General: Are we beyond being able to believe the truth?

I was reading a Facebook post the other day, and it was talking about the sad tale of Keith Sapsford. Keith fell to his death from within the landing gear area of a DC-8 that was leaving Sydney, bound for Tokyo.

What was fascinating was that his fall was inadvertently captured by an amateur photographer named John Gilpin.

But why this fascinated me now, is that when I read all the comments about the post, the vast majority of the comments were saying that the photo was fake, that it was AI generated, and that this could not possibly have happened.

I’m “old enough to remember it happening” old

Now I’m old enough to remember when this happened in 1970. The story was quite famous here in Australia, and John’s photograph was part of a double-page spread in Life magazine that year.

The article in the Facebook post had a few things that were clearly not correct, but the overall story was correct.

It did happen.

In fact, Keith is far from the only person to be a wheel-well stowaway. See here to be surprised by just how many there have been. And given how many there have been, I think it would have barely been news, apart from John Gilpin capturing the moment on film.

Even more interesting was that so many of the Facebook comments were really smug and carrying on about how could anyone have believed this?. Yet those people were 100% wrong. So sure of themselves, yet so wrong.

There were comments about it not being possible that the landing gear doors would open when the wheels were being retracted. On that DC-8, they sure did. And there were comments about the size of the plane, compared to the size of the person. I can only presume those people weren’t around in DC-8 days. And so on, and so on.

In the end, I was left wondering if, in the age of AI, where we’ve all now seen so many fake things, that we’ve lost the ability to believe the truth when we see it. Does any image have any meaning any more?

It’s also a good lesson though, on doing a little research before making vocal criticism.

2025-11-03