Speaker 1: Since the dawn of civilization, humankind has been searching for
Speaker 1: a sign that we're not alone in the universe, and
Speaker 1: every once in a while we think we found it.
Speaker 1: In France, like America, the flying saucer, Miss Graham makes headlines.
Speaker 1: A young Frenchman photographed this flying the whole sort of
Speaker 1: UFO phenomenon. The UFO craze starts in the summer of
Speaker 1: nineteen seven with a private pilot by the name of
Speaker 1: Kenneth Arnold in Washington State. This is Greg Gigeon, history
Speaker 1: professor at Penn State, talking about one of the first
Speaker 1: major UFO sightings. The pilot reported seeing nine strange objects
Speaker 1: flying in a tight formation. They were flat and roundish,
Speaker 1: and he'd never seen anything like them before. Newspapers get
Speaker 1: hold of it and take it up, and uh, that's
Speaker 1: where the first time the phrasing of flying saucers came from.
Speaker 1: UFOs quickly became a pop culture phenomenon. In Washington, ghost
Speaker 1: like objects dart across the radar screen at the CIA
Speaker 1: traffic controls under at National Airport for several hours, traveling
Speaker 1: more than one About as long as there have been
Speaker 1: reported encounters, people have been faking them too, but recently
Speaker 1: something has happened that changed it every bit as much
Speaker 1: as that flight in and that's digital technology, cell phone cameras,
Speaker 1: social media, and especially video and photo editing software. These programs,
Speaker 1: like Photoshop, they're capable of making celebrities look thinner, lighting
Speaker 1: look better, and anything seemed possible, and UFO researchers started
Speaker 1: to realize they hadn't seen anything yet. Hi, I'm pg
Speaker 1: at Cary and I am Astin Weinstein. And this week
Speaker 1: on Decrypted, we're taking a look at what it means
Speaker 1: for society when it becomes nearly impossible to tell whether
Speaker 1: a photo or video has been manipulated. It's part of
Speaker 1: our ongoing look at the unintended consequences of technology, where
Speaker 1: we're examining how Silicon Valley's best laid plans can go awry.
Speaker 1: Programs like Adobe Photoshop offer huge new possibilities for artists
Speaker 1: and designers, but it also means that government's dishonest news organizations,
Speaker 1: even UFO hoaxers, they can change their perception of what's
Speaker 1: real and what's not. Stay with us. Today's UFO craze
Speaker 1: has some of the same characteristics of other fake news trends.
Speaker 1: We're seeing today distrust of the government, slickly produced videos,
Speaker 1: and irresistibly wild content. It's stopped. It looks like it's
Speaker 1: stopped in the sky. It's not a plane, dude. I've
Speaker 1: always loved these weird internet communities. So I started poking
Speaker 1: around on YouTube watching some the videos. I quickly realized
Speaker 1: that there's so many types of UFO videos. Many of
Speaker 1: them are your straight up UFO sightings. Could be I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's totelings, so I don't think it's a
Speaker 1: popular Also, it looks weird, guys, I look making the
Speaker 1: shop a really who crew worked? Could? These videos are shaky?
Speaker 1: They look like they were shot on somebody's cell phone.
Speaker 1: And this one we can see the roofs of some
Speaker 1: houses and a dark cloud in the sky, and near
Speaker 1: the top there's a white flashing light that's moving fast.
Speaker 1: There are some other niche subject areas to like a
Speaker 1: bunch of accounts that focus on space weather. I saw
Speaker 1: some that allege a hidden secret beneath Antarctica PA. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't say you're an expert in photoshop for photo manipulation
Speaker 1: or video manipulation. That I would not, So I wanted
Speaker 1: to see what you thought one of these videos and
Speaker 1: whether they could trick you sort of. I'm gonna play
Speaker 1: a video for you called UFO, filmed a farm in
Speaker 1: California by a channel called UFO Seekers. Seekers was headed
Speaker 1: out again to see if we could catch anything flying
Speaker 1: through the area. Okay, it's a dark sky, there's nothing there. Oh,
Speaker 1: yes there is. There's a dot of light that just
Speaker 1: shot across the screen. Okay, it looks like a star,
Speaker 1: except it's like bouncing around. So be it? Is it convincing?
Speaker 1: I mean, I would say so. My head tells me
Speaker 1: that maybe I shouldn't trust what I'm seeing, but I
Speaker 1: can't tell whether the footage is real or not. As
Speaker 1: I was clicking through YouTube watching some of the videos,
Speaker 1: it didn't take long before I was watching videos that
Speaker 1: mixed these UFO sightings with talk of government cover ups
Speaker 1: and dubious scientific claims. So there's no question that conspiracy
Speaker 1: is a sort of a the sam and a plot
Speaker 1: that's Greg the history professor, that is a part of
Speaker 1: the UFO phenomenon. And so from a very early stage,
Speaker 1: there's this idea being circulated that groups of actors there
Speaker 1: are people behind the scenes who are who know no
Speaker 1: more than they're letting on. Prominent conspiracy theorists like Alex
Speaker 1: Jones from info Wars have talked about UFOs with their audiences.
Speaker 1: So image giant spaceships landing their doors open and tentacles
Speaker 1: all come out or pods all come out. Let's say
Speaker 1: it's wireless, but tentacles are scarier because we're designed, you know,
Speaker 1: for tentacles and teeth and things attacking us. So let's
Speaker 1: go without an allegory. And one of the biggest UFO
Speaker 1: channels on YouTube and account, called security m ten, also
Speaker 1: mixes UFO sightings and conspiracy theory. Security ten has one
Speaker 1: point eight million subscribers and its videos have been watched
Speaker 1: nearly half a billion times. Aside from just the black budget,
Speaker 1: there is another even deeper, underground black budget that has
Speaker 1: been and continues to be used to fund this operation.
Speaker 1: Not to mention that some of this technology used is
Speaker 1: a result of reverse engineered alien craft. Furthermore, as I've
Speaker 1: always said, and it's not just me, many whistleblowers everything,
Speaker 1: as these fakes go viral, they're already having consequences for
Speaker 1: global affairs. We know, for example, that North Korea has
Speaker 1: doctored images of its military capabilities and images of politicians
Speaker 1: seeming to do things that they in fact did not do,
Speaker 1: becoming more and more common by the day. UFO spotting
Speaker 1: wasn't always like this. You can create fakes camera if
Speaker 1: you know how to do it. That's Bruce mccabee. He's
Speaker 1: kind of a godfather of view of OO spotting. He
Speaker 1: talked to me about cases in New Zealand and Mexico
Speaker 1: where he investigated alleged UFO sighting days when they only
Speaker 1: have black and white if you do it yourself quite easily.
Speaker 1: One of the most common types of thanks to think
Speaker 1: about is a so called double exposure. But since the
Speaker 1: days of detecting fake UFO sightings by looking for double
Speaker 1: exposures and other signs of dark room trickery, there's been
Speaker 1: a revolution in editing technology. We wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: one of the people who's taking advantage of the medium
Speaker 1: and who's inside the modern UFO community. Well, I'm Heathcliff
Speaker 1: Spencer of Petis and I'm from the Netherlands and my
Speaker 1: full time job is Heathcliff Spencer. Peters runs a channel
Speaker 1: called the Lions Ground, which has about seventy thousand subscribers
Speaker 1: on YouTube, and quite a few of his videos Heathcliff
Speaker 1: is standing in front of a backdrop that looks like
Speaker 1: he's on a spaceship, and his videos have titles like
Speaker 1: bizarre UFO shaped cloud over Moscow, caught on camera or
Speaker 1: strange white bright orb over San Antonio. What is it?
Speaker 1: This YouTube channel makes exciting both fectual videos about u
Speaker 1: f O, secret societies, paranormal experiences or stories and everything
Speaker 1: in the BOO framework. You hear me, you see me?
Speaker 1: And Heathcliffe says he started making videos after a few
Speaker 1: things in his life went wrong. So how did you
Speaker 1: end up homeless? Wrong? Little friends, But he says he
Speaker 1: tapped into a community of counterculture YouTubers. Eventually, he says,
Speaker 1: he made it into a full time job, and that's
Speaker 1: different from the older generation of UFO researchers like Bruce mccabee,
Speaker 1: who pursued this on the side most of the time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I noticed that a lot of the videos I was
Speaker 1: watching had ads running on them. Every time someone views
Speaker 1: one of these ads, a small amount of money flows
Speaker 1: back to the video creator. Some of the bigger accounts
Speaker 1: like Securit Team ten also use Patreon. That's a website
Speaker 1: that lets people set up payments to content creators so
Speaker 1: viewers can directly support someone's work. I discovered the audiences
Speaker 1: for these videos are very engaged. Heathcliff's page has a
Speaker 1: very active comments section, and he told me he gets
Speaker 1: some of the material for his videos from his audience.
Speaker 1: How often do you get sent examples of a UFO,
Speaker 1: a siting or what have you? Oh? Not much, I
Speaker 1: think between the TWN and the twenty per day per day. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I asked YouTube what their policy was on these UFO videos.
Speaker 1: They said misinformation is not against their community guidelines even
Speaker 1: if it goes viral. For a video to be removed,
Speaker 1: it would have to be considered harassment or hate speech,
Speaker 1: or violate some other guideline. YouTube spokes first and Jessica
Speaker 1: Mason did say that advertisers can opt out of showing
Speaker 1: their videos on paranormal or cult topics like a denial
Speaker 1: of the moon landing or a UFO citing. So unabated
Speaker 1: by YouTube, these videos spread and there are other forums
Speaker 1: to like Facebook and Reddit where people can discuss UFOs, aliens,
Speaker 1: all manner of paranormal activity. So perhaps it's no surprise
Speaker 1: that UFO siting is a way up compared to a
Speaker 1: few decades ago. The National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, Washington,
Speaker 1: which is not a federal agency by the way, says
Speaker 1: there were three UFO reports in the month of July
Speaker 1: this year. That's down from about seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: sightings in July, but still way way higher than in
Speaker 1: the Obviously, the Internet makes it easier than ever to
Speaker 1: report a formal sighting. The Internet also makes it easier
Speaker 1: for these videos to spread, and crucially, it's a lot
Speaker 1: easier now to alter a photo to show evidence of
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial life, and it was when people had to double
Speaker 1: expose their own film in the guard room. Part of
Speaker 1: the reason there's such a wealth of UFO videos right
Speaker 1: now is that these days it's easy to access a
Speaker 1: photo or video editing program. So we went to the
Speaker 1: maker of one of the most widely available programs to
Speaker 1: ask them what they thought of how their creation had
Speaker 1: taken on a life of its own. We talked to Adobe.
Speaker 1: I'm Steven Nielson, the director of product management for Photoshop.
Speaker 1: Stephen agreed that tools like Photoshop have made it easier
Speaker 1: for anyone to manipulate an image. People are manipulating photographs
Speaker 1: well before photoshop, but photoshop and digital technology really enabled
Speaker 1: enabled higher quality result and made it much more accessible.
Speaker 1: But he said that while photoshop helped people make fake images,
Speaker 1: most people were creating images that were interesting and artistic.
Speaker 1: Also in the conversation was Victoria Nie. I'm the product
Speaker 1: manager for Motion Graphics and Visual Effects that Adobe. I
Speaker 1: cover after effects primarily. Victoria agreed that yes, Adobe's programs
Speaker 1: have helped democratize fakery, but they can also be used
Speaker 1: to detective fake as well. These same tools that can
Speaker 1: be used to create uh create content can also be
Speaker 1: used sometimes to detect when something has been manipulated, and
Speaker 1: so there are things that you can do in both
Speaker 1: after effects and in Photoshop that will help you see that.
Speaker 1: If you push the contrast, for instance, you can see
Speaker 1: that the noise in this part of the video is
Speaker 1: different than in this other part of the video, and
Speaker 1: so clearly these came from different sources. The problem is
Speaker 1: most people aren't photoshop experts, so it's very hard to
Speaker 1: detect good fakes. While it's true most of us can't
Speaker 1: spot a fraud, there are a few people who can.
Speaker 1: My name is Dan gel Lotos. I am a visual
Speaker 1: effects artist. Dean's worked on everything from big budget blockbusters
Speaker 1: to History Channel programs. One day was working a show,
Speaker 1: I think it was a a show for the Weather
Speaker 1: Channel called Deadliest Space Weather and he started looking up
Speaker 1: UFO videos on YouTube, and he was shocked by how
Speaker 1: obviously fake many of the videos were. To his trained eyes.
Speaker 1: The hoaxers were getting away with lying to so many people,
Speaker 1: so he decided to debunk what he was seeing. I
Speaker 1: know a lot of people come to the subject of
Speaker 1: UFOs because they've had an experience that they can't explain.
Speaker 1: The fact that there are people out there exploiting this
Speaker 1: genuine curiosity these people had is just galling to me.
Speaker 1: Dean started a YouTube account called the UFO Theater. He
Speaker 1: has about subscribers. He posts videos there every couple of months.
Speaker 1: Welcome fellow freaks to UFO Theater. I'm constantine. You know
Speaker 1: there are six point three million UFO related videos on YouTube,
Speaker 1: with more being at it every day. How do you
Speaker 1: know which ones are worth watching? How do you know
Speaker 1: which ones are fake? That's why I'm here to tell
Speaker 1: you what's real and what's crap. Whenever there's a place,
Speaker 1: as we said, for Dean, most of these videos were
Speaker 1: easy to debunk, so I asked him to walk me
Speaker 1: through one. This video comes from the Securit Team ten channel.
Speaker 1: It's titled NASA cuts Live Space Feed HD UFO appears
Speaker 1: at I that's an old caps by the way, now,
Speaker 1: this is not the first time that we've captured a
Speaker 1: faux phenomenon on the I S S live stream. However,
Speaker 1: it is the first time that we've caused something and
Speaker 1: recorded it from NASA's newly created live Earth Stream page.
Speaker 1: So we're looking at a feed that we're told in
Speaker 1: the video comes from NASA's High Definition Earth Viewing System.
Speaker 1: It's aboard the International Space Station. It's basically a big
Speaker 1: HD camera that's been constantly streaming the Earth since so
Speaker 1: nothing seems to be happening in the video. It's dark,
Speaker 1: but you can kind of make out the curvature of
Speaker 1: the Earth, and there's a solar panel that's presumably part
Speaker 1: of the I S S that's off to the right.
Speaker 1: For a while, we're just looking at the Earth. Then
Speaker 1: the image cuts to a gray screen. NASA directly after
Speaker 1: that had put up a notice on their live stream
Speaker 1: page indicating that they would be disabling and taking down
Speaker 1: the live stream feed for good. Thankfully someone decided to
Speaker 1: put this termination. The host of Secure Team, Tyler Glockner,
Speaker 1: says this is NASA censoring the image, but according to
Speaker 1: the NASA page in the video, this race screen is
Speaker 1: just what happens when the experiment is switching cameras or
Speaker 1: communications on available. That's when Tyler claims he captures the
Speaker 1: footage before it's censored and finds a triangular shaped UFO.
Speaker 1: All he did was he took some video that was
Speaker 1: shot from the International Space Station. This is Dean again,
Speaker 1: and he just laid over a little bit of a
Speaker 1: a triangular shape UFO over the footage, and then he
Speaker 1: cut in this title card that says we've lost the feet.
Speaker 1: So he claimed that this was authentic video that showed
Speaker 1: that not only were there extraterrestrials out there in orbit
Speaker 1: around Earth, but that NASA doesn't want you to see them.
Speaker 1: We tried to interview Tyler, but he never responded to us.
Speaker 1: Dean is a visual effects artist, so he's an expert
Speaker 1: in this stuff, but he's no match for the rising
Speaker 1: tide of UFO content, let alone the rest of the
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories and the fake news that's making the rounds online.
Speaker 1: When Dean's videos do really well, they get maybe twenty views,
Speaker 1: but that's only a tiny fraction of the number of
Speaker 1: people who watched the original videos. He tries to be bunk.
Speaker 1: I asked Dan why he still makes these videos. I
Speaker 1: don't know how much of an impact I'm making, but
Speaker 1: I'm constantly getting, for lack of a better term, fan
Speaker 1: mail from people who say, thank you for for showing
Speaker 1: you that this is not real, and thank you for
Speaker 1: helping me be skeptical about what I'm seeing. It's a
Speaker 1: good point. As a society, we're only just learning how
Speaker 1: to be skeptical of what we look at online, or rather,
Speaker 1: what we see online is becoming harder to discern from reality,
Speaker 1: and now artificial intelligence can make what's called deep fakes,
Speaker 1: which are incredibly convincing but totally fabricated videos of essentially
Speaker 1: anyone saying essentially anything. Recently, we've seen other tech companies
Speaker 1: pledged to regulate themselves better and contain the unintended consequences
Speaker 1: of their technology. I'm thinking, especially if the social media
Speaker 1: companies like Facebook and Twitter, which have essentially been forced
Speaker 1: to change their product in the wake of election interference.
Speaker 1: When I spoke to Stephen and Victoria from Adobe, I
Speaker 1: did ask them whether it would be theoretically possible for
Speaker 1: Adobe to try and catch users in the act of
Speaker 1: creating a fake So there's really no way from a
Speaker 1: programmatic standpoint to detect why someone is making something. I mean,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't want to. For instance, even in this case
Speaker 1: block it blocks satire, and yet that would be doing
Speaker 1: exactly the same kind of image manipulation with say current
Speaker 1: event video. Well, Photoshop does have a mechanism to detect
Speaker 1: whether people are using the program to make fake currency,
Speaker 1: but Stephen said that trying to do the same thing
Speaker 1: for other types of content would be much harder. So
Speaker 1: Austin seems like just another instance of a technology that
Speaker 1: comes into the world with one purpose and creates this
Speaker 1: whole slate of unintended consequences. Right. In this case, the
Speaker 1: unintended consequence is that we really can't trust what we
Speaker 1: see online anymore. Yeah, I mean that's a good and
Speaker 1: bad thing in some aspect. It's good that we're less
Speaker 1: believing of things that are edited, but bad in the
Speaker 1: sense that it negates some societal trust. I just worry
Speaker 1: that it feels a bit like a losing battle. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're already at a point where you basically need to
Speaker 1: be a visual effects artist like Dean to be able
Speaker 1: to spot what's real and what's not. And with the
Speaker 1: stuff you just mentioned about AI and deep fakes, it's
Speaker 1: only going to get harder from here. The technology kind
Speaker 1: of feels at odds with human nature a bit that
Speaker 1: we want to believe things and we won't want to
Speaker 1: find things that are evidence to what we believe already.
Speaker 1: Stephen from Adobe mentioned this in our interview, and I
Speaker 1: think you probably what what is partially at play here
Speaker 1: is confirmation bias. There is a natural human tendency to
Speaker 1: just look for confirming evidence, you know, evidence that that
Speaker 1: supports your your existing belief and discarding evidence that contradicts
Speaker 1: that believe So in the end, no matter how many
Speaker 1: videos you watch, you might not change your mind about
Speaker 1: basically anything at all, which means that trying to right
Speaker 1: wrongs and combat fake news is more important than ever.
Speaker 1: But it's also just really really hard. That though leaves
Speaker 1: us with Dean in a spare time doing what it can,
Speaker 1: does it ever feel kind of fruitless or like you're
Speaker 1: marching upper River? Yeah? Well it is. It is definitely
Speaker 1: like um um trying to build out the ocean with
Speaker 1: it with a bucket. And that's it for this week's Decrypted.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. Do you watch UFO videos on YouTube
Speaker 1: that you've fallen for a fake? Do you create fakes?
Speaker 1: We want to hear from you. You can email us
Speaker 1: at Decrypted at bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter
Speaker 1: at oust wine A U S g W E, I M,
Speaker 1: and I'm at Patari. If you're a fan of the show,
Speaker 1: please take a moment to rate and review us. It
Speaker 1: really helps new listeners find the show. This episode was
Speaker 1: produced by Pia Gadkari and Magnus Hendrickson. Our story editor
Speaker 1: was Ann Vandermay. Thanks also to Brad Stone, aki Eto,
Speaker 1: Emily Bus, Liz Smith, and Toford for us. Francesco Leavey
Speaker 1: is head of Bloomberg Podcast. We'll see you next week.