Did a California woman really see an extraterrestrial being walking on her doorbell camera?

Probably not – and CREOL’s experts were on hand to examine the facts.

In a viral video with millions of views on social media, a figure appears to move in front of a porch in the middle of the night. The internet’s armchair quarterbacks were quick to spread it far and wide, speculating whether this was an alien counter. It wasn’t long before NBC News took note, and reached out to CREOL to get some answers.

Shuo Sean Pang is an expert on digital cameras and imaging. He explains why he believes the “alien” is actually a real person:

Doorbell cameras use ‘video compression’ which means the details in a video under low light conditions are encoded into just a few pixels of a single color, usually green. They do this to reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent over the internet.

In this case, the moving object is probably a person. The motion triggered an automatic exposure adjustment, which is evident from the sudden brightness at the beginning.

Since the area around the person is moving and poorly lit, the video compression causes it to appear pixelated and greenish. The video does not contain detailed features of the object, only the dark green shadow.

Perhaps a close call of some sort – but likely not a “Close Encounter”. You can watch the NBC News NOW segment here.