New UFO videos are showing up on YouTube daily, with descriptions that make them seem truly out of this world -- but are they really?
Take the case of what appeared to be a diamond-shaped object that allegedly hovered over Hong Kong on the nights of Oct. 5 and 6.
Ex-cable TV reporter, Wu Xiaodong Yi, claims to have captured a UFO over Hong Kong on Oct. 5, but his cell phone quality was so low that he waited until the next night with a better video camera, hoping the object would come back, according to a Chinese sales company, ePrice.com.hk.
As luck would have it, the UFO did show up again the following evening.
Here's the Hong Kong UFO, as posted by Smileboyhk:
Open Minds.tv uncovered the translated ePrice coverage of this "event," noting how the diamond-shape appearance of the UFO may have been caused by an effect of the camera aperture as it moved in and out of focus.
Huffington Post showed the video to photo and video analyst Marc Dantonio.
"The first thing I noticed was the changing colors and flickering of the object," Dantonio told HuffPost in an email.
"The fact that it was there the next night around the same time strongly indicates that this was a likely mistaken astronomical object. I consulted software, and when I looked at Hong Kong, noted that my suspicions were true -- Jupiter was visible over Hong Kong that night. Jupiter is often mistaken for a UFO."
Dantonio suggests why the so-called UFO looks like a diamond in the sky.
"The object is clearly vastly out of focus and the shape is likely due to the internal camera geometry. As far as the horizontal line running through the object, this usually occurs because there is an object, possibly a hair, on the camera aperture. When zoomed in, the object of interest is dispersed and defocused into a large amorphous diamond shape."
On the same night in question, half a world away, two UFOs were reportedly videotaped over San Antonio, Texas, about 30 minutes apart by someone identified as SAUFOTX, according to Latest UFO Sightings.
SAUFOTX -- a possible acronym for San Antonio UFO Texas -- described the object as a UFO-Orb.
Here's one of the San Antonio videos:
"As I was skywatching...I notice this orb high in altitude that seemed to be hovering," according to SAUFOTX. "I quickly began to film, when zooming in, you can clearly see [the] UFO ORB, traveling slowly overhead...emitting some kind of energy field around it. Clearly an unidentified flying object. In my opinion, this glowing object was clearly no weather balloon, aircraft or satellite."
Dantonio disagrees.
"The object is not moving at any terrific speeds and not demonstrating any specific movement that calls it out as anything other than a high flying balloon.
"The video was filled with music and titles, and an attempt was made to make this look impressive, but really, this was poorly shot, bad footage. Based on the amount of time that the video shooter had to capture this, it was certainly there for a long time. I can tell you that balloons seem to crawl across the sky and are quite bright and disarming."
It should also be pointed out that not every UFO video posted on YouTube should be thought of as a hoax.
When it comes to UFOs, seeing is not always believing -- it's generally something that can be easily explained.
As in the case of the Hong Kong UFO, just because you might have a strong zoom on your camera, when you try zooming in too close, the end result may be too good to be true.
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