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.  

 

 

 

 

 

The Kryptos Sculpture

Tags

code, code breaking, cryptanalysis, cryptography, jim sanborn

Kryptos is a mysterious encrypted sculpture, designed by artist Jim Sanborn, which sits right outside the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia.

It would appear that the CIA Fine Arts Division (I didn’t know they had one!) commissioned Sanborn to create a cryptographic sculpture that would be sited in a courtyard on the CIA campus.

The sculpture consists of two parts, one is a set of stones laid out in International Morse Code. The second was a 12 foot high copper, granite and petrified wood sculpture inscribed with four encrypted messages composed of 1,800 letters carved out of the copper plate.

Image courtesy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos

When I first saw this picture, one thing struck me. There is black lettering to the left of the picture. There is white lettering to the right. The first visible line of text at the top appears to be spelling the alphabet in black lettering followed in white lettering by the word KRYPTOSAB. 

That particular line of “alphabet” has letters missing – they happen to be the very letters in KRYPTOSAB – can’t see past the H on the left but reading across, letters K, O, P, R, S and T are missing from that bit.  

Now I appreciate that I’m no expert in the field of cryptography so I was quite proud of myself until I found out that some of the sections HAD already been decoded!

The passages that have been decoded make for interesting (if mystifying) reading and I quote the following courtesy of Wikipedia:

The following are the solutions of parts 1–3 of the sculpture. Misspellings present in the code are included as-is. Kryptos sections K1 and K2 ciphers are polyalphabetic substitution, using a Vigenère tableau similar to the tableau on the other half of the sculpture. K3 is a transposition cipher, and K4 is still unsolved.

Solution of passage 1

BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION

Solution of passage 2

IT WAS TOTALLY INVISIBLE HOWS THAT POSSIBLE ? THEY USED THE EARTHS MAGNETIC FIELD X THE INFORMATION WAS GATHERED AND TRANSMITTED UNDERGRUUND TO AN UNKNOWN LOCATION X DOES LANGLEY KNOW ABOUT THIS ? THEY SHOULD ITS BURIED OUT THERE SOMEWHERE X WHO KNOWS THE EXACT LOCATION ? ONLY WW THIS WAS HIS LAST MESSAGE X THIRTY EIGHT DEGREES FIFTY SEVEN MINUTES SIX POINT FIVE SECONDS NORTH SEVENTY SEVEN DEGREES EIGHT MINUTES FORTY FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO

On April 19, 2006, Sanborn contacted an online community dedicated to the Kryptos puzzle to inform them that the accepted solution to part 2 was incorrect. He said that he made an error in the sculpture by omitting an “X” used to indicate a break for aesthetic reasons, and that the deciphered text that ended “…FOUR SECONDS WEST ID BY ROWS” should be “…FOUR SECONDS WEST X LAYER TWO”.

Note: The coordinates mentioned in the plaintext: 38°57′6.5″N 77°8′44″W are for a point that is approximately 150 feet southeast of the sculpture.

Solution of passage 3

SLOWLY DESPARATLY SLOWLY THE REMAINS OF PASSAGE DEBRIS THAT ENCUMBERED THE LOWER PART OF THE DOORWAY WAS REMOVED WITH TREMBLING HANDS I MADE A TINY BREACH IN THE UPPER LEFT HAND CORNER AND THEN WIDENING THE HOLE A LITTLE I INSERTED THE CANDLE AND PEERED IN THE HOT AIR ESCAPING FROM THE CHAMBER CAUSED THE FLAME TO FLICKER BUT PRESENTLY DETAILS OF THE ROOM WITHIN EMERGED FROM THE MIST X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q ?

This is a paraphrased quotation from Howard Carter’s account of the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun on November 26, 1922, as described in his 1923 book The Tomb of Tutankhamun. The question with which it ends is that posed by Lord Carnarvon, to which Carter (in the book) famously replied “wonderful things”. In the November 26, 1922 field notes, however, his reply was, “Yes, it is wonderful.”

Solution of passage 4

Part 4 remains publicly unsolved.

However, http://www.wired.com/2013/07/nsa-cracked-kryptos-before-cia/ advises that a small group of cryptanalysts from the NSA had actually deciphered the same three sections years earlier, taking them less than a month, according to documents held in the NSA archives that were unearthed by Elonka Dunin in a Freedom of Information request. Dunin maintains a website entirely devoted to the Kryptos sculpture.

Looking at Sanborn’s Bio-Resume on his website, there is no indication that he has any background in cryptography which makes me wonder how on earth he devised this complex encryption in the first place? With no obvious training in or experience of cryptography (and no one appears to be asking this) WHO did he consult to create this code in the first place – it must have taken many hours of work on this before he ever got around to actually sculpting the work!  On his website are pictures showing other sculptures featuring English, Native American and Latin texts but these all, as far as I can tell, post-date the Kryptos one.

“Artist Jim Sanborn was born in Washington, DC on November 14, 1945. He graduated from Randolph-Macon College in 1969 with a double major in art history and sociology. He received his Masters degree in sculpture from Pratt Institute in 1971.

Sanborn has received numerous awards and grants and has exhibited in major museums in the United States, Asia, and Europe. Jim Sanborn’s public artworks are located in Japan, Taiwan and many locations in the United States.”

To further complicate and mystify those interested in his work he closed down his kryptosclue.com website due to ” an overwhelming number of frivolous or debasing or hostile comments.”  The Jimsanborn web page tells potential enquirers that he will respond to any short personal email on payment of a $50 fee. However, this is only to discuss the enquirer’s possible solution or decryption process and goes on to state that Sanborn “will not intentionally reveal clues or a solution to the remaining unsolved K4 section.”

My question is, will Sanborn take the answer to the unsolved passage to the grave or will he put the world out of its misery before he takes his last breath?  

No doubt he has a contingency plan in place that, upon his demise, his solicitor (presumably entrusted with the solution to the whole code)  would oversee enquiries about decryption and, hopefully, has set an end date at which time the solution to the encryption would be made public.
Further reading:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos

Elonka Dunin’s website http://elonka.com/kryptos/

http://jimsanborn.net/kryptos_fees.pdf

Ghost pictures and how to spot the fake

Tags

Elsie Wright, Ghost apps, Harold Snelling, image manipulation, Paranormal, photo ‘manipulation, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, smartphone apps

Presumably you’ve read about how models’ pictures can be Photoshopped to make the ladies appear more ‘shapely’ than they are in real life.

If that last sentence made no sense to you, here’s a brief explanation before we go any further:-

Photoshop is a computer software program that gives the user advanced image editing capability that lets you enhance, retouch, and manipulate pictures. The picture below shows you a before and after of a picture of Britney Spears in 2013.

So, with a little bit of technical jiggery-pokery aided by some nifty software, the image that adorns newspapers and promotional material is a computer enhanced version of the lady in question.

The software is inexpensive and easily available to purchase as are similar programs by other software companies.

At this juncture I’d like to point out that image manipulation like this is nothing new!

The first documented photo ‘manipulation’ happened back in 1917 with the case of the Cottingley Fairies.

The picture with “cut out” fairies.

The Cottingly fairies could only have happened because of the fact that the two girls, Frances Griffiths (9 years old) and Elsie Wright (16 years old), realised they could use a camera to fake a picture showing fairies. Elsie’s father, Arthur, was a keen amateur photographer and had his own darkroom. Arthur knew of his daughter’s artistic ability and that she had spent some time working in a photographer’s studio and he dismissed the figures as cardboard cut-outs.

Two months later the girls borrowed his camera again and this time returned with a photograph of Elsie sitting on the lawn holding out her hand to a 1-foot-tall gnome.

Exasperated by what he believed to be “nothing but a prank” and convinced that the girls must have tampered with his camera in some way, Arthur Wright refused to lend it to them again. His wife Polly, however, believed the photographs to be authentic.

At this time, photography was in its infancy and most people had little experience of cameras so the idea of faking a photo hadn’t yet been conceived (other than the two girls whose idea it was).

Elsie’s mother attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford and at the end of the meeting Polly Wright showed the two fairy photographs taken by her daughter and niece to the speaker. As a result, the photographs were displayed at the Society’s annual conference in Harrogate, held a few months later.  There they came to the attention of a leading member of the Society, Edward Gardner.

Gardner sent the prints along with the original glass-plate negatives to Harold Snelling, a photography expert. Snelling’s opinion was that “the two negatives are entirely genuine, unfaked photographs … [with] no trace whatsoever of studio work involving card or paper models”. He did not go so far as to say that the photographs showed fairies, stating only that “these are straight forward photographs of whatever was in front of the camera at the time”. Gardner had the prints “clarified” by Snelling, and new negatives produced, “more conducive to printing”,  for use in the illustrated lectures he gave around the UK. Snelling supplied the photographic prints which were available for sale at Gardner’s lectures.

Author and prominent Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle learned of the photographs from the editor of the Spiritualists’ publication Light. Gardner and Doyle sought a second expert opinion from the photographic company Kodak, who declined to issue a certificate of authenticity. The prints were also examined by another photographic company, Ilford, who reported unequivocally that there was “some evidence of faking”.

In 1983, the cousins admitted in an article published in the magazine The Unexplained that the photographs had been faked, although both maintained that they really had seen fairies. Elsie had copied illustrations of fairies from a popular children’s book of the time, Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published in 1914.

They said they had then cut out the cardboard figures and supported them with hatpins, disposing of their props once the photograph had been taken.

Now I’d like you to have a look at the following webpage, by Mashable, which is about trick photography entitled 1850s-1950s, Photoshop before Photoshop – 100 years of manipulating images without computers.http://mashable.com/2015/02/19/before-photoshop/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link

The Silent Screen

I realise that this next bit is less about the paranormal and more about the history of cinematography. However, the pioneers of the film industry were the first to realise, and experiment, with the moving image.  Yes they started out as films to entertain and offer a little escapism for the viewing public but film directors realised they could use film to show action that audiences had never thought possible.  

Méliès’ fantasy film “A Trip To The Moon” showed a capsule being fired from a large cannon at the man in the moon, with the rocket landing in the moon’s eye. The film was one of the most popular films of the early years of the twentieth century and heralded an interesting future for cinematography which brought Buster Keaton, Keystone Cops and Charlie Chaplin to our cinema screens.

The Talkies

We know that The Jazz Singer was the first movie with sound. Fast forward to the 20th Century.  We’re used to seeing films like 2001, Independence Day, Avatar and Interstellar. These films look so real and yet we know they were filmed in a studio and special effects were added using Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), blue screen, scale models, animatronics, pyrotechnics and 3D. Film makers have been experimenting and pushing the boundaries of what can be produced on film. No doubt you will have seen many SciFi and horror films where the supernatural/paranormal has been the storyline – The Shining, The Exorcist, The Ring, Paranormal Activity to name just a few.  The technology is not just the domain of those making blockbuster movies, software to create special effects is readily available for anyone with a PC, laptop, tablet or other computing device, including mobile phones.

Returning to the present

With the proliferation of smart phones and their ability to add ‘apps’ (applications i.e., programs) it is not surprising that photo imaging programs have become available for these, too.

Smart phones (they all have cameras now) have, as standard, basic image editing capability like adding a sepia effect, creating a negative view or making the picture black and white.

However, there are programs that will ‘enhance’ pictures that you take – you could add borders to your photos or create a montage but, more specifically, there are ‘ghost apps’ freely available for both iPhone and Android.

Since you are reading this document, it is a foregone conclusion that you have an interest in the paranormal and it is likely you will have seen, either in Facebook groups, through Google searches or on dedicated paranormal websites, videos and photos purporting to show one or more ghost images.

If you are going to deal with this topic objectively and rationally, you should seek to eliminate the obvious, e.g., the possibility that a picture has been doctored by superimposing an image on an otherwise ‘normal’ looking photo.

I would suggest you use as reference material the excellent FB page that RiPA HQ (Research into Paranormal Anomalistics) have put together called “Has that pic been app’d?” which you can find at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.474504212650788.1073741831.135752936525919&type=1

New in 2015: Adding a Facebook group who are on the case too and worth a look is you’re doubting a photo https://www.facebook.com/FakeGhostPhoto

A short explanation on EXIF meta data written and reproduced here with kind consent of Leon B:-

Every digital camera attaches an explanation, or record, of each photograph taken. It is attached to that photo as a secondary file internally, on that photo. It’s found by clicking on “properties”. It includes information like: camera brand/type, file size, f-stop, whether the flash was used, etc. Some also include the Geo coords.

When a photo has been manipulated, as we see a lot of in the paranormal field, that data will usually replace the original data. Sometimes the exif will only state that it is simply a jpeg, with some other non-camera data, such as the date and time.

In the case of editing software, such as ExifTool, there will be a “composite” annotation, which is not part of the camera’s exif meta data. Facebook compresses any photos and replaces the meta data with its own (raising concerns of ownership and privacy!). Transferring a photo, via email or texting from your phone, will also compress the photo with the same affect. The larger files, using cameras with 10+ megapixels can potentially cause even email transference to be compressed.
In a nutshell, the metadata on exif files, attached to all digital photos, is the easiest way to determine authenticity. The last program to affect that file will leave its signature.

Images: exif data straight from a photo taken on my phone, and data taken from a photo downloaded from Facebook.

 

 

Addendum 20/09/15

To corroborate my comments regarding pictures and hoaxes (separately or together!) I today came across this very useful information:

https://theconversation.com/six-easy-ways-to-tell-if-that-viral-story-is-a-hoax-47673

Addendum 23/02/16

I’m not alone in my concern with the ways in which technology is used to ‘enhance’ a picture by adding or hiding elements.  Whilst we know photoshopping of celebs is all too common, it’s becoming that much harder to identify a real picture from a clever hoax  The blog Neuralogica addresses like-minded concerns: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/identifying-real-or-fake-images/

In particular, what is now going to be called into question is the future of photographs  or videos used as evidence in court in the case of a crime.  If we are now able to so skilfully treat pictures and videos so that they look, to all intents and purposes, to be totally real, there is an argument that these may no longer be acceptable in a court of law.

Addendum 02/04/16

There’s an FB page that debunks pictures by showing that a ghost app has been used, so well worth a look at https://www.facebook.com/GhostAppGhosts/

However, I’ve come across a website called Obsidian Dawn who generate photoshop brushes, one of which is entitled “ghosts”.  I’ve created a document with each of the images the app provides as a handy reference tool:

www.obsidiandawn.com ghosts-photoshop-gimp-brushes

Smartphone Apps

Some examples of the type of apps you can find on GooglePlay and iTunes:-

Android
GhostCam Spirit Photography

“The best spirit photography app on Android market. Prank and fool your friends easily with mock up haunted ghost photo.”

Ghost camera allows you apply ghosts to your photo select from gallery,  or you can use phone’s camera to take new ghost photos.

Apple

Ghost Capture You can manipulate any photo from your iPhone photo album. After choosing an image, (or taking a new photo directly through Ghost Capture) select a ghost to superimpose onto the photo. Choose from creepy Victorian children, faceless torsos, Civil War soldiers, ghostly orbs, and more. After placing the ghost, adjust the size, rotation, and transparency to achieve the optimum effect.

Ghost Effects Wanna freak out your friend with a picture with ghosts in it? You should try Ghost Effects.

Ghost Effects lets you add horrible ghost effects to camera or pictures.

Take a photo with your friends with a ghost right behind them and send it to them, and wait to see their reaction.

They will get the chills and you will have a good laugh.

Panoramic Photos capture demons from hell?

With the advent of the smart phone it’s not just apps that you can download that can mislead the less tech savvy!  

A recent picture was captured by a schoolgirl at Hampton Court Palace and featured prominently on many daily papers, professing to show the “ghost of the grey lady”.

Not a ghost at all, just the girl’s phone camera having difficulty processing the image cocrrectly!

However, gullible the general public were the simple truth is that the girl was, in all probability, using the “panoramic” setting on her phone and the phone couldn’t cope with a person moving out of shot.  It’s discussed in detail by the Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/ghost-of-the-grey-lady-at-hampton-court-how-image-aliasing-allows-iphone-cameras-to-photograph-spectres-10069536.html

Panoramic photography is a technique of photography, using specialised equipment or software, that captures images with horizontally-elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as wide format photography. The term has also been applied to a photograph that is cropped to a relatively wide aspect ratio, like the familiar letterbox format in wide-screen video.

If the explanation sounds boring, the outcome of using this feature is anything but!  Please have a look at Bored Panda’s panoramic photo fails and have a good laugh.

A brief discussion of orbs

It is appropriate, at this point, to mention photos and videos that I have no doubt that you will come across, showing “orbs”!

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orb_(optics) defines these as unexpected, typically circular, artifacts that occur in flash photography —sometimes with trails indicating motion—especially common with modern compact and ultra-compact digital cameras.

Orbs are generally understood to be produced from retro-reflection of light off solid particles (e.g., dust, pollen), liquid particles (water droplets, especially rain) or other foreign material within the camera lens. Please refer to my blog post entitled “Cameras, Orbs and Lens Flares” which deals with this topic in greater detail.

You are advised to read about these in order to familiarise yourself with the phenomenon. They are most commonly seen when viewing a photo but not at the time of taking it. There are people who attest to having seen orbs with the naked eye.

Whilst some pictures that you will find during your paranormal research are likely to have been tampered with using the techniques highlighted above, there are some photos where there is no explanation for what appears on a picture.

http://strangeoccurrencesparanormal.weebly.com/orbs-explained.html explains the phenomenon well.

Ghost videos
Akin to what has been mentioned above, there are numerous videos on Youtube and paranormal websites attesting to paranormal activity – poltergeist activity, inexplicable noises and actual sightings of ghosts, shadows and strange beings.

You only have to think back to films like Paranormal Activity, White Noise and Poltergeist, which depict “paranormal” events taking place. In big screen films we know they’ve used high tech equipment to carry out this wizardry. However, ‘home-made style’ videos are just as easy to produce, using low tech solutions, using fishing wire (invisible from a distance) or out of shot humans to move items so that they appear to have been moved by an unseen force.

Edit 28/01/2016 Came across a youtube video by Eric Biddle which I’d like you to view Obejects move by themselves (sic) since it shows some quick demonstrations of how easy it is to make objects appear to move “by themselves”.

A particular video that I watched on Youtube some time ago, purportedly showed evidence of paranormal activity in a living room.  The video camera was placed at one end of a through-lounge, showing a sofa on the right of the picture, furthest away, a window with full-length curtains in front of which was an armchair.  The video did not show the whole room, both walls, left and right, were out of shot.  The video captures the curtain behind the armchair being moved.  After a delay the sofa is up-ended by being pushed from behind so that it’s back tips forward onto the floor.  In my opinion, these  “effects” were all achievable by a person out of sight of the video camera. I’ll have to find that video and post it so that you can see for yourself.

 

Edit 07/12/2015 Facebook post of a children’s entertainer/magician whose video shows how expertly videos can be edited to show us the most amazing things that AREN’T possible but are fun to watch. https://www.facebook.com/ChuttiVikatan/videos/648673875235158/

 

 

 

 

Picture said to be from a Russian mental institution, 1952? No! Actually a still from American Horror Story!

Tags

Cameras, image manipulation, Paranormal

Girls “climbing” or suspended half way up a wall – touted on the internet and various paranormal groups as being photographic ‘evidence’ of the paranormal.

Although various comments said it was obvious the girls had one foot in a recess enabling them to look as if they are suspended in midair against the wall, none actually recognised that this was a still from a horror series from America.

A little research (I found it so easily I’m surprised that this hadn’t been previously debunked by others!) found International Business Times’ review partially reproduced below.  Simple proof that it’s another fine example of cinematography and nothing more.

American Horror Story’ was created by the co-creators of `Glee’, but the shows have little in common besides that. The show revolves around the Harmons, a family of three, who move from Boston to Los Angeles in order to reconcile past anguish. What the Harmons don’t know is that the house they’ve moved into is haunted. But it’s not haunted by Casperesque friendly ghosts – it’s haunted by demonic creatures. The creatures have a history of not only spooking the house’s residents but also devouring them. After living in this house, family patriarch and psychiatrist, Ben, may need a shrink of his own.

First episode date: October 5, 2011

However the following text (the link from which it’s taken is also given below)

Detention” was released on Aug. 6 and immediately got fans of the FX mini-series into an excited frenzy. The 17-second video featured eight girls in black and white facing a wall … while floating in the air. In the background a chilling voice sang the line, “There is a house in New Orleans,” from the song “House of the Rising Sun.”

Immediately sending shivers down the spines of viewers, it appears that “American Horror Story” had some inspiration for “Detention” – German performer Pina Bausch. In 1977 Bausch performed a piece called “Blaubart” (or in English, “Bluebeard”) with the recording of Bela Bartok’s “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.” During her performance, a series of women seemingly were able to hang in the air while facing the wall (there were holes in the wall helping keep them in place).

A photo taken from the performance began to make its round on Twitter thanks to @TerrifyingPics. But the Twitter account got a little creative about the performance still. It carries the caption: “

“Picture said to be from a Russian mental institution, 1952.”

The photo was subsequently posted on Reddit  where users immediately dismissed the idea that mentally ill people in Russia have the ability to levitate. Instead they unearthed Pina Bausch’s 1977 performance.

You can read the whole article here http://www.ibtimes.com/american-horror-story-season-3-spoilers-detention-promo-coven-mirrors-pina-bauschs-blaubart-1401183

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.

Cameras, orbs and lens flares

Tags

Cameras, Lens Flares, Orbs

Firstly I want to credit some colleagues, because their valuable comments have helped me to formalise the documentation within this article. So I want to thank my colleagues/friends on The Real World of the Paranormal Facebook group – a select group who have been drawn together by the desire to weed out the paranormal drivel that so many readily believe – where there is little scientific justification to do so. The group’s mission says “dedicated to being a informed, scientific & objective view of the perceived paranormal world.” I particularly want to thank two people: Barrie H, the group was his inspiration and has been my lifesaver amongst the dross of paranormal postings; and Leon B, who is an investigator and tech specialist, whose no-nonsense approach to the paranormal has been both an education and a revelation!

So let’s start with the basics. A camera, whether an old film one or a digital one which uses light sensitive diodes, simply responds to the visible light spectrum. It doesn’t pick up UV or infrared or any other strange frequencies (unless it is designed to do so). So if there was a ‘white lady’ there, people would have seen her. The camera can see nothing that the human eye cannot, in fact, the reverse is likely. So any ‘strange’ images are produced by light reflections on the lens or by some kind of aberration in the camera’s electronics. End of story. Boring but logical explanation!

The following link shows 15 Famous Paranormal Photos explained by science courtesy of http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_680_15-famous-paranormal-photos-explained-by-science_p2/ which includes the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, The Enfield Poltergeist “jumping girl” and the “spaceman” behind the little girl.  The above

link at cracked.com touches on a topic which is related to the increase in paranormal phenomena being “captured” on picture or video but which I will deal with as a separate post sometime soon – namely ghost apps and Photoshopped images.

Now, back to a bit more science, this time, relating to the anomalies in pictures that people attribute to orbs, again courtesy of Leon B.

Investigator’s tip:
“Lens flare” is caused when a relatively bright light source, out of the frame, reflects or refracts off the surface of the lens. This often places a dim version of that light source (called an artifact) directly into frame. It can also be seen when the light source reflects off the lens and becomes trapped behind the lens filter, giving the same effect.

A second form of lens flare occurs when the light strikes the lens or filter from almost a 90° angle, resulting in a hazy effect that covers part of the frame. This can affect the entire photo, causing a reduction in contrast or turning the entire photo an off color.

A third effect that is more common on digital cameras is the rainbow flare. This happens when light strikes the coated filter just right and creates a prism effect, causing a rainbow.

Lens flare can manifest itself as a clear, dim orb (with the same shape as the light source), a transparent orb (or series of orbs, depending upon the number of lenses are in your camera), a smooth mist on one side of the photo (occasionally showing rays of light emanating from the center), or a rainbow across the frame.

Your clients may argue with you on this, so provide some sample photos with the same effect to show them that there is a scientific explanation.

Leon helpfully provided this link which explains in greater detail (and scientific fact!) how “orbs” are found in photos:-
http://strangeoccurrencesparanormal.weebly.com/orbs-explained.html

The thing about photos is that, with the prevalence of digital technology, SLR cameras and smart phones, now everyone can take convincing photos.

What concerns me is how easily people can jump to conclusions about what they think they saw. As an example, here’s a link that provides an interesting insight into “false orbs”
Ghost Orbs – or not?

A further really interesting website which you should investigate is What are Orbs and How to Avoid Them courtesy of Skepthink who categorically state that:

“Orbs are not paranormal or supernatural in nature, despite the best efforts for many believers to argue that their orbs are different. In fact, they are nothing more than airborne debris and particles being captured by the lens illuminated by the flash or light glare or lens flare. Capturing orbs is rather simple, avoiding them requires some basic camera knowledge.”

The preceding articles are particularly interesting because I consider that too many people misinterpret what they see!  Bear in mind how easily our eyes and brains are deceived by simple optical illusions like those you can see at Michael Bach’s Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena and some not so simple but very clever ones Mighty Optical Illusions

Seed wings, photographed at dusk, can easily be mistaken!

As evidence of this, I provide the above picture of seed wings, commonly mistaken  for “fairies”.   Up close they’re very obviously seed wings but, take a photo of one at dusk or early morning, maybe with a slow shutter speed, and you’re going to get something that looks a little spooky!

Now a little history lesson, appropriately, about photographing fairies!

The Cottingley Fairies

The Cottinglye fairies could only have happened because of the fact that two girls, Frances Griffiths (9 years old) and Elsie Wright (16 years old), realised the possibility of using a camera to fake a picture showing fairies.

Elsie’s father, Arthur, was a keen amateur photographer and had his own darkroom. Arthur knew of his daughter’s artistic ability and that she had spent some time working in a photographer’s studio so he immediately dismissed the figures in the first photo as cardboard cutouts.

However, two months later, the girls borrowed his camera again and, this time, returned with a photograph of Elsie sitting on the lawn holding out her hand to a 1-foot-tall gnome.

Exasperated by what he believed to be “nothing but a prank” and convinced that the girls must have tampered with his camera in some way, Arthur Wright refused to lend it to them again. His wife Polly, however, believed the photographs to be authentic.

Of course, at this time, photography was in its infancy and most people had little experience of cameras so the idea of faking a photo hadn’t yet been conceived (other than the two girls whose idea it was).

Elsie’s mother attended a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford and, at the end of the meeting, Polly Wright showed the two fairy photographs taken by her daughter and niece to the speaker. As a result, the photographs were displayed at the Society’s annual conference in Harrogate, held a few months later.  There they came to the attention of a leading member of the Society, Edward Gardner.

Gardner sent the prints, along with the original glass-plate negatives, to Harold Snelling, a photography expert. Snelling’s opinion was that “the two negatives are entirely genuine, unfaked photographs … [with] no trace whatsoever of studio work involving card or paper models”.  He did not go so far as to say that the photographs showed fairies, stating only that “these are straight forward photographs of whatever was in front of the camera at the time”.  Gardner had the prints “clarified” by Snelling, and new negatives produced “more conducive to printing”,  for use in the illustrated lectures he gave around the UK.  Snelling also supplied the photographic prints which were available for sale at Gardner’s lectures.

Author and prominent Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle learned of the photographs from the editor of the Spiritualists’ publication Light.  Gardner and Doyle sought a second expert opinion from the photographic company Kodak, who declined to issue a certificate of authenticity. The prints were also examined by another photographic company, Ilford, who reported unequivocally that there was “some evidence of faking”.

In 1983, the cousins admitted in an article published in the magazine The Unexplained that the photographs had been faked, although both maintained that they really had seen fairies. Elsie had copied illustrations of fairies from a popular children’s book of the time, Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published in 1914. They said they had then cut out the cardboard figures and supported them with hatpins, disposing of their props in the beck once the photograph had been taken.

In a 1985 interview on Yorkshire Television’s Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes: “Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet!”

In the same interview Frances said: “I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in”.

I hope you have found this to be an interesting article. My next one will continue in a similar vein with regard to ghost apps and Photoshopped images.

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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