Oops! I forgot to include the following shot in my writeup of the Altamont Fair:
Cute as it is, I bet it would have made me sick 🙂
Category: Tech
Blast From The Past
Back to 2001, Easter Sunday to be precise. Together with two factions of the Friedland clan, we were launching model rockets in a Fairport park.
The rockets are bought unassembled, so we’d put them together and painted them prior to the day. As you can see we had a box full of engines and wadding and fuses (for the launch circuit) all sorts of bits and pieces to get them going. The launch pad is also a separate purchase.
That’s a lucky shot above. The rockets take off very quickly and – depending on the size and engine used – can go high enough they are difficult to see. Then, assuming everything goes according to plan, they deploy a parachute and float gently to earth ready to be reused.
(There’s so much fail in that picture…)
If it is windy, the rocket can travel a surprising distance before reaching the ground. My photos from this day show we had 4 rockets in total, and I recall we lost two of them because they’d blown far away behind some trees.
Here’s some video of two of our launches:
To that, I can only say “Oh man!” 🙂
Bonus shot of young Jordan (I hope she’s reading this!) right now:
Not three meters from where I’m sitting is an unassembled rocket and some engines. All I’d need is a launch pad…
The ‘Dragonfly Drones’ of 2007
In June 2007, a freelance photographer named Steven took the following photograph as he was walking in the woods of Big Basin, California.:
Over the next month, people in other parts of California photographed similar objects (and posted them anonymously), and the following are just an example of the images recorded:
The UFO community went crazy. These were the first high quality, high resolution photographs of UFOs ever captured. Furthermore there were a lot of them, taken by many different people in many different locations. They were quizkly dubbed the ‘dragonfly’ or ‘drone’ UFOs.
Later that month, an individual using the pseudonym ‘Isaac’ went public with an explanation of what these craft were. He claimed that during the 1980s he worked for a beyond top secret government organization on a program named CARET, the goal of which was to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology. These UFOs were, he said, products of such research.
All of his claims are still readable on his website. Be sure to click on the photos and scans he provides.
There is something remarkable going on here, and looking back at it from three years hence (I only found out about this yesterday) makes it even more strange.
It’s all fake, of course. Within weeks countless experts had exposed the images as the product of 3D modelling software Maya and illustration software Photoshop. The ‘drones’ were 3D models composited onto real images. Isaac’s images were not fake in that they seemed to be actual scans. However it is certain the documentation that had been scanned itself was fake. The quality of the fakes is extremely high – obviously someone (or some group) put a great deal of work into this.
What makes this story quite unusual is that no one has ever come forward and revealed it was their work.
There have been many stories, the most intriguing of which was it was a professional viral marketing campaign (for what?). But it’s all speculation, and the fact remains that to this day – over three years later – it is unknown who created the images and why.