Monsters and Myths

Suspicious images that emerged last month showing what some believed to be a legendary giant snake in Borneo have been proven to be fakes.

The Daily Mail reported that the image above had sparked local villagers’ fears that the mythical Nabau, a 100-foot-long serpent, had returned. But online investigators tracked down the real photo, identical to the image that created a frenzy but without the serpent figure.

Scientific American talked to a Kansas librarian who was one of many to reveal the hoax. Nathan Chadwick explained that by using the reverse search engine TinEye, which crawls the Web for pixels that match an uploaded image, he was able to locate the original photo. According to many Web sites, the original image shows the Congo River in Africa, not the Baleh River in Borneo.

A second photo that the Daily Mail included in its story was actually found to be an image that was entered in a 2002 hoax contest.

When AOL posted an earlier story about the photos and questions over their authenticity, 55 percent of those answering a poll said they believed the images did in fact show a 100-foot-long snake.

It would appear the Borneo monster is just a myth.

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Grainy images of a large snake in Borneo’s Baleh river have some locals afraid the mythical Nabu snake is back. Is Borneo’s 100-foot river snake—reported yesterday by London’s Telegraph and captured in photographs real?

Like the Loch Ness Monster, countless UFOs and Bigfoot, it’s hard to say, says Hany Farid, a computer science professor at Dartmouth University, because it’s been captured in such low resolution. “It’s as if you took a blood sample,” he says, “threw away 99 percent of it and asked me to do a forensic analysis.”

An expert of digital photography forensics, Farid notes that with so few pixels to analyze, there’s much less evidence to weigh in one way or the other. At a high resolution—say, 1,000 by 1,000 pixels—tampering gets tougher. At that level, he says, “It’s really hard to do. You’ve got to get it all just right.”

The low level of resolution is precisely why viewers should be skeptical. To make a fraudulent photo, he says, one would want to work in high resolution, fake it as cleanly as possible and then compress it and make it a bit blurry. “That’s a good way of masking any artifacts that you’ve left behind,” he says.

Plus, Farid notes that although the fuzziness of UFO and Nessie photos might add a bit of desirable mystique, in this day and age of high-quality point-and-shoot digital cameras, there really aren’t many reasons why anyone’s daytime photos should be as blurry as those of the Borneo “snake.”

In addition to the resolution of the two snake photos, other characteristics of an easy fake pop up as well, he observes. Both images show the snake in a somewhat open area, not interacting with other objects. It would be a lot more difficult, Farid says, to fake a snake wrapped around a person.

Although Farid won’t opine whether the Borneo photos are real or manipulated, he suggests a handy rule of thumb: “When you look at images, you should think about, ‘How hard would this be to do?’”

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Recently in the news a few photographs were taken of a supposed one hundred foot long snake swimming up the rivers in Borneo. This snake is said to be Borneo’s version of the Loch Ness Monster but the photos themselves can actually be of anything, including a photoshop job. One photo shows the snake happily swimming in the Baleh River, while the other photo reveals the snake peering above the waters off the coast of Borneo near a small fishing village. If this snake is real, exactly what kind of snake might it be?

It is possible this snake can be a a real water serpent, as some reptiles tend to live in water such as the alligator. Or it could be an eel, mistaken for a sea serpent, as the natives believe to see every now and then. It can even be an entirely new species of snake, for all the scientists know. Not too long ago a fossil of a 45 foot long snake was discovered in Colombia in South America. Given the tropical climate of that part of the world, it is not unusual for a snake to attain such a gargantuan size. The Brazilian rain forests are known for their anacondas, even though these snakes are nowhere near a hundred feet long.

Those who live on the island of Borneo have even given the monster a name - Nabau - making it feel more at home and giving them a bit of notoriety. Every culture deserves to have some legend to call their own, even if it bears a similarity to a legend in a loch located in the United Kingdom.

Looking at the photos again and again, soon the reputed snake ceases to be real. It looks like someone manipulated the creature, if there was one, in the area when the photos were being taken. It looks to smooth to be a curved branch just flowing with the water current down the river and off the coast. The village doesn’t look too lively but it is of course possible everyone there was elsewhere or taking a nap.

If the photos were manipulated, the most likely creature that got stretched was an eel. Eels are common in warm bodies of water so it wouldn’t surprise me if some Indonesian eel had his photo snapped when he wasn’t looking. At least it gives the people in Borneo something to talk about and it puts the island on the map.

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