When Your Eyes Tell You Lies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 16, 2000 | by Timothy W. Maier

In the 1994 senatorial race in Virginia, Democratic challenger Mark Warner's head was super-imposed on a photo of someone else shaking hands with President Clinton, who was unpopular in the Old Dominion. Warner's opponent, GOP Sen. John Warner, pulled the ad -- but only after it had been run for four days.

Today it is not uncommon to see long-gone celluloid heroes such as John Wayne pop up in commercials. Woody Allen, of course, interacted years ago with Humphrey Bogart in Play It Again, Sam, and Tom Hanks managed to be present during the Watergate scandal as well as shake hands with John F. Kennedy in Forrest Gump. Can we be that far away from some clever cinematic techie splicing together hundreds of scenes from John Wayne movies to create Return of the Duke?

What harm could that be? No one ever will die in fantasyland. But it's the real world that scares image experts. Faked photography is not going away, and computers are being used to make fakes nearly impossible in some cases for even the world's leading image analysts to detect.

"What you see isn't necessarily the truth," says Dino A. Brugioni, the founder of the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center and author of Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation. While no credible imagery expert is saying that NASA has pulled a Capricorn One, it is clear that with today's cutting-edge technology governments have the capability to dupe an entire nation, Brugioni says. "The technology is there and it's only going to get worse."

Brugioni has spent years debunking faked photographs, such as when he informed media heavyweight Ted Koppel that the Nightline team had been misled by a bogus film showing a two-reactor meltdown at Chernobyl. Only one had gone into meltdown. In 1978 he was the one who discovered aerial photos of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination complex, which showed Nazi prisoners being marched to the gas chamber. They were the real thing.

"Communists, Ghosts, Monsters and Aliens" is the title of a chapter in Brugioni's book on fakery. It details the findings of the U.S. Air Force's "Project Blue Book" in 1948 which concluded that hundreds of photos of alleged UFOs and many strange phenomena were the result of film defects, soot, grease marks, moisture, lint, lens flare and camera movement. Some of the shots were submitted simply as attempts to dumbfound the experts, such as the photograph of a hubcap tossed into the air.

The Air Force created three categories: hoaxes, insufficient data and rational explanation. But not everything could be explained, and three years ago the CIA admitted that more than half of the unexplained UFO sightings during the 1950s and 1960s eventually were accounted for as observations of secret reconnaissance flights.

Other countries long have used faked photos and photographic manipulation to push their agenda. Russia and Communist China have been frequent offenders. Lately countries in the Middle East also have been dabbling in such deceptions, Brugioni says.