PHOTOCAT is the Italian Catalogue of
cases with photo or video evidence. Before describing the work
behind such a catalogue, it is more convenient to introduce
shortly the question of photo evidence.PHOTOCAT and
THE QUESTION of PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE
PHOTOCAT is the Italian Catalogue of
cases with photo or video evidence. Before describing the work
behind such a catalogue, it is more convenient to introduce
shortly the question of photo evidence.
Thousands of pictures of alleged UFO phenomena have been offered to the general public and UFO buffs as a proof of the physical reality of what has been called “flying saucer” for a long time. Photographs emerged in the early days of the UFO era, in the United States of July 1947, producing a lot of debate at once. Faking a picture, especially in a situation where more blurred details in the image oddly mean more mystery, has been a quite simple art. It was a good way to foul friends or journalists, as well as an interesting business for those "skilled" guys who have been selling hoaxed UFO pictures to newspapers or magazines or gullible guys eager to see a "real spaceship".
Most UFO researchers consider photographic evidence nothing but a very suspicious aspect of UFO related stories, something like a side-effect of the deeply rooted myth associated to them. Pictures are too easy to be faked to be considered a valuable "proof". All of us have experienced terrible situations, where pictures have been declared "genuine"and "really portraing a puzzling unknown object" and later found more or less complex hoaxes. Some UFO buffs tried to defend clearly faked pictures just in order to have something concrete in their hands able to demonstrate the physical reality of "flying saucers", so to show that they were not nuts. This attitude has been common throughout the whole history of the UFO movement (suffice to think to the highly controversial Gulf Breeze saga), involving also other individuals. The famous Italian case of Mr. Giampiero Monguzzi (a man willing to become a journalist who presented a series of astonishing photos portraing a classic domed saucer landed on a mountain landscape, with a strange astronaut-like figure next to it) is a clear example: the photographer confessed the hoax to a magazine, also showing the original models, yet somebody argued he had been forced to deny the reality of his encounter with an "alien spacecraft".
Many contactees, since the pioneer G.Adamski, showed several photos as "proof" of their wonderful experience with outer space beings: visual evidence has always been one of the most convincing easy-to-be-made tools to make people believed about the reality of their contacts. Unfortunately, nearly all of the pictures supplied by these folkloristic people have turned into hoaxes or look highly suspicious. Other people and journalists have been responsible for photographic tricks produced in order to get publicity, sell the photos or get a "scoop" useful to increase newspapers or magazines circulation.
As far as I know no project devoted to a comprehensive collection of photographic evidence cases has never been accomplished, even on national scale. Something seems to have changed during the very last two years, but no real work has been produced yet with the honorable exception of a Mexican project headed by the staff of the magazine "Perspectivas Ufologicas". It is highly recommended to national UFO associations or active researchers to start a well-organized project aimed at the comprehensive collection of the valuable video-photographic evidence of their own country, possibly making use of computer technology. International catalogues or books devoted to alleged UFO pictures, including "Los OVNIS y la evidencia fotografica" published in 1978 by two Argentinian researchers about a study on UFO pictures and some South and North American cases, have been produced in the past yet these works may be considered far from being complete and, anyway, never updated. Several thousands of pictures should be available all around the world. Archiving of such evidence would be very interesting for two reasons at least:
In 1991 I started a new project within the Italian Center for UFO
Studies, fully devoted to the collection of all Italian photo and
video documents portraing alleged unusual aerial phenomena. All
available material was randomly distributed among private
archives, magazines, loose newsclippings and often still in the
hands of the witnesses themselves. Besides collecting such a material,
the problem about how to manage such a mass of documents emerged.
Main goal of the project was and still is the establishment of a
comprehensive catalogue of photos and videos including their
reference data: this is a very first step of a more ambitious
work about an in-depth survey of collected evidence under
different viewpoints (image patterns, motif patterns, computer image
analyses, comparison between faked pictures and
"genuine" ones, reasons of forging, etc ....). To carry
out project's first goal the use of computer technology has been
taken into consideration in order to reduce times and allow a
more flexible access and distribution of available data.
At time of this writing about 600 cases have been
filed in the database and more or less the same number of images
has been acquired by scanner, mostly in grey levels. About 70% of
the cases has one image at least, even though sometimes coming from
low-quality sources like magazines or newspapers. It is expected
to increase such a figure to 75-80% at most when the collection
project will be really over: it is practically impossible to have access
to some original sources, while others don't carry the related
pictures at all. The accumulated photographic evidence from Italy
now counts in excess of 80 Megabytes of TIFF images, also available
in a highly compressed JPEG format.
Besides collecting pictures of alleged
UFO sightings, PHOTOCAT features a sub-catalogue where fakes, conventional
phenomena and strange-looking photographic effects produced by camera
(ie.: lens flares) or development defects have been stored as
well. This is an interesting collection of items to be used as a reference sample against
the "real" PHOTOCAT catalogue, in order to compare the
two sets in search of possible different patterns. At first
glance, alleged photos and recognized fakes don't show any evident
difference, yet such a matter will be carefully approached by a future
advanced research activity.
PHOTOCAT may well be considered the starting point of further
more interesting research projects, including photo analyses. 
Of course such a task requires
first generation pictures at least and excellent scanners
featuring high or very high optical reswidth="345" height="263">Of course such a task requires
first generation pictures at least and excellent scanners
featuring high or very high optical resolutions: this means that
pictures originally stored into the database have to be scanned
again. Professional colour scanners and image processing software
are required, as well as a quite powerful hardware configuration:
what is even more important is a good knowledge of photographic
parameters/rules and optics. Without experience in such fields,
evaluation and interpretation of results from a computer-based image
analysis would be really limited if not meaningless. It is not
enough to carry out seemingly attractive image enhancements or filtering,
supplying a different, much more "technological", view of
the original picture able to wonder enthusiast people. Computer
aided image processing must be coupled with rigorous interpretation
of the results, otherwise the whole work could be practically valueless.
I have personally experienced that computer technology may fail
in finding the clues of a faked pictures, such as a thread
sustaining a UFO model, even when the thread was actually there ! Several factors
must be considered when examing a photo evidence and evaluation
of results must be cautious: the absence of a thread, I repeat,
doesn’t mean necessarily that the picture is not faked. A
thorough investigation about a single photographic case takes a
lot of time and money, also due to the many different information
to be collected and evaluated. Anyway, Italian photo evidence is available
to anybody interested in developing a cross-analysis about the best
pictures .
I have already carried out a quite extensive survey about a two-photo
set taken at Battipaglia (Salerno, Southern Italy) on April 9,
1992 , also producing a 20 colour slide collection showing
different steps of the analysis, together with related pictures
and detailed comments. Results pointed out several doubts about
the reliability of the sighting's tale and the real features of
the portraied object: final conclusions, also supported by
indipendent analysis carried out by American researcher Jeff
Sainio, refer to the possibility of a model shot next to the
camera.This may be well defined the very first in-depth analysis
of an alleged UFO picture carried out in Italy by local
researchers.
Two other colour pictures, reportedly taken in Sicily in January
1995 by two different guys, have been recently examined and one
found to be faked: a cool thread was just on top of the domed
saucer !
My personal recommendation to international researchers is the
start up of a comprehensive collection of their country's alleged
UFO photographs and videos. That's a valuable sample of UFO hystory
which features a lot of now neglected information, as well as an
outstanding gallery of visual wonders. Preservation of such an
evidence, beyond its possible real value as "proof" of
an original physical phenomenon, is a real must for any study
group or single researcher
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