Joined: 13 Jun 2007 Posts: 1663 Location: Cincinnati, OH
Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 10:49 am Post subject: What the heck is this???
As usual, New Mexico is buzzing with weird occurrences, the latest of which is a controversial video clip, purportedly showing a ghost at a Santa Fe courthouse. The skeptics say it is an insect or spider on the lens, one says ball lightning. Here's the link to the clip. Tell me what you think:
Though I tend to believe in ghosts to one degree or another, I don't accept orbs as ghosts, and I don't think insects walking on a lens are ghostly, unless you can show me they are recently dead bugs!
Joined: 13 Jun 2007 Posts: 1663 Location: Cincinnati, OH
Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 8:29 am Post subject:
After watching it a few times, especially the close-up portion, I think I agree withthe folks who say this is a spider or insect making its way across the camera lens.
S _________________ "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." -- Thomas Jefferson
I've never understood why people think that orbs are ghosts either. They always look like defects in the image. I guess it's because they're in the photo but aren't seen otherwise, after all, ghosts are invisible. Poor logic, IMHO.
There are corpse candles and other ghostly lights that are associated with graveyards and will o the wisps are associated with swamps, but in folklore, they were always seen by witnesses. This modern thing of the unseen showing up in photos runs counter to the way ghosts and fairy creatures are reported as appearing to witnesses.
I'd say the whole ghost photography where nothing's seen until the film is developed bit goes back to spiritualism, which was largely hoaxed to begin with, it has no basis in genuine Fortean phenomena or folklore.
Joined: 13 Jun 2007 Posts: 1663 Location: Cincinnati, OH
Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2007 12:35 pm Post subject:
In this particular case, I think what we have is a bug crawling across a camera lens. Just recently though, I recall a news photographer taking a flash photo in the darkened room of an allegedly haunted tavern in England. The imaged showed a picture frame and appearing in the picture frame was a rather frightening image of something. Again, it may be the human mind that creates a face out of random patterns of light and shadow but it was pretty darn weird. I posted the link for it on a board called World of The Strange which appears to now be defunct. I'll have to hunt around and see if I can find it.
S _________________ "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." -- Thomas Jefferson
Joined: 13 Jun 2007 Posts: 1663 Location: Cincinnati, OH
Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2007 12:27 pm Post subject:
Man, Will, that is weird. Assuming that all three of the swings are of the same design and manufacture, you'd think they would react similarly to environmental factors like wind. I would be tempted to say this is more "fun with fishing line" but is it likely any hoaxer would be willing to keep the gag going for ten days?
Still, I would feel better about this if the incident hadn't occurred in Argentina. I admit I've shown my prejudice on this before, but I have a really hard time putting much stock in any claims coming out of Central or South America.
S _________________ "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Assuming that all three of the swings are of the same design and manufacture, you'd think they would react similarly to environmental factors like wind."
$5 says the 'experts' are examining the wrong swing. It is human nature to examine the middle swing and ignore the other two. To differentiate between the middle swing and outer two swings you'd have to do one of two things to create the effect: either make the middle swing move more - or make the outer two swings move less.
My best guess is that all three swings behave that way in the wind (the rubber slat design is like an inverted paraglider chute and would catch the wind) and that the ability of the outer two swings has been impeded at the points their chains connect with the cross bar, while the middle swing is left to move in the wind.
Second best guess is that the outer two swings are behaving normally for conditions, but the middle swing's chains and crossbar connection points have been liberally sprayed with WD45, allowing greater motion in reaction to the winds. _________________ I am not young enough to know everything. - Oscar Wilde
Joined: 15 Jun 2007 Posts: 1351 Location: California
Posted: Wed Oct 31, 2007 1:11 pm Post subject:
I had a similar experience around 1972.
I was living in our family's farm house at the time. It is the original family home and my father was born in that house and my grandfather died in that house.
Anyway, the bedroom we were using (I was married at the time) had no closet in it...so a glavanized pipe ran from the wall and then turned down at the other end and was attached to the floor. All our clothes hung from the wall outward and at the other end...where it turns downward is where I hung all the unused wire hangers.
One day I was home alone and I kept hearing this squeaky sound. I went to investigate.
There were appoximately a dozen unused wire hangers and only ONE of them in the MIDDLE of the bunch was swinging rapidly. It continued to swing as I stood there and watched it. I was very surprised and even more amazed when it didn't begin to slow down at all!!! Now, I was not timing this but I know that it should have lost momentum a lot sooner than it did. When it began to finally slow down, it did so rather quickly.
None of the other hangers moved at all!!! That is what really freaked me out about it. Those other hangers were right next to this one on both sides!!
It only happened that one time....but we only lived there about six months.
I tried to duplicate it but was never successful. The hangers next to it would always move too because it would not swing without wiggling a bit. Nor could I get it to swing that long. It still baffles me to this day.
A lot of other strange things happened in that house during those six months. _________________ "It's our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
Dumbledore
to Harry Potter
Joined: 09 Sep 2007 Posts: 311 Location: Central Texas
Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 8:10 pm Post subject: The New Mexico incident has proven to be insects
The swing is interesting, but I doubt a ghost would keep it going for 10 days. I also question reports from South America. A lot of strange things happen there, but there's also quite a bit of hoaxing. Ataraxik's comments on the swing are interesting but I'd be curious as to how he'd explain Scam's experience?
I've had two ghostly experiences, one was seeing my foster father six months after he died. I was around 8 at the time, and I was closer to him than I was to anyone else in my foster family. He was a religious man, a Methodist of Welsh descent. The other side of my foster family was Irish American.
In folklore terms, I saw a specter of my deceased foster father. Evans-Wentz noted that Irish percipients circa 1900 called visions of a person who'd died but whose death is not known to the percipient an apparition, but a traditional ghost of someone dead was a specter. I guess the terms are interchangeable nowadays.
The other incident was a room in rented house when I was very young, probably closer to 4. It was cold to me, but not to my older foster sisters. I had a rocking horse with a pull string and the neigh sounded very tinny and far away. The eyes of the horse scared me, yet I was not scared of the horse in the prior house we rented. This place was big enough that I had my own bedroom and a playroom and I would not go in the playroom except to get toys. I don't recall anything else strange about the house, and we only lived there less than a year.
I had never been scared of any room in any other house, before or since. So, I don't automatically chalk it up to imagination. IMHO, children can sense things that adults can't and even though children make things up, I wonder if they do so because they sense something that they don't understand? Thus, even a made up story fills the gaps and provides an explanation for what an older person would see as unexplainable?
Skeptics make up stories all the time, it's called debunking, and it provides comfort that we only live in a world haunted by demons of ignorance, not the demons of folklore. Still, there are ghosties and ghoulies and long leggity beasties that simply will not go away no matter how many reductionist explanations are pulled out of the stage magician's hat.
So, I believe in ghosts and in hauntings, I just don't see orbs as proof of ghosts because they look like photographic defects. Since we don't have many digital images of ghosts, I doubt that they are seen in the normal visual way. Perhaps it's a seeing with the mind, with senses that cannot be controlled but are left over from earlier stages of human development?
It's always especially interesting when material objects are said to move of their own accord. That sort of physical evidence almost works, but some can be debunked more readily, like swings. My wife's seen shadow people in her childhood home in California, yet when I showed her the swings, she said that swings move all the time and it was probably the wind. I guess she liked swings more than I did as a kid? I never paid much attention to them as they always made me dizzy. The playgrounds we take our kid to don't have swings anymore.
Now, I'd love to hear a skeptical explanation of that coat hanger. _________________ Two Western, two Middle Eastern and two Asian religions expect the end of an age soon. Whatever happens. Don't take the mark. Don't be deceived. Search for the truth and the truth will set you free.
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