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See here for reporting information.
| Number: | FR0380 |
|---|---|
| Date written: | December 20, 2006 |
| Date received: | December 20, 2006 |
| Date published: | February 29, 2008 |
| Date of sighting: | December 20, 2006 |
| Place of sighting: | Country path near Erstein, Bas-Rhin, France |
| Original language of report: | French |
| Reported using: | |
| Unreleased information: | Name, firstname, email address |
| Investigation, additional information: | None |
| Explanation: | Photographic artefact of the "orb" type. |
|
Subject: message from [FIRSTNAME] [NAME] 3 attachments [Firstname] [Name] residing in Erstein 67150 Alsace (France) hello and thank you your website is great. I usually walk my dog every morning with my camera on me to take points of view this morning 12/20/2006 around 7:45 a.m. i took a picture of my village in the sunrise. On my way home i put the photos on my pc that's where I noticed something strange in the upper left corner that does not appear on other photos.I therefore send to you 3 photos taken successively, the thing is on one of the 3 ... why. ? ... How! if you have an opinion on the thing? |
We have here what French ufologists usually call a "surprise photograph", ie that the witness did not anything with his eyes at the time, and discovered an anomaly on a photograph once he looked at them on a screen or a printout.
On the first photograph, we see at the top left certainly what intrigued the sender.
EXIF data of the three original images indicate that they were taken with a digital camera Olympus X350 or D575Z or C360Z.
The image with the "thing" was taken December 20, 2006 at 07:37 a.m., with an exposure of 1/30th of a second, a focal length of F/3.1, 6mm, an ISO speed of 400, and most of the settings on automatic mode.
The second image was taken at 7:43 e.m., and the third at 7:38 a.m..
So we have the mysterious object at 7:37 a.m., then at 7:38 and 7:43 a.m., it did not appear anymore. Si there is no "before" picture.
The three images are pointing in the same direction, the town of Erstein, but are not taken exactly at the same distance. The farthest is the last one, it shows the largest field, the "thing" is no longer there, what seems therefore to exclude that the thing was the Moon. It would not have moved that much within the 6 minutes.
I nevertheless checked the presence of the moon for the date, time and place, as the Moon sometimes looks like this on photographs. But it is excluded, as it rose only at 9:46 a.m.
An enlargement of the object of curiosity, without smoothing effect, gives:
|
Although not quite spectacularly colored, the round thing evokes the famous "orbs" in which some want to see UFOs, others see ghosts, or paranormal phenomena.
These "orbs" are caused by the diffraction of light on small objects close to the lens and on which the focus is not set because it is set on the background. The little thing appears by blurring as a round thing. This is the same effect that makes car headlights at night appear as round luminous balls on photos.
What object caused that? It is obviously impossible to say, but I got similar results with insects, pollens, dust specs, and water droplets.
The "orb" effect needs a source of light. In this case, the EXIF data indicate that the flash of the camera was set to "auto". This means it must have fired, given the lack of light at this hour.
