Hi there ! Orb in Crystal Valley Cemetery – Manitou Springs, CO – Oct 2012

Our good friends at Past Hauntings in Nottingham, UK linked this article a week or two ago, from one of England’s national newspapers. It tells the story of Professor Klaus Heinemann, a research scientist at NASA, who has taken up the much belabored cause of ‘orbs’ as (possible) evidence of spirit activity. It’s a lengthy piece, but whichever side of the argument you happen to fall on, we’d encourage you to read it.

Now, a common rhetorical defense folks like us in this field use to combat the dismissive critic is to say “you should have an open mind,” and we try very hard to follow that in both our views on the paranormal and in our investigations. In some ways, we would humbly submit that our own minds may be more open than most paranormal troopers, since we are open to the possibility that there are no such thing as ghosts or spirits, but intend to be persuaded only by evidence. (And in case it matters, we kind of believe there are, based on our investigations and a few personal experiences….belief, in our view is a sliding-scale condition, not necessarily a binary one.)

But one thing we’re pretty sure about is that orbs – the garden variety, floating-inexplicably, two-dimensional, shadowless, invisible to the unaided eye, flash-only recorded ones, anyway – are not evidence of spirit activity, but merely particulate (dust, water droplets, pollen, insects) matter reflecting camera flash light too close to be focused upon by consumer-grade digital cameras.

We’ve come to believe this via a number of convincing-to-us pathways of evidence – non-flash pictures very rarely show them, they do not cast shadows, they tend to appear under humid or very dusty conditions, they seldom have any tightly-correlated activity associated with them (no, just being in an allegedly haunted house doesn’t count), they are never captured by two different cameras from two different vantage points simultaneously.

More orbs – Denver Firefighters Museum, 2010.

We also believe – as harsh as this may sound – that the vast populations of ghost hunting teams out there have a vested interest in promoting orbs as spirit activity to validate their own work and please their Facebook followers and their clientele. (And before you throw a rock, yes, we do publish orb photos when we report on investigations in these pages. We do NOT endorse them as evidence of spirit activity, though, and usually say so explicitly.

In preparing a lecture last fall for a local paranormal convention, we came across a neat, succinct diagram of the optical mechanism by which orbs appear on digital images:

It’s all about the focal plane.

We’ll allow that this process may be responsible for only a subset of orb images, although to be honest, we’ve seldom come across a case where this elegant and perfectly reasonable explanation  just couldn’t work. There’s more to it than just this, of course, as you have to account for lenses, directional flashes, etc. But sorry, folks, you’d need a pretty strong case to shoot this down, and we’ve yet to encounter one.

As for the article, though, we have a number of complaints about it, but we want to focus on one particular passage:

Heinemann also found that during his numerous dual camera experiments, when he used twin cameras to capture an object from two different angles, a single orb shape would often appear – but only in one of the two images taken simultaneously.

It was as if the orbs somehow chose which camera to appear on, or whether to appear at all.

This reminded us of a study we linked to a couple of years back where the Society for Psychical Research did an exhaustive study on orb photography and – gadzooks – found exactly the same thing that Professor Heinemann did. In two camera studies, orbs almost never appeared in two cameras simultaneously, and when they did, they appeared in different places.

But the conclusion one draws isn’t that “the orbs somehow chose which camera to appear on, or whether to appear at all,”, but that the artifact creating the image was closely in front of one lens, and (obviously) not the other.

This is a pretty potent example, in our view, how even latent belief can lead an otherwise rigorously careful mind into flirting with the fantastic and dismissing the mundane and rational. Orbs choosing which camera to appear in ? Really ???

Crazy haunted Rainforest Exhibit – Cleveland Zoo, Aug 2005

Lastly, our favorite orbs-are-not-ghosts example comes from our own experience, in the ridiculously humid Rainforest Exhibit of the Cleveland Zoo, way back in 2005.

Perhaps the good Professor would have us believe that this is the most haunted zoo in the universe.

It is, after all, baffling !!!!

]]> http://spiritbearparanormal.com/2014/03/23/nasa-guy-proves-orbs-are-spirits-really/feed/ 2 http://spiritbearparanormal.com/2013/03/28/is-st-swithuns-church-haunted/ http://spiritbearparanormal.com/2013/03/28/is-st-swithuns-church-haunted/#comments Fri, 29 Mar 2013 01:50:02 +0000 admin http://spiritbearparanormal.com/?p=1489 St Swithun church, in Brookethorpe, Gloucestershire, England on our trip there last September. The church is very old, dating to the 13th century – it is no longer in use and is cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, a British non-profit that [...]]]>

St Swithun, Brookethorpe, Gloucestershire (flash fired)

St Swithun, Brookethorpe, Gloucestershire (no flash)

We shot these two pics at the old St Swithun church, in Brookethorpe, Gloucestershire, England on our trip there last September. The church is very old, dating to the 13th century – it is no longer in use and is cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, a British non-profit that tends to redundant (and usually historic) churches in England.

We had the camera propped, so the frame is exactly the same. The darker image (counter-intuitively) is  the one with the flash – you’ll note the interesting mist and apparent moving orbs rushing toward the lens. The non-flash image does not show these visual anomalies.

When we are asked our views on ‘orbs’, one of the threshold tests as to whether or not orbs represent cogent evidence of paranormal phenomena (i.e., the presence of a spirit) is whether or not the orb image was captured with a flash. (Flash images will commonly reveal orbs; it’s very rare that a non-flash images does, those may be the ‘real deal’.)

In this case, the orb/orb-like artifacts did show up on flash, although clearly within the context of a mist-type medium.

As usual, we’re not sure what to make of these images, cautious (as always) not to firmly represent these as genuine ghost images…but open to the possibility.

So I grabbed my camera and….

Orbs !

…caught one. Two actually, and more than that if you examine the photo closely enough. We shot a few more, and got some in those pictures, too.

Now, let’s be honest here. First off, despite a couple of unusual things in the six years we’ve lived here together, we do NOT believe our place is haunted. We even did an EVP session right after this photo was taken, a fairly long one, using our new Sony ICD-AX412 recorder, and got nothing at all. Nothing. Not even close.

Second, note the two boxes on top of the cabinet that the orbs are floating near contain the ashes of Sharon’s first husband and my first wife. Creepy? No, not really – we were both widowed eight years ago, and we’re used to having them around.

The point is this – if you have already convinced yourself that the space you’re in is haunted, or creepy, even if you’ve just been told this by someone else, you’re far more inclined to use photos like this as validating evidence, even to the point (and admit it, you’ve seen this on TV) where you think you can see faces in the orbs themselves.

We try plenty hard not to impose our standards of evidence adjudication on anyone else – but we would throw this picture out immediately…even if we thought the place was haunted. We’ve laid out our standards of ‘orbage’ in our FAQ’s here.

So here’s a question to our fellow ghost hunters: be honest, if you were invited into a home or a building that you were told was haunted, and you got nothing at all for evidence – no EVP’s, no video, no object movement, no corroborated EMF weirdness, nothing except photos like this - would you validate the haunting?

We’ll follow this post up with some additional thoughts soon.