The CARET Drone UFO Photographs

May 10, 2007. Photographs arrived by email at Coast to Coast AM. The sender called himself Chad. He said something had been hovering near Bakersfield, California, over the area where he and his wife were walking.

A circular, ringed centre with three spiked arms. On its underside, unidentified lettering and seemingly alien glyphs. "The craft is almost completely silent and moves very smoothly," Chad said. "It usually moves slowly until it decides to take off. Then it moves VERY quickly and is out of sight in the blink of an eye." Up close, he said, it sounded like power lines.

Others followed. On May 12, Deborah McKinley reported a sighting at Lake Tahoe to MUFON, describing a vibrating sound. On May 20, a poster called Rajman1977 put six photos from Capitola online. The craft hovered over a utility pole. Soon after, his email account was cancelled. He vanished from the internet.

In June the sightings moved to Big Basin. A man called Stephen shared three photos of a more intricate craft, with metal "hair" on top and bottom and many more ringed arms. Then Ty, who said he had been cycling there, sent 12 photos to Linda Moulton Howe at Earthfiles.

June 26, 2007. An open letter arrived from a man calling himself Isaac. He claimed he had been an engineer from 1984 to 1987 for CARET, Commercial Applications Research for Extraterrestrial Technology. Behind a fake tech company office in Palo Alto, he said, more than 200 civilian scientists worked under military oversight. The glyphs were "functional blueprints." The Big Basin craft had been seen appearing and disappearing, he explained, because an experiment near Moffett Field jammed its cloaking system.

MUFON first called the images the clearest and most detailed UFO photographs since Gulf Breeze. Then investigator Steve Reichmuth, relying on professional visual effects artists, concluded they were computer-generated. CGI expert Marc D'Antonio agreed. "I have to say that this one is not actually even a GOOD fake." He pointed to mottled shadows left by radiosity rendering.

The Drone Research Team showed that the Big Basin and Rajman photos were not taken where claimed. According to Metabunk, Rajman's came from Campbell, and Chad's scene was on Highway 17 near the Summit Restaurant. In 2023 Nick Pelling read the hidden file data. Photoshop tags. A Lake Tahoe timestamp a week before the claimed sighting. No corroborating witness ever came forward.

On July 9, 2023, artist Margaret Gel published "The Isaac Caret Hoax." Art she made around the turn of the century, she wrote, had been stolen by someone she thought she could trust and put into the hoax. Its ciphers hid the names of people she loved, and a message: "ETERNAL SOLDIER SAILOR MOON." Earlier, in December 2008, Gizmodo had suggested viral marketing for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Its makers denied it, and nobody ever claimed the photographs themselves.

The drones lived on anyway. A Terminator episode, "Earthlings Welcome Here," aired in December 2008 with designs closely modelled on them. An Alienware campaign in October 2007 had used an almost identical alphabet. Isaac and the photographers were never identified. Only their pictures remain.