Investigation and Analysis of MW’s UFO Photos Taken in the Summer of 2015
Author and Investigator: Keith Rowell, ASD and Photo/Video Analyst for Oregon MUFON
Date: August 31, 2016
Version: 1.1
FI ID#: 7186
CASE Number: None.
BGE Results: None.
Location: SE Portland, OR.
Sighting Date and Time: 7/27/15 at 8:50 PM.
Disposition: Unknown - Other.
Case Status: Completed.
Investigation Log
4/12/16. First met MW at an Oregon MUFON meeting.
June or July. MW mentions the 7/27/15 incident and at least one other in 2015.
8/15/16. MW is at my place and gives me copies of her 39 photos taken on 7/27/15.
8/18/16. Begin this report.
8/20/16. MW at my place to discuss her photos some more and we take some test photos.
Background
I first met MW at the April 2016 OM meeting. She’s a 23 year old college student. Since that time I’ve talked to MW probably more than twenty hours during which she has related much of her childhood and young adult experiences that may be related to UFOs and possible abduction/deep experiencer events.
Weather Information
The temperature in Portland on 7/27/15 at 8:50 PM was 70º with winds out of the north at 8.1 mph. It was partly cloudy trending to clear.
Location
SE Portland. Location is not important in this case except for the fact that oddball light displays produced by hobbyist UAVs need to be considered. But the photos in this case are not consistent with photography produced from hobbyist UAVs at night.
Synopsis
Note that MW may be a UFO abductee/deep experiencer and as such may have a psychic connection with the phenomenon. Because of this, she may see UFOs more than other people. This instance of photo-taking may be one of those times.
MW came home to the house she was living in at the time from grocery shopping with her roommate, BC. She had told him earlier that she had seen UFOs occasionally in her lifetime and that she had a feeling that she would see a UFO shortly after arriving home from the grocery shopping that they had just done.
As they drove up to their house, MW pointed out the fairly prominent, lighted “something” in the late evening sky. She felt it was a UFO. BC acknowledged the OOI (Object of Interest) as something a bit odd, but he wasn’t as fascinated by the scintillating, star-like object hanging in the sky as she was. It seemed pretty far away and was about 30º to 40º above the horizon in the southeast in their residential neighborhood.
They went inside to put away their groceries and then MW came back outside with her camera but without BC. (MW is a bit of a photography buff and knows her way reasonably around her DSLR, a NIKON D7000.) MW knew that she needed to brace herself against something to steady the inevitable camera shake during slow shutter speed conditions.
She braced herself against the top of her car and began taking photos at somewhat random intervals. She ended up taking 39 total photos – 38 of them within about six minutes and a last one that same night about two hours later. Oddly, the last photo does not show the OOI. Her memory of the rest of the evening is hazy and incomplete. See Analysis of the Photo Evidence later.
Objection Description
The OOI in this case is to the naked eye a star-like or planet-sized, bright, prominent object in the evening sky. The OOI seemed to shimmer/vibrate/pulsate in a way unlike the twinkling of stars or the steady appearance of planets. It stayed more or less in one very small region of the sky and hung around for a while. The photos MW gave me for analysis document a time of six minutes, but she says the OOI was around for much longer, perhaps as much as half an hour.
Interview/Statements
About three informal interviews (discussions) of the basic story and MW’s photo evidence at my place mostly.
Natural/Human-made Phenomena
An OOI explanation for this case might be a star, planet, satellite, meteor, or a hobbyist UAV. These are eliminated for the following reasons.
Stars. Stars do twinkle to the eye in rainbow type colors, but to a consumer grade camera, such as the Nikon D7000 used here with shutter speeds of around 0.5 to 0.75 seconds, the twinkling is not evident. Stars appear as a solid whitish blob of pixels, which may be roundis if the camera is reasonably steady. MW states that she steadied the camera and herself as best she could by leaning against a car, yet her photos show elaborate looping in a very tight and compact display.
Planets. Planets appear as solid, very tiny discs of usually white light, but sometimes, in the case of Mars, reddish, if it is particularly near Earth. To a D7000 at 0.5 to 0.75 seconds shutter speed, planets appear as a whitish, smeared blob of pixels if the camera shake problem is not controlled by using a tripod or by very good bracing against some stationary object like a wall, tree, car, etc.
Satellites. These are generally too faint to be picked up by a D7000 under normal shooting conditions as we have here according to the EXIF data. And they show up like planets if they do at all.
Meteors. Meteors are eliminated since we have this OOI documented for a duration of at least six minutes. This is far too long for meteors since they approach at 25,000 to 160,000 mph and are typically burned up in seconds.
Hobbyist UAV. A UAV is eliminated because the looping, multicolored displays are not similar at all to what various, LED-festooned UAVs can produce during the relatively short shutter speed of around 1/2 a second. The many colors are not completely out of the question, but the looping display that shows up in the photos is much too complex for typical UAV LED displays.
None of these OOI identification candidates are close enough to be a reasonable identification for this OOI.
Evidence/Investigation
See the Analysis of the Photo Evidence heading later.
Witness Credibility
Since April 2016, I have talked at least ten hours with MW to understand her life story and her UFO connection. She is a very active explorer of this part of her background at this time. Having me take a look at these photos is another part of that exploration. I have no doubt that MW is telling me her story as best she understands it at this time. Her testimony about how these photos were taken along with the entire context is entirely truthful, I believe.
Correlating Cases
No check conducted.
Analysis of the Photo Evidence
Author: Keith Rowell, Photo/Video Analyst for Oregon MUFON
Date: August 18, 2016, through September 2, 2016. Version 1.1
Photo Characteristics
MW gave me 39 photos consecutively numbered from DSC_1390 to DSC_1436 taken by her Nikon D7000 DSLR camera on the date of the event. These proved to be of various quality for analysis. Many of the photos were out of focus due to the difficult night time shooting conditions – a tiny object in essentially a featureless dark field.
It is quite possible to adjust the pattern of focus points in DSLR camera settings, but most users are not that interested or sophisticated enough to use this feature. Essentially, in the focus pattern settings, you need to turn off all the potential focus points except the one in the very middle of the field of view. With this one focus point active, you make sure to carefully target the OOI and then press the shutter button. Then the OOI should be in focus for every shot in which this is accomplished. The alternative for well-focussed photos of an OOI is to use manual focussing.
The time stamps of the first and second to last photos (20:49:03 to 20:55:04) document that the OOI was present for a duration of at least 00:06:01, or six minutes and one second. The ten photos chosen for analysis span a time of 00:01:06, or one minute and six seconds at the very beginning of the entire sequence of the photos.
I decided to narrow this analysis to the first ten photos because all of them seemed to be near-focussed to well-focussed. Here’s a table of relevant photo data.
## Photo Date Time Exp FN FL CR X Y Area Colors
## 1 1390 2015-07-27 20:49:03 0.769 5.6 202 36 79 112 8848 7
## 2 1391 2015-07-27 20:49:05 0.769 5.6 202 32 100 76 7600 5
## 3 1392 2015-07-27 20:49:06 0.769 5.6 202 33 87 62 5394 6
## 4 1393 2015-07-27 20:49:07 0.769 5.6 202 25 113 115 12995 6
## 5 1394 2015-07-27 20:49:28 0.400 5.6 202 22 49 57 2793 5
## 6 1395 2015-07-27 20:49:29 0.769 5.6 202 42 62 165 10230 5
## 7 1396 2015-07-27 20:49:33 0.769 5.6 135 20 40 32 1280 4
## 8 1397 2015-07-27 20:49:36 0.769 5.6 135 23 42 56 2352 6
## 9 1398 2015-07-27 20:50:04 0.769 5.6 135 19 43 73 3139 3
## 10 1399 2015-07-27 20:50:06 0.769 5.6 135 17 46 75 3450 5The table shows the following:
Photo Number. The number automatically assigned by the Nikon D7000, for example, DSC1390.
Date. The date the photo was taken. All the dates are the same.
Time. The time the photo was taken in 24 hour format. All these photos were taken in about one minute’s time.
Exp. The shutter speed. Most of the photos were taken at about 3/4 of a second.
FN. The f-stop number. All the same here because the D7000 was probably setting the camera at maximum exposure consistent with the shutter speed and ISO setting. Variable (zoom) lenses close down to a minimum wide open aperture as the lens is zoomed toward the telephoto end. This is typical of cheaper zoom lenses by all makers. So, f5.6 is as wide open as MW’s Nikon lens gets at 200 mm. (Her lens is the AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED.)
FL. The focal length of the zoom lens in 35 mm equivalent. It was at the maximum length because this would be natural for a photographer who wants to maximize the size of the interesting and typically(!) small OOIs that people see and want to “get some evidence of”! Note that MW zoomed out a little toward the end of the ten photos, probably to get more context for the OOI, for example, the tree branches that show up.
CC. The count of color areas in the OOIs. This gives some sense of the times the color was changing in the various OOI displays. See later for more about this. Counting how many distinct areas there were was somewhat difficult in some of the photos, but clear enough in most of them.
X and Y. The pixel counts both horizontal (X) and vertical (Y) of a bounding box drawn around each OOI display.
Area. Simply the area of the bounding box. (The X and Y values multiplied.) This gives a sense of how big the OOIs are in each photo. Note that they do vary.
Colors. A count of the basic hues that show up in the OOI. Hues are essentially the rainbow colors with some others possibly: blue, purple, red, yellow, green, brownish(?), and whitish.
Virtually all other EXIF data for each photo is the same. The data in the table are the only significant characteristics that varied from photo to photo. For example, ISO was the same for all ten photos: 1600. Summing up, we can see that MW did change the focal length in photos seven to ten. And the shutter speed varies only once for photo 1394. Everything else is the same for her photos. MW was not “experimenting” with different camera settings. She was just trying to get a photographic record of what she was seeing, and she let the camera settings go, hoping that something would show up. And something did. Something different from what she saw with her eyes as it turned out.
Panel of the Ten Photos
The following screen shot of the ten photos under analysis presents the photos in the sequence that they were taken going down and right to left. Some are a few seconds apart and others tens of seconds varying as MW decided to press the shutter button. See The Ten Photos. We can see that the looping, “squiggly” patterns vary randomly and that they are quite complex actually.
The Ten Photos
Appearance Aspects of the OOI
Two aspects stand out in MW’s photos of the OOI: the colors and the looping, knot-like paths. See The Ten Photos and Photo 1395.
A Hypothesized OOI Orb Part
Looking at the panel of ten photos, the OOIs give the impression of something “zooming around” while leaving a trail of multicolored light regions. If this idea is correct, then we can imagine a small orb of about the width and height of the width across of the snake-like patterns. This orb might be moving around rapidly while it is changing colors rapidly in order to create the patterns that we see. We will call this hypothesized object the OOI orb part.
Assuming this is how the squiggly, snake-like patterns were made, it is apparent that if the speed of “zooming around” is constant, then the transitioning from color to color is not constant because the length of the sections of color along the snake-like path vary. Other interesting observations can be made assuming the existence of this OOI orb part. The existence of this OOI orb part will be assumed for most of the analyses that follow.
The Color Regions
The number of color regions in the ten photos selected for study vary from a low of 17 to a high of 42 with an average of 26.9. That is a lot of of color regions. The colors (hues) that show up are various shades of blue, green, yellow, red, purple, brownish(?), and whitish, which are essentially the colors of the rainbow. The table below shows whether the color was present or not in each photo. Curiously, red does not show up often and blue and green are always present. Yellow is hit and miss. By amount of area covered, blue and green are the most represented by a big margin.
| Photo | Yellow | White | Brown | Blue | Purple | Green | Red |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1390 | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y | Y |
| 1391 | N | Y | N | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| 1392 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N |
| 1393 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N |
| 1394 | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N |
| 1395 | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | N |
| 1396 | N | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | N |
| 1397 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N |
| 1398 | N | N | N | Y | Y | Y | N |
| 1399 | N | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | N |
The Looping, Squiggly Paths/Patterns
Note that when prominent stars are photographed at slow shutter speeds that patterns vaguely similar to MW’s photos might be produced due to the twinkling of stars. However, the looping is not as tight and compact and the colors due to the twinkling effect are not nearly as prominent or even the same. See the Stars and Planets Tests later for a demonstration photo and discussion.
Speed of Color Change
How fast did the color changes occur? To answer this question, I selected photo 1395 because it offered a relatively “untangled” path so that I could move along the path and count the transitions. There were 42 transitions give or take a few. The shutter speed of photo 1395 was 0.769 of a second. So we get a color transition speed of 42 divided by 0.769, which is about 55 times a second. This is a rather fast rate of color transition for any kind of normal human-designed blinking light phenomenon outside of perhaps a laboratory set up.
Photo 1395
Angular Size of an OOI Display
What is angular size? Objects that we see always have an angular size but they don’t always have a real size that we can know. One of the holy grails of ufology is to be able to calculate a reasonable real size of a UFO. But to do that, the UFO must be very nearby something of known size or preferably in front of something of known size. Then we can calculate a reasonable real size for the UFO using trigonometry. However, in this case, as usual, the UFO (OOI) was not in front of something or nearby. It was just hanging in the night sky.
But, in many cases, we can get a reasonable idea of the angular size of a photographed OOI or even of an eyewitness only OOI. Then we can compare the angular size of the OOI that we calculate from the photo dimensions and EXIF data (or from careful witness observations) to get a better idea of just how big an OOI was in the night sky. We can know this because the angular size of the full moon is 0.5º. So, we can compare the moon’s angular size with the OOI’s calculated size and see, for example, how many of the OOI’s it would take to go across the face of the full moon if they were lined up edge to edge. (The OOI’s I have calculated in the past have always been smaller than the full moon.)
In this analysis, I selected photo 1395 again since the path is relatively simple and straightforward compared to some of the other paths. Remember that we cannot know the real length since we don’t know the real distance or real size of the OOI. But we can know the angular size, so let’s work on that.
I used the ImageJ image analysis program to determine the path length in pixels of the OOI’s looping path. I decided to measure the length of the 27 short, straight lines that I used to trace inside the path. The length using this method is about 427 pixels. So, if we stretched out the path and unlooped, “unkinked” it, etc., the OOI’s orb part path would stretch out across 427/4928 of the horizontal distance across the whole photo, or about 1/12 of the distance across the width of the photo. (The whole photo across is 4928 pixels.)
Angular Speed of the OOI
We know that the OOI display happened in 0.769 of a second, which is about 3/4 of a second. So, if the OOI orb part path were stretched out straight and it was going horizonally, it would have crossed the entire photo width in 12 times 3/4 seconds, which is equal to about 9 seconds.
From the EXIF data, we know that photo 1396 was taken with a 200 mm focal length lens (35 mm equivalent). So, the angle of view across the photo is about 10.3º. This makes the angular speed of the OOI orb part about 10.3º/9 sec, or about one degree per second. So, the OOI orb part that made the whole OOI display would have taken by itself 180 seconds (three minutes) to go from, for example, the horizon point in the east, through the zenith directly overhead, to the horizon point in the west. (To circle around the Earth in the sky would have taken six minutes because a full circuit around the Earth would have taken the OOI orb part through 360º.) But this OOI orb part stayed in one very tiny part of the sky and zoomed around making the looping display, all the while flashing green and blue, mostly, and red and yellow occasionally. So, what was it?
Typical Satellite Speeds
Satellites are highly variable in the speeds that they go across the sky. Five minutes to cross the entire sky, horizon to horizon, (which we don’t normally see satellites do) is a reasonable average. So, our OOI orb part would have been like a satellite in speed, more or less, but it traveled its odd, twisty path in a tiny portion of the sky – only about 0.2º across, or in a very compact area of the sky about equal to halfway across the face of the full moon.
The Very Last Photo
MW gave me all of the photos she took on 7/27/2015 of the OOI that so fascinated her. In fact, all of the 39 photos except for the last one show some evidence of the basic OOI described and analyzed in this report. Again, photo 1437 shows no OOI. It shows only a severely out-of-focus dark frame with perhaps some extremely underexposed, unfocussed tree leaves (boughs). You be the judge. See Last of the OOI Photos and Two Hours Later.
Look at the two full frame photos (and considerably altered in dynamic range so that an image shows up). (Note that the OOI does show up with no manipulation of the dynamic range or anything else. Again, the dynamic range is altered so that we can “see into” the dark areas of the photo.) The time stamps on the two photos are 20:55:04 on DSC_1436, and 22:47:49 on DSC_1437. Thus, there is a one hour, 52 minutes, and 45 seconds time interval between the taking of the two photos. It should be noted that MW’s memory of the rest of the evening after she took the photos is hazy. Is this evidence of “missing time”? MW may eventually investigate this. Till that time, we can only speculate and note that there is in fact a typical “missing time” time interval indicated by the time stamps on these two photos.
Did MW deliberately stage this evidence for my benefit? She might have. Or, maybe she didn’t. Did she show mock surprise when I pointed out the time difference? Or was her surprise genuine? These are the kinds of things that sometimes confront people who actually take the time to investigate UFO cases.
Photo 1436: Last of OOI Photos
Photo 1437: Two Hours Later
Star and Planet Tests
Both MW and I did some test photos with a couple of prominent stars and one airplane that happened by when we were doing our tests. Between us, we shot around 50 photos. She used her Nikon D7000 with the same lens as in the night in question, and I used my Canon DSLR 60D with an equivalent lens. A quick visual inspection of the test photo below makes it very unlikely that MW was somehow mistaken about what she saw and photographed. It was not a star, planet, or satellite either, for that matter. These do not produce the tightly looping, colorful displays that we see in MW’s OOI photos given the EXIF data documented for each photo. See Test Shot of Arcturus (Photo Enlarged) below.
We used the same camera settings, lighting conditions, and photographer behavior for our test photos:
ISO 1600.
Shutter speed of 1/2 second.
Lens zoomed to around 200 mm (35 mm equivalent).
Virtually the same lighting conditions on a residential street at around 8 PM on a clear night.
We held our cameras steady in which case there was no complex looping or color behavior. And we intentionally experimented with various kinds of shake and exaggerated camera movement during the short exposure time.
We picked the most prominent and brightest stars that night (Vega and Arcturus) to do our test photos. Only the best of the photos is shown here. Note the lack of brightness and contrast in our test photo, and especially the lack of anywhere near the tight compactness and complexity of appearance of the looping, busy OOI displays in this test photo. This is the best, most looping one we ended up with out of 50 or more test photos.
Additionally, we were trying to very intentionally shake and vibrate our test photos in hopes of duplicating what MW produced in her OOI photos. We came nowhere near duplicating what MW had done. And, for her OOI photos, she says she was trying to steady her camera quite consciously as best she could knowing about camera shake problems in low light conditions with slow shutter speeds.
Note also that there is no color variation at all in the path in the test photo. The path appears essentially gray. Actually, I was expecting the looping star trail to show some color, but this was basically not the case.
Test Shot of Arcturus (Photo Enlarged)
The magenta patches of color and the random black and gray with some green are all artifacts of the extremely dim lighting conditions. Also, the dynamic range adjustment simply to see anything in the all black photo as it appears unmanipulated is more extreme in this test photo case than is the case in any of MW’s OOI photos. This leads me to suspect that the inherent brightness was a number of magnitudes greater than Arcturus and Vega, and this is what MW said. The OOI was very bright in the sky.
The bottom line is that MW did not mistakenly photograph a star, such as Arcturus, or a planet, etc.
Conclusion: What Did MW See?
Remember that MW did not see the paths that show up in her Nikon D7000 photos. What she saw was an intermittantly flashing, very “busy” light display about half the size of the full moon. She was thinking, “What is this that I am seeing?” An analysis of the photos reveals that what was apparently creating the busy, little OOI light displays was a tiny, randomly fast-flashing, multicolored light zooming around within a very small part of the sky. What was this? It was a “UFO.” What MUFON calls an “Unknown - Other”, which is its designation for any UFO that is not craft-like.
Let’s not forget that UFO witnesses many times report seeing light displays that behave and appear odd. That is why they think “UFO” and then report their sightings (sometimes) to someone who will take them seriously, such as MUFON, NUFORC, CUFOS, the UK’s BUFORA, and other mostly citizen organized and run UFO investigative organizations around the world.
References
Lens angle of view calculator: [id]: http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/calc.htm
Time duration calculator: [id]: http://www.easysurf.cc/tspan-s.htm
About satellites: [id]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite
SkySafari Plus, astronomy program for Macintosh