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At some point or another, everyone fantasizes about being able to fly, soaring through the air like a bird high above the ground, over buildings and wherever your fancy takes you. A man named Jarno Smeets took that dream and seemingly made it a reality by concocting a sort of winged apparatus that allowed him to flap his arms and soar like an eagle. He uploaded a short YouTube video that quickly went viral, and just like that, over a million viewers were able to live out their fantasy of flight vicariously through some guy on the Internet. The only problem is Jarno Smeets doesn't appear to exist and it now appears that the video is a fake. Hello bug, meet windshield.
There's still a slim chance the video is legit, but if that's the case, why does nothing about Jarno Sheets check out? Wired.com put its detective cap on and tried to verify the bird-man's impressive resume, and at each step along the way, people he supposedly worked with or went to school with shrugged their shoulders and said, "Who?"
Smeets claims on his LinkedIn page that he used to work at Pailton Steering Systems from 2008 to 2010. John Nollett, the group managing director for Pailton Engineering Limited, told Wired he checked with each of his divisions and nobody has heard of Smeets.
"He's never worked for us in any of our locations," Nollet said.
There's no record of Smeets ever attending Coventry University in the U.K. where he supposedly went to school from 2001 to 2005, and not surprisingly, Smeets declined Wired's request for a phone interview, claiming he's "overwhelmed" at the moment.
But Wired did speak with a computer scientist at Stanford University who performed CGI effects for movies like Terminator 3 and Star Wars: Episode III, and in his opinion, there's plenty of reason to be suspicious, such as cutting the camera, which is an "obvious trick."
Do you think the video is a fake?
Comments are closed on this article
mini6090
March 23, 2012 at 7:08am
Is this seriously being questioned? If this is real... then so is this:
http://www.break.com/index/macbook-transforms-into-mini-jet.html
limitbreaker
March 22, 2012 at 5:07pm
Its really obviously fake, imagine trying to lift your self by pushing down on something solid on your side and see how hard it is by just using your chest muscles, are we really going to beleive that puny guy is so strong/fast that he can lift him self high in the air by pushing down on air?
Jox
March 22, 2012 at 1:08pm
There's another youtube video where he's on a Dutch(?) talk show admitting to the hoax. Hit the CC button on the bottom to see subtitles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OESwdRb48jM
JohnP
March 22, 2012 at 1:04pm
Oh we can fly all right, just not for long and only in one direction. BTW, there is NO force of gravity! What we are really feeling is us trying to resist the bending of the time/space curve that surround massive objects. Newton only got it pretty much right, works great for planets and cannonballs, not so good for GPS, and not at all for quasars and pulsars.
Blaze589
March 22, 2012 at 10:43am
It's clearly a hoax. He's way too heavy and the wing span is too short. For his perceived weight (180lb) even if he moved those "wings" at the same rate as a hummingbird it still wouldn't be possible.
strangelove9
March 22, 2012 at 7:43am
Here's the debunking story from Gizmodo: http://www.gizmodo.com/5895235/cgi-experts-say-flying-bird-man-is-fake
biggiebob12345
March 22, 2012 at 7:08am
Everything about the whole "flying with wings" process looked like a hoax to me. I can see managing to get a few inches off the ground for a few feet. But taking off like a bird like they show in the video? Not happening.
Gizmodo has a pretty thorough article debunking the video.
My opinion was that if this guy is really an engineer and this is really a "professional project" why wouldn't he use dedicated accelerometers instead of off the shelf wiimotes?
dgrmouse
March 22, 2012 at 6:26am
This, odd as it is for Max PC, was just what I needed to see this morning. Thanks!
stradric
March 22, 2012 at 6:16am
The movement of the guy in the air looks animated to me. Then his legs lift up like he's doing 60 MPH, when Wired estimates maybe 15 MPH. So ya, a decent hoax, but most certainly a hoax. Also, it's on the internet. When people come up with amazing inventions, they speak to news outlets.
Craiiiig
March 22, 2012 at 6:09am
If you look at around :17 to :20 the shadows look off. Camera cuts aside, I think there are other visual signs that this video is not completely honest. The biggest ones for me are the shadows on the wings. The wings themselves look too reflective as well. Also, from :35 to :40 the motion blur looks CG and the legs don't seem to really react to the flapping properly in my eyes. Those are the things that made me scratch my head about the whole thing.
