Mystery after SUV filmed driving off cliff

[QuickQuickSlow]

26 minutes ago, Susanc241 said:

Has no-one been reported missing?  Seems strange if not.  One person at least, and maybe more.

what if the only other family/friend was also in the car?

[Susanc241]

11 minutes ago, QuickQuickSlow said:

what if the only other family/friend was also in the car?

But they would surely have workplaces, or neighbours, or some other stuff in their lives they would be missed from?  Very few people are not missed eventually if they 'disappear', even if they are never found, dead or alive.

[mdbuilder]

Those crazy SUVs...

[Skulduggery]

Gut instinct is hoax after looking at the footage but I could be wrong on this one.

[jowasmus]

On 1/7/2020 at 12:16 PM, ExoPaul said:

If anyone else is also interested this is the Google Maps location of where the video was recorded: 
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.5591515,-122.5143242,3a,90y,228.36h,96.47t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s4hGgV2idJkqaG-1mGNnl6Q!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
 

And here is a photograph of the same location with how steep a drop is. The people you can see are approximately stood where the car "took off". 
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.5595203,-122.5140265,3a,51.9y,270.61h,85.38t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipO8_ZgyZ8ajkNeWimPPwJZswlPUtbTpRWdsdOyL!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipO8_ZgyZ8ajkNeWimPPwJZswlPUtbTpRWdsdOyL%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya118.626915-ro-0-fo100!7i8192!8i4096

Appreciate the info on the area. It helps knowing & seeing the area these stories happened in.

[jowasmus]

12 hours ago, Seti42 said:

I find it really odd the barricade doesn't extend through that obvious hazard.

People probably kept knocking it down. At some point it's just not cost effective. LOL

[jowasmus]

On 1/7/2020 at 12:45 PM, stereologist said:

Looking at this view you can wonder if they hit the water or the wave cut terrace. If they hit the terrace you'd think that there would be marks where paint or metal was transferred to the rock.

May have hit the ground & kept on running. Can't tell about people nowadays. LOL

[saywhat]

Seems fake to me. At that speed I figured there would be dust flying up since it looks to be driving over dry dirt just before it went over...

[ercbreeze]

To me the tires don't look like they are turning . . .

 

[Grim Reaper 6]

17 hours ago, QuickQuickSlow said:

what if the only other family/friend was also in the car?

That's certainly a fair point that could be very possible.

peace.

[Grim Reaper 6]

2 hours ago, saywhat said:

Seems fake to me. At that speed I figured there would be dust flying up since it looks to be driving over dry dirt just before it went over...

That is a very good point, I didn't notice it before.

peace

[Peter Cox]

No dust or anything when it goes off road, must be a hoax.

[Mx449]

Is it just me or does the dash cam seem like its moving more than normal? Seems like the car is going pretty straight while the camera kinda turns to the right. Maybe this means nothing. I just found it odd.

What about identifying the car? Based on the time of day they could check other cameras on that route and locate the same car and get a plate #.

Crazy story though I'll be excited to hear the outcome. Hope everyone is okay and it is a hoax.

Edited January 9, 2020 by Mx449
Changed a sentence

[Mx449]

If it is a hoax, I hope someone comes forward. But as I said above, identifying the car and checking cameras on that route should make it fairly easy to identify that exact car and its owner.

[Mx449]

Sorry for 3 posts in a row but I wanted to add - if it is a hoax, wouldn't the person filming have to be involved to some degree? And I believe I read in a previous post that the police got the SD card from the dash cam? Also, I may have missed this info but I'm guessing the driver is who contacted the police about it?? How would someone pull off this kind of hoax? You cant just drive a car off a cliff and say just kidding.

Edited January 9, 2020 by Mx449
Typo

[QuickQuickSlow]

can't help but be reminded of the Hart murder-suicide (I still hope Devonte Hart turns up alive some day)

[Bendy Demon]

I watched this video a few times and...something seems off about it.

First off, the vehicle seems to be going at an incredibly high speed, I'd wager about 80 or more and,like someone mentioned, there is an incredible lack of dust being kicked up considering its speed.

I also played the video at the slowest speed possible and I noticed how the car seemed to up a bit as it went past the edge...not only that but when they show the edge of the cliff it is pretty straight and flat so there is no reason for the vehicle to go up.

Furthermore, since there is no sustained propulsion, the car would go downwards slightly the moment its wheels left the cliff edge.

Ah and how about the light glinting off the vehicle, there was none either.

No dust, no glinting, car going upwards..sounds like a manipulative hoax to me.

[Mx449]

8 minutes ago, Bendy Demon said:

I watched this video a few times and...something seems off about it.

First off, the vehicle seems to be going at an incredibly high speed, I'd wager about 80 or more and,like someone mentioned, there is an incredible lack of dust being kicked up considering its speed.

I also played the video at the slowest speed possible and I noticed how the car seemed to up a bit as it went past the edge...not only that but when they show the edge of the cliff it is pretty straight and flat so there is no reason for the vehicle to go up.

Furthermore, since there is no sustained propulsion, the car would go downwards slightly the moment its wheels left the cliff edge.

Ah and how about the light glinting off the vehicle, there was none either.

No dust, no glinting, car going upwards..sounds like a manipulative hoax to me.

Good points. Still seems to me that the dash cam driver would of had to been in on the hoax to have got the footage. And then to stick around and hand the footage over to police. Seems pretty risky. But I have to say I agree that it does seem like a hoax. Just cant get over or understand the dash cam drivers involvement. 

[stereologist]

2 hours ago, Bendy Demon said:

I watched this video a few times and...something seems off about it.

First off, the vehicle seems to be going at an incredibly high speed, I'd wager about 80 or more and,like someone mentioned, there is an incredible lack of dust being kicked up considering its speed.

I also played the video at the slowest speed possible and I noticed how the car seemed to up a bit as it went past the edge...not only that but when they show the edge of the cliff it is pretty straight and flat so there is no reason for the vehicle to go up.

Furthermore, since there is no sustained propulsion, the car would go downwards slightly the moment its wheels left the cliff edge.

Ah and how about the light glinting off the vehicle, there was none either.

No dust, no glinting, car going upwards..sounds like a manipulative hoax to me.

The vehicle is probably doing less than 80, closer to 50mph. I give my reasoning in an earlier post int he thread.

Also, there appears to be a pile of dirt or gravel that the car hits causing it to go upward. It can be seen in the video as well as on the other images posted by other posters. Check out the links to find those images

 

[Skulduggery]

The way it goes off the edge, while not impossible at a fast speed, seems super unlikely. More likely it would immediately turn downward. My approximation from seeing similar things happen. Yeah, and the whole dust thing.

[Chewie1990]

3 hours ago, Bendy Demon said:

I watched this video a few times and...something seems off about it.

First off, the vehicle seems to be going at an incredibly high speed, I'd wager about 80 or more and,like someone mentioned, there is an incredible lack of dust being kicked up considering its speed.

I also played the video at the slowest speed possible and I noticed how the car seemed to up a bit as it went past the edge...not only that but when they show the edge of the cliff it is pretty straight and flat so there is no reason for the vehicle to go up.

Furthermore, since there is no sustained propulsion, the car would go downwards slightly the moment its wheels left the cliff edge.

Ah and how about the light glinting off the vehicle, there was none either.

No dust, no glinting, car going upwards..sounds like a manipulative hoax to me.

I agree the lack of dust is a little surprising, but I'm not sure we can draw any firm conclusions based on that alone

As stereo says the speed doesn't look too unusual to me based on the local roads and the small ramp at the edge of the cliff would explain the cars trajectory

If you watch the video in slow motion i think you can barely see the compression of the front suspension as it hits the ramp and definitely the droop of the wheels as it becomes airborne - if it's a fake I'd say that's unusually good attention to detail

The wheels also seem to turn to the right but whether that's the driver attempting to save themselves, the wheels reacting to hitting a bump or just my eyes I can't say..

Not to mention the fundamental question of why would someone fake this and why share it with the police and not just post it on youtube like everyone else does? People do weird things but I don't see it..

Certainly local authorities don't seem to think it's fake and although I was originally sceptical I'm inclined to agree

The compromised search efforts probably make this seem more of a mystery than it is - either the car was swept out to sea or it's still there somewhere and they just havent been able to find it yet

[ChrLzs]

Dashcam?  Why so wobbly, and why is the original video in portrait mode?  More likely a phone on a really bad mount.  It's also very low-res, even for an older dashcam....

 

And it's now what, 9 days since the alleged accident and no-one has been reported missing?  And they say they collected car parts from the water, but couldn't find the vehicle and they weren't sure if the parts belonged to the right type of vehicle?  Sheesh.  You've got some seriously good investigators on the case....

Maybe they should call in .. oh .. perhaps a car mechanic who's worked on that model?

 

Good Grief.  

[Chewie1990]

Still weirdly quiet on this one, but just a little more background and perspective:
 

“Imagine a world where deepfakes are prevalent. That will allow anyone to deny and dispute anything that they don’t like,” said Shamir Allibhai, the CEO of Amber, a Palo Alto-based media forensics company founded in 2017. “The existence of fake video gives ammunition to anybody to delegitimize genuine evidence.” In the case of the San Mateo cliff crash, many social media users insisted the video was a deepfake.

But Allibhai’s hunch is the video is legit. “My gut feeling is this video is probably not deepfake,” he said. That’s because, unlike more traditional visual effects, deepfake videos are created by neural networks that need to be trained on a massive dataset that, in this case, would require thousands of videos of cars launching off cliffs.

...
CHP, for its part, has not wavered in its account of events. Investigators showed up about 20 minutes after the driver with dash-cam called in to report the crash at 10:38 a.m. and interviewed him on the spot, said Officer Bert Diaz.
A few days later, a couple that was driving in the white vehicle ahead of the man contacted CHP to confirm that they, too, had seen the car careen into the water below, Diaz said.

...

There’s a more traditional visual effect known as rotoscoping that also could have been used to fake such a video. It would have required someone superimposing a second clip of the dark green Lexus SUV launching out of the frame into the video CHP received from the witness. But because video metadata includes timestamps, experts say that’s also unlikely because such painstaking frame-by-frame editing takes hours and could not have been completed between 10:38 a.m. and 11 a.m.

...

So-called “compositing” is still used today by visual effects artists working on Hollywood films and commercial photographers. Dan Cregan, a compositor whose credits include films from the “Star Wars,” “Hobbit,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchises, is convinced the San Mateo County video is not a fake.
“The truth is you could make anything look real behind enough camera shake and image artifacts,” he said. “But a CGI (computer-generated imagery) car would have trouble looking right without all the data of when this happened.”
Cregan added that a talented compositor trying to fake the Highway 1 cliff video would be helped by the original dash-cam’s low resolution. But even then, Cregan argued, it could take days for a compositor to superimpose the car and fake the crash.

[Grim Reaper 6]

8 minutes ago, Chewie1990 said:

Still weirdly quiet on this one, but just a little more background and perspective:
 

“Imagine a world where deepfakes are prevalent. That will allow anyone to deny and dispute anything that they don’t like,” said Shamir Allibhai, the CEO of Amber, a Palo Alto-based media forensics company founded in 2017. “The existence of fake video gives ammunition to anybody to delegitimize genuine evidence.” In the case of the San Mateo cliff crash, many social media users insisted the video was a deepfake.

But Allibhai’s hunch is the video is legit. “My gut feeling is this video is probably not deepfake,” he said. That’s because, unlike more traditional visual effects, deepfake videos are created by neural networks that need to be trained on a massive dataset that, in this case, would require thousands of videos of cars launching off cliffs.

...
CHP, for its part, has not wavered in its account of events. Investigators showed up about 20 minutes after the driver with dash-cam called in to report the crash at 10:38 a.m. and interviewed him on the spot, said Officer Bert Diaz.
A few days later, a couple that was driving in the white vehicle ahead of the man contacted CHP to confirm that they, too, had seen the car careen into the water below, Diaz said.

...

There’s a more traditional visual effect known as rotoscoping that also could have been used to fake such a video. It would have required someone superimposing a second clip of the dark green Lexus SUV launching out of the frame into the video CHP received from the witness. But because video metadata includes timestamps, experts say that’s also unlikely because such painstaking frame-by-frame editing takes hours and could not have been completed between 10:38 a.m. and 11 a.m.

...

So-called “compositing” is still used today by visual effects artists working on Hollywood films and commercial photographers. Dan Cregan, a compositor whose credits include films from the “Star Wars,” “Hobbit,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchises, is convinced the San Mateo County video is not a fake.
“The truth is you could make anything look real behind enough camera shake and image artifacts,” he said. “But a CGI (computer-generated imagery) car would have trouble looking right without all the data of when this happened.”
Cregan added that a talented compositor trying to fake the Highway 1 cliff video would be helped by the original dash-cam’s low resolution. But even then, Cregan argued, it could take days for a compositor to superimpose the car and fake the crash.

I still beleive it was a stunt to create this controversy, and the longer this subject is discussed it only plays into the intent of the perpetrator of this Hoax. Vehicles don't mysteriously disappear and that alone should explain that something is right. Along with the fact that no explanation has been officially offered.

peace

[Eldorado]

Latest:

Investigators, Bay Area experts reassure skeptical public that crash was not a hoax

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/13/san-mateo-county-cliff-crash-video-mystery-real-or-deepfake/