Boy, do I know what you mean! My interest in image processing really took off when I first encountered the anomalists, and started looking into their claims. I found artifacts, all right, technical artifacts.

It was fairly easy to get across the idea that enlargement doesn't provide more information, despite the silly way it's portrayed by Hollywood. What was a lot harder was explaining that contrast enhancement doesn't add information, even though it seems to make detail magically appear. It's a matter of rearranging the data, expanding the range of brightness, while preserving the relationship between pixels, to make it easier for our visual perception system to comprehend the data. Unless you stretch the contrast so far as to clip the data, so that extreme light or dark fall off the chart into white or black--then you get a major source of "alien" artifacts, unnatural sharp edges that many people then claim are artificial.

This stuff isn't as easy as Hollywood makes it look!

--Robert