Fauxtogrophy – crash scene “angels”

Tags

Fauxtography, Roadside Crash Spirit

What is Fauxtography?

Well, it’s a new term to me but I’ve just read it on Snopes and presume this was coined by them and, in my opinion, this is a good term to describe what this blog is about.

I’ve previously dealt with the issues of image manipulation, pareidolia and debunking and this continues in a similar vein so let’s go back to 2014 and the “roadside crash spirit” being posted on the internet as proof of “a soul leaving the body of a crash victim”.

The Youtube caption reads “Ghost spirit caught at accident site – Shocking spirits caught leaving body” and was published on 26 May 2014.  

The video shows an ambulance crew attending to the body of a victim in a road traffic accident and purportedly shows the “soul” of the victim rising from the body.  

An awful lot of people were taken in by this and were sharing it willy-nilly as proof of the afterlife.  However, of all the hundreds of viewers, very few bothered to read the text that had been posted with the video by the film-maker which was underneath the video and less obvious.  it reads thus:-

GhostHunters is all about ghost(sic). Ghost are everywhere on our channel. Ghost  caught on tape, paranormal activities, Haunted places, or ghost possessions. We feature ghosts in every possible way.

These video are for entertainment. I think peoples are looking for ghost caught stuff on internet so i shot these videos. To see the video go to Roadside Crash spirit

Towards the very bottom of the page you’ll see this:-

DISCLAIMER: I shot and uploaded all videos here and I own all commercial rights, please do not try to reuse and upload elsewhere. These small films shows different ghost caught situations in fictional way. It might be scary for some viewer but these are meant for Entertainment purpose only. It just a movie not real. Video Credit:Creative Commons Licence:

Please, don’t go telling anyone this is real – the originator has even told us that is isn’t!

“Chilling” Spirit – Angel dust?

This photo is supposedly showing a soul ascending from the body at another crash scene only this one was posted on Facebook on the 12th July 2016 saying it was taken of a traffic accident in Kentucky.  

Can this be evidence of an afterlife?

Well, actually, no!  Snopes was pretty quick on the draw with this one and posted on the 14th July to scotch any rumours of evidence and tell us it’s false.  Whilst the person who took the photo is adamant that he hasn’t altered the photo, he’s certainly caused a bit of a sensation!   Saul Vazquez, the man who took the photo, posted it on Facebook and said he took it from the cab of his truck. It has since been shared over 16,000 times in just 10 hours.

Snopes gives us this conclusion:

It’s absolutely possible, even probable, that the photo was not altered.  However, this photograph doesn’t show a spirit or an angel, but what’s most likely an irregularly-shaped piece of dirt that has stuck to either the lens or the camera’s internal sensor.  Dirt or dust on the sensor of a camera assumes a greyish and fuzzy appearance in a photograph (and sometimes shows up as luminescent balls in night or high-contrast photography, to which the paranormally-minded sometimes refer as “spirit orbs“).

You can read the whole of the Snopes article here fatal-crash-spirit-photograph

From the above I can only say there are elements of pareidolia and photo-manipulation – even if the person taking the photo didn’t intend any deceit (since they were also deceived into thinking they saw something that wasn’t what they thought it was) and a whole lot of gullible people!    I refer you to my blog about the Hospital Demon Debunked as a further instance where what people saw wasn’t actually what was there! 

Have you seen other pictures (debunked or not) that are similar to the examples I have quoted?

I’d love to hear from you about my blog. I appreciate constructive criticism and welcome debate and discussion.  

 

 

 

 

 

Hospital Demon – Debunked!

Tags

Cameras, Optical Illusions, Paranormal, Pareidolia

Here’s an image that has been circulating around the paranormally-inclined on the net for a little while now. Variously described as either a “demon” or an extraterrestrial looming over the bed of a terminally ill patient (who died some after if you believe the story that is coming along with this in many cases), what this actually presents is an example of how our eyes can deceive us, and how our minds seek to organise random data based on our cultural bias.

So…. Quite creepy.

The “shape” certainly resembles a hunched, deformed figure.

But what are we actually seeing here?

Here’s an excellent breakdown of the “demon’s” constituent parts from a Metabunk user.

Now I don’t know about you, but once I viewed that breakdown I could no longer “see” the demon or alien in the original image. That’s the power of pareidolia and a great example of why we should never just believe our eyes when it comes to assessing   indistinct images of alleged paranormal entities.

In my opinion, the nurse who took the photo was working on the night (“graveyard”) shift, was viewing the patient on a monitor with tired eyes.

This article was originally typed up by me on Wednesday, 9 April 2014 and was inspired by (and for which I give credit to) a blog called The Skeptic’s Boot. The Rational Paranormal.  No Politics… No Drama… No Pants…

http://skepticsboot.blogspot.co.uk/2014_04_01_archive.html

Credit is also due to https://www.metabunk.org/ for the valuable observations of what we’re seeing in the picture.

Optical illusions and Pareidolia

Tags

Optical Illusions, Paranormal, Pareidolia, Susceptibility

What is Pareidolia?

This is the name for a well-known condition that we all experience: where our brains recognise shapes of faces, bodies, etc., in a place where we know they can’t be – purely because, from birth, our brains were taught to recognise faces and then people and bodies – it’s a baby survival technique!

Most people have never heard of pareidolia but nearly everyone has experienced it! Anyone who has looked at the moon and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth has felt the pull of pareidolia.  Like picking a face out of a knotted tree trunk or finding zoo animals in the clouds.   

The thing about Pareidolia is that, it’s not so much what we want to see, more the way our mind interprets something. If you see a shape, your mind is going to try to make something intelligible out of it, so that it can recognise that *something*. For an excellent video about the way our brains are very easily fooled, please view http://vimeo.com/85142018 it’s 43 minutes long but well worth watching to the end.

It is thought that pareidolia is a side effect of the human brain needing to very quickly recognise certain objects such as human faces or bodies – we have more experience with actual objects than random patterns that just look like those objects. For example, the shapes composing a face are more likely to correspond to a face than random patterns, so random patterns that are close to faces are interpreted actually as faces as the brain mistakes them for the real thing. Since humans are highly social and many of our interactions rely on gauging other’s moods by tiny hints in their facial expressions very quickly, most people are acutely receptive for such patterns. The emotions people can read from faces can also be exploited this way. Clock faces in shops will be permanently at “ten past ten” because this is a happy face, and never at “twenty past eight” because this is a sad face.

The Face in Mars photo from 1976

and a more recent close-up.

Here’s an interesting picture of someone’s clothes.  Look carefully -what can you see?

Now imagine if you woke up in your bedroom, with just the light shining through the curtains and noticed it for the first time – you’d be pretty scared – but there’s nothing paranormal about it!

It seems I’m not alone in wanting to show people how easily deluded they are.  Please have a look at Kev’s blog regarding pareidolia:

https://pararationalise.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/part-3-the-brain-and-the-paranormal-pareidolia-in-the-paranormal/


RationalWiki has a useful page about the topic at http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pareidolia with numerous examples to refer to.

Hope you can view the pictures I’ve included at https://www.pinterest.com/altissimma/pareidolia/

In a similar vein are optical illusions. Have a look at these as see how easily our eyes and brains are fooled!

distractify.com – mind-blowing-optical-illusions

and

www.dose.com -15-Optical-Illusion-GIFs-Designed-To-Make-You-Feel-Like-A-Lunatic

Edit 26th May 2016.  Well, would you Adam and Eve it? Not pareidolia, but just to prove that people are really very gullible, here’s one that made me laugh out loud today!

Visitors to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week (24th May 2016) were fooled into thinking a pair of glasses set on the floor by a 17-year-old prankster was a post-modern masterpiece.

To test out the theory that people will stare at, and try and artistically interpret, anything if it’s in a gallery setting, Khayatan set a pair of glasses down and walked away. Soon, people began to surround them, maintaining a safe distance from the ‘artwork’ and several of them taking pictures.

The teen behind the hoax had similar success with a baseball cap and a bin.  You can read the full article from the link Pair of glasses left on the museum floor mistaken for an exhibit!  So you see, we are all susceptible to mis-interpreting what we see.  It’s easy to understand why the visitors to the post-modern exhibition thought they were an exhibit but, surely, exhibits in museums have plaques explaining what each exhibit is about. There wouldn’t have been anything nearby for them to read about this exhibit and you’d think someone might have put 2 and 2 together, picked them up and handed them to museum staff in case someone had dropped them earlier!

Edit 12th September 2016

Apophenia  I was not aware of this term but have discovered that this is the generic term relating to the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data. Some new terms have been coined to describe several types of ‘perception’:

Patternicity
Michael Shermer coined the word “patternicity” in 2008, defining it as “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise”.

Agenticity
Shermer wrote in The Believing Brain (2011), that humans have “the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency”, which he called “agenticity”.

Randomania
In 2011, parapsychologist David Luke proposed that apophenia is one end of a spectrum and that the opposite behaviour (attributing to chance what are apparently patterned or related data) can be called “randomania”. He asserted that dream precognition is real and that randomania is the reason why some people dismiss it.

Besides Pareidolia, the other types of Apophenia are:-

Overfitting
In statistics and machine learning, apophenia is an example of what is known as overfitting. Overfitting occurs when a statistical model fits the noise rather than the signal. The model overfits the particular data or observations rather than fitting a generalizable pattern in a general population.

Gambler’s fallacy
Apophenia is well documented as a rationalisation for gambling. Gamblers may imagine that they see patterns in the numbers which appear in lotteries, card games, or roulette wheels. One variation of this is known as the “gambler’s fallacy”.

Hidden meanings
Fortune-telling and divination are often based upon discerning patterns seen in what most people would consider to be meaningless chance events. The concept of a Freudian slip is based upon what had previously been dismissed as meaningless errors of speech or memory. Sigmund Freud believed that such “slips” held meaning for the unconscious mind, as used in his work ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’.

Edit 28th October 2016 Audio Pareidolia

Today I found this wonderful Youtube video which is yet another example of how our brains are fooled.  In this instance it’s the belief that, when songs are played backwards, they convey satanic messages.    Please go and view Here’s to my sweet Satan.  The example comes from a website Reversespeech.com which I’m going to have to spend some time with!

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