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Madeleine McCann Tennis Ball Photo, is it Fake?

What do you think?

https://youtu.be/eye7IVL4iqQ

17 Comments

  1. Jenn H.

    This tennis ball photo of Madeleine does look fake.
    For one, she looks older, taller than she actually was
    from May 1rst – May 3rd.

    • Ralph Oscar

      Agreed – that looks like a 5- or 6-yr-old child.

  2. Sideaffected

    That’s THE sketchiest thing I’ve found out about so far. I honestly couldn’t even tell it was her-I thought it was a “sighting.” Then I find out it’s supposed to be her two days before the pool photo? I mean you’d think she’d get a slight tan on vacation not lose it completely in two days. Someone that pale does not tan deep brown like that except over time. It’s not possible. Did I also hear they lied about what date the picture from the playground was? Obviously its the first day-two kids in same outfits. If they’re LYING about that? There’s no way they aren’t guilty, that is so sketchy and weird. I wonder if their friends knew, how much they knew. So they were going to tapas and having a good time when she was maybe gone for days? That’s much more sinister than I thought. But why would they want her dead?

    • Clean Queen

      The disappearing tan is the same thing that really struck me. The other is the difference in color and texture of her hair. I don’t know enough about Photoshop to determine whether or not the points made in the video are legitimate. I will say that I find the blurry halo all around Madeline’s body to be highly suspicious.

  3. Sylvester

    It’s not that they want her dead. They want how she died, when and where covered up.

    • CBH

      Exactly.

    • Laura Thompson

      And, they don’t seem to care how many other people’s good names they drag through the mud, how many other lives they upend, or who gets hurt in the process of protecting their own reputations.

      • nickvdl

        It does seem to be a lot about reputation, and reputation management. Ditto the Ramseys.

  4. Sylvester

    I don’t really get it that this picture is altered based on what the photo analyst said – that there is a slight hump to the back and the hat appears too small on a head that doesn’t go with the body. But I do question why she would be wearing shorts on a cold day, why there is no one else on the tennis court, why she’s wearing sandals that weren’t visible any other place, and instead of tennis balls she may have been cuddling her cuddle cat toy – then they removed that from the picture and transposed tennis balls onto it. It’s a weird picture though, no doubt about that. As for her size, photographs can make anyone look bigger than they really are or taller or darker. The hair, to me, is the same. It’s the same blunt cut on the ends. If the child is scrunching her shoulders up high that tends to make the hair in the back fall lower. So is it a fake? Yes and no. It could very well be her, just not on the tennis court at the resort, possibly somewhere else at some other time.

    • nickvdl

      It’s a weird picture though, no doubt about that.>>>Agree. It’s weird.

  5. maren c. molnar

    Her right hand on the tennis ball photo is much whiter than her arm.

    • Ralph Oscar

      It looks like the hand in question was wearing a glove while the rest of the arm tanned, doesn’t it?

  6. Untiltomorrow9

    I don’t think the child on the right is Maddy. She looks like a child of 4 to 6 years old, whereas the child on the left, whom we have all been told IS Maddy, is possibly as young as 2.5 years old. I would suspect that this photo was not taken at the pool in Portugal but for the fact that many people would have disclosed this if true.

  7. Untiltomorrow9

    The erased, distorted pixels are alarming. I’d like you to do the sa,e analysis with another completely unrelated photo taken with a comparable camera under comparable lighting conditions to see whether these are natural el chronic faux pas. I also want to poin out the vast difference in the lighting between her legs and the crook of her elbow. Could that be natural/accurate?

  8. Christoffer Foret

    Sorry for posting this as a reply. It was meant as a general comment. Also sorry for spelling mistakes. But English is my second language 🙂
    Ive found the work done in the above videos very interesting. I work professionally with Photoshop, and have done it for almost 15 years. The last ten years I’ve worked om “before” and after images”. So I work a lot with manipulating images, cropping and replacing parts of images, making them blend in.

    So the above video with the analysis makes very much sense to me, because she points out areas that shows signs of manipulation. So I decided to see what I would find, doing a similar analysis of the photo.

    Here are my findings going thrue the photo:
    The edges arround and the outline of Madeline on the tennis photo, has a halo effect. An image that has a halo effect or smudged edges, is a sign that something has been pasted in, “clone stamped” (taking a part of a photo and copying it to another area) or otherwise manipulated.
    Other signs of manipulation are on her face. There are colours that looks out of place. Yellow refraction arround the mouth ? perhaps its a photo quality thing ? but it looks out of place.
    There are a lot of odd lines. There is a line in the photo, created by pixels, between her neck and tshirt, where her skincolour changes.That looks manipulated or put together almost.
    Her right wrist has a line, where the skincolour changes. .
    Her fingers on her left hand changes skin colour, and there is a line across them. Again it looks almost composite.
    Her right arm has a line across, just below the tshirt. That transition between t-shirt and arm looks manipulated.
    Her feet and sandals look put on afterwards.
    Her forehead also has pixelated lines. And when you zoom in, (as you can see in the video, the transition from hair to skin looks clonestamped and copied.

    Another little test I did, was to put my fingers over her head, and look at the body. Does it look like a little girls body ? And I think again it looks weird. The body looks to strong on the shoulderblades. But that might just be me. The sandal also looks as if they were pasted in, and the sorrounding area changed.
    (Ive made some notes on some photos, and would be happy to post them, but I couldn’t find out how to upload pictures here)

    But to me, the tennis photo looks fake, and like a composition of different images, taken and merged together.

    The main questions for me are,( if we conclude the photo is fake) why did the parents have a photo made ? was it too important for them to show she still lived at the time when the photo was supossedly taken ?

    Sorry for posting this as a reply. It was meant as a general comment. Also sorry for spelling mistakes. But English is my second language 🙂
    Ive found the work done in the above videos very interesting. I work professionally with Photoshop, and have done it for almost 15 years. The last ten years I’ve worked om “before” and after images”. So I work a lot with manipulating images, cropping and replacing parts of images, making them blend in.

    So the above video with the analysis makes very much sense to me, because she points out areas that shows signs of manipulation. So I decided to see what I would find, doing a similar analysis of the photo.

    Here are my findings going thrue the photo:
    The edges arround and the outline of Madeline on the tennis photo, has a halo effect. An image that has a halo effect or smudged edges, is a sign that something has been pasted in, “clone stamped” (taking a part of a photo and copying it to another area) or otherwise manipulated.
    Other signs of manipulation are on her face. There are colours that looks out of place. Yellow refraction arround the mouth ? perhaps its a photo quality thing ? but it looks out of place.
    There are a lot of odd lines. There is a line in the photo, created by pixels, between her neck and tshirt, where her skincolour changes.That looks manipulated or put together almost.
    Her right wrist has a line, where the skincolour changes. .
    Her fingers on her left hand changes skin colour, and there is a line across them. Again it looks almost composite.
    Her right arm has a line across, just below the tshirt. That transition between t-shirt and arm looks manipulated.
    Her feet and sandals look put on afterwards.
    Her forehead also has pixelated lines. And when you zoom in, (as you can see in the video, the transition from hair to skin looks clonestamped and copied.

    Another little test I did, was to put my fingers over her head, and look at the body. Does it look like a little girls body ? And I think again it looks weird. The body looks to strong on the shoulderblades. But that might just be me. The sandal also looks as if they were pasted in, and the sorrounding area changed.
    (Ive made some notes on some photos, and would be happy to post them, but I couldn’t find out how to upload pictures here)

    But to me, the tennis photo looks fake, and like a composition of different images, taken and merged together.

    The main questions for me are,( if we conclude the photo is fake) why did the parents have a photo made ? was it too important for them to show she still lived at the time when the photo was supossedly taken ?

    • Louise

      I believe it is a pic of Kate as a child. The sandals and hat are the right fashion of the era Kate was that age. That child looks about 5or 6 to me.

      • Patti

        You may have something there. This isn’t a 3 yr old, with those arm muscles.

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