Have you seen a video purporting to show something weird about a bald man outside one of former president Donald Trump’s many trials? The video has gone viral on TikTok and Reddit, with many people insisting it’s evidence of either a Reptilian (an other-worldly creature wearing a human suit) or an alien walking among us. But everything that might appear “weird” in the video can be easily explained if you take a look at the original video.
One Reddit headline reads, “A clip taken from the video of the alleged alien.” But if you watch that version of the video you can immediately see part of the problem. It’s a screen capture of a TikTok video, which is itself a video taken of a TV or computer screen.
Admittedly, the man in the video does look a little weird, since it’s essentially a copy of a copy of a copy. The man’s head looks a little warped and alien-like and the inside of his ear appears strange, as though he has “gills” as some people on Reddit insist. But those are artifacts and distortions that appear when someone films a screen.
Another Reddit post asked if they “live among us,” with a narrator insisting something weird is happening with the man’s eyes.
“Watch his eyes. Watch his eyes… definitely not normal,” the narrator says.
“There were a few of them there like this. Very obvious we’re in a spiritual or some type of warfare going on for sure,” the narrator continues.
But, again, this video is essentially a terrible copy of a camera feed from Donald Trump’s arraignment, which means we can get a more honest look at the situation by tracking down the original. I was able to find several versions of the original video as part of livestreams on YouTube dated April 4, 2023, back when Trump was arraigned for the first time in a Manhattan courthouse. I say “versions” because a number of different news outlets had cameras set up filming this particular scene waiting for Trump to emerge, including ABC News and CNN, among others.
Starting at around the 1-hour-and-45-minute mark in the CNN video, you can see police and security mulling around outside, waiting for Trump, along with the bald gentleman who’s gone viral. It’s unclear precisely what his job might be, but he’s presumably part of the Secret Service detail for the former president or someone associated with another government entity. Every courthouse where Trump has appeared this year has stepped up security in a major way, so we can deduce this guy had a good reason to be there just outside the area where the former president was being arraigned.
You can watch the video for yourself, though it’s admittedly long since many news outlets were livestreaming for hours on April 4. It was a historic day, of course, as the first time a former president had ever been indicted. Trump has since been criminally indicted a total of four times and faces 91 felony counts in both state and federal jurisdictions over a range of crimes, including his refusal to return classified documents and his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
But if you’d rather not watch the entire April 4 livestream yourself, I’ve pulled a 3-minute clip that you can watch below. There’s nothing weird or particularly other-worldly about the video, as you can see. The big difference with this video, of course, is that it’s not viewed through the distortion of someone holding their phone up to the screen at an odd angle.
Some people are under the severely mistaken impression that they can uncover hidden truths by getting a close-up view of videos with their digital camera. But that’s simply not how digital photography works. You can’t see more than what’s already present by taking a video of a video.
This video is just a regular guy doing his job. Anyone can experiment at home by putting their camera very close to the video on a computer screen and making things look nefarious as you twist and turn your angle. You’ll notice how things warp and the lines from the screen show up in odd ways, giving everything a sense of low-tech mystery.
Online sleuths have always tried to piece together things that don’t make sense, like we saw recently when people like far-right influencer Laura Loomer insisted an explosion at the U.S.-Canada border was a jihadi terrorist on their way to Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade. In reality, it was someone who was traveling from the U.S. to Canada and had nothing to do with terrorism. And this guy outside Trump’s arraignment is just the latest victim of poor amateur sleuthing. It’s literally just a video of some guy.
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