Terrence Masson applies his science skills on UFO Hunters. All images courtesy of Terrence Masson.

Now in its third season, History Channel's UFO Hunters (Wednesdays 10:00 pm/9:00 C) continues its emphasis on hard science, which began last season with animation/vfx vet Terrence Masson coming aboard as image analysis consultant. Masson, who's "directed award winning short animated films, was the sole developer of the original South Park CG animation technique, built a previs department for Douglas Trumbull, fed Boba Fett to the Sarlac and flew the Millennium Falcon for George Lucas," is also director of game design at Northeastern University and is Conference Chair of SIGGRAPH 2010 (to be held in L.A.). He recently spoke with VFXWorld about his role on UFO Hunters.

Bill Desowitz: Tell us about the show and what you do.

Terrence Masson: It's pretty hard science. They investigate a lot of cases sent in from the public -- either still frames or video -- and they also look at historical cases as well. For me, it was interesting because it's the same as being a visual effects supervisor only in reverse, because what I spent 20 years doing was photorealistic stuff: how to integrate CG fake stuff into live action footage and basically fool people. I'm looking at the finished product and saying, "Yeah, this is fake." Or, "OK, that's real and here's why." And it's important to say on camera while running image processing algorithms and image stabilization, motion schemes, spatial analysis doing matchmoving.

BD: How does the image analysis work?

TM: If you isolate what somebody's been shooting in the sky, you can pretty accurately determine its relative speed, the distance, if it's making any turns or hovering like a helicopter or moving in a straight line… I always try to find out what the local airport traffic is like because people are often oblivious to that. They don't know that they're standing just a quarter of a mile away from a military base or a commercial airline.

How many visual effects artists get a chance to be in front of the camera?

BD: What tools do you use?

TM: I use Maya for 3D scene reconstruction, SynthEyes for image stabilization and tracking, MATLAB for image processing and a whole lot of Google maps to place airports and sight lines of the locations.

BD: How much of what you analyze is a hoax?

TM: Very little is fraudulent. The stuff that I get is pretty much 100% "real" in terms of it being a real photo [or video] of something that was actually there. That's not to say that everything is explainable, known objects. Maybe that's a little more than 50/50 and it's almost always aircraft because part of the analysis that I do is basically performance envelope, meaning flight dynamics and capability. I've always been pretty much of a flight nut anyway: I'm pretty familiar with aircrafts, statistics and performance. To take the simplest case, if you get somebody shooting video of something on a clear sky or at night, you can always get the camera stats. It's like doing camera surveying for visual effects on a live-action set. So you have an exact … field of view, depth of field, all that.

BD: What have you been working on recently?

TM: There was one episode off the coast of Connecticut that had some really wild stuff. It was very faint and he had to use high gain settings to make them visible. I triangulated all of his locations very accurately on how he was beaming and shooting his footage based on his verbal description of where he was standing and the actual visual things in the frame he was shooting, matched up with visual landmarks and I took about seven or eight of these vectors and [they] absolutely bulls eyed one of the three major airports that was down there. And so knowing that, having the camera data, I realized that the lights are actually 30 miles away and not five miles away, and that's why they looked like they're moving a lot slower but behaving differently. Then it became apparent that this is actually a number of planes all on approach in landing patterns.