Comments on: Plesiosaur Photo Hoax

By: vaughan

vaughan — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 23:38:22 +0000

Hi Guys,

I’m new here; a lifelong amateur naturalist and long-standing pro photographer from the UK.

I discovered Loren’s site and ‘joined’ and chipped in a few days ago on the ‘Another Thylacine Photo’ (message 136).

With a bit a practice ‘anything’ can be created in photoshop. If you want a ‘convincing’ plesiosaur picture, no problem, whilst a ‘thylacine’ picture, like the one I mentioned above, would be kid’s play.

Here’s a very basic question if you will bear with me:

No image, unless it’s in RAW format with all the original shooting data intact, can ever be acceptable as ‘proof’ (on its own) of the existance of a crypto – can it? Judging from your reports it looks as if even the Ivory-billed video is in doubt – by some. One imagines the accusation is that it too was manipulated as the bird shows the correct features?

Surely a living body, or a reasonably fresh corpse is absolutely essential for proving existance? (DNA etc.)

A photographic ‘record’ is all very entertaining, I will be the first to admit. However, at the end of the day it must surely be pretty useless, save for sometimes, in genuine cases, putting field-workers on the right track.

The Photoshop hoaxers are I believe, unlikely to be people who use the product on a daily basis, but those who believe they have discovered ‘an unknown tool’ with which they can make a name for themselves – if they’re brave enough to ‘sign their work’ that is! To familiar PS users, and there seem to be quite a few commenting hereabouts in the comments’ boxes, they surely must look very naive.

Best wishes,

Vaughan

By: CryptoInformant

CryptoInformant — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 01:09:05 +0000

Nice work.

By: finbarmccool

finbarmccool — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 20:37:07 +0000

You may, indeed, wonder why people create hoax photos?

Perhaps it’s to show other cryptofans how easy it is to create a “faux foto” and not always believe what they see.

I should know, as I’m the one who created the image above. I started to create a website with “faux fotos” and the source images used to create them, but then my fakes started showing up on the web as “real”, so I scrapped the entire project.

I have a lot more images, and as an artist, they are fun to make.

Unfortunately, as a cryptofan, I can’t really display them, at least on the web, as they start to circulate as the real thing.

By: devinbennett

devinbennett — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 11:16:23 +0000

With Photoshop accessible to pretty much anyone, and a willingness for most human beings to tell a ‘tall tale’ or two, it’s easy to see why over 95% (or even more so) of all claims and evidence are farcical. I can only imagine an investigator’s frustration at the mountains of hoaxed evidence one needs to filter though in order to find a fragment of something truly authentic. All the rest of us can do is keep up the faith and keep looking! I am open to the possibility that as of yet undiscovered living fossils still exist on Earth. How wonderful it would be to actually find a plesiosaur somewhere… or a modern day descendant of an extinct giant ape/hominid!

By: U.T. Raptor

U.T. Raptor — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 02:15:06 +0000

“He’d also created a very good image of a baby pterodactyl. I’m sure that’s floating around the web somewhere as well.”
It is. Last I heard of it, the pic was being used as “evidence” on a creationist site…

By: pentagramma

pentagramma — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:23:40 +0000

Oh, that’s the same picture that circulated here in Brazil with the Sakhalin news.

That’s sad.

By: twblack

twblack — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 18:08:42 +0000

Oh well it would have made a good story had it been real.

By: wendelc

wendelc — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 17:33:46 +0000

This effort seems useful in a way though. Aren’t plesiosaur carcasses usually whales where the lower jaw has rotted away and fallen off? And here all the fellow did was photoshop away the lower jaw. Almost educational.

By: shumway10973

shumway10973 — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 16:20:34 +0000

actually not bad. The child is missing because you cannot have a dinosaur right there in “person” and with a child more interested in the waves coming onto shore. I can see where they used the cloning tool to run more wet sand around, such as the tail where the upper fin area was removed, I can see the original line. If you look where the mouth was taken away, you can see this person used a circular motion to get the “neck” in there. All in all not bad, but not good enough to get a graphics job.

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 15:19:16 +0000

Yeah, that is pretty creepy how the kid dissappeared in the second one. A mystery in its own right, I would say. Seriously, though, one thing I can say about hoax photos is that it makes our eyes sharp and hones our observation skills. I would say that because of the dearth of hoaxes these days, we are getting harder to fool. On the flip side, a real photo of a cryptid could be staring us right in our face and some people are going to say outright that it’s a hoax, especially if it is unusually clear. Kinda like the boy who cried wolf.