We held off on this as long as possible but just couldn’t keep our mouth shut any longer. We really didn’t want to promote the Russell Crowe video because, well, it’s clearly a hoax. But the Russell Crowe video has gathered so much momentum in the media that we had to present our assessment and explain what we think Russell Crowe really captured on film.
Here is how Fox News, a reliable source if we ever saw one [ahem, cough], reported the UFO captured on film .
“A friend and I set a camera [on the balcony] to capture fruit bats rising from Botanic Gardens. This was a big surprise,” Crowe wrote. He then sent his more than 800,000 followers a link to the video, which shows oddly shaped lights apparently hovering over the gardens. Crowe defended the UFO footage “The camera is on a balcony – not behind glass,” he reportedly wrote.
Firstly, understand that the Russell Crowe video is not “time lapse” per se but rather, “timed exposed” as evident by the blurring in the “video”. Below we include the relevant frames because calling it a “video” really doesn’t make much sense. It is a moving object that has blurred with the timed exposure.
Also understand that the perspective has been altered as is evident by the changing “zoom” in each frame. Since Crowe stated that the camera was fixed on his balcony (with no glass between the shot and the UFO), we can deduce that the video has been digitally altered to some degree, in this case, it was zoomed in and possibly cropped.
Then we determine the time of the shot which is pretty easy to figure out – it was either shot in the early morning or near nightfall – you can see the lighting changing as the frames progress.
Next, we jump to Google Earth to examine the area where the video was taken. From that, we can see that the park where the UFO was filmed is really about a mile away from Crowe’s balcony, across a large area of water. Since the object appears in front of the trees in the park, we know that the object passed between Crowes’s balcony and the park. What lays between Crowe’s balcony and the park? Water.
So how do we analyze and solve this mystery UFO video? As with any mystery, we must first take all our facts and put the entire event in context. Imagine what the blurred image would look like if it were not blurred. It is fairly evident that it has a red light at top, some sort of smaller vertical piece running down below the red light, with a yellow light (or reflection) located at the bottom. It also has some sort of angled surface that attaches to the top and angles downward towards the left. What could this possibly be?
Let’s summarize the facts. It is a blurred moving object, tall with a red light on top and a yellow light (or reflection) on bottom, and between Crowe’s balcony and the park (remember the large body of water). What does the picture below look like?
Yep, it’s a sailboat passing by on the water between Crowe’s balcony and the park. The red light on top is standard equipment on sailboats (we would have seen the green light had the sailboat been sailing out of the bay) and the mast rigging is fairly evident.
We hate to say this, but Crowe almost certainly understood what the object was. Again, look at the facts. It was released right before one of his movies (a movie that Russell Crowe has openly complained was not promoted enough) and the raw footage was not released but instead, a digitally altered version that was zoomed and cropped. And it was released from a brand-new YouTube account which leaves Crowe room to weasel out of it if things go south. It screams hoax all over it. Or maybe it hints at stupidity…
Here are all of the “video frames”.