Probably many of you have seen this photo before and at the first glance at it said "What a mediocre / wretched / ridiculous Photoshop!" or something like that. Now we will not convince you of the authenticity of this picture, but we will tell its real story and you will draw your own conclusions.
This image was taken on May 10, 2004 in Santiago, Chile. Engineer Germán Pereira was taking photographs of police carabinieri riders in Forestal Park that day.
One of the pictures was very blurry, but in it, to Pereira's great surprise, one could clearly see a small figure of a gray humanoid creature, no more than 80 cm tall, who, without hiding anyone, crossed the path behind one of the riders.
“The picture was taken at 17.40 at a location on the corner of JM de la Barra and Cardenal José María Caro Avenue, next to Bellas Artes. It was a cloudy day and the sun was hidden behind gray clouds, - said Herman Preira, - So I set up my Kodak DX6490 camera with a correction for low speed (1/10 seg).
This is probably why I was able to capture the movement of this creature. In addition, since the carabinieri were about 20 meters away from me, I also used the zoom (10x), which also played a role in the blurry picture.
I am very impressed with this photo. This is not a fake or a correction, I assure you of this. That is why I immediately decided to talk about him. I contacted ufologists from the CIFAE society to find out what kind of creature it was and wanted to know more information."
Anomalous phenomena researcher Eric Martinez of the Chilean UFO Society CIFAE (left) and author Herman Pereira.
Researchers at CIFAE have studied this image very carefully. They checked the image for blurriness, indistinctness, interference due to atmospheric phenomena, for processing in different programs, filters, noise and other parameters. In the end, their conclusion was that the picture was difficult to study, since it was not the original that was presented, but a cropped version, and it is impossible to firmly say whether it is a fake or not. The only thing that is set to 100% is that the picture was accurately taken using a Kodak DX 6490 camera at the time stated by the photographer and using the stated settings.
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After the picture of Pereira hit the media, it was discussed around the world, and the photographer himself began to receive calls from Spain, Colombia and Argentina so often that he was soon forced to turn off his phone. Pereira barely got a new job in those days and people around him were surprised by his popularity and his photography.
Herman Pereira works as an engineer, and for him photography is just a hobby for the weekend. On that day, May 10, he rode a bicycle to Forestal Park and took 10 photos in total. He saw the alien on one of them only the next day, when he was looking at the pictures.
According to Pereira, when he took pictures, he saw no one on the track, except for the riders. It is possible that this creature is simply invisible to the ordinary human eye, but it could be caught with a camera. Pereira himself had not previously filmed UFOs or aliens and was not even interested in this topic.
Supposed versions of who it could be in the picture:
1. Alien. The most likely and the first thing that comes to most people when looking at this photo. In appearance, the creature is a bit like the so-called "gray" aliens with its puny body and large head. It is a bit low for the "gray", but eyewitnesses sometimes tell about such aliens.
2. Gnome or goblin or the so-called duende (about which we recently published an article).
3. Ghost. It is possible that this is a very strange looking ghost.
4. A fallen tree branch. Maybe this, because this is a park with tall trees and the weather was cloudy, gusts of wind are not excluded.
5. Walking child. For a child, the creature looks too strange, it is much easier to believe that this is a ghost or an alien than that it is an ordinary child.
6. Monkey. What is a monkey doing in the middle of a park far from the wild? Escaped from a menagerie or a private home? Then there would be announcements about it and someone else would see it.