Just in time for the Oscars… I want to party with this guy: everetthiller’s Holiday Party 2011.

Ooh, look: It’s a video showing a UFO hovering over Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock Temple Mount:

Except it’s not, as Steven Novella (*swoon*) patiently explains in Jerusalem UFO:

UFO-blogger has uncovered this photograph, which looks suspiciously like the background of the video. It now seems like this photo was used to generate the CG, and the voices were just added over. Once I saw this I went back over the video to see if this fits, and it does. You’ll notice that in the video no lights in the city sparkle, twinkle, or shift at all. Their flares are all absolutely static – because it’s not a video, its a still picture. I’ll have to keep this effect one in mind for the future. Also, I think I notice some pixelization when the camera “zooms” – because it’s not a real zoom, it’s a digital zoom into the photo. I suppose it’s possible that a video camera has a digital zoom, but in my experience most video cameras these days have a pretty high optical zoom function.

So this video is totally busted as a fake.

Ayup.

According to the good people at Web Urbanist,

…people have been altering photographs for political purposes almost since the day photographs were invented.

Oh yeah? JPEGs or it didn’t happen! Oh, wait…

Anyway: Politics of Photoshop: 15 Shady Edits for Political Purposes.

Isn’t local politics fun? Bessemer mayoral candidate Dorothy Davidson claims Nick Saban endorsement, passing out fliers with altered photo.

See also the update, in which Davidson’s campaign manager takes the blame: Bessemer mayoral candidate’s campaign manager admits he lied about endorsement from Alabama Coach Nick Saban.

From some bloggy New York Times site: In an Iranian Image, a Missile Too Many.

Here’s the first version (which apparently was pulled by those stalwart defenders of copyright, the mainstream media, from the web site of “Sepah News, the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards”). This photo ran on the front pages of the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and the Chicago Tribune, as well as on the web sites of BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, and NYTimes.com. None of these top-notch media outlets noticed (or at least, none of them cared) that one of the four missiles is a fairly obvious photoshop clone:

Today the following image was posted to the Sepah News site. Presumably this is the original from which the other one was made:

It’s kind of fun to figure out how little effort was required to alter the image, and what a big psychological difference is achieved by the alteration. (And again, what a gullible bunch of n00bs the MSM editors were to run it without comment.)