Night-sky clips bounce between apps with fresh captions and sharper crops. This guide gives you a repeatable routine so you can trace a viral UFO video back toward its first appearance and spot mirrors, joke edits, and stock footage dressed up as breaking news.
Grab the cleanest copy
Download the highest-quality version you can from the post you are reviewing. If the platform offers an original upload date near the player, write it down next to the poster username. Keep the URL bar intact because you will compare it with later shares.
Run reverse searches on key frames
Pull two or three sharp frames from steady portions of the clip, then run image search on each frame separately. A frame from stock footage or an older news segment often appears before the UFO headline shows up. Pay attention to dates on results pages, not only titles.
Read metadata only as a hint
Export metadata when your tools allow it, but treat EXIF as supportive evidence only. Re-encoding strips fields, and some editors add misleading timestamps on purpose. Pair metadata with platform timestamps and search hits instead of trusting one signal alone.
Compare captions across uploads
Collect three versions of the description from different shares. If location names drift from a desert highway to a suburb across uploads, you are probably watching copies rather than a single sourced incident report.
For related incident reporting styles on Altered Dimensions, see our mass bird fall coverage from northern Mexico, which shows how local sourcing and dated wires anchored that story.
When you finish verifying the clip, browse the Altered Dimensions homepage for daily paranormal news, or read how we organize topics so you can jump straight to aliens, earth anomalies, crime, or vanished cases.
Note: If you believe we miscredited a file or date on Altered Dimensions, open Feedback from the menu so editors can review your link trail.
You must log in to post a comment.