There are lots of 'mystery' websites on the web, which I find highly entertaining. These usually try to pass certain well known stories or images off as being 'unexplained mysteries', or in some cases proof positive of Aliens / NASA Cover ups / Bigfoot / Conspiracy theories of all sorts etc etc etc.
They often give you some sort of 'facts' relating to the image or story, which will give you enough to ensure that a cursory investigation appears to prove that this is all a genuine mystery. However, dig a little deeper and the 'mystery' often rapidly disappears.
Perhaps one of the oldest out there, and therefore most often used, is the so called Solway Spaceman ...
.... this centres on family picture taken by a Mr Templeton on the Solway Frith in the UK in 1964. When developed, one of the pictures of his young daughter apparently now included a 'spaceman' like figure in the background, when it obviously had not been seen when the picture was taken. Mr Templeton hadn't monkeyed with the image (pre-computers and Photoshop etc), so this is presented on many websites as a 'mystery'.
What they usually fail to mention is that even when the image first started to circulate widely with the start of the Internet, the first investigators concluded that the background figure was actually the back of Mrs Templeton with a hat (women wore hats when outside back then), who had wandered unseen into the shot when the photo was taken. The whiteness of her dress was just some overexposure of the film developed by Mr Templeton at home. She appears correctly in other images taken on the same roll of film.
Another old favourite, and often show is the Hook Island Sea Monster picture, taken in 1965 by Robert Le Serrec and his family with a friend, during the December of 1964. Supposedly shipwrecked on the island the group were crossing Stonehaven Bay on December 12th 1964, when Mrs Le Serrec spotted a strange object on the lagoon floor. It proved to be a gigantic tadpole-like creature, estimated to be about 30 ft long. They took a few photos and claimed that it moved off when they approached it.
... so a mystery and proof of the existence of sea serpents? Well, perhaps not. There are several concerns with the image ... firstly the biology of the 'creature' is unusual for a sea creature, with the 'eyes', located on the top of the head, and well away from the front of the snout - similar shaped (sea snakes), but smaller real sea creatures have their eyes at the side of their heads, and near their snouts to maximise visual coverage. Then the image itself has concerns - the wavy outline shows clearly that the edge of the ‘creature’ is partly overlapped by sand and it looks like clumps of sand are set on top of the edge of the creature, as if it would float off if not weighted down. Similarly there is apparently another sand clump holding it down about midway down the body.
But the clincher has nothing to do with the image, but is that in 1959, Le Serrec apparently had tried to get a group together to join him on an expedition that would prove “financially fruitful”, and that he had “another thing in reserve which will bring in a lot of money… it’s to do with the sea-serpent”
Another favourite is the so called Black Knight Satellite in polar orbit over the earth since the 1950's (if not earlier). This of course was before we had satellites ourselves. So proof positive of aliens?
This one of course attracts many UFO/NASA conspiracists as well as mystery lovers. One theory is that it has orbited Earth for approximately 13,000 years. Another theory is that Nikola Tesla first heard the satellite transmitting during his 1899 radio experiments (I knew he would turn up somewhere 😉). Some conspiracists claim that in 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper reported a UFO sighting during his 15th orbit in Mercury 9, and that was confirmed by tracking stations. But again, there is no evidence for this ever happening.
Of course you could just accept that its simply just a bit of space debris, and probably just a thermal blanket that was confirmed as lost during an EVA by astronauts Jerry L. Ross and James H. Newman.
Finally, there is the Geophone Rock Pyramid. Apollo 17 took a number of photos of the area around the Geophone Rock during the last lunar flight to the moon. AS17-136-20680 is the reference number of an apparently blank photo taken by that mission and is supposedly on the NASA website. That photo appears to have been damaged by extreme light exposure and noise issues, but NASA watchers adjusted the image using current filters and lo and behold, suddenly a Pyramid shape appears..
Well, I searched the NASA site for image AS17-136-20680 ... I couldn't find it. However companion image AS17-135-20680 (OF300) (209k or 1402k ) is there. I uploaded it, and it looked like the one on websites. Its not uniformly grey, and in fact you can see a pointed shape mid-centre right if you look closely. I then filtered it a few times,and I hate to say it, but yes, out of the fog appears a pyramid shape.
Often the simplest explanation is the most likely one, but often the least used, however for the NASA image I have no such simple explanation.
So perhaps there are real mysteries out there after all .....
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| 1964 - Templeton Spaceman Solway Firth UK |
They often give you some sort of 'facts' relating to the image or story, which will give you enough to ensure that a cursory investigation appears to prove that this is all a genuine mystery. However, dig a little deeper and the 'mystery' often rapidly disappears.
Perhaps one of the oldest out there, and therefore most often used, is the so called Solway Spaceman ...
.... this centres on family picture taken by a Mr Templeton on the Solway Frith in the UK in 1964. When developed, one of the pictures of his young daughter apparently now included a 'spaceman' like figure in the background, when it obviously had not been seen when the picture was taken. Mr Templeton hadn't monkeyed with the image (pre-computers and Photoshop etc), so this is presented on many websites as a 'mystery'.
What they usually fail to mention is that even when the image first started to circulate widely with the start of the Internet, the first investigators concluded that the background figure was actually the back of Mrs Templeton with a hat (women wore hats when outside back then), who had wandered unseen into the shot when the photo was taken. The whiteness of her dress was just some overexposure of the film developed by Mr Templeton at home. She appears correctly in other images taken on the same roll of film.
Another old favourite, and often show is the Hook Island Sea Monster picture, taken in 1965 by Robert Le Serrec and his family with a friend, during the December of 1964. Supposedly shipwrecked on the island the group were crossing Stonehaven Bay on December 12th 1964, when Mrs Le Serrec spotted a strange object on the lagoon floor. It proved to be a gigantic tadpole-like creature, estimated to be about 30 ft long. They took a few photos and claimed that it moved off when they approached it.
 |
| Hook Island Sea Monster - 1964 |
... so a mystery and proof of the existence of sea serpents? Well, perhaps not. There are several concerns with the image ... firstly the biology of the 'creature' is unusual for a sea creature, with the 'eyes', located on the top of the head, and well away from the front of the snout - similar shaped (sea snakes), but smaller real sea creatures have their eyes at the side of their heads, and near their snouts to maximise visual coverage. Then the image itself has concerns - the wavy outline shows clearly that the edge of the ‘creature’ is partly overlapped by sand and it looks like clumps of sand are set on top of the edge of the creature, as if it would float off if not weighted down. Similarly there is apparently another sand clump holding it down about midway down the body.
But the clincher has nothing to do with the image, but is that in 1959, Le Serrec apparently had tried to get a group together to join him on an expedition that would prove “financially fruitful”, and that he had “another thing in reserve which will bring in a lot of money… it’s to do with the sea-serpent”
Another favourite is the so called Black Knight Satellite in polar orbit over the earth since the 1950's (if not earlier). This of course was before we had satellites ourselves. So proof positive of aliens?
 |
| 'Black Knight' - An Alien Satellite? |
This one of course attracts many UFO/NASA conspiracists as well as mystery lovers. One theory is that it has orbited Earth for approximately 13,000 years. Another theory is that Nikola Tesla first heard the satellite transmitting during his 1899 radio experiments (I knew he would turn up somewhere 😉). Some conspiracists claim that in 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper reported a UFO sighting during his 15th orbit in Mercury 9, and that was confirmed by tracking stations. But again, there is no evidence for this ever happening.
Of course you could just accept that its simply just a bit of space debris, and probably just a thermal blanket that was confirmed as lost during an EVA by astronauts Jerry L. Ross and James H. Newman.
Finally, there is the Geophone Rock Pyramid. Apollo 17 took a number of photos of the area around the Geophone Rock during the last lunar flight to the moon. AS17-136-20680 is the reference number of an apparently blank photo taken by that mission and is supposedly on the NASA website. That photo appears to have been damaged by extreme light exposure and noise issues, but NASA watchers adjusted the image using current filters and lo and behold, suddenly a Pyramid shape appears..
 |
| Geophones Pyramid On Web .... A Real Mystery, Or A NASA Cover Up? |
Well, I searched the NASA site for image AS17-136-20680 ... I couldn't find it. However companion image AS17-135-20680 (OF300) (209k or 1402k ) is there. I uploaded it, and it looked like the one on websites. Its not uniformly grey, and in fact you can see a pointed shape mid-centre right if you look closely. I then filtered it a few times,and I hate to say it, but yes, out of the fog appears a pyramid shape.
 |
| I Did My Own Filtering of NASA image AS17-135-20680 - A Mystery To Me. |
Often the simplest explanation is the most likely one, but often the least used, however for the NASA image I have no such simple explanation.
So perhaps there are real mysteries out there after all .....
Yes, there must be some real mysteries out there, the mistake that a lot of people make though is to jump to unlikely explanations when perfectly good, non fantastical ones exist. Even when simple explanations aren't readily available, it's still wrong to jump to aliens or the supernatural to fill the void, there's no logical basis for doing so - it just dilutes the REAL alien stories ;)
ReplyDeleteWell as demonstrated in last image ... at least one of the stories contains a puzzle if not a mystery.
DeleteBefore looking at the photos available on the NASA sight myself I thought that they were all taken by a camera pointed towards the Lunar surface, however most of the photos AS17-135-xxxxx are of the Lunar Roving Vehicle which has many triangular features.
DeleteThis "Mystery" just became much less mysterious.
Having examined all the pictures in the series, I can certainly see where you are coming from Vroomfondel. However I couldn't see one (and I looked at every one) that replicates that shape, or even looks a bit like it .... I guess you can choose to say "I want to believe", or not as your heart dictates.
DeleteAn episode of the TV show Alien Files: Unsealed broadcast as recently as 02/07/2022 on the Blaze channel in the UK, still claims that Jim Templeton's 'Solway Firth Alien' photo (first image in post) is an alien, linked via Men In Black (MIB) 'aliens' to the UK's first Blue Streak intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launch in Woomera Australia, which they said either failed or was halted after interference by MIB/aliens.
ReplyDeleteOf course 2 mins on the Internet showed this to be the usual farrago of half truths: In fact during development the the Bluestreak intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM - Not an ICBM), it became clear that the missile system was too expensive, and too vulnerable to a surprise first strike attack. The missile project was cancelled in 1960, with US-led Skybolt the preferred replacement.
The UK government proposed civilian satellite launcher called Black Prince with the Blue Streak as the 1st stage. This led to the formation of the European Launcher Development Organisation (ELDO), with Blue Streak used as the first stage of a carrier rocket named Europa. It was this Europa launch system that was actually tested at the Woomera test range in Australia, and later at Kourou site in French Guiana. The Blue Streak first stage was in fact successfully tested three times at the Woomera test range in Australia as part of the ELDO programme, but following launch failures caused by the failure of the autopilot in the later French Guiana tests, which caused the vehicle to break up, the ELDO project was cancelled in 1972 and Blue Streak with it.
You have to take all the UFO believers on TV shows with a very big pinch of salt .... they all make very good money from the nonsense they spout, and usually a few minutes search debunks what they are peddling as half truths at best or rubbish at worst.
I don't intend to go over the alien arguments here, but just pointing out that the believers, often cherry pick the 'facts' selectively when they create the TV shows.