When Hector Siliezar visited the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza with his wife and kids in 2009, he snapped three iPhone photos of El Castillo, a pyramid that once served as a sacred temple to the Mayan god Kukulkan. A thunderstorm was brewing near the temple, and Siliezar was trying to capture lightning crackling dramatically over the ruins.
In the first two images, dark clouds loom above the pyramid, but
nothing is amiss. However, in the third photo, a powerful beam of light
appears to shoot up from the pyramid toward the heavens, and a
thunderbolt flashes in the background.
Siliezar, who recently shared his photographs with occult investigators, told Earthfiles.com that
he and his family didn't see the light beam in person; it appeared only
on camera. "It was amazing!" he said. He showed the iPhone photo to his
fellow tourists. "No one, not even the tour guide, had ever seen
anything like it before." [See photo]
The photo has surfaced on several Mayan doomsday discussion forums. But was the light beam a sign from the gods — a warning about Dec. 21, 2012, the date that marks the end of the Mayan calendar cycle, and when some people fear the world will end? Or is it simply the result of an iPhone glitch?
According to Jonathon Hill,
a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight
Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras
used during NASA's
Mars missions, it is almost definitely the latter. Hill works with
images of the Martian surface taken by rovers and satellites, as well as
data from Earth-orbiting NASA instruments, and is fully versed in the
wide range of potential image artifacts and equipment errors.
He says the "light beam" in the Mayan temple photo is a classic case of
such an artifact — a distortion in an image that arises from the way
cameras bounce around incoming light.
It is no mere coincidence, Hill said, that "of the three images, the
'light beam' only occurs in the image with a lightning bolt in the
background. The intensity of the lightning flash likely
caused the camera's CCD sensor to behave in an unusual way, either
causing an entire column of pixels to offset their values or causing an
internal reflection [off the] camera lens that was recorded by the
sensor." In either case, extra brightness would have been added to the
pixels in that column in addition to the light hitting them directly
from the scene. [7 Things that Cause UFO Sightings]
Evidence in favor of this explanation is the fact that the beam, when
isolated in Photoshop or other image analysis software, runs perfectly
vertical in the image. "That's a little suspicious since it's very
unlikely that the gentleman who took this picture would have his handheld iPhone camera positioned exactly parallel to the 'light beam' down to the pixel level," Hill told Life's Little Mysteries.
It's more likely that the "light beam" corresponds to a set of columns
of pixels in the camera sensor that are electronically connected to each
other, but not to other columns in the sensor, and that this set of
connected pixels became oversaturated in the manner described above.
"That being said," Hill said, "it really is an awesome image!"
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