UFO Fleet Captured Leaving Moon: Video - Facts

Story:

Large Group of UFO’s Leaving the Moon

Other Versions

1. Astonishing video showing UFO fleet taking off from the moon

2. VIDEO: UFO ‘fleet’ captured leaving moon

3. Massive Amount of UFO’s Leaving the Moon? Shocking Video!!

Analysis:

An ‘astonishing’ video shared heavily online, also reported by few media outlets, claims to show a large group of UFOs taking off from the Moon’s lunar surface. Alien conspiracy theorists suggested it is evidence of extraterrestrials living on our moon, and some even prompted the claims of Alien base on the lunar surface. Thankfully, the UFO claims on Moon shown in the video are not facts.

Origin of Story

On 13 November 2016 YouTube user Geri Vigil published the video in question with a title ‘Large Group of UFO’s Leaving The Moon‘. The brief capture of full moon surface shows a number of ‘blobs’ appearing to move away from the bottom-left area of the Moon’s horizon. UFO blogger Scott C Waring suggested the objects are clearly in orbit around the moon and may be there to protect the moon from humanity. He also added that the ‘UFO fleet’ may be owned by a species that’s not so friendly about sharing. The paranormal UFO claims soon garnered popularity and was also mentioned in few news outlets.

Actual Facts

Although there’s blob like appearance on the moon’s outer surface on bottom left corner in the video, note that there is also a lot of shimmering seen in that area. Sceptics rubbished the UFO theory and suggested it could simply be an optical illusion. Photographer John Biondo explained that the blob-like appearance seen in the video are not UFOs, but the result of a common phenomenon called Chromatic Aberration often visible when you look at the Moon’s edge. Chromatic aberration is an issue that happens quite often as we take images of high contrast scenes, when a lens fails to bring all wavelengths of colour to a focus at the same point. Chromatic aberration manifests itself as red, green, blue, purple, magenta or yellow colour ‘fringes’ along boundaries that separate dark and bright parts of the image. In viewing a distant object in space like Moon, the fringes due to chromatic aberration usually appear throughout the circular surface boundary of the Moon. In the video description, the user Geri Vigil mentioned that she created the video with the YouTube Video Editor, and more importantly, in the video we only see the left corner portion of the Moon zoomed-in (area with alleged UFO presence). So there’s also the possibility that the footage was edited to show mysterious UFO appearance.

Picture Suggesting to Show UFO Fleet Captured Leaving Moon, Video — UFO Fleet Captured Leaving Moon, Video

To conclude, the claims that the video shows a large group of UFOs taking off from the Moon are just hoaxes; the fringy appearance is most possibly due to a common effect (issue) called chromatic aberration.