SUBJECT: A NEST OF INFO ON GULFBREEZE UFOs FILE: UFO1641
PART 27
11/8/90
REANALYSIS OF PHOTO #19 SUPPORTS WALTERS' STORY
by
Bruce Maccabee
In his initial testimony regarding the "Road Shot (Photo #19), Ed Walters
reported that he had been driving along highway 191-B at about 6:00 PM on
Jan. 12, 1988 when a brilliant white light suddenly entered the cab of his
truck. This caused him to lose some sensation of feeling in his hands and
forearms. He said that he momentarily lost control of the truck and swerved
to the left hand side of the road and then onto the left side shoulder. As
this was happening he observed a UFO moving above and ahead of him and, as
he managed to stop the truck on the left shoulder, the UFO was hovering
several hundred feet ahead over the road. Ed said he had his Polaroid
camera with him in the truck. He grabbed the camera and took the picture
(Photo #19). But then he realized the object was moving and he had the
impression that it was going to come back and hit him with the white beam
again. He immediately crawled under the truck where he would be completely
shielded. Unfortunately his legs were still protruding as the UFO did,
indeed, shine the white beam down on him again.
The complete story of the Road Shot (and Ed's other sightings) is told
in his book, The Gulf Breeze Sightings (Morrow, NY, 1990). This is a
must-read for anyone who wants to understand the historical context of
Photo 19, the stereo photos of May 1 (which will be referred to later) and
of all of the Gulf Breeze Sightings. Technical analysis is provided in A
History of the Gulf Breeze Sightings (updated version available from the
Fund for UFO Research). For the purposes of this discussion the description
given above of how Photo #19 happened to be taken is sufficient.
During the initial analysis of Photo 19, in the spring of 1988, it was
assumed that the bright irregular image within the image of the road was
the reflection of light from a non-uniformly radiating source within the
glowing bottom of the UFO, and that the UFO was actually over the
reflection. This seemingly reasonable assumption allowed the size of the
UFO to be estimated in the following way. First the location of the
reflection was determined by projecting a sighting line across the road in
the direction of a "tree bump" in the skyline that appears above the image
of the UFO. As a person walked along the sighting line form the camera
position toward the tree bump he crossed the road and actually walked
through the location of the reflection. Since the reflection image partially
obscured the yellow line in the road, it was assumed that where the sighting
line crossed the yellow line was the approximate location of the
reflection, and hence the approximate location of the UFO. Measurements
made on the site yielded a distance of about 185 feet from the camera to
where the sighting line crossed the yellow line, When this distance was
combined with the size of the UFO image on the film the size of the actual
UFO could be calculated. It was found to be about 7.5 ft across the bottom
bright area, about 9 feet high and about 12 feet across the mid-section.
The calculation of the UFO size is the extent of the analysis that has
been published to this date. However, in an unpublished calculation done
during the summer of 1988, I used the RI to estimate the size of the
illuminated area on the road. A simplified calculation showed that it had to
be quite long in the dimensions along the line of sight. In fact, I
estimated it to be about 80 feet long, if its center were 185 feet from the
camera. Although this was a surprise to me, I simply attributed this to
light coming out from the bottom of the UFO in a non-circular pattern at
very flat angles (i.e., nearly horizontal). This seemed odd, but it
certainly didn't violate physics.
Recently Rex and Carol Salisberry, in reevaluating the Walters sightings,
carried out an independent analysis of the RI in Photo #19. Being unaware
of my 1988 calculation of the elliptical spot on the road they proceeded
from another assumption. They assumed, for unstated reasons, that light
could only come downward from the UFO in a direction roughly parallel to
the (nearly) vertical axis of the UFO. Combining this assumption with my
estimate of the bottom diameter (7.5 feet) they concluded that if the UFO
were real, then it would illuminate a spot on the road that would be only
slightly larger than the bottom of the UFO itself. That is, they claimed
that the illuminated spot on the road would have been nearly circular and
only about 7.5 to 8 feet in diameter. They then used simple photogrammetric
and trigonometric calculations to predict what the size of the RI should be
under their assumptions. They predicted that the RI should appear as a very
thin line in Photo 19. Since it is, in fact, a very fat line (measured
vertically), it disagrees with their prediction. Hence, they claimed that
the RI could not have been caused by an actual reflection in the road since
to do so would be a virtual physical impossibility (Salisberry, Interim
Report on the Reopening of the Walters UFO Case, 23 Sept. 1990). The
discovery of this "physical impossibility" led them to further conclude
that the RI must have been faked (by double exposure) with the logical
consequence that the whole photo, the story, etc. were all faked.
It is of great importance to note that their result follows directly
(after some simple math) from their assumption that light from the UFO
could only travel downwards (roughly) parallel to the axis. If they had
allowed for the possibility that light could travel outward from the bottom
of the UFO at very flat angles then they would have seen that the spot on
the road could be much larger than the bottom of the UFO. This is the
result I obtained in the summer of 1988.
My reanalysis of Photo #19 is based on the assumption that the RI really
was caused by light reflected from the road. Starting from this assumption
I have estimated the nearest and farthest points of the reflection. The
distances from the camera to these points were estimated by combining
on-site measurements with measurements on the photographs. By measurement
it was found that the sighting line from the camera toward the tree bump
crosses the near edge of the road at a distance of about 90 feet from the
camera and the far edge of the road about 490 feet from the camera. The
illuminated spot on the road lies between these two distances. Using
photogrammetric techniques involving angles that are determined by
measurements on the photographs, I estimated that the closest point of the
illuminated area to the camera (the lowest point of the RI) was about 180
feet away, and the farthest point was about 305 feet away. (These distances
could easily be off by 10 feet either way because of the low precision in
measuring the actual boundary positions of the images.) Similarly, the
width of the illuminated area was about 8 feet. Thus the spot on the road
was approximately a thin ellipse with the long axis running along the
sighting line to the UFO. (These calculations did not take into account the
slight downward slope to the road from the centerline toward the edge. To
take this into account would require a much more complicated analysis and a
very accurate survey of the road. If the downward slope were to be taken
into account it would likely decrease by a small amount the calculated
length of the illuminated area.)
Although the illuminated area is highly elongated, there is no physical
reason why such an area could not be produced by a UFO (or by a
conventional light source). Thus this analysis shows that the RI is not a
"virtual physical impossibility" and it cannot be used as proof that Photo
19 is hoaxed. However, the analysis does raise the question of how the
highly elongated illuminated area might have been produced.
One way would be for the UFO to be over the far end of the reflection,
for example, and emanating a very elliptical (in cross-section_ beam in the
direction of Ed's truck, but pointed downward so that it hit the road.
Alternatively, the UFO might be over the center of the illuminated area,
directing light downwards and both toward and away from the truck. Yet a
third possibility is that the UFO is farther away from the truck than the
illuminated area and is directing a beam downwards and toward the truck. It
is this last possibility which I find most interesting.
It is important to realize that a previous assumption can be arbitrarily
rejected. Previously I and others had assumed that the UFO was actually
over the illuminated spot on the road. With this assumption it was possible
to calculate the size of the UFO based on the image size and on the
measured distance to the reflection (assumed to be rather compact and
centered about 185 feet away). Thus the assumption was necessary for the
previous analysis. However, it was not justifiable since the distance to an
object cannot (generally) be estimated from a single photograph.
The distance to an object can be calculated from a stereo pair of
photographs, however, and Ed obtained just such a pair on May 1, 1988. The
details of this sighting are in Ed's book. The information which is
important here is that, using a stereo camera with a two foot baseline, Ed
photographed two UFOs, the larger of which looks like the UFO in the Road
Shot (see Ed's book for further details). These stereo photos also have
images of lights which were at a known large distance. The images of the
distant lights allowed the cameras to be calibrated for parallax. After the
calibration had been done it was found that the UFO was about 475 feet away
(over water!) and nearly 15 feet in diameter across the bottom. Thus its
width was nearly twice the value which I had originally estimated for the
Road Shot UFO (about 7.5 feet).
Assume, now, that the size of the Road Shot UFO was the same as the size
of the large May 1 UFO. Since the image size corresponds to a bottom
diameter of 7.5 feet at 185 foot distance, then it also corresponds to a
diameter of 15 feet at about 370 feet.
If the UFO were actually 370 feet from the camera (but still over the
road) the sighting line crossed the far side of the road at 490 feet), then
the UFO would have been 65 feet from the farthest point of the reflection
(at 305 feet from the camera). Hence the only way that light could get from
the UFO to the illuminated spot on the road would be if the UFO projected a
beam of light 65 feet toward the truck but downward at a slight angle so
that the beam hit the road. The color of the RI suggests that this beam of
light was white or pale yellow.
A reconstruction of the Road Shot scene, with the illuminated spot
between the camera and the UFO, is presented in Figure 1. This
reconstruction can explain a puzzling fact about the RI: its high level of
brightness. Under the previous assumption that the UFO was directly over
the reflection I carried out tests with a powerful, 100,000 candlepower
spotlight shining directly down onto the road. This reflection of the beam
on the road made film images that were much, much less bright than the RI.
Hence I had to assume that there was an extremely intense (much, much more
than 100,000 candlepower) source of light within the UFO.
This new reconstruction can explain the brightness of the RI quite easily
without resort to extremely intense light sources within the UFO. It is
well known that virtually any surface, even a rough black surface like a
road, can give a strong reflection in the forward direction when
illuminated by light at a grazing angle. This is the phenomenon of forward
gloss (a rough, diffuse reflector becomes nearly a specular reflector at
grazing incidence). This particular case, with the beam from the UFO
hitting the road at a flat angle (several degrees) and the camera viewing
the illuminated area at a flat angle (about a degree), is virtually
"optimized" for the forward gloss effect. Experiments with a spotlight have
confirmed this effect at the site of the Road Shot. Hence it is reasonable
to conclude that the RI is a result of a moderately intense beam of light,
like that from a powerful flashlight, projected downward at a slight angle
from the UFO, incident at nearly a grazing angle on the road and reflected
in the direction of the truck.
Although the photograph itself provides no information which would allow
us to choose which is the actual situation (e.g., UFO over the center of
the reflection, UFO at the far end of the reflection, UFO beyond the
reflection, etc.), the context of the situation does provide enough
supplementary information to suggest a choice. ED described being hit by a
white light before he ran off the road. He said that after he took the Road
Shot he climbed under the truck because he thought the UFO was going to
zap him again with the white light. (He says that the UFO did just that
while he was crawling under the truck.) What might have caused him to think
that the UFO was going to direct the white light at him again? Could it be
that the white light was contained within a beam from the UFO and that Ed
realized that the beam was hitting the road just ahead of him after he took
Photo 19? Perhaps the white spot on the road, made by the beam, started
moving slowly toward the truck just after Ed took the picture. Under these
circumstances, he might well have concluded that the object was going to
try to hit him again with the beam.
Although there is no direct photographic evidence that the RI was made by
a white beam on the road, the preceding discussion shows that the existence
of such a beam would be consistent with Ed's story and with the brightness
of the RI. The existence of a beam also allows the UFO to be further from
the truck than the reflection and this, in turn, means that the UFO in the
Road Shot could have been then same size as was the "large size Type 1 UFO"
in the May 1 stereo photos.
CONCLUSION
The preceding analysis shows that the sample of the RI is not a "physical
impossibility" and hence does not prove the Road Shot is a hoax as claimed
by Rex and Carol Salisberry.
A reconstruction of the Road Shot scene based on this reanalysis supports
Ed's story by demonstrating that the RI may actually have been caused by the
white light, which Ed described, in the form of a beam projected from the
UFO toward the truck.
Note: Photo 14 also has an RI underneath the image of the UFO. The RI is
quite non-circular and can be explained in a manner similar to the
explanation of the RI in Photo 19.
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