contain no reference objects, so that movement can’t be determined. In many sightings, it’s primarily the movement that’s strange.

Other times, it’s best to keep your camera in your pocket and use binoculars instead. You might very well realize that something that looked odd to you is actually pretty ordinary. This has happened to me on more than one occasion.

When it does work out, though, even when the image is aesthetically poor, it can serve as that all important second line of evidence that can bump up the probability of a report. So, no, photos and videos are not useless, but they are also not all we need.

As for the second question – why are there so few good, authentic videos and photos – I think we need more research. We’re going to start asking people who didn’t get a photo what they remember about that – where was your camera, did you get it out to take a photo, etc. When we have some data I’ll get back to you, but anecdotally, it seems most witnesses simply don’t think to take a photo, or they think that conditions are too poor for it. Why that seems to be the case requires a deeper look..

We have some detailed advice for how you can improve the chances of getting a good image or video in the event you see something weird in the sky. These things will take some time to go over, so we will save it for a future video on our YouTube channel. I hope you’ll subscribe to that channel (link in the show notes, as always).