Google 'Mystery Team' Evidence Decoded - Can You Name This Man?

December 11, 2008

UPDATE: It's official -- this mystery man is Mike Joyce! Via Twitter, users Snibble, QuarkSpin, cariann and myself (Disco_Dave) put the pieces together a day before the official announcement. The "Mystery Team" is now known as "Next Giant Leap" and you can visit their site here.

The official Google Lunar X PRIZE blog, aka the Launch Pad, highlighted this mysterious video today:

Mysterious, indeed! (Personally, I enjoyed the part where GLXP asks "what is your name?" and the mystery man says "If I told you, I'd have to kill you." A required line in such a situation.)

Anywho, this is the first second visual, physical evidence for the "Mystery Team" competing for Google's $20-30 million to send a video camera-packed spacecraft to the moon on private money (see here for first piece).

I interviewed the leader recently -- click here for our chat -- and asked why the team has been maintaining anonymity. It's for several reasons, but mainly so they could build a crack team amid disbelief and bureaucracy. In other words, the mystery protects perfectly great scientists and engineers from being warded off by their colleagues before the "super team" is assembled.

Apparently the team is now fully assembled, however, and they're set to reveal themselves soon. Check out this chunk of a press release I just received:

Wednesday, Dec. 17th: The stealth team (AKA "The Mystery Team") whose members' identities have thus far remained a secret, will reveal their true identities in person, at NASA Ames.

I have a hunch. I think the person in the video is the same one I interviewed. I happen to know a thing or two about Photoshop, so let's work some magic on this bad boy...

Here's a breakdown of my Photoshop work:

                                                                                   

Image 1: The mysterious YouTube video in high definition. Impossible to solve, you say? I think not... let's take a screenshot.
Image 2: Ah, our video scrambler use a simple trick of inverting the colors! Let's undo that sleight of hand.
Image 3: The film is split. Let's pair the top of the head to the torso...
Image 4: Forget the rest of the picture; let's focus in on our man, who appears to sport a mustache. Real or fake is now the question.
Image 5: Still looks orangey, so let's remove that color cast...
Image 6: Those lines are irksome -- give it a gaussian blur to remove the lines (de-interlacing didn't work!), boost the contrast, and give it a sharpen. Looks like we have our man! Caucasian, white mustache, medium/slim build, dark hair peppered with gray. Likes to wear sport coats with solid undershirts underneath.
Image 7: A black-and-white version for all of you color haters.

Looking at the picture Snibble provided (this one), I think we're looking at the guy on the right.

So, who is this man?

Comments

[Snibble]

Well, I admit my mistake. MikeJ _does_ have a mustache.

http://www.twitpic.com/tcss

[snibble]

Hmmm...good point...

But we know the vid was made during AGI conference, right? And the pic is captioned "Feb 2008".

[Dave Mosher]

Thanks for the link Snibble -- added it into the post.

I think it IS a mustache though. The man on the right side of that pic you provided has a mustache, his build is the same, and he's also wearing a sport jacket with a plain black shirt underneath...

Dare I say, but I think this video was shot at the same time the image was. I guess we'll find out soon enough ;)

[snibble]

Oh...and it's not technically the "first" evidence...see http://bit.ly/miY9.

[snibble]

I still don't know about the mustache, though.

I think that might be shadowing/noise. It seems most pronounced in images 4 & 5, but then fades away again, esp in the b&w image.

[Snibble]

Aha! You managed to find a frame to grab with much less "jitter effect" than all the ones I had the patience to give the same treatment to.

Congratulations.