Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files premiers tonight (Thursday, July 15th) on Syfy. SciFiChick.com was able to participate in a conference call with stars Ben Hansen (team leader and former FBI agent), Bill Murphy (lead scientist and investigator) and Executive Producer John Brenkus.
Here are some Q&A highlights from the call:
Today, someone with their own software can fake UFO and paranormal events. How much do you scrutinize to determine if you’re investigating a hoax?
Bill Murphy: …If you kind of know the software and you know how it’s done, spotting it really isn’t too difficult. There’s some pretty sophisticated material out there. And a lot of times it isn’t for the intention that somebody would create it just to deceive others.
But sometimes you have an artist that wants to put his work out there and gauge the response of the public as to you know how good he is modeled the object. And that’s okay that people do that, you know they may create UFOs, but there are UFO’s over Haiti models that you know kind of sparked this whole new wave of irregular shaped UFOs have been a lot of fun to look at.
But you know you can spot things. It’s how much time somebody wants to take in creating it is up to that person. Most people that put them out there are going to be students or they’re going to be you know somebody that’s trying to break into the field.
And they will spend a reasonable amount of time to create it and there will be flaws that you can spot whether its flaws in the composite or flaws in you know shadow placement. You know there are things that you can kind of pick up on fairly quickly.
What’s the challenge with the tools you have in the field to spot something that could be faked?
Bill Murphy: Okay, well one of the criteria that we have… is a strong eye witness. And so if there are multiple witnesses, and in some cases that we’ve investigated, you know many, many dozens of witnesses. And that makes for a really strong case because you’re talking about something that is not just a piece of video, that a service with the person who – where they shot it but something that you know physically is there that other witnesses have come forth and said they’ve seen.
And there could be 911 calls or news reports or you know whatever it takes, reporting an object or a sighting or some sort of event that’s happened. And those are strong cases, so the video is bolstered by multiple eye witnesses or if there are limited eye witnesses then there’s a credibility you have to look at.
You know what are the motivations for this video being posted and if we get there we really don’t pull any punches to try to replicate the video. So the challenges are something that I don’t think we’ve had stop us. Generally we try to stop at nothing once we’re there to demystify the video. I mean we stop at nothing. Really extreme stuff and it’s a lot of fun.
John Brenkus: Yeah, let me just jump in real quick. I think in terms of you know thinking that someone just created the clip you know on their computer, that’s part of the debate and discussion, well is it someone who just created an effect. Because we’re all at this point, the audience is pretty savvy at being able to spot it. So the three criteria that we have set up, is the footage actually compelling? You know, does it have credible eye witnesses and it is something that can be testable eliminates a lot of cases that you say well it was just created on a PC.
I think you know the people behind this show and the audience look at these clips in an intelligent manner. I think that what you’ll see is the cases that we investigate aren’t ones that you just automatically say well it must be CG. Because it doesn’t get that far in our process if you can eliminate it that quickly.
Ben Hansen: And then let me add to what Bill’s saying. When we do come up against those cases that are very difficult, either they’re done very well in CG, we’re just not sure, that’s where I like to use my experience and focus on the poster or the witness who shot this video or provided this photo.