Koi UFO Video 088: Cape of Good Hope, South Africa (2003) - Chris Oakley
[DEBUNKED] Koi UFO Video 088 appears to show a flying saucer hovering above the sea near a beach. The video has a caption indicating it was filmed on 19th September 2003. The video is usual accompanied by a description stating that it was filmed over the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) on 19 September 2003.
Quite a few copies of this video appear online, most of which have a relatively modest number of views. One copy has approximately 140,000 views as at March 2015.
In fact, as detailed below, the video was produced in 2004 by Chris Oakley (a video artist and filmmaker) and is included on a DVD of his video art work. His website describes this video as "referencing both contemporary media practices and Magritte’s famous painting The Treachery Of Images" and states that it "presents a fantastic image framed plausibly". Chris comments that "as the treatment of fictional and factual content converges in the mainstream media, our responses to media representations become ambivalent".
Sections below:
2. Stories and claims relating to this video
3. The real background to this video
4. Relevant online discussions
1. The relevant video
Koi UFO Video 088 appears to show a flying saucer hovering above the sea near a beach. The video has a caption indicating it was filmed on 19th September 2003.
Screen shots from the video are included below for ease of identification:
2. Stories and claims relating to this video
This video is usual accompanied by a description stating that it was filmed over the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) on 19 September 2003.
3. The real background to this video
This video was produced in 2004 by Chris Oakley (a video artist and filmmaker) and is included on a DVD of his video art work.
His website describes this video as "referencing both contemporary media practices and Magritte’s famous painting "The Treachery Of Images" and states that it "presents a fantastic image framed plausibly". Chris comments that "as the treatment of fictional and factual content converges in the mainstream media, our responses to media representations become ambivalent".
The website incidentally includes a higher resolution copy of the relevant video than the ones which litter Youtube and other websites. A screen shot from that higher resolution footage is included below.
Magritte’s famous painting "The Treachery Of Images", cited by Chris Oakley, is reproduced below for anyone needing a reminder:
When the fact that the video was the work of Chris Oakley was pointed out by "Internos" in one discussion on of the AboveTopSecret.com discussion forum, another member responded that this suggestion was "just plain silly" because Chris Oakley "has nothing else even remotely like this on his site" - commenting that this was "one of the best UFO videos I have ever seen".
However, this video is in fact in keeping with the central underlying theme of Chris Oakley's work. As stated in his entry on the Saatchi art website, his work aims "to exploit the margins of fiction of actuality" and an attempt to "attempt to define a space between actuality and representation".
Chris Oakley is pictured below.
As part of the process of uploading my notes on this video during March 2015, I sent Chris Oakley a link to this page and invited him to provide comments he would like to see added here. He kindly replied that he thought this page was "a very honest, well researched representation of the situation". He also gave some further information and comments, including the following:
"The video was made initially to provide a humourous interlude at screenings of artist's and experimental film. I saw it as a humourous take on a quite serious subject within art and visual theory more generally- images are images, and the real is real, and occassionally they might seem to intersect. At the same time, I was quite interested in images purporting to show UFOs, and wondering why they were so poorly produced in the main. I have been very interested in the Billy Meier case. His photographs were amazing, and required a great deal of craft to produce such convincing images with technology available to an amateur at the time. But then came his cine films, which were laughable. I've never seen more convincing footage of models dangling on string. I see the whole phenomona of the creation of these images as a modern folk art.
Once I'd found out the video had leaked in the UFO community, I found it very funny. At some point, someone had obtained the video and deliberately placed in the the view of the community falsely presented as a potential piece of UFO evidence, which seemed to avalanche quite quickly. I don't really understand the motive for this, but I can't help but find it amusing. I have had other films I have made (unrelated to flying discs) deliberately stolen misrepresented to reinforce a belief, and some of those have angered me not simply as a flagrant copyright violation, but in the deliberate attempt to mislead. I'm fairly indifferent in this case, especially as on once occasion I replied to a similar enquiry to yours which was posted on a UFO forum by the enquirer. Another individual then read my re-posted response, and accused me of being involved in spreading misinformation for the US government, as the video was plainly real!
...
In terms of the production method of the video, I used some seascape footage shot with a domestic camcorder and an image of a UFO created in photoshop, which were combined into a digital composite using some fairly professional but quite standard media production software".
4. Relevant online discussions
Relevant discussions on the AboveTopSecret.com forum include the following:
2008 (February) discussion entitled "Vivid Cape of Good Hope UFO"
2008 (April) discussion entitled "UFO filmed at beach in South Africa 2003"
