Is the 1925 John T. Scopes UFO picture a fraud? Or is it genuine?
The John T. Scopes UFO photo
Background for those who don't know the John T. Scopes story:
John Thomas Scopes was the defendant in the famous Scopes “monkey” trial in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925. He was a schoolteacher and part-time football coach at Rhea County High School when an Act banning the teaching of evolution in Tennessee public schools (the Butler Act) came into force in early 1925.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who have never been noted for allowing anti-evolutionists many civil liberties at all, recruited John Scopes in a test case to challenge the new law. They also recruited agnostic-atheist lawyer Clarence Darrow to head their defense team.
The trial took place in July 1925. Scopes was found guilty of breaking the law, and the judge fined him $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court reversed this decision two years later on a technical legal point. The technicality was so minor that the State could have tried Scopes all over again on the same charge if it had wanted to, but the Supreme Court's advice was to enter a nolle prosequi, which means “we could start proceedings, but we don't want to”.
Now to our UFO picture …
We found the picture at right in the archives of the New York University website in May 2006. It was taken in June 1925 (the NYU page wrongly says 1924) — a few weeks before Scopes's Dayton trial. The photo shows a fine-looking John Scopes pointing to a stain on his tie. Now the interesting thing about this photo is not that Scopes's tie has a sarsaparilla stain on it from a drink he had spilled moments before. The interesting thing is the UFO lurking in the sky behind him. Is it real? As we are interested in creation and evolution, as well as fake UFO pictures, we were surprised we had never come across this photo before.
We searched the web for another copy of the photo. After all, if all examples of the photo contain the UFO, then it is more likely to have been in the original. We found the same photo (the picture at left) on the Science News website. The interesting thing about this photo is not that they have left the sarsaparilla stain on Scopes's tie, but that there is not a hint of a UFO in sight.
So here is the mystery: Did Science News remove the UFO, or did the NYU contributor mischievously upload a fake UFO photo?
What we found
We enlarged the two photos up to four times their size so we could compare pixelations and look for anomalies. Which photo was best? The one with the UFO is much better quality. It has better resoluton, less pixelation, and better overall quality. In fact, if we left it at that we would have to say it seems to be the real one. The non-UFO photo is lower quality and has had a sharpness filter applied to it. It also has a slightly whiter patch in the sky where the UFO appears in the other one.
Another difference is that the two photos are different heights. When we set the width of each to 147 pixels, the photo with the UFO was 220 pixels high, but the non-UFO one was only 211 pixels high. Does this mean Science News cropped 9 pixels off the height to remove the UFO?
No. We found in the enlargement of the UFO photo that the UFO has a finer pixelation (less distortion) than the rest of the photo. This would be impossible if it had been in the original photo, because the pixelation should be uniform throughout. It means the UFO was taken from another image, and has been cloned, reduced, and superimposed on this photo.
As much as we would like to pin more quackery on Scopes than just his views of evolution, we have to say the Science News photo — with the sarsaparilla stains but without the UFO — is taken from the original.
External link
For more information on the Scopes Trial, see the CreationWiki article, Tennessee vs. John Scopes.
Related topics:
- How UFO pictures are faked.
- Where do UFOs come from?
- Confessions of a famous Loch Ness Monster faker.
- Has the Bermuda Triangle mystery been solved?
- How did the photographer get this full iceberg photo above and below the ocean?
- Is the Shroud of Turin an elaborate hoax?
- Did tourists at the World Trade Center really take this photo just before the plane hit on September 11, 2001?
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