The Camera Does Lie

Let’s face it: the Internet is a wonderful place. Where else can you read all the works of William Shakespeare without having to pull a huge book off your shelf? Or catch up on the news from around the world with only a few clicks? See eagles snatching children! Witness men flying with homemade bird wings! Cheer for pigs that are saving goats!

Whoa — if you think those last three sound sketchy, you should. There’s a whole world of video con-artistry out there, and the Internet loves it. Besides ordinary pranksters and video artists, corporations are even getting into the act, faking videos to sell products.

What’s a trusting person to do? Learn to call out the fakes.

Ye Olde Fakeroo

There’s nothing new about faking images. Falsified pictures of ghosts, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and monsters have been around for years.

In the 19th century, “spirit photography” captured the public’s imagination. Clever photographers created portraits of living people alongside ghostly versions of their deceased relatives or friends. (Fakers still love to record “paranormal activity” with cell phones and handheld video recorders.) “Photographing” UFOs became popular after World War II.

Perhaps the most famous fake photograph was taken in 1934 at Loch Ness in Scotland. Gray and grainy, it supposedly shows the head and neck of Nessie, the dinosaur-like monster of the lake. And you can still view the first moving images of “Bigfoot,” shot in 1967, on YouTube.

Fooled You Once

While some people still debate whether the Bigfoot film is real, it looks plenty bogus compared to today’s slick videos. The best modern fakers spare no expense or sleight of hand.

Several years ago, a video of a pig saving a drowning goat (all together now: awwwww!) made the rounds on the Internet. The 30-second scene took days to make. Legions of animal trainers who were sworn to secrecy participated. An elaborate track was built for the pig to follow in the water. With millions of views, the really good videos like that one — go viral, spreading like wildfire and keeping the whole world guessing.

One person who’d rather not guess is Rhett Allain, an associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana University and author of the Wired Science blog Dot Physics. Allain enjoys analyzing online videos. He smacks down those that don’t live up to the rigors of physics and obsesses about those he suspects but can’t pin down.

Allain explains that when he looks at fishy videos, he asks, “Is this video physically possible?” Then he uses “known physics models to see if I could come up with a way to get the video to be real.”

Fooled You Twice

A viral video in 2012 showed an eagle snatching up a small child in its claws, then dropping the kid safely on the ground. Very convincing — until you do the math.

The best way to start your analysis is to ask questions like, “Could an eagle lift and carry a child that size?” The larger the bird is, the larger its wingspan must be to get it off the ground and keep it airborne. Doing a little research, Allain discovered that a golden eagle must have a 7.5-foot (2.3 meter) wingspan just to lift its own body weight of about 14 pounds (6.4 kilograms) plus perhaps one small prey. If the child in the video weighs about 28 pounds (13 kilograms), the eagle is lifting almost twice its own weight. This would require a wingspan of about 33 feet (10 meters)!

In a video like this one, Allain also measures the way things move, accelerate, and fall to see if they obey natural laws. He asks more questions: At what angle does the child fall? How does the child move through the air as the eagle lifts them up. Does the child accelerate constantly through the fall as a falling object should? In the eagle video, none of the answers adds up.

Fake Shake

One of Allain’s favorite techniques is to analyze camera shake — you know, the quaking that occurs in a video when the person filming it holds the camera in their hand instead of mounting it on a tripod.

Allain explains, “To make editing easier and the video more realistic, some people use a tripod for their camera to record the video. They then add fake shake to make it look like the camera was handheld.” Voilà — the jerking and unsteady motion of a camera in the hands of someone who is walking. A software program lets you graph camera shake by analyzing the movement of the background. If there’s a pattern to the jumpiness, it’s a fake. Real camera shake is random.

Of course, there are also some simple common-sense ways to spot an imposter just by looking.

One fact to check is continuity. Is everyone wearing the same outfit throughout a video that is supposedly a single take?

Faux Flight

As technology improves and fakers become more determined (with bigger budgets), it gets harder to weed out the hoaxes. Sometimes, a little old-fashioned research goes a long way.

People loved to be entertained — and fooled. We are drawn to amazing feats and want to believe they’re real. With a willing audience, and social media making it easier to reach us, there’s no reason to think the fakers will quit anytime soon.