Hi everyone!

The year is coming to an end, and with that, a year of challenges. Since the first launch a year ago, we’ve covered everything from satellite imagery analysis and ship tracking to art crime and explosive ordnance. 

This month, in celebration of our first anniversary, we’re levelling up the challenges. Watch this newsletter and our Discord channel closely, and get ready to push your search a bit further than before…

But first, we’ll discuss last month’s challenges, look back at our livestream with Kolina Koltai, and highlight some of the write-ups you’ve written!

December Challenge: Archive 2025

Have you followed the news closely this year. That might give you an advantage this month. We created five challenges linked to important news events over the past year.

We also tried to include various open source techniques we’ve seen in the challenges over the past year. Remember your approach to multispectral satellite imagery? And to ship tracking? In that case, you got this!

Let’s get started. Find the latest challenges here. 

But as we said, there might be a little more to it. Don’t worry, we’ll clarify things later on. Just get going and see what you come across. 

This month, our Discord server will be more important than ever. Open source research is all about collaboration, and this is the place to find others working on the challenges. Join us in the #challenges channel!

We won’t have a livestream this month, but on Jan. 14 at 5pm CET, we’ll host the very first Challenges office hours! At this Discord server event, open to all, participants can discuss the challenges, find out how we hide secret clues and come up with new ideas to solve them. We would also love to get some feedback and do a collective brainstorming session on other things we could feature in the future. And you don’t know it yet, but we’ll have a lot to talk about by then…

November’s Shifting Perspectives

SPOILER ALERT: From this point on, we’ll be discussing last month’s challenges. If you still plan to complete them, you may want to skip this section.

Here are the answers to the “Shifting Perspectives” challenges:

1. MZBEW 

2. APM 19

3. 161132 

4. 4.6

5. 07105 07116 13101 13105

Thanks again to everyone who shared their insights with us, whether it was on Discord, our social media channels, or in your own blog posts or videos. We’ll highlight some of our favourites here.

Your Approaches

The first challenge of this series, White Wash, was what clued many of you in on the key to success for this series: a good 3D model viewer. Austin Ortel found the resolution on the challenges page too low to read the sign on the building, so using Chrome’s inspect element tool, they extracted the 3D file from the page and uploaded it to a model viewer. There, they could take a higher-resolution screenshot to share to Google reverse image search and reveal the neighbourhood where this building was located.

For Instant Exposure, many of our Discord community members shared that they found the first clue to this location by a reverse image search of the photobooth. The brightly coloured photobooth was shared by multiple people on Pinterest and Instagram. Someone pointed out that one person’s Instagram post included multiple photos in Hamburg. As the Instagram user wore the same outfit in each, the photos were likely taken on one day, providing clues about the area the photobooth is located in. Most people managed to find the exact location by manually searching Google Maps and satellite imagery.

Patina Pattern was an easy one to solve if reverse image search worked in your favour. Depending on where you are based and your personal Google search history, the results of reverse image search can vary. The three-dimensional nature of these challenges adds another variable: which angle do you search for? Faaiz Kaleem managed to solve the challenge quickly. The angle of his screenshot returned a helpful site that included the name of the sculptor.

To assess the scale of the structure in The High Shack, a good clue is to think about how the 3D model was created. You can see many details at the bottom of the structure, while the roof appears to be missing. This suggests the building was too high to capture from above, dismissing the possibility of it being a bird feeder.

Michele Benanti shared his approach on LinkedIn. They researched the shape of the structure in the image and identified where such buildings were commonly found, which helped narrow the search to a specific region. Users on Discord also suggested looking at the home base of challenge creator Jae, shared on his blog: Helsinki, Finland. From there, they examined islands one by one, comparing satellite imagery and photos to pinpoint the exact location.

In Cobbled Together, Faaiz Kaleem focused on the statue and used reverse image search to identify which statue it was. Many Discord members shared that they weren’t able to find the statue using this method and instead found many statues that resembled the one pictured. Some tried finding the monastery first, based on clues in the description. Others used the 3D model to create screenshots from different angles and persisted with reverse image search. This is also how Faaiz found matching images and verified the exact spot using Google Maps and Street View. Consulting the monastery’s historical information allowed them to complete the challenge.

Our researcher Kolina Koltai also attempted this month’s challenges. Make sure to check out how she did here: https://youtube.com/live/xZNPhr4s9j8 

And Finally…

GeoPeter is back! He managed to complete our maritime mysteries series, check out how he did in his latest video!

That’s it for this month’s Bellingcat Challenge Newsletter. We’d love to hear your feedback on the challenges. Join us on Discord and let us know if you have ideas for future challenges.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you and you’d like to subscribe, you can do that here.

Elsewhere on Bellingcat

Before we go, here are some links to other exciting projects from Bellingcat:

• Building on Ruins: The Russification of Mariupol, One Apartment Block at a Time

• Geolocating Darfur Killings of Those Escaping Al Fashir

• 'Pattern of Extreme Brutality': Tear Gas, Pepper Balls Among Weapons Deployed Against Protesters in Illinois

• Russia’s Grain Smuggling Fleet Continues Undeterred

Next month we will be taking a break, but we’re back in February!