Last week (WTF!) I discussed some photos I’d taken in which an alien appeared.
As well as asking the question, in my blog post, if anyone could explain the mysterious appearance of this alien being, I pasted it on my Facebook page.
This led to quite an interesting discussion.
The mystery was eventually solved by my nephew who sent me a link to a hoax website (museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comments/aliens_among_us).
Apparently, there’s an Android app called Camera 360. Now before you iPhone people get too smug, I understand the same thing was there as well although I’m not sure if the app had the same name.
This app would randomly insert pictures of aliens into your photos without telling you about it.
Once I found out this had happened I promptly uninstalled Camera 360 and put a very critical rating on the app store for it.
So, the first lesson was; don’t install Camera 360. If you do, you won’t be able to trust any photos you take. To me, this was appalling. One commentator, Mark McPherson, was a bit stronger – his response was “More than appalling. Immoral. Unethical. Illegal?”
with which I heartily agree.
I’m not even sure if I used it to take the said photos or whether just having it installed was enough.
The other thing I found was a really interesting response to my posting and facebook had an interesting discussion going for a while.
Of course there were a number of people who jumped straight in and said it was fake based on nothing apart from their close-mindedness.
They couldn’t come up with how it happened and wouldn’t enter into any consideration that there was an explanation other than I was pulling a swifty.
Then there were people who were intrigued and willing to be open to various possibilities.
What was most fascinating was that this demarcation tended to be along gender lines.
This wasn’t absolute as there were a couple of people who crossed over, but the cynical, critical. closed comments were predominantly from men while the openness and willingness to consider options were usually the women.
That’s something to think about.