This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 6, Issue 1, from 1992.
Over the years, articles in the UFO literature in many countries have dealt with the picture of the little Silver Man, who is often claimed to be a flying saucer crewmember from a UFO crashed near Mexico City. Often it is stated that the bodies of his alien pilot colleagues found in the UFO wreckage have been sent to Germany for ‘further investigation’. It is certainly a strange picture. But is it genuine?
When Claus Westh-Henrichsen, a commercial artist, saw a picture of the Silver Man in the Danish UFO magazine UFO-NYT, he wrote to the editor:
As a professional draughtsman and retoucher, I can imagine the situation: it’s the silly season on the newspaper, and there’s simply no news, no world-shattering story. The newspaper’s photographic retoucher is bored, scratching his ear with a pencil. On the archives cupboard is a couple of pictures; one is showing a family wheeling a pram along, the other showing a group of jugglers from a circus. One of the jugglers sticks out in the photograph, looking odd as he stands there in his strange costume, slightly out of focus, receiving the cheers of the crowd. Snip, snip, out with the pram, in with the juggler – and a whole new situation is created! After closing time the work is lying there on the draughtsman’s desk. The pictures editor wanders by, notices the picture, and smiles wryly: ‘What the heck? This could be quite a joke!’.
Far-fetched? No, I tried it myself on the Danish newspaper Politiken, back in 1958. Using a portrait and a picture from a soap advertisement, I undressed the celebrity in the advertisement! And it was better than the Silver Man!
So, let’s take this theory, and examine the famous picture of the Silver Man a little more closely. Let’s call the two men in foreground of the picture A and B, and the Silver Man S. We shall begin by considering the perspective in the picture. If you make the picture bigger, so that the position of the feet can be drawn (considering the length of the coats), this makes S hover above the ground. Also, S is situated parallel to A and B (that is, in their plane in the photograph), but he is still missing 25 cm to reach the ground. But we can see that S is also standing on something! If not, the angles of his feet would be different.
The picture shows a group of walking people, but S is standing still. A and B have an ‘arm function’, which indicates that they are holding something stiff and horizontal (see * in the diagram). The positions of the palms of their hands, and the bending of their arms, show that they are pushing or pulling something. Also, B’s glove would look like this if he was holding something.
Furthermore, it is not logical that the height of A’s and B ‘s hands above the ground would be the same – not if they were holding something alive! Note that all three of A, B and S have bent arms. This is an unnatural stance. If S can walk by himself (which one would assume), A’s and B’s arms should be relaxed.
Finally, where are the thousands of curious people, missing from the picture? There is no doubt that the sun is shining. However, the ground under S has been ‘softened’ (the retoucher was not quite able to account for the shadow here). Note also that S does not cast a shadow, as one might expect.
So, this is the solution of Claus Westh-Henrichsen. A nice stroll in the spring sun in Berlin has been cleverly altered to make a mystery. We can see that the expressions on the two ladies’ faces have nothing to do with the apparent situation. Meanwhile, the two men are pushing a pram, which at that time had high, broad grips. The hoax is revealed!
What of the true origin of the picture? Where did it first appear? Hans-Wemer Peiniger, of the German UFO organization GEP, believes that the Silver Man comes from an April Fool’s joke in a German magazine sometime in the early 1950s. Alas, nobody has yet been able to trace the magazine in question. However, Peiniger remembers that the picture illustrated a report about a crashed spacecraft. The authors of the article were G Falscht and R Logan. If you know your German, these names become the words ‘gefalscht’ and ‘erlogan’ – ‘forged’ and ‘imaginary’! In English, the authors might have been ‘D Lusion’ and ‘M Aginary’! It is said that non-German speaking reporters did not get the joke and unwittingly passed the picture on to worldwide picture bureaux.
On the other hand, maybe it isn’t a hoax at all…
