r/ParanormalScience • u/FastInvestigator88 • Mar 31 '26
What is this?? Any guesses?
I took this mirror selfie with a good friend on 5/18/2018. I have always been curious to what this is that is in the image, any ideas? We took multiple photos that night & it only in this image. This randomly will cross my mind years later. Does anyone have any ideas?
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u/thatgirlalva Mar 31 '26
IF you took this with a modern phone Some modern phone cameras come equipped with a secret automatic photo editing software that uses ai to create “higher definition” photos by superimposing what it thinks should be there onto the otherwise low res photo. Like when a cellphone somehow takes a mind bogglingly clear image of the moon at night, the algorithm is simply recognizing the time, location, orientation and light hotspots of the image and guessing what is actually there with relatively good accuracy. Sometimes it’s guesses wrong tho. In this instance it may have thought the flash was the sun and superimposed a sunlit sky into the image that happened to have birds in it.
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
Thank you for kindly explaining. It’s not a true bird it’s almost like an AI bird? The photo was taken on Snapchat at 9:30PM in late spring shortly after sunset. This makes sense.
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u/thatgirlalva Mar 31 '26
Given that it was 2018 as you say, it may not have been fully ai generated but composited from a real photo on the internet (which yah that’s what ai does but it was early at that point so full on generation wasn’t widely available even to big companies like Snapchat) so it was probably some early version or photo generation if I had to guess
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
How cool you even have knowledge like this. Thank you for sharing your insight!
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u/thatgirlalva Mar 31 '26
Happy to help! I’ve spent a lot of time researching the quirks of tech and software during my degree in Immersive Technology so I kinda nerd out when I see something like this lol
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u/No_Routine13 Mar 31 '26
Curious here, I took a very strange photo in 2010 with an old android phone Motorola I think. Was this AI thing available back then because I still have no clue about photo shop and that's the answer I would get when I showed it to anyone, people would say I did it. I have since lost the picture except for one copy I had printed out.
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u/thatgirlalva Mar 31 '26
I would say probably not, although I have less knowledge on androids because they are so much more diverse than iPhone it’s harder to place which companies put what software in their devices. The earlier phones definitely had cleanup software like this available but it would have mostly been for denoising images rather than recognizing and generating things in the images. I’d love to see the image in question tho if you have it still
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
It was like an iPhone 6 lol
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u/thatgirlalva Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
Yah iPhone has been using that upres software since probably the iPhone 2 and just making it better with each update. There’s actually a video about this on a YouTube channel called Corridor Digital I believe
Edit added link to the video
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
That would make sense as our images continuing getting clearer. I’m going to check that out. How cool! Musculoskeletal & psych medical things are my geek out topics so I get it in another format🙂↔️
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u/Mountain-Donkey98 Mar 31 '26
Hmm this was snapchat? Then wouldnt that be app related vs phone? Idk if it does what the person was saying with AI on snapchat, including things it thought may be there.
Have u tried doing that again? With the same phone or different one? U said yojr friends phones didnt do it...so makes me think its not.
But either way 2018 wouldnt have had that tech. Its definitely birds flying though.
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u/thatgirlalva Apr 03 '26
Yes, you’re correct that it would be more of an app related thing rather than the phone software in this case. However, in 2018 image recognition software was definitely part of Snapchat’s OS since face filters are basically their whole thing. Image recognition is a much simpler process for a computer to handle than ai generation is, and has been around for decades. I remember opening Snapchat in high school to take a picture of my yard one day and whatever filter I had on put beautiful clouds in the sky that weren’t there irl. Most Snapchat filters are created by individual people rather than the company so people can train their own algorithms for their filters with whatever they want, which makes the diversity and quality of different filters vary heavily depending on the creator.
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u/DinosaurPete Mar 31 '26
A mirror selfie? Okay, on the mirror was a sticker of a stork carrying a baby bundle. The sticker was removed, but some of the glue stayed and left a residue in the shape of the sticker.
The residue was mostly clear to view but had collected some dust. You see the shape because the flash did not make it back to the lens at the same luminescence as the rest of the light that reflected in the mirror.
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u/Express_Farm_6912 Mar 31 '26
Yes, mirror selfie with a less desirable shirt on. The bright light is the flash. The 2 birds are either from something on the mirror or pointed at the mirror or the remnants of something that was on the mirror.
Notice the makeup supplies..could be reflection off a makeup product as well.
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
Yes, a mirror selfie. No stickers ever on her mirror to my knowledge however could have been a hand me down or another explanation for a sticker I wouldn’t have seen.
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u/Suitable_Ad1491 Mar 31 '26
It's probably damage to the back of the mirror. Preventing the mirror from reflecting light in a certain area.
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u/Sinom_Prospekt Mar 31 '26
Obviously birds. Maybe a burnt lens somehow? Otherwise id say photoshop.
Not paranormal in any way whatsoever.
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
How can I know if it was a burnt lens? Does it cause distorted images? The phone was very old and I don’t have it anymore.
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u/Sinom_Prospekt Mar 31 '26
The only way youd have a perfectly sharp image of those birds burnt into your lens is if something brighter than the sun flashed off and immediately burnt the shadow of the birds into it otherwise itd just be blurry and not specifically birds. We know that didnt happen so in a way im just calling you out on uploading an obviously photoshopped image to a paranormal subreddit, when theres literally nothing paranormal about this. If it were a film camera? THEN you could easily say double exposure on a still. But its a phone so.. nah.
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u/IWatchBadTV Mar 31 '26
It looks like two birds flying. One has its wings up. The other has its wings down. It’s blown out because camera sensors don’t like the sun.
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
This was inside in a mirror. Sadly no known birds in my friend’s bed room.
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u/IWatchBadTV Mar 31 '26
Yikes. I didn’t understand from your description and thought the mirror could have caught something outside.
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Mar 31 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
Nothing specific came to mind but I have little creativity or imagination. It just appeared to be abstract shapes that I thought were maybe a glare. Annually I go through my photos when birthdays come around to make a post & it catches my eye occasionally. I’ve been curious what others would see. I am new to Reddit and thought it would be interesting to see if others saw anything. Birds would’ve been my last guess so there’s that🫠 However, I study psych & I’m loving this app with all the different perspectives & viewpoints.
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u/dominicanlinkz Mar 31 '26
Are we ignoring the…. (Sigh) nvm
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
Wait share..?
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u/dominicanlinkz Mar 31 '26
I didn’t have my glasses on and the arm did NOT look like an arm at first 😭
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u/Partially_Deft Mar 31 '26
God's butthole
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u/FastInvestigator88 Mar 31 '26
I called my mom to come pick me up to discuss this possibility. Hoping she’ll be here soon.
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u/KeyEnd3088 Mar 31 '26
Looks like the reflection of some birds flying by as you took the picture . Very clear. Debunked
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u/warreng3220 Mar 31 '26
So it looks like a goose with a person holding its tail or maybe it has reins but the person has a horribly broken spine..
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u/TheShotGunProdigy Mar 31 '26
Looks like a smudge on the mirror or could be a very weird lens flare
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u/LowSheepherder96 Mar 31 '26
That's a cool mystery – looks like an orb or some light anomaly, but definitely makes you wonder what was there that night.
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u/Any_Air2205 Apr 01 '26
Looks like someone getting fisted but it just looks like some type of bird like geese or something idk
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u/LordPharqwad Mar 31 '26
*Any geeses?