A practical workflow for evaluating UAP videos that appear in your social media feed before re-sharing. Covers reverse image search, satellite-pass checks, EXIF data analysis, and the small number of techniques that catch most fakes.
A UAP video goes viral approximately every two weeks. Most are fakes, mistakes, or misidentifications of mundane sources. A small fraction are real and unexplained. The Council’s editorial position is that the credibility of UAP discourse depends on the audience getting better at telling the difference — not just the official investigators.
This guide is the workflow the Council uses internally before a viral video is referenced in a brief or case file. It takes about 10 minutes per video and catches most of the false-positives.
What this guide does NOT do
This guide does not require special tools or access. The techniques below use freely-available services. It does not produce certainty — verification is probabilistic — but it raises the bar substantially above “looks compelling, retweet.”
The five-step workflow
Run these in order. Most videos fail at one of the first two steps.
Step 1 — Reverse image search
Take a screenshot of a representative frame from the video. Run it through:
- Google Lens (lens.google.com) or Google Image Search.
- TinEye (tineye.com) — reverse image search engine with strong duplicate-detection.
- Yandex image search — surprisingly effective for non-Western originals.
What you’re looking for: the same image (or a similar one) on the internet before the date the video is purportedly from. If a “new UAP video from yesterday” matches frames from a 2019 movie poster or a 2022 video game cinematic, the search engines will usually find it.
This step alone catches an estimated 30–40% of viral fakes — they are repurposed older content.
Step 2 — Source provenance
Trace the video back to its earliest appearance:
- Twitter/X: Click through to the original poster. Check their account history. New account? Account that previously posted unrelated content? Account that consistently posts UAP content for engagement? Each is a flag.
- TikTok: Same checks. TikTok also frequently displays a “duet” or “stitch” indicator that reveals derivation from earlier content.
- YouTube: Check upload date, channel history, channel subscriber/view ratio.
- Reddit: Check the subreddit (r/UFOs, r/aliens, r/HighStrangeness, r/UAP) and the user history of the original poster.
A video with no traceable original source — appearing fully formed across multiple accounts on the same day — is itself a flag. Authentic content typically has a recoverable provenance.
Step 3 — EXIF and metadata
If you can obtain the original file (not a re-encoded social-share version), check the EXIF metadata:
- Camera model. Does it match what the poster claims they used?
- Timestamp. Does it match the claimed observation time?
- Geolocation. If present, does it match the claimed location?
- Software field. “Adobe Premiere” or “Adobe After Effects” in the software field indicates post-processing — not necessarily fake, but flag for additional scrutiny.
Tools: ExifTool (command-line, free, definitive), Jeffrey’s EXIF Viewer (web-based), or any of several smartphone apps.
Limitation: most social-share platforms strip EXIF data on upload. Working with stripped files makes this step impossible. The absence of EXIF is itself a weak negative signal — it suggests the video has passed through social media at least once.
Step 4 — Satellite and aircraft cross-check
If the video shows objects in the sky at a specified time and location, check what should have been visible:
- Starlink visibility: findstarlink.com shows real-time and historical visibility of Starlink trains.
- ISS and other satellites: Heavens Above (heavens-above.com) shows historical satellite passes by location and time.
- Aircraft traffic: ADS-B Exchange (adsbexchange.com), FlightRadar24 (with Pro for historical) show commercial aircraft positions historically.
- Bright planets: Stellarium (free desktop app), SkySafari, or any planetarium tool shows what bright planets and stars were where at the observation time.
A “UAP” that appears at the exact time and direction of a known Starlink train, an ISS pass, or a bright planet rising is, with high probability, that mundane object.
Step 5 — Frame-by-frame analysis
For videos that survive steps 1–4, basic frame-by-frame analysis can catch additional issues:
- Look at the object’s edges in multiple frames. Real objects show consistent edge characteristics; CGI often shows compression artifacts, halos, or edge inconsistencies that change between frames.
- Compare object motion to camera motion. If the camera is moving, the background and the object should track consistently. Object that moves with the camera (always centered, always same size relative to the frame) is suspicious — it suggests the object is composited rather than filmed.
- Check shadows and lighting. Object lighting should match the scene lighting. A daylight object with shadow direction inconsistent with the visible sun is a flag.
- Listen to audio. Reactions of bystanders, ambient sound, microphone-handling noise — all are part of the recording’s authenticity.
Tools like VLC Media Player (free) allow frame-stepping. InVID (browser plugin developed for journalist use) is purpose-built for video forensics.
What survives the workflow
Most viral UAP videos do not survive these five steps. The minority that do — that have a verifiable provenance, plausible EXIF, no obvious mundane match, and frame-by-frame consistency — are the ones worth treating as data rather than as content.
Even surviving videos rarely meet the threshold for Confirmed. Most reach Inconclusive: the video is real and the object is unexplained-by-this-workflow, but stronger evidence (multi-sensor correlation, witness corroboration, instrumented context) is what would move the verdict further.
The cultural responsibility
The Council’s editorial position is that sharing unverified UAP content harms the field. Each viral fake that gets shared widely:
- Reduces the average credibility of UAP claims in mainstream discourse.
- Makes serious cases harder to surface.
- Provides ammunition to dismissive analysts.
- Wastes the attention of researchers who have to debunk what was initially shared as plausible.
The Council does not ask readers to be cynics. We ask them to be disciplined. Before sharing, run the workflow. If a video is good enough to survive, it is good enough to share. If it isn’t, it isn’t.
Council recommended
This guide does not require gear. The tools — reverse image search, satellite trackers, EXIF readers, frame-by-frame video tools — are all freely available.
For readers who want to develop the discipline through practice, the Council recommends working through the historical record. Take one of the cases the Council has marked Debunked — Phoenix Lights Event B (Case #00012), Hudson Valley wave (Case #00098), Belgian Wave Petit-Rechain photograph (referenced in Case #00056) — and apply this workflow to the original viral material. The exercise builds intuition.
Related cases
- Case #00012 — Phoenix Lights Event B — the textbook case of a famous video with a known mundane source
- Case #00056 — Belgian Wave Petit-Rechain photograph — a famous still that was decades-later admitted by its photographer to be a fabrication
- Case #00098 — Hudson Valley wave — a sustained period of authentic-looking but mundanely-sourced sightings