Photo of strange airborn animal?
This photo has been making the rounds online on Spanish and French "paranormal" blogs. Is it a bird? A toy? An insect? Or something much much... freakier? Loren Coleman weighs in with a bit of Fortean skepticism at Cryptomundo. "Carnivorous flying mammal?"
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To my eyes it looks like a wasp, very close to the camera lens.
I have to second the wasp...
I agree with Ito. It looks like a wasp.
I'd say what I see there but the Pope has declared a Holy War on my perception.
Wall walker? :)
That's Kermit, I tells ya...
i'm thinking grasshopper/cricket.
Donald duck Naked?
Hmmm.... I'd say either it's Watto from the Phantom Menace or Tinkerbell...
One definition of "cryptid" may as well be "a creature that defies all attempts at camera focus." Without any further context for the photo I'll go with the wasp guess also.
Its a bird with a long shutter speed. As the wings end the downstroke, they dos not move as fast as when in full range motion, making what appear to be legs. You can see it at the top of the stroke as well.
The head looks reptilian with open jaws. Maybe a budgie? Those might not be it's legs. It might have picked up a bit of ribbon or other material.
It´s very clear, it´s just a bird.
The camera was not fast enough to capture the flight and the bird seems to have four wings. Just an optical ilusion.
Sorry.
Clearly a mynock.
Hmmm....
http://www.clipartof.com/details/clipart/13773.html
Clearly a rogue piece of tyrannosaur clip art.
http://dinosaurfanfiction.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/raptor-jesus.jpg
Squirrel?
@takuan goon goon goon
I'm thinking flamengo. Though it might have escaped from a secret facility carrying out hideous genetic experiments and will tranmit a lethal, unstoppable virus as soon as it will find a victim to mutilate with its razorsharp claws and beak.
It definitely looks like a sock monkey to me.
http://www.applesaucekids.com/sound%20effects/horse_whinney_2.mp3
Looks like a bird (duck) without feathers... Those people are harming animals to make money???
Oh and I agree with the long exposure shot, that's probably why it's so blurry.
It's one of these flying monkey toys
Bird with lots of motion blur fuzzing its outline and smoothing out the feather details.
Of course birds are the last lineage of dinosaurs, so if someone wants to insist it's a dino I won't argue with that.
Looks like a sock monkey
One of the Olson twins?
Enhance.
Why, it's Terry the pterodactyl from Pee Wee's Playhouse:
Photo taken in Argentina: parrot!
I have to disagree with #11 and #13, who suggest that it is a bird whose wings were captured at the top and bottom of their movement, creating the illusion of legs.
If you look at the top wings, you can see that the blur can be approximated to blurry triangles. These blurry triangles have the same blurriness all the way through.
If, as you suggest, we are seeing the result of the wings being slowest, and thus only visible, at the top (and bottom), the upper blurry triangles would be most visible at the very top, and then become smoothly completely invisible as they went down. Instead, we see a patch of uniform blurriness, below which we see nothing. Therefore, I have to say that these top triangles represent the entire motion of the wings. Therefore, only the top blurs are wings. Therefore the bottom blurs are legs or something.
(Notice also that the place on the wings where they are closest to the body is quite dark, which makes sense since it doesn't move as great a distance, and this dark area is consistent with the range of motion that the blurry wings imply).
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/01/13/photon-gating-makes.html
Definitely a bird - I've got a picture of a bird I took on a recent vacation that bears strong similarities to this picture, taken with a consumer-grade 10MP digital camera. The bird in flight just moves faster than the camera can process.
It seems to be a bit of paranormal disinformation.
Know yee nothing of the world, this is obviously a Fiji Mermaid.
Your all nuts thinking its a bird or a wasp or any other type of insect.
Its clearly a baby dragon.
its a flying Woot monkey. its rare to see them in the wild.
Is that not just a bird with it's wings in both the down *and* up possition due to the longer exposure? No? Ok then... ALIENS OMGWTFZORZNOOOOOOOOOOO!
It's a streetlight.
http://www.jprtrading.com/images/med_img_slingmonkey.jpg
looks suspiciously like a slingshot monkey toy caught in flight
It's a grasshopper. Also, the capthcas (sp?) are stupidly hard.
It looks like the mythical Mexican Ornitorrinco to me...
A new incarnation of Elvis?
eep. Hate to be the only one not being silly, but I'll give a very confident "wasp".
That's an airplane parking area, and I'll vouch that the stingy little buggers LOVE making a nest in parked planes.
Give an extra bit of adrenaline to your preflight inspection, knowing that the "remove pitot cover", "stow chocks in luggage locker", or "test prop belt for tautness" might result in a face full of aggressive wasp.
It's pink with dark under the rear half of its wings, it has really long legs and it has a heavy, curved beak with a black spot at the end? Looks like a flamingo to me.
#36 beat me to the cross-pollination of the memes, darn it.
It's Marcus Schrenker
I really gotta go with flamingo too. In any event, it is without any doubt at all a bird.
It's clearly trying to find Cory's 3/4 in. connectors...
It's a blurry picture of a Macaw.
Based on the location, the language, and the culture it's got to be the Virgin Mary.
I cant believe noone has seen yet that this is the propellor blur of the airplane that is clearly in the picture. The nose of the prop is clearly defined in the middle and the 'wings', there are three, are actually the propeller blades.
Kay, next.
Obviously it is a carnivorous flying mammal.
How did you guy not notice that it's Watto from Star Wars?
I know I'm not the only Star Wars geek on here.
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/adc/10227314a_b~Watto-Posters.jpg
http://www.wizards.com/starwars/images/starwars/watto_2.jpg
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/100/307177294_ccda5a6924.jpg?v=0
DJRevMoon, your Intervention is scheduled for 2 o'clock, if you can't make it please let your sponsor know.
Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka.
To those who still think that it just has its wings and the up and down positions (captured in both positions by the slow camera): have you watched birds fly?
Most birds fly by flapping their wings from pretty high up to about mid-way, or slightly lower, as shown in this diagram, or this one.
Indeed, lots of searching Google Images finds plenty of examples of blurry wings from high to mid-range, and plenty of photos of birds in mid flight with their wings high. None at all with their wings anywhere near as low as these would be. Birds just don't flap their wings so that they end up vertically downwards.
The blurry images of the small birds (which this appears to be) are the most striking, but while bigger birds often have a lower swoop, I've never seen one flap with their wings all the way down vertically. Try to imagine that blurry image actually flying, and you'll see that it's impossible.
The legs make me think it's some kind of grasshopper or locust.
Mini-Pterosaur
It is a velociraptor in the process of traveling through time. There, mystery solved.
Clearly a dragonite. http://guidesarchive.ign.com/guides/12045/images/dragonite.gif
I fail to see how it could possibly be anything else.
It's a sock-monkey gremlin stuffing skeins of wool in the jet's engine
The instant I saw the picture I thought it was a grasshopper caught in flight. Grasshoppers fly with their long back legs extended, and if you caught one close to the camera and out of focus, it would look just like that. For comparison, see: http://www.acclaimimages.com/_gallery/_pages/0272-0606-2606-5202.html Sorry about the text overlay, but it's the best image I could find. Blur the image and it would look almost exactly like the picture in question.
rubber chicken
Actually the shape is extremely similar to that of the heron in flight here. If you make the shape blurry, they are almost identical.
I think it's a heron or similar big bird, but it looks so weird because the blurriness has distorted our sense of the bird's depth, so we see it as flatter than it really is. Squinting to make the heron blurry, though, I find that the shape is just about the same.
I can't explain the hue, though.
My guess is praying mantis.
I know what it is!
Swamp gas. Clearly swamp gas.
I believe it to be Flat Eric.
#51, I thought the same thing. It's a prop.
Maybe the Montauk Monster finally expupated.
The virgin Mary, with child.
Quetzel bird?
http://www.claywatson.com/proof2.html
or maybe its the elusive pipsquack....bird.
http://www.pipsquack4wheelers.com/80-38_tom_jerry_and_pip_squaker0.gif
They are notoriously hard to photograph.
I say it's a Mahar.
...It's an out-of-focus wasp, kids. I've actually seen one at nearly this same angle on at least two webcams in the past, one of them being one of the old KSC VAB webcams from about 10-11 years ago.
...On a side note, those of you who've seen the "mysterious rods" that the MUFON morons were hyping about a few years ago? Those are gnats and/or mosquitos flying so fast they distort the slower CCDs of the camcorders that shot the frames.
I'm sorry but I've seen many episodes of Star Trek and this is clearly Flat Eric out of synch... either space or time.
Look him up and tell me I'm not right.
It's a Charmander!
It's a bird that caught a frog by the head.
Sock monkey
Slingshot monkey, definitely.
Anonymous #35 has it - baby dragon FTW.
I thought it was a seagull getting hit by a plane propeller. But its obvious whatever animal a "chicken" McNugget comes from.
It's a bird carrying a frog.
Mothman!
Holy crap! I just saw The Mothman Prophecies last night -I think that's him! Run, run for your lives!
-Carrie
Hey, it's one of those fairies from Torchwood!
So that's what ever happened to the artist formally known as prince. I mean I heard he was hard to photo these days but congrats on the photo