With over 15 million views as of this posting, the most popular YouTube UFO video is titled UFO Haiti. Posted in August of 2007, the video created quite a stir and continues to do so. Possibly because many famous UFO cases don’t make it into the mainstream media, and thus not into the major public’s purview. Often UFO videos and pictures get recycled. Someone re-posts them with a new story a year or so later and the image become big again. That is what has been keeping this video alive.
Here is the link to the original video. We had to embed a re-post since the original has disabled embedding.
Back when this video came out, it looked too good to be something someone would make just for fun. However, it becomes increasingly apparent that good special effects is not so difficult to achieve. As software gets cheaper and computers get better, it is easier and easier to produce sophisticated videos such as this. Although, the creator of this video was no amateur.
Many a skeptic’s suspicions about this video were confirmed when it got so popular that the L.A. Times even got involved. After some cyber-sleuthing, they cracked the case and got an admission out of the perpetrator. The following is an excerpt from the story which can be found here.
The 35-year-old Barzolff is a professional animator who attended one of the most prestigious art schools in France and has a decade of experience with computer graphics and commercial animation.
It took Barzolff a total of 17 hours to make both the Haiti and Dominican Republic videos. He did it all by himself using a MacBook Pro and a suite of commercially available 3-D animation programs, including Vue 6. The videos are 100% computer-generated.
The videos, he said, were intended as research for a feature film project he’s been working on with Partizan, the France-based production company responsible for, among others, Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
When contacted to verify the story, “Eternal Sunshine” producer Georges Bermann said it was all true, and that Barzolff was “an absolute genius” who could “make anything look entirely real.”
To prove that he was truly behind the videos, Barzolff agreed to provide the L.A. Times with a new spacecraft video. Called “Proof,” the video depicts a small version of one of the spacecraft floating above a Paris street. As the camera pans over, the viewer sees two elderly women at a cafe, one of whom is holding a remote control device. Humorously, of course, this video makes use of computer graphics as well.
The movie Barzolff is working on for the big screen is about two guys who create a UFO hoax so realistic that it spirals out of their control. “For better or worse,” said Barzolff, who cited being “overwhelmed” by the response to his video as one of the reasons he didn’t want to go public with his name.
Barzolff stressed the videos were not intended as a viral marketing ploy. His movie is still in the idea phase, and he created the hoax strictly as a “sociological experiment” — in other words, just to see what would happen.
What happened far exceeded his expectations.
After he finished producing the videos, he posted them and went to bed. “I thought they would reach perhaps 2,000 people,” he said through Sam.
“When I woke up the next morning there were 70,000 views,” on the Haiti video. “Twenty minutes later it was up to 130,000 views. It grew exponentially from there.”
Barzolff called the results of his experiment “entertaining, thrilling, completely addictive, and a little scary.”
The scary part, he said, was that in spite of the evidence, “many people refuse to believe it’s a hoax.”
You can see the “Proof” video (now titled “Naughty Grannies”) at this link.
If you hadn’t seen the UFO Haiti video prior to reading this story, now you won’t be fooled. You will probably find that if you have friends that are into UFO videos, you will be getting an excited email/text/twitter with one of the links to the video when they discover it. Then you will have to decide whether you want to burst their bubble by sending them a link to this story, or let them live in their UFO bliss for awhile. I should know, it happens to me all of the time.
