Everything was done with my IPhone, thanks to a IPhone app called UFO Camera Silver that allows you to choose different kind of UFOs and put them on any picture. You can choose the size, the "transparency" of the UFO, etc... So i took some real pictures of the park's construction - which are in my DLP "From sketch to Reality" book by the way, and upload them in my IPhone to be able to add the UFOs with the IPhone App. But there is no use of Photoshop at all in the pictures, the app did all the job. If you're interested, the App is free right now on the App Store.
About the text itself, of course all the Imagineers interviews are fake, but all the difficulty was to have dialogs that looks as real as possible. And, as i've study the UFO phenomenon some years ago i knew pretty well the usual description of the phenomena.
By the way, there is a private joke inside the article. The name of the photographer - Allan Hynek - which supposedly shoot the last UFO picture in Discoveryland, is fake. It's a tribute to someone who was named John Allen Hynek, a brilliant scientist and the most serious UFO specialist. He used to begin his search on UFOs working for the U.S government as a "debunker" until he understood that some UFO cases were unexplainable and that it was not possible, scientifically speaking, to reject them all. His books inspired Steven Spielberg for "Close encounters" and he even appears in the movie at the end, holding his pipe.
But that's not all. John Allen Hynek best collaborator was...Jacques Vallée another great UFO reliable specialist, and that's why in the text the Discoveryland "photographer" talks about Vallée. The quote from a brahman hindu is real and coming from one of Vallée's book...and it's also what i think about the UFO, that, if the encounters are real, they come from another plane, another dimension.
If you want to know more about Hynek, an interesting guy, here is the Wikipedia page about Hynek and the one about Vallée. On the picture below, Hynek is on the left and Vallée, the taller one, is on the right.
Also, to reinforce the credibility (if i can say!)- or to push a bit more the madness of the whole article! - i added in the comments a FAKE comment supposedly written by Imagineer Pat Burke who says:
"Great article, Alain! However, I think Jeff forgot to tell you about a meeting we had three months after the grand opening. As Frontierland's Show Designer I was working on adding props near BTM, when Jeff and I met one of the farmers who had previously owned the land on which we had built the park. This guy told us something pretty weird. It's incredible, but five years before the UFO "wave" over the park, he found one of those mysterious "crop circles" in his field, that generally appears overnight without any explanations, although people think they're a kind of "extra-terrestrial" message. And guess where this crop circle was located in his field? Exactly where we had built Big Thunder Mountain four years later, and where we first sighted the UFOs in 1991!"
So it don't looks like but the article was more sophisticated than it looks, as i wanted to have different levels of reading which helps to make the hoax more believable. And i'm glad you enjoyed it!
