Is the mysterious photos from Alfred Middleton's expeditions genuine?

Users of social networks spread the history of a British traveler who disappeared during an expedition to exotic countries, but left behind several mysterious pictures. We checked the reliability of such posts.

According to viral publications, Briton Alfred Isaac Middleton devoted his life to traveling in the Amazon, Africa and Asia, trying to find the “heir to Atlantis” - the city of Dawlit. At the turn of the XIX - XX centuries, he, together with like -minded people, went to Amazonia (according to another version - to Sumatra), where he was captured, and no one saw more Middleton. The posts say: “At the end of the 19th century, the manuscripts of the traveler were bought by a private collector, and during the Second World War were lost. Everything that remains of one of the most ambitious researchers is a pile of photographs that captured very strange objects: inexplicable structures, representatives of unknown tribes and unusual animals. The landscapes in the pictures seem so fantastic that all the attempts of academic scientists to establish a place of filming were unsuccessful. Later, due to their own powerlessness, they were proclaimed by staging. ” 

Publications containing several such photographs, as well as a portrait of Middleton himself, are widely used in Facebook (one of the records scored more 1100 repostov), ​​""Classmates","VKontakte","Zen" Telegram, Tiktok, Rutube, Tenchat And on some other resources.

In open sources, not counting publications about mysterious history, a British traveler named Alfred Isaac Middleton is not mentioned. In particular, English -speaking "Wikipedia»Contains several dozens of articles about carriers of the same surname, but Alfred Isaac is not among them. A person who is closest of them in the field of activity to the hero of viral posts is John Henry Middleton, archaeologist of the second half of the XIX century and the director of the Museum of Art and Antiquities at the University of Cambridge. During his life, he managed to visit North and South America, Africa and Asia, but he did not disappear anywhere and died 49 years old from an overdose of morphine. The external similarity of namesakes, if there is, is insignificant.

A little more Alfred Middleton looks like Percy Fossetta - British traveler beginning of the XX century.

And it's not only about appearance. Fossett is known for his expeditions in the Amazon, where he was looking for the so-called lost city Z-a monument of ancient civilization, which, according to the researcher, is located in the jungle of the Brazilian state of Matu-Gros. During one of his expeditions, Fossett went missing. The discussions about huge ancient animals that can roam the jungle of South America expressed in a conversation with the writer Arthur Conan Doyle. Basic The novel "Lost Peace". Apparently, such animals are captured in some of the mysterious pictures. Fossett himself was inspired by a manuscript known as "Manuscript 512". In this text, discovered in Brazil in the 19th century, a settlement in the spirit of the very dowl from viral posts is described.

Nevertheless, the toponym of the Dawleetoo is absent in authoritative sources. In the project "Google Books"He appears only in two publications on the topic of alternative history, and one was published in 2023, the other in 2024. In some posts on social networks Approvedthat the information about the mysterious city in the Brazilian jungle was taken from the book “The Lost Dowl Casket” - the authors even cite link On it on the Amazon website. This link leads to the page of the book “Lost Casket”, written in 1881 by a certain Fortune du Boagobe. The full text is freely available on the site Archive.org And does not contain any references to the city of Dowlite (which is not surprising, because the “lost box” is an ordinary French detective at the end of the 19th century).

For the first time a brief presentation of the story about the adventures of Middleton along with 36 pictures appeared July 28, 2022 on Facebook in the AI ​​Art Universe group. As the name implies, this is a large (600,000 subscribers) the community is devoted to images and videos created using artificial intelligence. The post about Middleton was placed by Mitch Gates computer schedule specialist. The next day, he published a similar Record Already on his personal page, accompanying it with a hashtag #Midjourneyii (Midjourney - a popular service for creating images according to a textual description). And a few days later, when the story of a fictional British traveler became viral, Gates I complainedthat in the publications they forget to indicate the name of its author. But it was too late - the pictures without mentioning the source diverged around the world and in many cases managed to form details.

In addition to a number of visual artifacts characteristic of AI and not manually processed after generation, the author also left the Easter ladies, indicating the origin of the photographs. So, the initials of Middleton in the title of the original publication (A. I.) coincide with the English -speaking abbreviation to designate artificial intelligence. And the name of the mysterious city Dawleetoo Deciphered One of the readers of the post in AI ART Universe: it is in tune with Dall-E 2, improved by the version of another neural networks To convert the text into the image. However, as the author himself noted in the comments, in this case he used only Midjourney.

Thus, a series of pictures allegedly taken by Alfred Middleton during expeditions was generated by artificial intelligence, and the history of the origin of the images and the biography of the British traveler were invented.

Photo on the cover: social networks

Not true

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