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Los Angeles Times

Though the island in the Caribbean shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic was spared a direct hit from Hurricane Dean this week, it may be that other, stranger entities made landfall.

Evidence "UFO Haiti" and "UFO Dominican Republic" - two authentic-looking home videos recently posted on the "News and Politics" section of YouTube. The films, uploaded from two anonymous accounts, both appear to record close-up sightings of Area 51-type craft hovering above the island's beaches at sunset. As the ships pass eerily over, wind whips through the palm trees, dogs bark and a woman gasps in disbelief. The videos hummed to the top of YouTube's "Most Viewed" list and from there invaded discussion forums and news aggregator sites across the Web, where debate raged about their authenticity.

Still, with all the cries of fraud, even the most steadfast doubters couldn't find anything in the footage that was obviously bogus. More than a few observers in either camp called them "the best UFO videos ever."

They're fake, right? Right?!

With so many people scrutinizing every frame in the videos, it was not long before the first imperfections were spotted in the story's hull. For one thing, no one could find any reports of flying objects in the Haitian or Dominican media - or anywhere else. But it was the trees that aroused the most suspicion.

Freeze-frame the Haiti and Dominican Republic videos side-to-side, critics found, and you will see a palm tree in both videos that appears to be almost the exact same shape.

Aha!

Wait.

Two palm trees on the same tropical island? And they look really similar? Have you ever seen two palm trees that don't look really similar? Someone needed to look deeper. Maybe that someone was me.

The key would be to find the source of the videos. By the time I got in the game, there were several videos titled "UFO Haiti" that actually predated the version that was on the "Most-Viewed" list. The best idea, then, was to contact the posters of several of the earliest "UFO Haiti" videos, including barzolff814, whose 2.2 million-view video was listed as the fourth to be posted under that name.

After going through several leads, I got a call from a woman named Sam. From Corsica. "Hello," she said. "I am calling on behalf of barzolff814."

Barzolff, Sam said, wished to remain anonymous, but he was prepared to share the full story of the videos.

Barzolff, 35, is a professional animator who attended one of the most prestigious art schools in France.

It took Barzolff a total of 17 hours to make both the Haiti and Dominican Republic videos. He did it all by himself using a MacBook Pro and a suite of commercially available 3-D animation programs, including Vue 6. The videos are 100 percent computer-generated.

The videos, he said, were research for a feature film project. Barzolff called the results of his experiment "entertaining, thrilling, completely addictive and a little scary."