The Kanpur Flying Saucer Photos

In its look back at a weird year for UFO sightings, Inverse paired two cases from Uttar Pradesh in 2015. One was the Gorakhpur photo in October. The other came first. It came from a family rooftop in the Shyam Nagar area of Kanpur. The story was reported by Dainik Bhaskar, then picked up by IBTimes India on 26 June 2015 and IBTimes UK the following day.

A Wednesday morning. Early. Abhijit, a fifth-grade student, was up on the roof with a phone. "I like nature photography and when I saw various shapes of clouds in the sky I started clicking pictures on my phone," he said. In the first accounts, he noticed nothing strange at the time. It was later, going through the pictures, that he stopped. "I saw a round object in the photographs and when I zoomed to take a closer look at it, I noticed it was a UFO."

His father, Santosh Gupta, looked too. "When we checked the pictures snapped by (our) son, we saw red light spotting around the white-coloured round object," he said. It was "as if white smoke was emitting from the centre of the object." IBTimes UK described "a perfect disc-shaped unidentified flying object."

Santosh Gupta stood by the images. He said "the photographs are real and it can be verified at any lab for its authenticity", and that "the picture is authentic, and no trick or technology was used." Father and son denied using photo-editing software. Even the phone is debated. Wikipedia says it was the father's. Abhijit spoke of "my phone".

1 March 2017. Amar Ujala returned to the story, in a piece by reporter Gaurav Shukla. Its version was stranger. Abhijeet, as the paper spelled his name, said he had seen the UFO several times within three days.

His father, Santosh Kumar Gupta, went up to the terrace with him and took several photos. Nothing appeared in them. The father went back inside. The boy stayed on the roof. He took about 10 photos. Four of them showed UFOs. Family members and neighbours photographed the sky too. Their phones showed nothing unusual. The paper said a video was also recorded, though it did not reproduce it, and its headline spoke of an alien. The text describes no being.

The sceptical framing arrived almost at once. On 27 June 2015 the Indian Express ran the headline "Kanpur boy clicks pictures of a UFO, but it is a bit too perfect to be believed." IBTimes UK reported that "experts have raised doubts about its authenticity", without naming them. India.com noted that sceptics found the photos "a little too perfect".

Writing about the Gorakhpur photo, Wikipedia noted that similar images were probably "created using digital editing software or even a mobile phone app." No published source applies that to Kanpur directly. But the shape of the Kanpur story keeps the question open. One phone. An object no one else could catch. No official investigation, and no record of the offered lab test ever taking place.

Inverse remembered "one in June documented by a fifth grade student". India.com put the case in its top five UFO sightings in India, though it misdated it to August. Amar Ujala said the boy had become world famous, his photos a subject of research around the world.

The four frames remain the whole of the evidence. Whether they show a craft or a clever edit has never been settled.