The Gorakhpur Flying Saucer Photos

2015 was a busy year for strange pictures in Indian skies. In June, a boy in Kanpur photographed a "too perfect" saucer on his father's phone. In October, photos said to be from Manipur showed a vast mothership over the state. The Gorakhpur district administration would later say the same object had been falsely reported in Lucknow and Kanpur in the months before.

The weekend of November 28, 2015. Photos started circulating on WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. They showed a giant craft above Padri market in Gorakhpur. They were credited to a local man named only as Rinku. No surname. No age. No job.

IBTimes India described a "huge disc-shaped flying object" hovering over the market, "rotating on its own." India.com called it a "huge flying saucer." Reports relayed by DNA India placed it at about cloud level. On Facebook, Avishek Sarkar wrote of a "mother ship" over Gorakhpur. Nobody described it arriving. Nobody described it leaving. Just a vast disc, hanging over a market, turning slowly in place.

Locals were reported to be frightened. Experts at Gorakhpur University were said to be studying the images.

The Gorakhpur district administration was not impressed. It dismissed the rumours as "just another hoax." No police, Indian Air Force or ISRO involvement was reported. No result from the university study was ever published.

At DNA India, Gwyn D'Mello went looking for the source. A reverse image search found nothing. A keyword search did. The craft was "V for Victory," fan art made in 2006 by Jukka Korhonen of Finland as a tribute to the TV series V.

Korhonen's ship had found a second life. In October 2015 the Camera360 photo app ran an "EndWar" campaign, adding UFOs, monsters and mechas to its sticker library. DNA quoted a sample caption: "Hey, look what I've just captured with #Camera360! I'm sure it will startle you." D'Mello added two more doubts. A craft that size would have been seen from neighbouring cities. And it stayed level even when the photos were tilted.

DNA credited the blog of Isaac Koi. Weeks earlier, Koi had traced the Manipur photos to the same artwork. He credited French researcher Jérôme Beau with the Camera360 link, and Curt Collins and Gilles Fernandez with helping find the source.

The story ran online only. In a year-end piece, Inverse described a "much larger object, snapped by an individual who claims to have seen the mysterious ship rotating in the air." Snopes later linked fakes from Memphis and Benguela to the same art.

Wikipedia lists Gorakhpur among its UFO sightings in India. Its only citation is a Daily Express article from 14 October 2015, about six weeks before the Gorakhpur photos appeared. According to Koi, that article was about Manipur. Wikipedia's own verdict on the worldwide wave is plain: the images were likely "created using digital editing software or even a mobile phone app." The mothership over Padri market never flew anywhere. It simply kept turning up.