The Internet comes at you fast.
Mere hours after a French guy posted a plausible looking video of unidentified
objects orbiting the moon, captured, of course, by an anonymous friend,
hordes of keen-eyed cyber citizens analyzed every detail.
They confirmed the phase and orientation of the moon against the time and place
the footage is claimed to have been taken. Checks out.
They identified the big crater: Endymion.
They even calculated the size and speed of the objects:
10 to 20 kilometers across, traveling at a mere 300 000 kilometers an hour.
Whoa, take it easy, nerd patrol.
That's a lot of speculative math.
How about we let a certified expert weigh in?
Like science communicator and allegedly bad astronomer,
Dr. Phil Plait. Hi, Phil.
Hey Captain.
So, how fast should an object be orbiting the moon at this altitude?
Well, a lot slower than 300 000 kilometers per hour.
There is a formula that lets you calculate how fast an orbit is.
First, you take the mass of the ob—
So you're telling me, the only way these things can be going that fast
is if they're powered spacecraft operated by an alien intelligence?
What? No, I'm not saying that at all.
You're looking at this the wrong way.
You have to take a step back and look at the big picture. When a lot—
Hold that thought, Phil.
I just realized, we need to look at the big picture.
It's not just the UFOs.
This entire video could be artificial!
Creating a CG moon seems easy enough.
There's got to be a tutorial on that out there somewhere. Ah!
Let's make a moon.
Add a UV sphere and give it a subsurf modifier. Smooth!
Light the sphere from the side, all dramatic like.
It already comes with a handy UV map.
All we need are some textures. Hey, look at that.
NASA's got us a whole CG moon kit.
Aw, NASA, how'd you know?
Plug the color texture into the base color input, run the displacement textures
through the height input of a bump node
into the normal, and adjust the strength to looks about right.
Neil deGrasse Tyson might have something to say,
but the mute button is right there.
Play with more settings. It looks great!
You're a good person.
Now just model some stars, a galactic portal,
a fleet of starships, map the whole thing onto a screen in a futuristic pipe
room, 3-D, track your green screen actor into it, and you're on your way
to approaching a fraction of my unfathomable artistic prowess.
Kneel before your Blender GOD.
You know, those tutorials aren't as lazy as I thought.
Still, some artists have made their own
versions of the moon UFO video that are pretty on-point.
This one by Mendezmendez is a close approximation.
And this one by Katherine A. Ross imagines a different perspective
It's almost as good as I could make if I wanted to.
Sorry, Phil, you were saying?
Thank you. What I was trying to say is
there's no need to focus on all of the details
when there's a more fundamental reason why this video is obviously a hoax.
Of course, getting down to the fundamentals, observing the unobserved.
You know the famous video experiment where you're asked to count
how many times students pass the ball and you don't even notice
the gorilla that walks in and makes out with one of them?
No one has ever noticed the gorilla.
That's why the comments are turned off.
Just goes to show, sometimes you got to look past
the obvious and take a holistic view.
So let's strategically ignore the sexy moon and instead
pay attention to its friends, the clouds.
In these expensive stock shots captured around the world,
real clouds crossing the moon flow in arbitrary directions.
But in the UFO video, they scroll on a perfectly horizontal axis.
I guess that could be a coincidence.
Let's line them all up, average the moon's scale,
and retime the clouds to move at the same speed.
In the stock footage, the shapes of the clouds are pretty static.
But in the UFO video, they undulate wildly everywhere at once,
the familiar simmer of expression-driven procedural noise.
Same with the supposed heat distortion, which wobbles uniformly
all over the image until suddenly vanishing
completely on frame 856.
It's as if someone forgot to extend
an After Effects adjustment layer to the end of the shot.
Hate when that happens.
And what about the optics of it all?
The moon is 384 000 kilometers away,
and we're zooming in on a zip code with a telescope. At this focal length.
Even the slightest camera bumps should cause us to lose it out of shot entirely.
This looks more like the shaking
of a moderately long lens aiming at a neighbor's window.
But the big shake at the start reveals something else.
Most things that stretch the height of the frame in homemade video
usually skew in lateral motion because of rolling shutter.
But here, the moon's crescent shape stays perfectly solid during the shake.
We already know that global shutter cameras,
which avoid this problem, are hard to come by these days.
So which kind did this anonymous amateur astronomer
use for their hundreds of hours of moon footage?
Probably the virtual kind inside animation software,
which might also explain the motion blur length consistent with the usually default
perfectly calibrated cinematic 180 degree shutter angle.
The clues were all there, in plain sight.
Isn't that right, Phil Plait?
Oh, I can talk now?
Yeah, that's not what I meant at all Captain.
Huh?
I was talking about corroborating evidence.
You can analyze the imperfections of this video all you want, but
at any time there are thousands of people observing the moon through a telescope.
Right. So...
So if objects dozens of kilometers across
moving at dozens of kilometers per second
are flying around off the edge of the moon?
I'm guessing somebody else would have seen them.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But couldn't you have told me that earlier, before I did all this work?
Oh, for F—
Jeez, astronomers.
Well, you heard it here last folks.
Professionals and amateurs alike
have been staring at the moon continuously since it was invented.
There would have been more videos.
And I would have been tagged in each and every one of them.
"Paging Captain Disillusion" or "Get on this Captain",
or just @ my name and nothing else
like I'm being CC'd on an internal memo,
like I'm a virtual assistant in Microsoft Debunk 95.
Do I look like a damn paperclip to you?