A Flock of Birds Form the Face of a Monkey
Pareidolia knows no bounds. That is a short way of saying that our brains are perpetually tasked with making order out of chaos for, ultimately, survival advantages. Pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing patterns in random objects. Examples include seeing identifiable shapes in cloud formations, the front of cars looking like faces, or seeing the heart-shaped terrain on Pluto. It is constantly happening and we (almost) never stop to think about it.
However, an excellent reminder made the headlines recently, when video footage captures a flock of birds (supposedly starlings, and therefore by definition, a murmuration) in flight, twisting and turning among themselves and forming, for about a second, what appears to be the likeness of Russian President Vladmir Putin.
There is doubt – appropriately so – as to the authenticity of the video, with some people claiming the video has been altered. However, murmurations are very impressive looking displays in nature, and there are many examples to behold. Regardless, it is no less an example of pareidolia. Have a look and judge for yourself.
For Perry.
The conspiracy theorist’s “proof” that the video is fake isn’t convincing. All he does is use FotoForensics – which is designed for photos, not video frames – to show that the part of the frame with the birds appears to have different compression than other parts of the frame, but that could be because the birds are moving. Reminds me of the bogus proofs that Obama’s birth certificate is fake. I’ll wait for a real skeptic like Captain Disillusion to analyze it.
But how does a layman tell the difference between a conspiracy theorist’s and a real skeptic’s anomaly hunting?
And at what point is the face so clear that it must be artificial, as in Mount Rushmore or in this photoshopped image?
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s–CujjG9US–/1036281511209173830.jpg
FotoForensics tutorial: Common Analysis Mistakes
Mistake #5: Capturing Screenshots
http://fotoforensics.com/tutorial-mistakes.php#Screen Captures
“Variations of the screen capture mistake include:
Video frames mistake. The highest quality video is typically lower quality than a low quality JPEG. Video players also scale the picture and alter colors in images — these are significant post-processing steps. Extracting frames from video for analysis will result in no original metadata and a low quality picture that has been significantly post-processed. It is unlikely to provide useful information about the video’s content.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the conspiracy theorist was analyzing a 300×200 JPEG of the video frame, but the original video is 480p, that is 640×480, which suggests that the already compressed video frame was shrunk and further compressed to a JPEG. If you’re going to grab frames, at least use lossless PNG compression.
Mistake #4: Modifying Content (Resaves, Adjustments, and Annotations)
http://fotoforensics.com/tutorial-mistakes.php#Resaves
“One of the most common mistakes happens when people pass evidence to an investigator. They may scale the picture larger, brighten the image, or annotate it with circles and arrows so that the investigator knows where they should be looking…
Alterations are also common for pictures found online. An original photo may be resized for the web (modification #1), uploaded to Facebook (modification #2), downloaded, cropped (#3), uploaded to Imgur (#4), copied from Imgur, brightened (#5), and posted to Twitter (#6), and so on. A viral photo can quickly undergo dozens, or even hundreds, of alterations. Each modification changes the image and makes evaluating the content more difficult. “
It would be useful to run the same analysis on other videos of murmurations that don’t look suspicious, and compare the results to this one. If the analysis finds that they’re all fake, then it could be the analysis that’s bad.