Coleman_Rocket_2.mp4
[Hide] (2.8MB, 594x446, 00:47) To explain perhaps the first and essential question of the footage, the "how", story goes that the subject under the name of Victor smuggled it out of somewhere which he dubbed S4 of the base near Las Vegas, known almost universally as Area 51, noting that said footage came from there, not that he was there. Around the mid-90's it seems a government project to digitalize a bunch of extremely sensitive stock in analog laying around in tapes and other media was started and some technicians in charge of checking the machines doing so, we could deduce Victor was one, were ironically from a way lower security clearance than the content they were transferring and in one occasion we can suppose Victor was startled by the footage and decided to smuggle some of it out.
Implied in the tape that the footage was also not really meant to be in that batch for them as it was the only instance of that kind of thing in the process but Victor quickly stopped commenting on it, i suppose they were transferring footage of experimental fighter or bomber jets and then out of nowhere a fucking alien getting questioned moved this guy's guts.
So the process was to play the footage in its then-current format and pass it on digital using a setup with some recording hardware, either a converter plugged in to the player via video output like our nowadays VHS converters or a tethering camera filming the projection of said media (aka recording goes directly into computer via cable instead of internal memory); the really crucial website i couldn't find was one where some dude had found exactly what machine model the so-called Victor used to transfer the tape into digital format, i recall that machine was pretty expensive back in the day as it was brand new in 1994-1995 and kind of fitted the purposes, and that he found how due to the default bar that outputs into its files which i don't recall was a feature as a time-code or merely just a graphical problem. I think it was the thin white line in the upper part of the frame in the footage, easily seen in the video there.
I think i also recall that machine was capable of output to a compact physical memory format which would explain how it was possible to smuggle stuff out under heavy security measures.
In the documentary we can see in the video analysis section how the technician did in fact see the video being a conversion from tape, either telecine stock-to-tape-to-digital (3 generations) or tape-to-digital but with the tape being pushed with a dynamic range boost, which he then pushed more in his setup leading to showing details under the shadows like the rest of the thing's body and the uniform of one of the people interrogating the thing, details that ended up being very sought-after but not accessible unless having the Victor tape which already had that visual data crushed due to the conversion, the footage we got has its shadows even more crushed.
He also found discrepancies due to the moire patterns not matching but i think that can be explained by more plausible situations like the scan lines not being there because those weren't the screens but the reflections of them (reflecting on a window?) along with low-light stock not capturing it that well, which he said could very possibly happen and the situation was indeed under considerable low-light.
Okay that was the recap for the tape, these are the things we can take from it but perhaps i conclude things using other stuff i know or have read so i might not be fully unbiased or correct even:
>Officially the first time the footage was seen for a wider audience, at least internationally, aside from that one taping of the program Strange Universe around late 1996 or early 1997, which i don't know if it was aired before or after the VHS release
>Footage was mainstream somewhere around 1997, very tentatively the latter half
>One of the first instances of the Navy/Naval Intelligence being the ones checking on aerial phenomena and weird shit rather than the usual culprits of back then, the Air Force and FBI
Now for the things we can cross-reference nowadays:
>Navy/DNI were in fact the ones checking on aerial phenomena and weird shit since at least the early 90's, explicitly confirmed in several congress hearings
>DNI 27 is code "Yankee White", which is presidential or his aides, info that would be tough to know back in them days
>Digitalization of past items and specialized setups for checking only that data were confirmed many years later, explicitly in the Hillary hearings in congress (item #2 here); also ended up explicitly mentioning the OrCon tag
>Plausibility of tech at hand and smuggling process, along with the story, is pretty high as far as we know but without knowing how they checked people out from those kind of techbro facilities
The interesting tidbit from the european friend of Dorothy, Hasseman, about the 1989 Kalahari Incident opens another big can of mess which does connect this footage into the yoofosphere lore in such a manner that this post will extend quite a lot. To not create suspense as i am starting to dislike leaving anons in cliffhangers the gist of it and from what i've read goes like this:
January 1991 footage "The Interview" (green fella was purportedly 20 months inside a base) < (sequel of) < May 1989 Kalahari Incident < (visual references) < Socorro, New Mexico Flap of April 1964 (Lonnie Zamora's sighting) < (similar in timeline or visual references) < Voronezh Landing/Soviet Flap of Fall 1989 < (references) < September 1989 Conil sighting in Cadiz, Spain < (visual references) < Ummo Affair
As a personal note i agree with many of the characters in the tape, i want to believe it's a fake due to how brash and direct the portrayal and circumstances are but if it is a hoax then it is the hoaxer's hoax, it's the best there is to the point it's scary and with the years passing nobody has done something as good in terms of quality and if anything cross-referencing it with other events and facts we know it becomes even more convincing in terms of context. But it is an alien getting interrogated in a dark room, it's the opposite of being able to believe something, and the fact it fits perfectly in the UFO grift universe kind of makes it highly suspicious at the same time.
One of the characters in the movie, artist John Criswell, did later recant his opinion on thinking it was fake because he said he would look like a lunatic if he said he believed it was real after triple-checking it, the reason for thinking that he said was due to the level of tiny details all around the movie which made him wonder how the hell did they do that and how he didn't think it was possible without a big budget and without someone in the team gossiping it to other specialists, leading him to think it would be easier for an alien to be interrogated than an outsider team of animatronics specialists doing something like it for almost no money and while taking perfect care of the setup even if it was darkened (to note he saw the tape with the interrogators and the thing with its body still visible). Many claim the footage is hoax due to "shit puppetry" being obvious but i don't know, other than them trying to find human movements into something not supposed to be human i think they also don't know or haven't seen puppetry nor its traditional rules, also the fact that an expert in puppetry animatronics would in theory not be an amateur controlling it or at least know when it's looking good or not, plus hand puppetry is massively harder when considering the fascia piece is also emoting tiny muscles and excreting liquids from several parts.
One thing's for sure, if it is a hoax it was done with the utmost detail and by someone or some group who were very well-read, had money to spare and not claim credit for the advanced animatronics, didn't attempt to do it again despite commercial success and nobody has been able to recreate it convincingly. The fact Rocket Productions' president does hint he doesn't care if it is real or not but the quality of it evokes a "what if" does somewhat tick me it was an intentional project that ended with a masterpiece in the found footage genre, but even if that's the case it's worth to point it out because it did hit the nail with the military details of that era which i guess isn't that hard to hide if we consider Hollywood and the glowniggers are connected and could've shared some technicals, after all that's how some movies get some ideas from.
Also to note is the recent surge of it, i thought i was a cool guy for mentioning all the time but since the pandemic this footage is even more famous than the autopsy, i guess that was always the case in my region but the americans and euros have found renewed interest for it. A channel i found on Rumble, which does look like the work of a loonie man that sees details in places where they probably aren't, still did a great job pinpointing visual narrative clues in the footage that showcase perfectly what Criswell said: It has too many details to be rehearsed both by the puppet and by non-actors who should be more worried about the animatronic puppet in the spotlight, all in one continuous 3-minute cut.