The Temple Mount UFO Sighting

Theoretical Alignment

This case aligns with the Psycho-Social Hypothesis in its digital form, and with nothing else. The footage that made the Temple Mount "UFO" famous was shown within days to be an edited composite: a still photograph of Jerusalem's Old City at night, displayed on a screen and given artificial camera shake, with a moving light added on top. No independent witness, photograph, radar record or official report of a light over the Dome of the Rock that night has ever surfaced. What remains of interest is not an aerial phenomenon but a social one — how a small number of anonymously posted clips, staged to look like independent angles on one event, reached millions of viewers and international news coverage before the editing was exposed, and how readily viewers read religious and prophetic meaning into a light placed over one of the most contested holy sites on Earth.

An earlier version of this page argued that the case might still hold a genuine core because "at least one" of the videos was a hoax while the others were unresolved. That framing does not survive the contemporaneous record. The Jerusalem Post reported on February 7, 2011 that the second clip was posted the same day as the first, from "much closer," with "the same soundtrack," and that the third showed "the same event, sans the Hebrew-speaking men"; the critics who examined the clips treated them as one production, and none of the people heard in them has ever come forward. The Extraterrestrial and Interdimensional hypotheses have nothing to work with here.

Complete Timeline

Date	Event
January 28, 2011, ~1:00 AM (claimed)	The time later given for the sighting: a light said to have descended over the Dome of the Rock, hovered, flashed and shot upward. The night was late Thursday into Friday. No report from anyone else in Jerusalem at that hour has been found.
January 29, 2011	A YouTube user calling himself "eligael" posts the first video, showing a man with his back to the camera at the Armon Hanatziv promenade, and writes that "this morning around 1:00 AM" he and "another guy" witnessed "an amazing ufo aircraft" over the Old City. A second clip, showing the same view from much closer with the same soundtrack, appears the same day (Jerusalem Post).
January 30, 2011	A third clip, posted by a user called "50nFit," shows the same event with English-speaking voices instead of the Hebrew speakers; one says, "We've seen 'em in Mississippi like this, but never like… never like this" (Jerusalem Post; Salon).
February 1, 2011	Neurologist and skeptic Steven Novella posts an analysis on his NeuroLogica blog listing the red flags — an unresolved blob of light, motion "too perfect, geometric, and uniform," unconvincing reactions, city lights that never twinkle — and calls the first video "totally busted as a fake."
February 3, 2011	Fox News (from The Sun) and Israel National News report the videos; Fox quotes former Ministry of Defence UFO desk officer Nick Pope. Mick West opens a Metabunk thread on the hoax the same day, where users identify the background as the Wikimedia Commons photograph "Jerusalem night 7088."
February 4, 2011	Salon reports that AOL's Lee Speigel doubted the close-up video, citing an analysis suggesting its audio was assembled from separate tracks, and quotes Benjamin Radford: "it's almost certainly a hoax."
February 7, 2011	The Jerusalem Post ("Close encounters of the fabricated kind," Jonah Mandel) reports that the videos have passed 2 million views, that HOAXkiller1's six debunking videos have about 350,000, and that close-ups show the background was a static image on a screen given fake camera shake with a "motion tile" effect.
February 9, 2011	LiveScience/CBS News publish Benjamin Radford's "Holy Land Hoax: Jerusalem UFO Not Kosher," quoting Robert Sheaffer: "the original Jerusalem UFO has now been definitely shown to be a hoax." The same day Share International issues a press release presenting the light as a sign of the coming of "Maitreya."

The Videos, One by One

Most retellings speak of "four videos" from four "independent" witnesses. The contemporaneous reporting is more specific, and the details matter, because the case for authenticity always rested on the idea that several unconnected people had filmed the same light.

The first clip. On January 29, 2011, a YouTube account named "eligael" posted a video shot, according to its description, at "the promenade of Armon Hantziv in Jerusalm," the ridge-top walkway (also called the Haas Promenade) south of the Old City. The Jerusalem Post quoted the description in full: "This morning around 1:00 AM at the promenade of Armon Hantziv in Jerusalm, i was witness (with another guy), an amazing ufo aircraft over Jerusalem old city (mount Moriah) Dome of the Rock,Temple Mount...What is the meaning of this sighting ???" The clip shows a man with his back to the camera looking toward the Dome of the Rock while the two men exchange exclamations in Hebrew. A small spot of light hovers above the Temple Mount, then shoots up into the sky, "joining a group of smaller red lights." News reports gave the uploader's name in several spellings — "Eligael Gidlovitch of Tel Aviv," "Eligael Gedalyovich," "Aligal Gidliovic," "Eli Gael" — but none of the outlets that used them reached him, and nothing about him has been verified.

The second clip. "In an attempt to lend reliability to the first video," the Post wrote, "a second appeared the same day, showing the same view from much closer, with the same soundtrack." A clip filmed from a different spot would have carried different sound. A clip carrying the identical soundtrack is not a second witness; it is the same production presented twice. Richard Bartholomew, summarising the coverage, notes that the original poster later added a further video showing the object higher over the Old City.

The third clip. The next day a user called "50nFit" posted what purported to be the event filmed from another vantage point by a group of English speakers, "one of them apparently from Mississippi," who, in the Post's words, "express their wonder over what they pretend to be witnessing." Fox News, drawing on The Sun, described them as American tourists and reported that they said they had seen similar objects in Mississippi. Salon quoted the line directly. None of these speakers was ever identified.

Later clips. By February 3, Israel National News counted "at least three" videos taken "simultaneously," one of them combining two of the others in sync, and noted that "a fourth video was added later." It placed one video with "a tourist from the United States" in or near the Old City and the others with Israelis on the promenade "less than 3 km away." A YouTube compilation titled "ALL 6 VIDEOS" later gathered six clips. The count matters less than the pattern: every clip appeared within a few days on anonymous accounts, and no clip was ever offered as an original camera file.

The descriptions also disagree with one another in small ways. Israel National News reported that in one video the light "spins, then shoots upward with no flash," while in the others it "hangs higher, floats down fairly quickly, then soars upward right after a flash," and estimated that it stayed about 24 seconds. Genuine footage of one event from several cameras would agree on what the light did; footage animated separately for each clip need not.

How the Hoax Was Exposed

The exposure came from video editors and skeptics working in public, mostly on YouTube and in online forums, within about a week of the first upload. Three findings did most of the work.

A still photograph, not a night scene

In genuine handheld night video of a city, lights flicker with atmospheric turbulence, cars move, windows change, and nearby and distant objects shift against each other as the camera moves. In the first clip nothing in the city moved. Steven Novella pointed out on February 1 that the city lights did not twinkle or shift, "because it's not a video, its a still picture," and that pixelation during the zoom suggested a digital zoom into a still image rather than an optical zoom. Israel National News reported the same objection from viewers: "other lights in the scene don't twinkle and nothing else appears to move." The background was then traced to a specific photograph: on Metabunk, users identified it as "Jerusalem night 7088," a photograph of the Old City at night on Wikimedia Commons, and the Jerusalem Post reported that HOAXkiller1's videos showed "the original photo available on Wikipedia Commons that was the backdrop."

Close-ups went further. According to the Post, they "showed the background image was actually a static image on a screen" — the hoaxer had filmed a monitor displaying the photograph. Mick West made the same point on Metabunk with some dryness: "note to future fakers, if you are going to just video your monitor screen, then don't put a 1080p version of it on youtube."

Motion Tile: the fingerprint of fake camera shake

A still image filmed from a tripod looks static, so to make it look like handheld footage the hoaxer added artificial camera shake in editing software. Shifting a frame in that way exposes black gaps at its edges. Adobe After Effects' "Motion Tile" effect hides those gaps by tiling or mirroring the image's edge pixels outward. The mirrored strips are faint but visible, and because they are tied to the artificial movement they move with it. HOAXkiller1 explained the effect to the Jerusalem Post: it mirrors a bit of the edges of a static image "to hide the black edges created when they added fake camera shake to the video. The camera movements are fake. That is why the mirror lines follow the movement of the camera."

Robert Sheaffer, the skeptical investigator who writes the Bad UFOs blog, reached the same conclusion independently and put it most plainly to Benjamin Radford: "the original Jerusalem UFO has now been definitely shown to be a hoax. Effects of the video processing software are clearly seen. The hoaxer used Motion Tile effects with edge mirroring to introduce camera shake into the video. You can see the mirroring effects along the edge of the video. This proves that the video did not go directly from the camera to YouTube, that it made a stop in between inside a sophisticated video editing software suite." Allen Versfeld, writing on the Urban Astronomer site, drew the obvious inference: if the shake was added afterwards, the original camera was steady, probably on a tripod, and the shot was planned.

A light that lit nothing

Benjamin Radford, then managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer, noted that one woman in the videos says the light was so bright that "you can almost hardly look at it," yet "the object does not seem to reflect any light from the gold-plated dome below it." A real light bright enough to be hard to look at, hovering a short distance above a gilded dome, would light it up. A light added as a flat layer over a photograph lights nothing. Radford added that a featureless light is among the easiest "UFOs" to fake, since there are no windows, wings or shadows to draw.

The audio

The soundtracks drew their own criticism. The Post described the "unconvincing oohs and aahs" of the men filming; Novella wrote that "their reaction just does not seem genuine"; and the skeptic Larry Robinson, quoted by Universe Today, pointed out that "the guy yells 'Whoa' before the object jumps into the sky, not after." Salon reported an analysis suggesting the close-up video's audio had been assembled from several separate tracks and laid over the footage to imply that people were present. The identical soundtrack on the first two clips is the clearest audio evidence of all.

Remakes and Demonstrations

Within days, other YouTube users showed how easily the footage could be reproduced. The Jerusalem Post described a remake by a user called "xbatusai" in which "not one but four pretty colored lights accurately mimic the pattern of the single light spot in the eligael piece." On Metabunk, a user rebuilt one of the clips in the free 3D program Blender from the same Wikimedia photograph and wrote that he was "pretty sure I used the same method as the original hoaxer." Another poster there wrote that "we made a better fake just for fun." Versfeld pointed readers to an earlier training video, by someone skilled in visual effects, demonstrating how to fake handheld camera shake — the technique visible in the footage.

The remakes do not prove who made the originals, but they settle the practical question the believers raised: whether an amateur could produce footage this convincing. Several did, in days, with free or common software.

The Media Cycle

The story's reach came from the press, not from the clips alone. Richard Bartholomew catalogued the headlines in a post of February 8, 2011: the Daily Mail asked "Are aliens here?", the Daily Telegraph ran "UFO hovers over Jerusalem shrine," Fox News ran "'UFO' Hovers Over Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock Shrine," and CBS used a similar headline with a question mark. One aggregator headlined "Jerusalem Dome Of The Rock UFO Videos Impress Pope," meaning Nick Pope rather than Benedict XVI. Bartholomew noted that the headlines did not disclose that the only evidence was a handful of YouTube videos.

Fox's February 3 report, credited to The Sun, described a "glowing circular object" that "descended slowly," hovered, flickered and "shot upward," recorded "from four different perspectives," and noted that flying over the Dome of the Rock is forbidden. It quoted Nick Pope, formerly of the UK Ministry of Defence's UFO desk, saying that if the videos were real they were remarkable, that the acceleration suggested an unmanned craft, that a hoax would have been carefully planned, and that the Israeli military had advanced drones. Share International's press release cited Channel 4 News and the Sydney Morning Herald on the apparent synchrony of the angles. Bartholomew also reports that Fox later floated the idea that the clips were viral marketing for the film Battle: Los Angeles; no evidence for that was ever produced.

Skeptical coverage caught up within the week: Novella on February 1, Salon's update with Radford on February 4, the Jerusalem Post on February 7, and Radford's LiveScience article, republished by CBS News and Space.com, on February 9. By then the first video alone had been viewed more than 2 million times.

The Hoaxer's Method, Reconstructed

Putting the published findings together, the method behind the first clip can be reconstructed in outline. The maker started from a night photograph of the Old City, "Jerusalem night 7088," freely available on Wikimedia Commons. He displayed it on a monitor and filmed the screen, which is why HOAXkiller1's close-ups showed a static image on a screen and why Mick West could see a high-resolution recording of a monitor. The footage was then taken into editing software, where a light was animated descending over the Dome, hovering and shooting away, and artificial camera shake was added to make a tripod shot look handheld; Motion Tile filled the gaps the shake opened at the frame edges, leaving the mirrored strips that Sheaffer and HOAXkiller1 spotted. A soundtrack of two men exclaiming in Hebrew was laid over it.

A second version of the same scene, cropped closer, was posted the same day with the same soundtrack, and a third with English-speaking voices followed the next day. Versfeld's inference that the original camera was steady and the shot planned follows directly from the added shake. Nothing in the published record identifies who did this, or whether one person made every clip; Radford reported speculation that most or all of the videos came from a single person, and the shared soundtrack shows that at least the first two did.

Readings of the Light: Religious and Otherwise

Because the light was placed over the site of the Jewish Temples and the Dome of the Rock, many viewers read it in religious terms. The Jerusalem Post described the debate beneath the videos as ranging over "theology, eschatology, contemporary Mideast politics, the Egyptian pyramids and HOAXkiller1's mother." Fox reported that some believers argued the object was the Hebrew God, Elohim; Bartholomew notes others who took it for an angel. The original uploader's own description ended with a question: "What is the meaning of this sighting ???"

The most elaborate reading came from Share International, the organisation of the British artist and New Age teacher Benjamin Creme. Its press release of February 9, 2011 presented the Jerusalem light, together with a "rider on a white horse" seen in footage from Cairo during the Egyptian protests, as signs heralding the public emergence of "Maitreya, the World Teacher," and described the Jerusalem object as one of four star-like signs seen worldwide since December 2008. The release offered no analysis of the footage.

The timing helped. The videos appeared on January 29, the day after the Egyptian protests' "Friday of Anger" and four days after the protests began on January 25, when audiences were already watching the region closely. Nothing links the clips to those events; the context simply explains part of the appetite for them. None of the religious readings, whatever their sincerity, bears on the factual question, which is settled by the editing evidence.

The Sky and Weather That Night

Because the backdrop was a stock photograph, the videos show nothing about the real sky over Jerusalem on January 28, 2011. The real conditions can be reconstructed independently. NASA JPL's Horizons ephemeris places the Moon below the horizon at 1:00 AM local time (23:00 UT on January 27), about 9° below the east-south-eastern horizon, rising shortly before 2:00 AM as a 34%-lit waning crescent; there was no moonlight on the city at the claimed time. The ERA5 reanalysis (via Open-Meteo) gives about 7°C, roughly 20% cloud cover and no precipitation at the Temple Mount at that hour: a cool, mostly clear winter night, though reanalysis is a model estimate, not an observation from the promenade.

The geometry is simple. The Armon Hanatziv (Haas) Promenade lies on the ridge south of the Old City; Israel National News put it "less than 3 km" from the Dome of the Rock, and map coordinates give a little over 2 km. From there, Radford's estimate that the light was "no more than about fifteen feet long," scaled against the Dome, would make it a small object hovering a short distance above a lit, gilded building in a busy city.

Arguments Made in Defence of the Videos

The videos had defenders, and their arguments deserve a fair statement before they are set aside.

"There are several angles." This was the strongest argument, and it is the one that briefly troubled skeptics: Salon reported on February 4 that skeptics "had difficulty dismissing the event as a hoax because there's more than one video account of the event," and Share International quoted the Sydney Morning Herald's remark that the clips were "shot from various angles that all seem to be in sync." Independent angles would indeed be powerful evidence. But angles are only independent if their makers are. Here the second clip shares the first clip's soundtrack, all the clips appeared on anonymous accounts within a few days, none of their makers was ever identified, and the clips disagree about whether the light flashed before leaving. A hoaxer who has animated a light over one photograph can animate it over a second, or over the same photograph cropped differently.

"A hoax this good would need careful planning." Nick Pope, quoted by Fox News, said that if the footage was a hoax it had been carefully planned, and he raised the possibility of an advanced Israeli military drone. The remakes posted within days answer the first point; the second point is not consistent with the evidence, since the background is a stock photograph rather than a live view of the sky in which any drone could have been flying.

"The debunking video was planted." According to Richard Bartholomew, All News Web, which claimed to have broken the story, suggested through its writer Michael Cohen that the third clip had been inserted to discredit the event, and promoted a government cover-up theory. That argument concedes that at least one clip was fake while offering no evidence about who made it or why the remaining clips should be trusted; it also does not address the Motion Tile mirroring in the first clip, which is the one Sheaffer and HOAXkiller1 examined.

"An advanced intelligence could do anything." A reader commenting on the Urban Astronomer analysis argued that an off-world intelligence could evade security and possess technology beyond current physics. Arguments of that kind cannot be tested and cannot explain why a real craft would appear only in a photograph of the Old City downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. The Jerusalem Post quoted a YouTube commenter who put the believers' fallback position candidly: "UFO existence is fact… Whether this video is real or not doesn't change a thing." That may be a statement of faith; it is not evidence about this footage.

What Would Have Authenticated the Footage

It is worth being concrete about what genuine footage would have looked like, because the absence of each item is part of the case against it.

Original files. A camera or phone records a file with its own encoding, frame rate and metadata (device model, date and time, often location). Supplying the untouched original, or the device itself, to an analyst or a news organisation is the single most useful thing a genuine witness can do. No uploader in this case ever did so; Sheaffer's point was precisely that the posted file "did not go directly from the camera to YouTube."

Named witnesses. A genuine witness can be interviewed, cross-examined about where they stood and what they saw, and checked against the place. Radford observed that a genuine videographer would have been expected to come forward to sell the story or seek analysis within days. None of the people on any of the clips ever did.

Independent corroboration. A brilliant light over the Dome of the Rock at 1:00 AM would have been seen by others — residents of the hillside neighbourhoods facing the Old City, police on duty, people on the promenade itself, which is a popular lookout. Radford and Novella both stressed that a real event would have produced many more videos and reports. None appeared.

Consistency between angles. Two cameras filming one object from different places see the same event at the same moments: the same flash, the same departure, parallax that matches the distance between the cameras. Measured carefully, that consistency would even allow the object's distance to be triangulated. The Temple Mount clips instead disagree about the flash, and two of them share one soundtrack.

A live background. Real night footage of a city shows atmospheric shimmer, traffic and changing lights. A still image shows none of these, and this one could be matched to a specific published photograph.

Every one of these tests was available to the people who posted the clips, and none was met.

Lessons for Evaluating Viral Video

Steven Novella used the case to recommend what he called "armchair skepticism": a viewer without special equipment can still ask whether a clip shows only an unresolved blob of light (which "no matter what they appear to do, are never compelling"), whether its motion looks natural or animated, whether the reactions sound genuine, whether the background behaves like live video, and whether a real event would have left other evidence. Each of those questions, asked of the first Temple Mount clip, pointed to a fake before any technical analysis was published.

Allen Versfeld, writing on the Urban Astronomer site, drew a wider moral: digital tools make any photograph or video easy to fake, so such media alone cannot be valid proof of an extraordinary claim. Benjamin Radford added a point about method: believers "dismiss skeptical explanations" but "do not offer any better analysis," whereas a serious alternative must account for all of the facts, including the edge mirroring, the stock-photo backdrop and the missing witnesses. The case is a compact demonstration of all three points, and it was resolved in about ten days by people working openly with the same public copies of the clips that everyone else could see.

Key Witness Profiles

The Five Observables Assessment

Why "Debunked"

The Temple Mount UFO is classified as Debunked because its only evidence, the videos, has been shown to be edited fabrication, and nothing else supports it. The first clip's background is a still photograph traced to Wikimedia Commons, filmed from a screen; its camera shake was added in editing, as the Motion Tile edge mirroring shows; and its brilliant light illuminates nothing around it. The second clip carries the same soundtrack as the first, so it is not an independent angle. The uploaders are anonymous, the voices were never identified, no original camera file was ever offered, and no one else in a busy city reported a light over its best-known landmark. The score sits near the floor rather than at it only because the hoaxer was never publicly identified.

Sensor & Instrumentation Detection Profile

The only instruments in this case are the cameras, or rather the editing software, behind the YouTube clips. No radar data, air-traffic record, security-camera footage or other sensor record relating to the night of January 28, 2011 has been published by any Israeli authority, and no statement by the Israeli Air Force, police or air-traffic authorities about the videos has been found. Earlier versions of this page asserted that the Israeli Air Force and Ben Gurion air-traffic control "confirmed no unidentified targets," that an IDF spokesman had commented, that Israel Antiquities Authority cameras "recorded nothing anomalous," and that an Israeli forensic expert named Gilad Shadmon had found no manipulation in two of the videos; none of those statements or people could be traced to any source, and they have been removed. An earlier draft's attribution of a radar confirmation to Haim Eshed was removed for the same reason.

What can be said is narrower and sufficient. Fox News, reporting the videos, noted that flying over the Dome of the Rock is forbidden; the airspace over Jerusalem is closely watched; and no report of any aircraft, drone or unknown object over the Old City that night appeared in the Israeli press. The case does not need sensor data to be resolved, because the footage itself has been shown to be a composite.

The video analysis that did take place was done in public. HOAXkiller1's six videos, Robert Sheaffer's identification of Motion Tile edge mirroring, Steven Novella's frame-level observations about static lights and digital zoom, and the Metabunk thread's identification of the Wikimedia Commons backdrop all point the same way. No analyst has published a contrary technical finding. (Earlier versions of this page cited a Skeptical Inquirer analysis by James McGaha and Joe Nickell; no such article has been found, and the reference has been removed.)

Environmental & Geospatial Context

The Temple Mount — Har HaBayit in Hebrew, al-Haram al-Sharif in Arabic — is a raised esplanade of about 37 acres in the Old City of Jerusalem, site of the Jewish Temples and of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque. Since 1967 Israel has controlled security in the Old City while the Jordanian-funded Islamic Waqf administers the Muslim holy sites on the Mount. Few places on Earth carry more religious and political weight, which is why a light over the Dome of the Rock drew the attention it did.

The Armon Hanatziv (Haas) Promenade, where the first clip claims to have been filmed, is a popular lookout on the ridge south of the Old City, a little over 2 km from the Dome of the Rock by map coordinates (Israel National News put it at "less than 3 km"). JPL Horizons places the Moon below the horizon at 1:00 AM, and the ERA5 reanalysis suggests a cool (about 7°C), mostly clear night. An earlier version of this page described "clear winter skies" with "temperatures near freezing" and put the promenade 800 metres from the Dome; neither figure had a source, and the second is wrong.

An earlier version also said Egypt's revolution began "three days later, on January 25." The Egyptian protests began on January 25, three days before the claimed sighting; the videos appeared during that week, on the day after the "Friday of Anger" of January 28.

Observer Credibility & Occupational Profile

There are no identified witnesses in this case. The first and second clips came from the "eligael" account, whose owner's name was reported in several inconsistent spellings and never verified; the third came from "50nFit," with unidentified English-speaking voices. Benjamin Radford put the point in the language of an investigator: "anonymous reports are usually a red flag that something's bogus," and anyone who had genuinely filmed "some of the most amazing video footage of a UFO taken in the past decade" would have been expected to submit it for analysis or sell it to a broadcaster rather than post it anonymously.

Earlier versions of this page described the primary videographer giving interviews under a pseudonym, a group of "three from Texas" filming near Zion Gate, and an Israeli news cameraman who filed an incident report from near Jaffa Gate. None of those details appears in any source found; the only reported American voice is the one who mentions Mississippi. They have been removed.

The absence of independent witnesses is itself the strongest circumstantial evidence. Radford noted that "there are well over a million people in Jerusalem at any given time," many of them religious visitors near the Temple Mount, and that "no one other than the videographers reported having seen the lights." Novella made the same point: a real light over a major city would produce many videos and thousands of witnesses, and "there would not just be one or two videos."

Physical & Material Assays

No physical evidence was claimed, and none was ever sought: no one reported scorching, debris, residue or any effect on the Dome of the Rock or its surroundings, and no investigation of the site was reported. The only material in the case is digital, and it has been examined. The first clip is a recording of a computer monitor displaying a still photograph, with artificial camera movement and an added light; the second shares its soundtrack; the later clips are of the same production or are copies. None was ever supplied as an original camera file with intact metadata, which is the one piece of material evidence that could have supported a claim of authenticity.

An earlier version of this page argued that the compression of the YouTube copies made forensic analysis "impossible" and that the multi-angle footage was the "strongest argument against total hoax." The first point is answered by the analysis that was actually done — the backdrop was traced to a specific photograph and the edge mirroring is visible even in compressed copies — and the second by the shared soundtrack and the anonymous, same-week posting of all the clips.

Historical Precedents & Archive Matches

Jerusalem has a modest history of real light sightings that did not need special effects. On January 4, 1979, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's Daily Bulletin reported that early risers in Jerusalem had called the district police station at about 4 a.m. to report "large and strange blue lights" over the Mount of Olives; officers who went outside saw objects over the hills, the Air Force and the meteorological service were notified, and it was assumed the light source was a bright star. That report had named police witnesses and an official response; the 2011 videos had neither.

The 2011 case belongs instead to the family of composited internet UFO videos: footage built on a real photograph of a famous place, with a light or craft added and the camera made to look handheld. Its distinguishing feature was the attempt to manufacture corroboration by posting several "angles" in quick succession, one of them with different voices and a different language. That approach made the story more convincing for a few days and easier to expose, because the clips could be compared with one another. Within this catalogue, the Belgian UFO Wave offers the contrast of a case in which many identified witnesses reported over months, and in which a famous photograph was later confessed as a hoax.

The sky-truth lesson is the same as in older photographic hoaxes: a light that does not interact with its surroundings — no reflection on a gilded dome, no glow on the stone below — is very likely not in the scene. Benjamin Radford's observation on that point required no software at all.

Material Analysis

The "material evidence" in this case is the set of videos. Unlike cases involving physical traces, radar returns or medical effects, the entire evidentiary basis consists of a few compressed YouTube files, so the material analysis concerns what those files show about how they were made.

Video Forensics: Motion Tile Edge Mirroring

The decisive finding was the edge mirroring in the first and most widely shared clip. When a still frame is moved to simulate handheld shake, its edges move into view and leave black gaps; Adobe After Effects' Motion Tile effect fills them by repeating or mirroring the edge pixels. The mirrored strips are tied to the frame and move with the fake shake. HOAXkiller1 and Robert Sheaffer each identified them, and Sheaffer's conclusion was that the video "did not go directly from the camera to YouTube."

Static Background Analysis

The city lights in the first clip do not twinkle, nothing moves, and the zoom pixelates the way a digital enlargement of a still image does (Novella). Users on Metabunk then found the image itself: the Wikimedia Commons photograph "Jerusalem night 7088," and close-ups shown by HOAXkiller1 indicated it had been filmed from a screen. The background of the "UFO video" is therefore a known photograph, not a recording of Jerusalem on January 28, 2011.

The Light Element

The light descends, hovers, flashes and shoots away, but it never illuminates the Dome of the Rock or anything else in the frame (Radford), and its motion struck Novella as "too perfect, geometric, and uniform" with abrupt starts. Israel National News noted that the clips disagree about whether the light flashes before departing. Both points fit a light added separately in each clip and are hard to square with one real object filmed from several places.

Official Response

No Israeli authority is known to have commented on the videos, and no official record about them has been published. Earlier versions of this page reported security-camera, radar and air-traffic "confirmations" and a public petition to the Knesset and UNESCO; none of those could be sourced and they have been removed. The case is resolved by the videos themselves.

Conventional Explanation Candidate

The conventional explanation for this case is that it is a 100% digital fabrication (CGI hoax) created using static photography and motion-graphics software (such as Adobe After Effects). Analysis by HOAXkiller1, Robert Sheaffer and others showed that a still photograph of the Old City at night, traced to Wikimedia Commons and filmed from a screen, was used as the background, with artificial camera shake (betrayed by Motion Tile edge mirroring) and a moving light added. The additional "angles," one sharing the first clip's soundtrack, were posted anonymously within days and appear to have been intended to mimic independent witnesses.

Related Cases

Further Reading & Recommended Literature

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Essential Viewing

Sources

• Jonah Mandel, "Close encounters of the fabricated kind," The Jerusalem Post, February 7, 2011 — the eligael upload and description, the same-soundtrack second clip, the 50nFit clip, HOAXkiller1's six videos and the Motion Tile explanation, the xbatusai remake. jpost.com
• Benjamin Radford, "Holy Land Hoax: Jerusalem UFO Not Kosher," CBS News (from LiveScience), February 9, 2011, with Robert Sheaffer's Motion Tile statement. cbsnews.com
• Benjamin Radford, "Hoax in the Holy Land: Jerusalem UFO a Proven Fake," LiveScience (also Space.com), February 2011. livescience.com
• HOAXKiller1, "HOAX! - Third View of UFO over Temple Mount in Jerusalem," YouTube, 2011. youtube.com
• Mick West et al., "Jerusalem Temple mount UFO debunked," Metabunk forum thread, opened February 3, 2011 — identification of the Wikimedia Commons backdrop; remakes. metabunk.org
• Wikimedia Commons, "Jerusalem night 7088.JPG" — the photograph identified as the videos' backdrop. commons.wikimedia.org
• Steven Novella, "Jerusalem UFO," NeuroLogica Blog, February 1, 2011. theness.com
• Fox News (from The Sun), "'UFO' Hovers Over Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock Shrine," February 3, 2011 — Armon Hanatziv witnesses, American visitors, Nick Pope's comments. foxnews.com
• Hillel Fendel, "UFO 'Sighted' Over Temple Mount," Israel National News (Arutz Sheva), February 3, 2011. israelnationalnews.com
• Amy Steinberg, "Possible UFO in Jerusalem ignites Web controversy," Salon, February 4, 2011 — Lee Speigel's audio analysis; Radford's update. salon.com
• Mark Thompson, "In Case of Jerusalem Video, UFO Could Mean 'Unidentified Flashlight Objects'," Universe Today, 2011 — Larry Robinson on the "Whoa" timing. universetoday.com
• Allen Versfeld, "28 January 2011: UFO over Jerusalem," Urban Astronomer, June 30, 2011. urban-astronomer.com
• Richard Bartholomew, "Jerusalem UFO YouTube Videos Generate Headlines," Bartholomew's Notes on Religion, February 8, 2011 — headlines, uploader name variants, All News Web and Benjamin Creme claims. barthsnotes.com
• Share International USA, "Jerusalem UFO and Rider on a White Horse in Cairo are Signs of Maitreya, the World Teacher," PR Newswire, February 9, 2011. prnewswire.com
• Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "UFOs in Jerusalem," Daily Bulletin, January 4, 1979. jta.org
• NASA JPL Horizons, observer ephemeris for the Moon at 31.778°N, 35.235°E, 2011-Jan-27 22:30–2011-Jan-28 01:00 UT: at 23:00 UT azimuth 111.3°, elevation −8.7°, 34.0% illuminated; above the horizon by 00:00 UT. ssd.jpl.nasa.gov
• Open-Meteo historical weather API (ERA5 reanalysis), 31.778°N, 35.235°E, January 27–28, 2011: 6.7°C, 20% cloud cover, no precipitation at 23:00 UT. open-meteo.com

Corrections (October 2026)

A fact-check against the contemporaneous coverage removed a large amount of invented material from earlier versions of this page, which also contradicted its own Debunked rating by calling the case "one of the most genuinely ambiguous" on record. Removed as untraceable: a Skeptical Inquirer analysis by James McGaha and Joe Nickell; an Israeli forensic expert "Gilad Shadmon"; statements by the IDF Spokesman, the Israeli Air Force, Ben Gurion air-traffic control and Israel Antiquities Authority cameras; a "student project" origin; a group of "three from Texas" and an Israeli news cameraman; Knesset inquiries, a UNESCO referral and an appeal by Barry Chamish; claims that Jeffrey Kripal and Diana Pasulka analysed the case and that MUFON, SCU and AARO changed their procedures because of it; an unrelated passage on Haim Eshed and the 1966 Tully "nests"; and eleven source entries (among them "L/L Research," "Burt Monroe," The Skeptic, "VFX News," the Weather Channel, Israel Police and IAA "logs," the Journal of Socio-Cultural Anomalies, Computer Graphics World and The Anomalist) that could not be found. Corrected: the promenade is a little over 2 km from the Dome, not 800 m; the Egyptian protests began on January 25, before the sighting; the night's weather and Moon are now taken from ERA5 and JPL Horizons; the first-hand chronology now follows the Jerusalem Post; and the motion-tile finding is credited to HOAXkiller1 and Robert Sheaffer.