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On
November 8th, 2005, this picture was posted on the Coast To Coast
website. From the description supplied by image submitter Michael
Rippie,
"Andy
Price said levitation was not possible and I said it was. For proof he
demanded I levitate myself off the ground for 60 seconds. I said that
was to easy as I am only 225 lb. I told him to keep an eye on the 7
thousand lb rock. I raised the rock up 4 feet off the ground and began
to move it up the hill. Naturally he could not believe his eyes and
while jabbering about needing proof or no one would believe him he
raised his camera and took this picture."
"I said picture or not
no one will believe you. Still, he insisted I send this to you. You can
call it Rippie's believe it or not, floating Rock. Andy wonders if the
picture can be used for proof of what he saw."
To see the page on C2C, go
here. |
There were some responses already posted with the
image when
I saw it. Two basically said it was an optical illusion. Another said
the shadow was faked.
Well, I took a good look at this picture in some image editing
software, doing gamma adjustments and the like and really could tell
much. The image is too small and is highly compressed (almost 20:1).
Very little is any detail can be seen in the shadow. The artifacts from
jpeg compression making zooming in almost useless. But all is not lost.
Just look at the shadows. If this rock is indeed floating in the air,
then why is it's shadow to the right of the rock when all the shadows
of the plants, and indeed on the rock itself, are to the left?
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This
is a gamma lightened image. I also removed the pixelation artifacts
caused by the excessive jpeg compression. As you can see, the shadow
doesn't look like a simple black blob that was "photoshop'ed" into the
image. |
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If
this is indeed the shadow of the rock, it's larger than the rock
itself. Tracing lines form the shadow to and past the rock reveals the
location of the light source. But obviously there is no light source at
that location. |
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Zooming
into a few select location you can see the shadows are actually on the
left sides of the objects in the scene. In fact, the REAL shadow of the
rock can also be picked out.
Yellow outlines the object.
Green outlines the shadow.
Blue follows the shadow back to the light source.
As you can see in all three cases the shadow lines point to a light
source (the Sun) as being to the right. This is inconsistent with the
lower dark area being the shadow of a levitating rock. |
The conclusion is pretty clear. This is not a
levitating
rock, unless the levitator can also affect light and shadows at the
same time. The most likely explanation is that this is merely a
coincidental optical illusion. At first glance it was difficult to not
see a floating rock and shadow. The photographer was probably unaware
of the illusion until reviewing the images later.
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