Saturday, December 1, 2012

"Augmented Reality" : Lying with Pixels

[Onebornfree commentary: this  July 2000 {!!} article, originally brought to my attention by September Clues researcher "Reel Deal", might be one of the most important you ever read, if at the present time you still tend to assume that what you see on the  news or in televised sports events  etc. is actual live video footage, and is in any way  trustworthy  as a  visual record of events as they happen{ed}. By extension, the same applies to any inherent trust you might still have for "still" photographic imagery produced in newspapers and magazines, of course. Here is a quote from the article itself: " the ramifications of this new technology reach beyond satellite imagery. As live electronic manipulation becomes practical, the credibility of all video will become just as suspect as Soviet Cold War photos. The problem stems from the nature of modern video. Live or not, it is made of pixels, and as Livingston says, pixels can be changed." Regards, onebornfree.] 

Lying with Pixels 
 by Ivan Amato 

Seeing is no longer believing. The image you see on the evening news could well be a fake—a fabrication 
of fast new video-manipulation technology.

Last year, Steven Livingston, professor of political communication at George Washington University, astonished attendees at a conference on the geopolitical pros and cons of satellite imagery. He didn’t produce evidence of new military mobilizations or global pandemics. Instead, he showed a video of figure skater Katarina Witt during a 1998 skating competition. 

In the clip, Witt gracefully plies the ice for about 20 seconds. Then came what is perhaps one of the most unusual sports replays ever seen. The background was the same, the camera movements were the same. In fact, the image was identical to the original in all ways except for a rather important one: Witt had disappeared, along with all signs of her, such as shadows or plumes of ice flying from her skates. In their place was exactly what you would expect if Witt had never been there to begin with—the ice, the walls of the rink and the crowd. 

So what’s the big deal, you ask. After all, Stalin’s staff routinely airbrushed persona non grata out of photos more than a half-century ago. And Woody Allen ushered a variation on reality morphing into the movies 17 years ago with Zelig, in which he inserted himself next to Adolf Hitler and Babe Ruth. In films such as Forrest Gump and Wag the Dog, reality twisting has become commonplace. 

What sets the Witt demo apart—way apart—is that the technology used to “virtually delete” the skater can now be applied in real time, live, even as a camera records a scene and instantly broadcasts it to viewers. In the fraction of a second between video frames, any person or object moving in the foreground can be edited out, and objects that aren’t there can be edited in and made to look real. “Pixel plasticity,” Livingston calls it. The implication for those at the satellite imagery conference was sobering: Pictures from orbit may not necessarily be what the satellite’s electronic camera actually recorded. 

But the ramifications of this new technology reach beyond satellite imagery. As live electronic manipulation becomes practical, the credibility of all video will become just as suspect as Soviet Cold War photos. The problem stems from the nature of modern video. Live or not, it is made of pixels, and as Livingston says, pixels can be changed. 

The best-known examples of real-time video manipulation so far are “virtual insertions” in professional sports broadcasts. Last January 30, for instance, nearly one-sixth of humankind in more than 180 countries repeatedly saw an orange first-down line stretched across the gridiron as they watched the Super Bowl. New York-based Sportvision created that line and inserted it into the live feed of the broadcast. To help determine where to insert the orange pixels, several game cameras were fitted with sensors that tracked the cameras spatial positions and zoom levels. Adding to the illusion of reality was the ability of the Sportvision system to make sure that players and referees occlude the virtual line when their bodies traverse it. 

Last spring and summer, as Sportvision and rivals such as Princeton Video Imaging (PVI) in Lawrenceville, N.J,, were airing virtual insertion products, including simulated billboards on walls behind major league batters, a team of engineers from Sarnoff Corp. in Princeton, N.J., flew to the Coalition Allied Operations Center of NATO’s Operation Allied Force in Vicenza, Italy. Their mission: transform their experimental video processing technology into an operational tool for rapidly locating and targeting Serbian military vehicles in Kosovo. The project was dubbed TIGER, for “targeting by image georegistration.” “Just dial in the coordinates and the thing goes,” explains Michael Hansen, a young, caffeinated Sarnoff gadgeteer who can hardly believe he was helping fight a war last year. 

Compared to PVI’s job, the military’s technical task was more difficult—and the stakes were much higher. Instead of altering a football broadcast, the TIGER team manipulated a live video feed from a Predator, an unmanned reconnaissance craft flying some 450 meters above Kosovo battlefields. Rather than superimposing virtual lines or ads into sports settings, the task was to overlay, in real time, “georegistered” images of Kosovo onto the corresponding scenes streaming in live from the Predator’s video camera. The terrain images had been previously captured with aerial photography and digitally stored. The TIGER system, which automatically detected moving objects against the background, could almost instantly feed to the targeting officers the coordinates for any piece of Serbian hardware in the Predator’s view. This was quite a technical feat, since the Predator was moving and its angle of view was constantly changing, yet those views had to be electronically aligned and registered with the stored imagery in less than one-thirtieth of a second (to match the frame rate of video recording). 

In principle, the targeting step could have been hotwired to precision guided weapons. “We weren’t actually doing that in Allied Force,” Hansen notes. “We were just telling targeting officers exactly where Serbian targets were and then they would vector in planes to go strike the targets.” That way the human decision makers could pre-empt flawed machine-made decisions. According to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, TIGER technology was used extensively in the final three weeks of the Kosovo operation, during which “80 to 90 percent of the mobile targets were hit.” 

So far, real-time video manipulation has been within the grasp only of technologically sophisticated organizations such as TV networks and the military. But developers of the technology say it’s becoming simple and cheap enough to spread everywhere. And that has some observers wondering whether real-time video manipulation will erode public confidence in live television images, even when aired by news outlets. “Seeing may no longer be believing,” says Norman Winarsky, corporate vice president for information technology at Sarnoff. “You may not know what to trust.”

The Sublime to the Ridiculous

A crude form of video manipulation already is happening in the satellite imagery community. The weekly publication Space News reported earlier this year that the Indian government releases imagery from its remote-sensing satellites only after defense facilities have been “processed out.” In this case, it’s not real-time manipulation and it’s up front, like a censor’s black marker. But pixels are plastic. It is perfectly possible now to insert sets of pixels into satellite imagery data that interpreters would view as battalions of tanks, or war planes, or burial sites, or lines of refugees, or dead cows that activists claim are victims of a biotech accident. 

A demo tape supplied by PVI bolsters the point in the prosaic setting of a suburban parking lot. The scene appears ordinary except for a disturbing feature: Amidst the SUVs and minivans are several parked tanks and one armored behemoth rolling incongruously along. Imagine a tape of virtual Pakistani tanks rolling over the border into India pitched to news outlets as authentic, and you get a feel for the kind of trouble that deceptive imagery could stir up. 

Commercial suppliers of virtual insertion services are too focused on new marketing opportunities to worry much about geopolitics. They have their eyes on far more lucrative markets. Suddenly those large stretches of programming between commercials—the actual show, that is—become available for billions of dollars worth of primetime advertising. PVI’s demo tape, for instance, includes a scene in which a Microsoft Windows box appears—virtually, of course—on the shelf of Frasier Crane’s studio. This kind of product placement could become more and more important as new video recording technologies such as TiVo and RePlayTV give viewers more power to edit out commercials. 

Dennis Wilkinson, a Porsche-driving, sports-loving marketing expert who became CEO of 10-year-old PVI about a year ago, couldn’t be happier about that. Wilkinson’s eyes gleam when he describes a (near) future in which virtual insertion technology pushes advertisements to the personalized extreme. Combined with data-mining services by which browsers’ individual likes, dislikes and purchasing patterns can be relentlessly tracked and analyzed, virtual insertion opens up the ability to shunt personally targeted advertisements over phone lines or cables to Web users and TV viewers. Say you like Pepsi but your neighbor next door likes Coke and your neighbor across the street likes Seven-Up—the kind of data harvestable from supermarket checkout records. It will become possible to tailor the soft-drink image in the broadcast signal to reach each of you with your preferred brand. 

Just 15 minutes up the road from PVI, Sarnoff’s Winarsky is also glowing—not so much about capturing market share as about the transforming power of the technology. Sarnoff has a distinguished history in that regard; the company is the descendant of RCA Laboratories, which started innovating in television technology in the early 1940s and has given birth to a plethora of media technologies. The color TV picture tube, liquid crystal displays and high-definition TV all came, at least in part, from RCA qua Sarnoff, which has five technical Emmys in its lobby. 

The ability to manipulate video data in real time, he says, has just as much potential as some of these forerunners. “Now that you can alter video in real time, you have changed the world,” he says. That may sound inflated, but after looking at the Katarina Witt demo, Winarsky’s talk of “changing the world” loses some of its air of hyperbole. 

Deleting people or objects from live video, or inserting prerecorded people or objects into live scenes, is only the beginning of the deceptions becoming possible. Pretty much any piece of video that has ever been recorded is becoming clip art that producers can digitally sculpt into the story they want to tell, according to Eric Haseltine, senior vice president for R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale, Calif. With additional video manipulation technologies, previously recorded actors can be made to say and do things they have never actually done or said. “You can have dead actors star again in entirely new movies,” says Haseltine. 

Contemporary shots featuring footage of dead performers have been around for several years. But the Hollywood illusion-craft that, for example, inserted John Wayne into a TV commercial required painstaking, frame-by-frame post-production work by skilled technicians. There’s a big difference now, says Haseltine: “What used to take an hour [per video frame], now can be done in a sixtieth of a second.” This dramatic speed-up means that manipulation can be done in real time, on the fly, as a camera records or broadcasts. Not only can John Wayne, Fred Astaire or Saddam Hussein be virtually inserted into pre-produced ads, they could be inserted into, say, a live broadcast of The Drew Carey Show. 

The combination of real-time, virtual insertion with existing and emerging post-production techniques opens up a world of manipulative opportunity. Consider Video Rewrite technology, which its developers at the Interval Corp. and the University of California, Berkeley first demonstrated publicly three years ago. With just a few minutes of video of someone talking, their system captures and stores a set of video snapshots of the way that a person’s mouth-area looks and moves when saying different sets of sounds. Drawing from the resulting library of “visemes” makes it possible to depict the person seeming to say anything the producers dream up—including utterances that the subject wouldn’t be caught dead saying. 

In one test application, computer scientist Christoph Bregler, now of Stanford University, and colleagues digitized two minutes of public-domain footage of President John F. Kennedy speaking during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Using the resulting viseme library, the researchers created “animations” of Kennedy’s mouth saying things he never said, among them, “I never met Forrest Gump.” With technology like this, near-future political activists conceivably will be able to orchestrate webcasts of their opponents saying things that might make Howard Stern sound like a mensch. 
Haseltine believes video manipulation techniques will quickly be carried to their logical extreme: “I can predict with absolute certainty,” he says, “that one person sitting at a computer will be able to write a script, design characters, do the lighting and wardrobe, do all of the acting and dialog, and post production, distribute it on a broadband network, do all of this on a laptop—and viewers won’t know the difference.” 

The End of Authenticity

So far, the widely witnessed applications of real-time video manipulation have been in benign arenas like sports and entertainment. Already last year, however, the technology began diffusing beyond these venues into applications that raised eyebrows. Last fall, for instance, CBS hired PVI to virtually insert the network’s familiar logo all over New York City—on buildings, billboards, fountains and other places-during broadcasts of the network’s The Early Show. The New York Times ran a front-page story in January raising questions about the journalistic ethics of altering the appearance of what is really there. 

The combination of real-time virtual insertion, cyber-puppeteering, video rewriting and other video manipulation technologies with a mass-media infrastructure that instantly delivers news video worldwide has some analysts worried. “Imagine you are the government of a hypothetical country that wants more international financial assistance,” says George Washington University’s Livingston. “You might send video of a remote area with people starving to death and it may never have happened,” he says. 

Haseltine agrees. “I’m amazed that we have not seen phony video,” he says, before backpedaling a bit: “Maybe we have. Who would know?” 

It’s just the sort of scenario played out in the 1998 movie Wag the Dog, in which top presidential aides conspire with a Hollywood producer to televise a virtually crafted war between the United States and Albania to deflect attention from a budding Presidential scandal. Haseltine and others wonder when reality will imitate art imitating reality. 

The importance of the issue will only intensify as the technology becomes more accessible. What now typically requires an $80,000 box of electronics the size of a small refrigerator should soon be doable with a palm-sized card (and ultimately a single chip) that fits inside a commercial video recorder, according to Winarsky. “This will be available to people in Circuit City,” he says. 

Consumer gear for virtual video insertion is likely to require a camcorder with a specialized image-processing card or chip. This hardware will take signals from the camera’s electronic image sensors and convert them into a form that can be analyzed and manipulated in a computer using appropriate software—much as photo editors at newspapers use Adobe Photoshop and other programs to “clean up” digital image files. A home user might, for instance, insert absent family members into the latest reunion tape or remove strangers they would prefer not to be in the scene—bringing Soviet-style historical revisions right into the family den. 

Combine the potential erosion of faith in video authenticity with the so-called “CNN effect” and the stage is set for deception to move the world in new ways. Livingston describes the CNN effect as the ability of mass media to go beyond merely reporting what is happening to actually influencing decision-makers as they consider military, international assistance and other national and international issues. “The CNN effect is real,” says James Currie, professor of political science at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington. “Every office you go into at the Pentagon has CNN on.” And that means, he says, that a government, terrorist or advocacy group could set geopolitical events in motion on the strength of a few hours’ worth of credibility achieved by distributing a snippet of well-doctored video. 

With experience as an army reservist, as a staffer with a top-secret clearance on the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, and as a legislative liaison for the Secretary of the Army, Currie has seen governmental decision-making and politicking up close. He is convinced that real-time video manipulation will be, or already is, in the hands of the military and intelligence communities. And while he has no evidence yet that any government or nongovernment organization has deployed video manipulation techniques, real-time or not, for political or military purposes, he has no problem conjuring up disinformation scenarios. For example, he says, consider the impact of a fabricated video that seemed to show Saddam Hussein “pouring himself a Scotch and taking a big drink of it. You could run it on Middle Eastern television and it would totally undermine his credibility with Islamic audiences.” 

For all the heavy breathing, however, some experts remain unconvinced that real-time video manipulation poses a real threat, no matter how good the technology gets. John Pike, an analyst of the intelligence community for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C., says the credibility risks are simply too great for governments or serious organizations to get caught attempting to spoof the public. And for the organizations that would be willing to risk it, says Pike, the news folks—knowing just what the technology can do—will become increasingly vigilant. 
“If some human rights organization popped up at CNN with some video, particularly an organization they were not familiar with, I would think that [CNN] would consider that radioactive,” says Pike. Same goes for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). “No responsible director of an established organization would authorize such a thing. And they would fire on the spot anyone caught doing it. The stock-in-trade of NGO policy organizations is that ’we tell the truth.’” 

Even cool heads like Pike, however, concede that the media’s fortress of skepticism has an Achilles heel: the Internet. “The issue is not so much your ability to get fake video on CNN, but to get it online,” he says. That’s because so much Internet content is unfiltered. “This could play into the phenomenon in the news production process where you would not replicate the original report, but you might report that it was reported,” says Pike. And that could cascade into a CNN effect. “These are undoubtedly experiments that will be done,” Pike says. 

The trouble is, says Livingston, it may only take a few such experiments to forever make people question the authenticity of video. That could have enormous repercussions for military, intelligence and news operations. An ironic sociological consequence might emerge: a return to heavier reliance on unmediated face-to-face communication. In the meantime, though, there will undoubtedly be some interesting twists and turns as pixels become ever more plastic.

Ivan Amato is a correspondent for National Public Radio and the author of Stuff: The Materials the World Is Made Of a chronicle of cutting-edge research in materials science. 

Copyright © MIT's Technology Review July/August 2000

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Total 9/11 Video Fakery vs. Richard Hall's Holographic Plane Hypothesis: A Critique - Part 1


The Richard Hall 9/11 Holographic Plane Image Thesis- Video

Youtube link to same video 
[Article update 11/24/12: Last night I was an invited guest on the AbIrato radio show. The subject of my interview was this, my 4 part analysis of the Hall thesis. The mp3 file of that interview can be heard here  N.B. the interview is somewhat marred by an intermittent "Skype" connection, but if you grit your teeth you might be able to make it through the entire thing. Regards, onebornfree.]

[Article update 01/14/13: this article was discussed by myself on Prof.Jim Fetzer's "Real Deal" podcast on 12/28/12.Regards, onebornfree.


*******************************
 This examination is  divided into 4 parts: 

Part [1] Introduction .

Part [2] Minor problems with the  Hall hypothesis, reviewed.

Part [3] The  main problems with the Hall hypothesis.

Part [4] Conclusion


[N.B. although it might appear otherwise, this review is  not intended to be a personal attack on Mr. Richard Hall - who I don't know and have never met. It  is, however, an "attack", or whatever else you might want to call it, on his 9/11 holographic plane image theory as presented in his video-onebornfree]. 

 Introduction - Or,  A Non- Scientist [Myself] "Throws Down The Gauntlet" To  All "Scientific" 9/11 Researchers: 



I first started getting seriously interested in alternative [to the government's] explanations of what happened on 9/11 in about 2003, although, admittedly I had smelt something fishy about it all from day one- I just could not put my finger on exactly what it was. 

In 2003 or so I found the French journalist Thierry Mayssan's site "Hunt The Boeing" -or something like that, which exposed the glaring anomalies in the official story of what  happened at the Pentagon. [ I'd provide a link to it but I am currently unable to find it online- was it taken down?] 

Since that time I have been enthusiastically exploring the ramifications of the various unofficial explanations for what happened on 9/11. 

I have therefor been not an original 9/11 researcher myself so much, but more of a reviewer of others research. As such , I am familiar with all of the major alternative explanations out there to date. 

One characteristic of the various alternative theories I have reviewed to date is the disturbingly high lack of a sound evidentiary review methodology by the various researchers.

For example, speaking as a none scientist [I have no scientific "schooled"credentials], time after time  I have observed  supposedly trained scientists, consistently, entirely ignoring the very  protocols and methodological guidelines that [to me] are so important  in any  serious quest for truth supposedly based on the scientific method, and which would, if consistently employed, enable their research to  be  seriously labeled [ in my own "unscientific" eyes at least], as being " genuine scientific research".

Mr Hall Is No Exception

In this regard, Mr Halls thesis is no exception to that almost complete disregard for basic, common sense scientific procedure . 

Frankly, it continues to amaze me that his research could in any way be taken seriously by other scientists and laymen alike , and that other, decidedly unscientific, "scientific" 9/11 research has perhaps been taken  even more seriously to date than Mr Hall's. 

No Genius

That both Mr Hall and the other various 9/11 "scientific" researchers are taken so seriously by many others worldwide is, to me, an indication of the general severe lack of critical thinking  capability possessed by the average human being- and believe me, I am certainly no genius myself. 

To Be Fair- It's Just "Par For The Course"

But to be fair to Mr Hall, who has a background in electrical engineering [and should therefor be very familiar with standard scientific method], his  ritual violations of basic "common or garden variety" scientific protocol are "par for the course", and ultimately no more egregious than those of other, often  more prominent [at this time] 9/11 researchers who also wear the "scientist" moniker, which , I suppose, is just another way of saying that Mr Hall's research is every bit as unscientific as is theirs , and contains the exact same glaring methodological errors repeated endlessly, ad nauseum, so I guess he is in good company [from his point of view], and has learned his lessons well, if comparison to other "scientific" 9/11 researchers is anything to be cherished, I would guess.

OK, I have now "thrown down the gauntlet" . My aim in this review is to expose the  violations of basic, simple, "common or garden variety" scientific methodology/protocol that I, for one, can all too clearly see in Mr Hall's thesis.

End of part 1 

 Total 9/11 Video Fakery vs.The  Holographic Plane Hypothesis: A Critique -Part 2. 

Total 9/11 Video Fakery vs.The Holographic Plane Hypothesis: A Critique - Part 2.



The Richard Hall 9/11 Holographic Plane Image Thesis- Video

[Article update 11/24/12: Last night I was an invited guest on the AbIrato radio show. The subject of my interview was this, my 4 part analysis of the Hall thesis. The mp3 file of that interview can be heard here  N.B. the interview is somewhat marred by an intermittent "Skype" connection, but if you grit your teeth you might be able to make it through the entire thing. Regards, onebornfree.]

*******************************

Question: Save Time , Examine Major Problems First , Or Present Minor Problems First, Before Major Problems? :

Although I believe I could  save the reader a lot of time by simply reviewing some initial, seriously wrong-headed assumptions of Mr Hall's,  and thereby  quickly disprove  his thesis, I have instead chosen to more or less  stick to the order in which Mr Hall presents his evidence in his video - meaning that I will first address what are possibly only minor concerns,[ tedious as that might seem], and not simply "cut to the chase" and address what I see as major concerns . 

SaveTime? : For readers who  wish to simply  "cut to the chase" out of time management concerns or whatever [I'd hate to bore you] , please go straight to sections 3 + 4 , which is my attempt to address the main problems I see with the Hall hypothesis.

And So, Onward and Upward!

Minor Problems:

1: Data Sets: 

Mr Hall uses 2 sets of alleged "official" radar data [N.B. although that data apparently gives information for both AA Flight 11 and Flight 175, as the majority of Mr Hall's  thesis focuses on a data versus video comparison of the  alleged flight paths of Fl. 175 {2nd "strike" South Tower, or "WTC 2"},  my analysis of Mr. Halls hypothesis will also only address the alleged radar data for Flight 175 and related video sequences ] : 

Hall data source [ a] =   Alleged civilian flight radar data from the National Transportation Safety Board [N.T.S.B.] from a Feb. 7th. 2002 report by Daniel R. Bower Ph.D. :


Fig. 1 above NTSB [ civilian] data source


.. and Hall data source [b] :  Alleged miltary data . Mr Hall states : " this data was downloaded from the internet." 





Fig. 2 above : Halls alleged military flight data for Fl. 175



 Hall Question 1 :  

What steps has Mr Hall taken to verify the authenticity of either/both sets of data? He gives no indication of having taken any steps to even try to authenticate either data set. 

And how does the mere act of downloading a data set from the internet validate that data set? Enquiring minds want to know ! : -) 


Moving on.......  

Mr Hall then proceeded to analyze the two , [unvalidated as authentic but mysteriously accepted as such], data sets. He  then says : 

 " immediately I realised there was a major discrepancy with the 2 paths.The military radar was suggesting that an object was travelling about 1400ft to the right of the official civilian radar. In fact, looking at the points on the miltary flight path, It looked as though the object would have flown past the towers, missing them by well over 1000 ft."

Hall Draws  A Purely Speculative Purple Line! :
He then  proceeds to draw a  purple line [since the rest of that supposed military data was represented by a purple line also, to distinguish that data set from the NTSB  supposed civilian data points shown in red to its right],  from the last  given military data point to an imagined  impact point on WTC 2 . 


He states: "I left both flight paths in the model and drew a line from the last [my emphasis]miltary radar return to the alleged impact point on the tower to complete the military radar path[my emphasis]:



Fig. 3 above : Halls speculative purple line drawn  from the last military data point given, to the face of WTC2 

Hall Question 2: why draw that line at all when there were  apparently NO MORE  military data points  given after that last one? What purpose does this new, entirely hypothetical line serve?

 Is Mr Hall implying that the invisible drone actually flew into the tower ?- if so, then why does he elsewhere state : " In fact, looking at the points on the miltary flight path, It looked as though the object would have flown past the towers, missing them by well over 1000 ft." ?  

Pure Speculation Or , Another Dimension? :

Obviously, the fact of the matter is that the data he found , if it is even genuine, does not contain any reference points beyond where it stops dead, well short of the WTC complex, meaning what, exactly? Did this mysterious, invisible drone just then stop dead in mid flight, or did it just disappear into another dimension, perhaps, only to  continue on the path Mr Hall speculates,  more than 1000 ft. to the side of WTC 2?  The fact of the matter is that the data [if it is even authentic] suggests neither a collision with WTC2, nor a flight past that misses by 1000ft. or more. 



Moving On...... Again:  The "Live" CBS Network Footage Versus the Rest.

Anyhoo, moving on.....the next step in Mr Hall's "analysis" involved comparing the flight paths for Fl. 175  shown in 26 video separate clips he selected for ease of viewabilty characteristics [interestingly, with both original alleged "live" network clips  and post-event released {i.e never broadcast "live"} alleged "amateur" videos, mixed in together so as to be virtually indistinguishable to the uninformed  viewer] , with the revealed flight paths from the two sets of data [red and purple lines] he uses in his 3d computer model. 

After completing that step Mr Hall concludes that all  26 clips he reviewed exactly match the flight path depicted in the NTSB data [represented by the red line in his video].


Hall Question 3: 

Mr Hall gives no indication of having taken any steps to authenticate any of the 26 video clips he uses - what , if any steps were taken by him to independently establish the authenticity of any of the video clips he used in his analysis?


However... Moving On [Again! ]: The Hall Video Clip No. 20 - The CBS Footage: 

 Hall Clip number 20 in his video, is the  original CBS "live" 16 sec. network footage  sequence [often called the "divebomber" sequence, for obvious reasons]:




Importance of CBS "Live" Footage- It's The Longest "Live" Network Sequence :

Many, [including Mr Hall, it appears], are entirely unaware of the importance of the original "live" CBS footage of Fl.175's pre-strike passage [see above video]. 

The fact is, that if you had been watching CBS on the morning of 9/11 and been paying close attention, you would have been amongst the first in the nation to witness alleged Fl.175's onscreen debut, simply because the CBS footage is the longest continual alleged "live" pre- "strike" network sequence , lasting a full 16 sec.s [The next longest is the original "live" NBC "ball" sequence, which is 14 secs long]. 

To reitterate: of the 5 available original alleged "live" network sequences [ CBS {long} CBS {short}, NBC, ABC, FOX ] , the  16 sec. CBS sequence picks up the action earlier than all of  the others, as can be seen in this brief gif file summary of all of the pre-strike network footage, by researcher Simon Shack :




ImageFig. 4 above: [gif taken from "September Clues" by Simon Shack  ] .  See also : http://killtown.911review.org/2nd-hit.html . See also all of the  original archived 9/11 network footage here , and mirrored here .


Importance of The Original Alleged "Live" MSM Footage:

Also, it is worth bearing in mind [ I've already mentioned it , but it bears repeating],  that although Mr Hall does not draw the distinction in his presentation, there are only 5 original alleged "live" pre-strike network video sequences on archive, meaning that all of the other 20+ clips he uses for his analysis were never shown "live" on 9/11 at all, but are what can be termed "after the fact" movies. [Possible exception : CNN footage or other cable network footage - at this time I have not positively identified the sources of all of the clips Mr Hall used].

FACT: The CBS "Live" Footage  of Fl.175's Flight Path Contradicts All Other Original "Live" MSM Sequences [ and Therefor Mr Hall's Red Line] :

The "live" CBS footage of Fl. 175's flight path contradicts  the flight paths shown in all 5 of the other original "live" broadcast network sequences, including the next longest, the NBC sequence,  and consequently, it also contradicts the flight paths shown in both  the civilian and military data sets Mr Hall uses in his very own analysis represented there by his red and purple lines, and, therefor contradicts the flight paths of all of the other videos Mr. Hall reviews as well, meaning that Mr Halls claim that the   civilian data he plotted matches all  of the video sequences he plots against it is incorrect:
Fig. 5  above :Screen shot [1] from Hall's clip 20

Fig. 6 above:  screen shot [2] from Hall's  clip 20:analysis-the red line Hall  uses represents the alleged  NTSB  civilian flight data  and forms the right side of the "V" above, the purple line for the military data forms the left side of the "V"]

Below is screen shot 3  of Hall video data used to support hologram plane theory [Mr Hall has drawn 2 straight lines [purple and red] extending from the bottom of the "V" to the face of WTC2 ] to demonstrate Fl. 175's  alleged final moments, whereas the original CBS footage [i.e. clip 20 in the Hall video] shows the plane image as viewed "live" considerably to the left and below those 2  lines, so that the plane image in the actual CBS footage must make a massive swerve back to the viewers right in order to strike the building[ In this still below, the plane image can be seen directly below the red line that is at a 45 degree angle from the left side of the frame to where it touches the WTC2 image] :
Fig.  7 above:   screen shot 3  of Hall's analysis of the CBS 16 sec. footage- [clip 20 in his analysis], showing the planes image below Hall's data  lines.

                                                                                                                                                         

Fig. 8 above: A close- up  screen shot of the previous fig. 7, taken from clip 20 [ i.e. the  16 sec. CBS "divebomber" sequence] in the Hall analysis.




FACT: Morning and Evening Versions of The NBC "Live"  Footage  Contradict Each Other

The second longest "live" 9/11 network clip was aired by NBC. It is 14 sec.s long [pre-strike].  It is often called "the ball" sequence because the moving object [Fl.175] resembles a ball or disc some of the time. [n.b. This sequence was the also main subject for a previous theory and video presentation by Mr Hall. ]

 However, on the evening of 9/11, NBC also  broadcast an entirely different "live" clip showing Fl. 175's approach to WTC2. That footage entirely contradicts its very own original 14 sec. "live", "ball" sequence! :

Fig. 9 above:  Contradictory NBC live footage: Above left: A still from   NBC's alleged "live" , "the ball" 14 sec. pre-strike sequence. Above right, a still from the NBC 9/11 evening broadcast version of the same event. 
Above- Fig. 10 above : Same network,  same perspective, same plane, 2 flight paths, 2 backgrounds! Left side= NBC "ball" sequence still-shot, right side = NBC evening replay. Neither flight path matches CBS footage.


Above- Fig.11 above: Why was an entire background erased from NBC's evening broadcast?

Below- Simon Shacks video presentation/comparison of the original NBC morning and evening depictions of Fl. 175's approach to WTC2 from which the above 3 screen-shots were taken:


Missing NBC Background Scenery:

Incidental fact to consider :   as well as showing a different flight path from its original "live" version,[above],  the evening NBC broadcast also erased the entire background first seen in the original "live" "ball" sequence it had previously broadcast, when in real life, from that alleged  higher perspective [according to Mr Hall], even more of the opposite shoreline should be visible than can be seen in the later "live" NBC sequence [still-shot above, right side of picture].

Primary fact to consider:  both versions of the NBC footage, as well as contradicting each other, also contradict the Flight path for Fl. 175 shown in the 16 sec. CBS "divebomber" clip. 

Although it might be argued by some [including , apparently, Mr. Hall], that because of a supposed higher viewing angle and perspective for the evening  9/11 NBC broadcast [although I cannot really see much, if any, difference in viewing angle myself],  that the flight path of Fl.175 is actually the same in both original "live"NBC  morning and  evening NBC clips shown here, and  regardless of that debatable perspective issue, if the Hall analysis concludes that two different NBC flight paths still conform to the red line of the alleged civilian data set he uses, obviously, neither NBC  flight paths shown above conform to the path shown in the original CBS "live footage, as in both sets of NBC footage the plane image never makes an appearance  below the red line drawn by Mr. Hall , as the CBS live sequence does, [if it did, obviously, Mr Hall's red line would have had to have been drawn differently, as indeed it should have with regard to Fl.175's flight path as represented by the CBS footage[ clip 20] that he uses].  

As it stands, Mr Hall conveniently ignores the aberration that is the "true" path of Fl. 175, at least as represented by the "live" CBS 16 sec. "divebomber" sequence. 

N.B. : for more glaring examples that directly refute Mr Hall's claim that the flight trajectories for Fl. 175 match each other [and therefor,according to him, match the lines drawn from his data sets], please see Part 4 of this report


End of section [2]


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