Are the photos of Borneo's monster snake real?
My unexpert analysis concludes that these photos of a 100-foot long river snake from Borneo are as phony as a politician's smile.
Grainy images of a large snake in Borneo's Baleh River have some locals afraid the mythical Nabu snake is back. Is Borneo's 100-foot river snake—reported yesterday by London's Telegraph and captured in photographs (one appears to the left)—real?Are the photos of Borneo's monster snake real?Like the Loch Ness Monster, countless UFOs and Bigfoot, it's hard to say, says Hany Farid, a computer science professor at Dartmouth University, because it's been captured in such low resolution. "It's as if you took a blood sample," he says, "threw away 99 percent of it and asked me to do a forensic analysis."
UPDATE, Feb 26: In the comments, Fromage used the excellent image search site TinEye to find the original snake-free photo (left). Congrats for exposing the hoax, Fromage!
UPDATE, Feb 27: Rhonda Roland Shearer says: Please see our recent post: http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/. We note that you credited Fromage with discovery of the source photo (judged from his Feb 26th comment) but Nuno of nunoxei.com posted his investigation on Feb 25th.
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It's completely obvious that it's a boat.
There is no need for any "analysis" Anyone who has ever looked out the window of a plane can tell that.
Amazing how that snake looks just like the wake from a boat. Clearly we're dealing with an extremely intelligent snake for it to be able to disguise itself like that.
Video is an option on pretty much any camera these days. The tricky thing for forgers on a budget is all that travelling matte stuff on a moving camera for video jiggery pokery.
Sure, it's a giant snake that leaves prop wash and a bow wake trailing behind it.
If you look close, you can even see the little water skier waving at the airplane.
P-Shopped I'd bet, the wake doesn't even look right for anything moving through water, animal or boat.
But can it regurgitate a little hippo?
the 2nd picture is even worse. looks like a boom floating on the water.
It's real you can tell.
Does anyone else see the image of Jesus floating on the river with the snake?
The image file is not photoshopped, but edited by apple software in English US:
Copyright 2007 Apple Inc., all rights reserved.
enUS
This is the worst p-shop ever. I cant believe anyone is fooled by this.
To me it looks like scaled up tiny snake. The wake is too lively and far between for an animal that large. It would be straighter and calmer looking from this distance.
gives me an idea...what would a roll of cheap cloth or plastic towed behind a power boat look like?
Yes, there is a breeding population of 100-foot long, quarter-ton water snakes in populated areas of Borneo. No, they don't leave corpses behind when they die, and no, no one has ever caught one. No, no one has ever accidentally killed one. No, no one has ever found one of their eggs. And yes, the entire breeding population of these snakes sustain their 100-foot, 500lb metabolisms on the small fish that swim in rivers.
Duh.
Can't be real. Too many USB ports.
FAKE!
Using the great tool "TinEye" you can see that is a fake.
The original picture can be seen here :
http://sl.iciba.com/viewthread-33-379175-1.shtml
(Could be the Congo river)
The TinEye link :
http://tineye.com/search/48aadefac26549bbf2bfcbd629708aacf3fa4f65
It's not Dartmouth Univsersity -- it's Dartmouth College!
Yes, it's the Congo River.
http://tour.rednet.cn/c/2007/12/29/1406947_17.htm
And all the links with this picture source are Chinese.
It's been shooped, I can tell by the whoops and from having seen some shoops in my time.
Yep, its fake - they don't let the real pictures out because they don't want you to believe. Wondering where the missing persons go, it eats the souls as well...
If something that massive were propelling itself through the water in that way, it would be kicking up huge waves and disturbing the water a lot more than this.
Think how heavy a snake that size would be, and how much water it would have to push to get moving.
Fromage pretty much annihilated this one.
But man do I ever want it to be true.
Obviously a fake. The second picture is just ridiculous. It's like the snake is dead and floating on the water surface. The first picture looks like it had more thought put into it. The second one did not have the look of something alive.
And the second picture is one of the 2002 photoshop contest of Worth1000.com called "Cryptozoo 2"
http://www.worth1000.com/cache/gallery/contestcache.asp?contest_id=305&display=photoshop
The autor of this 2002 picture is a girl called "SiIkenFairy"
I'm saddened that the link went to Scientific American. I'm old enough to remember Sci Am as a magazine that didn't suck.
@# 7
Grimshaw... as in the "huskies" hockey? As in mile zero motor inn? As in "hey lets drive to Fairview to watch the drag races?"
And yeah - thats a boat. Or a photo-shop. But its not real.
This goes here: www.thatsnotfake.com/exposed_fakes/
I think that's a photo from the recent sewage leak into the San Francisco Bay. Let's just say that I recognize that snake since it barely flushed.
scale: the average tree in the forest is 40-60feet tall, this monster would be at least 500 feet long - it's so pathetic - somebody pay someone good at this to really get us going would you?
You guys remind me how gorillas used to be ficticious, just 150 years ago. I'm not saying I believe in the 100-foot snake- I don't know. But I believe that some animals, reptiles, maybe squids and some plants, don't have a DNA-defined adult size, and grow until they die. Maybe in remote Borneo a huge snake could feed on pigs and cannibals long enough to grow unbelievably huge. Probably not this one, tho. I, too, think it's phony, but I'm not gonna pretend that I know.
150 years ago, there weren't nearly as many people with cameras.
Also, 150 years ago, gorillas weren't 100 feet long carnivores.
The number of conspiracy photos and videos is inversely proportional to the number of people with high definition cameras.
You guys remind me how gorillas used to be ficticious, just 150 years ago.
Fictitious to who?
Gorillas definitely existed 150 years ago, and I'm certain gorillas were very real to any people living even somewhat near them.
Titanoboa cerrejonensis required warmer weather,
therefore OMG GLOBAL WARMING!!!
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-snake5-2009feb05,0,6550292.story
The Borneo giant snake picture is fake.
Therefore, global warming is a hoax. Phew! Logic solves every puzzle.
I'm off to Boston with a car full of plague vaccine now. First man past the Missus Hip wins two Internets!
Why is this question even being asked? It's obvious that the giant snake is real. It could have time traveled here from the past, when there were snakes like this. A spacetime rift must have opened, enabling a bit of the past to slip through. It was probably caused by an excess amount of chaos in the ethers. Or perhaps it's an aspect of nature, like a river god!
with all those high res military satellites snooping over the whole planet and thousands of bored spooks interpreting imagery, if we have mega-cryptofauna, someone would have talked by now.
I think the funniest thing about this thread is the people posting about how the picture obviously shows a boat, rather than being a fairly straightforward (and in my opinion obvious) Photoshop (or a real monster snake). I can appreciate solid skepticism, but posting complete nonsense just because it's more "logical" than the first theory is almost as lame as being taken in by the lazy 'shop in the first place.
@mdh
ME: "You guys remind me how gorillas used to be ficticious, just 150 years ago."
MDH: "Fictitious to who?"
ME: "Europeans."
MDH: "Gorillas definitely existed 150 years ago, and I'm certain gorillas were very real to any people living even somewhat near them."
Me too! But if they catch a 100-foot snake tomorrow, I'll just say "what do you know about that!" while you "science minded individuals" eat crow, because you're so sure it was fake. Like the gorilla. Cameras didn't make the gorilla real.
"MY unexpert analysis concludes that these photos of a 100-foot long river snake from Borneo are" undetermined in a world that is neither black or white nor true or false. Sometimes it is remains gray forever!
ARCANE12
Geez, you're all suckers. Obviously the giant snake has been 'shopped *out* of the image at TinEye.
Oops, didn't see Jeff's comment #36. Some of us are hip to it!
I wish the internets had been around when Nessie and Roswell were big.
It just goes to show how far we've evolved skeptically in just 50 years. There's hope for humanity.
Dat@41
Win!
The snake is real, it's clearly the RIVER that's fake.
Hey, that thing is phony!
Holy crap! Tin eye is awesome!
Troofseeker, the other people are willing to make a series of conclusions based on what we know of megafauna and other information. Not making a conclusion that's likely from the evidence simply so you won't be at risk of being shown to be wrong isn't productive.
I love tineye.
I know a guy who swears many hundreds of people have stolen his image of the full moon thanks to tineye - never mind the different clouds and slightly different phases.
JoshuaZ, my handsome friend,
I'm just trying to pry open some minds to the concept that just because they've never seen something doesn't mean it can't be. Like a giant snake. Many of these guys believe that there used to be some very large reptiles. Isn't that something you "know" about megafauna? I used the example of the gorilla earlier, whom scientists were once quite sure was a mere myth.
I turn a lot of stones, and most of them have nothing more than salbugs under them. Dude, I'm not afraid of being wrong. You learn a lot more when things go wrong than when they go right. Note that I don't call myself truthKnower. All we really have is our perceptions of what our senses bring us.
Man, you guys are so gullible. It's patently obvious that the photo Fromage 'found' had been doctored to remove the snake. They don't want us to know about our evil reptilian overlords! David Icke was right all along!
ssssssstops sss taking my sss picturessss and posting on netssss I sss only tell you oncessss I not sssssign releasssssse formsssss
Troofseeker, you are correct that it isn't necessarily true that it "can't be." It is however, vanishingly unlikely. Moreover, the gorilla example as already explained to you is bad because we have a much more detailed understanding of the world now then we did 200 years ago, and the claimed snake is orders of magnitude larger than a gorilla.
Josh Z,
Maybe I watch too much sci-fi. I even write it. But there were such giant snakes in the Jurassic period, right? And snakes survived the last extinction. Borneo being one of the least explored regions on Earth, and looking at the density of that jungle, and the huge volume of life that it would support, I can see the possibility of snakes larger than any we've ever seen. 100 feet? I have the same doubts as you. But I'm not gonna pretend to KNOW about things in places I've never been to.
Thank you for being polite.
Not a fake, I can tell. Trust me.
Sure, nobody ever finds new stuff anymore. Our superior technology has found every animal bigger than a breadbox. ^-^
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/india-news/google-earth-reveals-afghanistans-unknown-historic-sites_10074536.html
Eyeballs and indexing again...
On a related note, there are two different birds living on my property that officially do not live this far north. I have mentioned this to local authorities of this, and they have told me that I am wrong... without checking ...because the books say so... I informed the birds of this, but they don't seem to care!
Ok ok.
Nuno of nunoxei.com posted the same conclusion, about the Congo river picture, one day before I did the same.
Numo is the first. Bravo.
Hey Fromage, your ways still nuked the hell outta mine so kudos for the SMARTER way of debunking this :). At least I know about TinEye now!
So... why are people still saying this isn't fake after you gave a TinEye link?!?
Baffling...