This video has been filmed off the monitor screen of a security camera in an office in Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Jose emailed this recent video to us a few days ago and we spent a fair bit of time studying it before offering a tentative opinion as to what's going on. But we have no way of knowing if our possible natural explanation is on the mark. To enable further discussion and collect other opinions, Jose has kindly given permission for us to post this extraordinary video on our site. It's rather mesmerising.

BTW, don't let the title of this blog lead your thinking. It was just too catchy to resist, sorry.

Comments are most welcome. Please do not copy or distribute this video: it is copyright.

I tried this text on the front page of the site but have moved it back here to the blog, as it's more representative of my personal position and does not fairly represent the NZSOS team overall.

We seem to have acquired a reputation for being skeptics of the paranormal. If that means we thoughtfully challenge extraordinary claims, weigh up the evidence carefully, favour the simpler, natural explanation over the inevitably more complex paranormal one, and avoid making claims that can't be strongly supported, well then, we are skeptics. But we have also individually experienced our own share of events that resist natural explanations. That's what keeps us interested and helps us understand what people who approach us for help may be going through. We're all still searching for answers.

We don't claim to be doing scientific research, at least in the sense of employing true Scientific Method to the study of paranormal phenomena. We've tried to, but it's more problematic than it sounds, maybe next to impossible; it comes out as being pseudoscience, or even looking 'scientifical'. We're just doing the best we can with the time and resources available to us.
More on pseudoscience.

Yes, we have all the standard instruments and do-hickeys that they use on TV; EMF meters,  FLIR cameras, etc, but we don't think that any of the gear we use can actually detect   ghosts. We use this stuff to understand the environment we're investigating, as it picks up stuff better than our human senses, as well as stuff we can't sense at all, and it records more accurately and objectively than memory. It's more useful for eliminating paranormal-based hypotheses than proving them to be true. More on investigation equipment.

We have never actually found a ghost! That is; we've never made a claim that anything we have experienced and/or recorded is actually paranormal. The farthest we've gone is, 'This thing happened and we haven't yet been able to find a natural explanation for it.' More

And we don't hold a set of beliefs that we're determined to prove is the truth.

If all that doesn't put you off, please feel free to contact us about your paranormal experience. We may actually be able to help!

James Gilberd, 6th January 2017.

It was a great pleasure to have a walk around in daylight, both in the main hospital and the old nurses' home buildings, with Mark Wallbank of Haunted Auckland and Roz of the Wellington SPCA -
- also a paranormal enthusiast. We had plenty of time to take photos, and enjoyed access to all areas. The place has no real menace during daylight (although the old Nurses' Home, which is currently a building site, full of hazards and so off-limits to the public, is still pretty eerie), but a few years ago, during each of the three occasions when Strange Occurrences conducted full paranormal investigations, some unexplained and rather unsettling stuff occurred after midnight - see The Wellington Fever Hospital Investigations 2010-2011

I was pleased that the Wellington SPCA took over this facility in 2013. Because of its haunted reputation, it had become a place to dare to enter and there were many break-ins. Luckily no one managed to set it on fire. Now the SPCA have made good use of this high-quality building in its scenic location, and the security of the site is substantially improved. A large section of the main hospital, most of the West Wing, is available for hire as a function and conference facility - a great place to escape the hubbub of the city and enjoy the unique surroundings. As to whether it's haunted; well, mostly when places are substantially renovated, as the Fever Hospital has been, reports of paranormal experiences die down. This is probably true, but the jury is still out!

PDF - Wellington SPCA Conference & Function Centre Information

Below: photos taken by James Gilberd of New Zealand Strange Occurrences Society, 9/12/2017.

This photo was sent to us for analysis by Rachel, from her recent trip to New Orleans. Taken in daylight by her sister with an iPhone 7, the photo contains an anomaly: she is apparently missing half her right hand, with which she was holding a medium-sized drink cup - also strangely invisible.

We initially thought this was due to subject movement, but none is apparent anywhere in the photo, which shows sharp detail throughout; and the Exif data (printed in full below) gives the shutter speed at 1/429th of a second - brief enough an exposure to freeze all but the most rapid movement.

The anomalous area is shown pixel-for-pixel in the detail photo below. It is unaltered from the original we received. We suspect this may be to do with the phone camera's image stabilization system but we don't have any way of exploring that possibility. An internet search did not reveal any similar faults with iPhone7 photos, other than complaints of a watercolour-like effect. The predominance of the bright red fabrics may also be a factor.

We don't know what is going on here. Can anyone explain?

We would like to hear from you if you know the cause of this anomaly, and/or if you know of similar effects occurring in photos taken using the Apple iPhone7 or any other cellphone camera.
Thank you.
James Gilberd,
New Zealand Strange Occurrences Society

Please note: the photos on this page are copyright. The owner has given us permission to publish them here but please do not copy or republish them without permission. Feel free to circulate the link to this page, though.

The following is the Exif data from the photo, as shown by Exif Reader.

The article, by Abigail Beall for Wired, "If ghosts were real, Brian Cox claims CERN would have found them by now", while somewhat interesting is typically shallow and rather a cheap shot.
I'm not anti-science - quite the opposite, actually - it's just that poor-quality, low-level science writing such as the article in question here get my goat.

For a start, it does not define what it means by 'ghosts'. Some kind of physical entity is assumed. As we know, there's more than one kind of phenomenon answering to the descriptor 'ghost'. Are we talking about the ghosts that mainly exist in the movies, such as in Peter Jackson's 'The Frighteners', where the comedy-ghosts don't even obey consistent laws of ghost-physics? Or the nastier type in the Paranormal Activity movie series that are able to physically interact with our environment, slamming doors and such, and with people, dragging them screaming out of bed and off to a grisly fate? No one believes that stuff, unless they've binge-watched too many scary movies and are seriously sleep-deprived.

Or are we talking about something more subtle, such as crisis apparitions - visions of family, friends or loved ones appearing at around the time of their death or other intense situation? (Telepathy, if it exists, could provide an explanation.) These occurrences are common and have been experienced by many reliable witnesses, testified to and corroborated in published accounts, such that crisis apparitions were held up as established fact by the SPR, whose research and findings are generally rigorous and skeptical.

And what about 'time slips'? The phantom Battle of Edge Hill was witnessed by many reliable people of good standing, but a couple of months after it happened!. Three military officers sent to the town to dispel the superstitious rumours all saw the apparitional soldiers and heard the fighting for themselves. There's the famous ghostly Roman soldiers, horses and all, seen by Harry Martindale and several other independent witnesses in the basement of the Treasurer's House in York, a case that has never been disproved. Poltergeists are something different again. So what, specifically, is claimed to be disproved by the scientists of CERN?

The later part of the article dismisses ghosts as any kind of physical possibility but does not consider the idea of their occurring in a higher dimension and not having a presence in our familiar 3D spatial reality at all. For my part - and I have no way yet of proving this - it seems that ghosts are not part of this physical world in any sense but more likely are experienced only psychologically; that is, in the mind, be it telepathically or otherwise.

For this reason, it is unlikely there will ever be an undeniable photograph of a ghost, unless the camera can somehow capture that which is not physically present or a part of any objective reality. It may be that the human mind (and that of higher animals that can be thought of as possessing consciousness, or - if you prefer - a soul) as well as being the product of brain activity (the Materialists hold that it is nothing more than that) exists also in four-dimensional and perhaps higher-dimensional space, and therefore is not bound by time, at least in the linear way that we perceive it) but extends itself fore and aft of the present moment. The extent and strength of this projection may vary for a number of yet-unknown reasons, but it may be linked to the strength of a consciousness - willpower - and the emotional intensity of events it has experienced. (This is of course just speculation.)

So, once we start looking at ghosts not as theoretical, physical entities that can be filmed, weighed and measured, but as a range of phenomena which the human mind is somehow capable of perceiving, maybe in a space that is beyond the familiar three-spatial-dimensions-plus-time model that we're mostly intuitively comfortable with and struggle to think beyond, we may be onto something.

The Large Hadron Collider has only really been operating since 2010, and experimentation in particle physics began just in the 20th century, so it's all still pretty fresh territory. So who's to say what future discoveries will or will not be made by scientists using the LHC to explore nature and the cosmos? Probably not Brian Cox, and certainly the writer of the article in question, Abigail Beall.

Scientists, whether or not they're looking for an explanation of ghost experiences and other paranormal phenomena, will likely - eventually - provide us with the answers to the questions that have been around for centuries. We just need to keep up with new developments, not take an anti-science stance, and not be put off by articles such as Abigail Beall's that, if not actually pissing on the unwashed from a great height, are nothing more than negative and discouraging to those seeking explanations for unknown phenomena.

This isn't paranormal in itself, but it relates to thought processes for considering paranormal events.

Last weekend Wellington experienced a storm, with gale-force, cold southerly wind and a lot of driving rain. Venturing downstairs on Sunday morning, we found quite a bit of water on the floor of the laundry and downstairs room (my Man Cave). We mopped it up, put old towels around the doors, etc, to stop too much more water being driven in by the strong wind. The storm continued Sunday night, and Monday morning it was the same deal with the mopping and the towels. The storm slowly fizzled out and by Monday night it had become calm and dry outside.

Then on Tuesday morning, there was a whole lot more water downstairs. It was worse than the previous couple of days' inundation. So, wait a minute; the storm's over, but...

Investigation ensued. Not a paranormal investigation, but the same sort of detective work was needed. We looked under the house, on the roof, and up in the roof. Eventually the cause of the flooding was found to be a pressure tank in the ceiling (the cold water tank that provides pressure for the hot water cylinder), which was overflowing. The stopcock had failed and the tank was continuing to fill. Water from it was running along the ceiling and down the internal walls.

Up till that discovery, we'd been working under a false assumption: the driving rain from the storm (which was ferocious and hard to ignore) was the cause of the flooding. Although a little water had driven in under the back door and through the cat flap, we'd largely been fooled. The measures we'd taken over the last two days were ultimately ineffective. So once we'd discovered the true source of the water, we were able to do something effective about it: call a plumber!

The point of this is that for a long time we were labouring under a misconception. The storm had masked the true cause of the problem, leading us to a false assumption. Any action we took by following this assumption was ineffective. That the storm and the pressure tank fault happened at the same time was merely a coincidence. The result of our misconception was three days of water damage to the house that could've been much reduced. (We're still drying things out, a week later, and the damage inside the walls is probably permanent.) If the storm had not occurred, we would've traced the leak to its true source before it could do so much damage.

So, what has all this got to do with paranormal investigation?  Well, the type of thinking that resulted in extra water damage is exactly the same as a lot of thinking (or lack of thinking) that goes on around paranormal investigations; before, during and afterwards. It was my own thinking that was wrong, and I've been in a few similar situations during paranormal investigations, where one apparent, major event masks a less obvious one. Or a false assumption about paranormal activity masks the true, natural reason for a set of events, maybe leading to someone's personal distress.

So, we shouldn't always settle on the most obvious conclusion without thinking around and beyond it. What if we're wrong because we're being misled?

This is one of the main reasons for working as a team. And, as in business, sports and elsewhere in life, a team formed of people who don't all think alike, a team where people are comfortable about questioning the assumptions of other team members, including the leader, is a stronger and more effective team. A team made up of paranormal believers will be more easily misled and thus less effective than one containing a people with a range of beliefs and views; from believer through agnostic through to skeptic. (It's fair to say, then, that a team comprising only skeptics and scientific thinkers would be equally ineffective in investigating the paranormal; they're more likely to miss stuff that people more open to the paranormal might more readily perceive.)

So, from this mundane plumbing issue, I have learned two lessons:

• Don't act on the most obvious cause until you've checked it is indeed the true cause
• Make sure you're working with people who don't all think the same way you do, and make sure you listen to them!

Please note: The photos in this blog and on this website are copyright and must not be downloaded, copied, printed and/or used elsewhere in any form.

We receive many possibly paranormal photographs for analysis. While some are easier to explain than others, all of them are fascinating, and whether paranormal or not, they possess a certain beauty. These two photos, taking during a camping trip in Redwood National Park in northern California, in 2015 and sent to us by Andrew Ewing in June, 2017 for analysis, are right up there in the mystery and beauty department. (Thank you again for permission to show and discuss them here.)

While many of the photos we receive are explainable by camera or photographic anomalies such as lens flare or dust orbs, these are a bit different. Here, it is the ability of the stills camera to capture a fleeting moment of time, something not perceptible by normal human eyesight. While there is lens flare in both images (caused by the brightness of the fire bouncing around inside the lens and resulting in the large pink-purple blob in the centre and extending out in a circular pattern), this has nothing to do with the flames that are the apparent size and shape of dancing human figures appearing on the right of the campfire.

There are two obvious natural - non-paranormal - explanations that immediately came to my mind:

- It's faked! Photoshopped!

Well, I personally don't think so. Other may disagree. I believe Andrew's statement that the photos have not been tampered with. I work daily with Photoshop in my profession as a photographer and have done so for almost 20 years; so while I'm not claiming that a real expert couldn't slip a fake past me, to my eyes these photo show no signs of being messed with.

Also, if you do an internet image search along the lines of 'ghostly flame figures dancing around fire', you'll get a variety of results, some obviously faked (for various reasons). All of the fakes appear quite different to these photos (and most of the natural photos are nowhere near as good!) And if I were going to fake a ghost photo, I'd make it pretty scary-looking and unambiguous as to what it was supposed to be.

- Pareidolia

This is the more likely explanation, the one I offered Andrew. Pareidolia is something hard-wired into all of our brains that causes us to see human-like faces and figures in what are essentially random patterns, such as rocks, clouds or tree bark. The man in the moon is one example. The smiley face emoji is another.   : )  It's just a couple of dots next to a curve, yet (even sideways) we all immediately see it as a face.

Personally, I think it's probably pure coincidence that these tongues of flame, each of  which existed for a brief moment and just happened to be caught on camera, appear a similar shape and size to dancing figures. More info on pareidolia - and the Wikipedia article is useful.

But then again, there are coincidences and coincidences. Most of us have experienced or heard about coincidences that are so uncanny that pure chance seems way too flimsy an explanation. There just has to be something more to it. Maybe these photos are entering into that area.

Though I'm in no way certain about this, just putting it out there: I think that it takes people's presence and personal mental energy (call it spiritual energy if you prefer) to trigger events that can be experienced as paranormal. Naturally, some people are much more inclined to do this than others (like how some people can mentally calculate square roots of large numbers, or have perfect pitch). Perhaps the combined energy and unified spiritual belief of the dancers around this campfire caused, or allowed, the flames to appear in this way. And to be captured photographically. Which begs the question: what if more photos were taken, and what (if anything) would they show?

At the end of the day, though, it comes down to personal choice and belief. We're free and encouraged to form our own opinions on these photos. It's important to give consideration to any rational, natural explanations that are available, and then decide for ourselves if we accept those explanations. Or maybe we can come up with another explanation of our own, perhaps based on a similar personal experience, or on particular historical knowledge of the site of the event, the circumstances surrounding it, the people involved.

If you have an opinion or theory about what these photographs show, we'd be very interested to hear it.
Thank you.
James Gilberd
Wellington, New Zealand

I'm kinda pleased to see the venue change. While Katoomba is a really nice town and the Blue Mountains National Park surrounding it is fantastic, going there three years in a row might've lacked a little spark. The new venue will offer the opportunity to host the event in a different way, with a new structure for the talks.

I'm coming clean - I was one of the people who independently suggested the shorter talks, no repeats, no parallel sessions structure. It's something I've seen work very well in the world famous Webstock conference in Wellington and thought it might translate well to Paracon. So if it doesn't work out, you now have someone you can partially blame.

One problem with the previous structure of several talks running simultaneously is that you can't possibly take in all the talks, and even with the repeats you will miss some good stuff. Also, as a Paracon speaker of lesser fame, it ain't good to have your own talk under-attended while someone famous with their own TV series is speaking in another room. I've sat in on some great talks by international and local speakers but with barely a couple-dozen people in the room. This linear structure for the presentation schedule will fix these issues.

It may also be that the Carrington couldn't provide a large enough room to run the Paracon with this linear structure, which might have a little bit to do with the change of venue to the Western Sydney University in Parramatta, which will provide a larger theatre, and presumably also with better AV projection facilities - another problem with previous Paracon venues. Parramatta is an old centre with many historic sites, which should be good from an investigation viewpoint.

I was disappointed to see some Australian paranormal commentators attack the Paracon organisors mercilessly and ferociously (and on Christmas Eve to boot!) primarily because of the venue change. (I'm not going to provide a link to that podcast.) Obviously there's going to be a few hiccoughs around changing venues, but it was done 6 months out from the start of the conference, so in plenty of time to avoid most problems. I know that a few people had to cancel their hotel bookings, and good on them for booking early, but for most conference attendees it's not going to present a problem. And the conference's closer proximity to Sydney might open it up to a few more people.

James Gilberd's presentation and photography workshop.

Anyway, I'll be giving a talk on photography and the paranormal (again - I know) but with different content to my 2015 talk. I won't be talking about dust orbs this time as I think they've been well and truly laid to rest. Anyone who in 2017 still thinks a dust orb (an easily recognised and fully explainable photographic anomaly) is any kind of spirit manifestation is probably beyond rationality so a lost cause as far as scientific argument goes. But developments in camera design, and the shift of much photography to cellphone cameras, has presented some new challenges that need to be looked at.

I will also be running a workshop on the basics of photography as far as the paranormal is concerned - how to use stills photography more effectively in paranormal investigations. This will not include the use of cellphone cameras (which have their uses but are rather limited) or video cameras (which I don't know much about) but will concentrate on learning to use dedicated stills cameras in a more controlled manner for better evidence-gathering. Understanding and avoiding some of the common anomalies that can cause false positives by seeing how they are created is a big part of it. This workshop will be on Friday 26th May, so the day before the main conference weekend.  More information will be posted here soon, but I advise booking early for this, as there will be a cap on numbers. (I don't know what the limit is yet, but I want to be able to get around people individually.) If one of your jobs in your paranormal team is taking still photos during and prior to investigations and you're not already an expert photographer, then this workshop will help you.

And if you are already an expert photographer, with a good understanding of the workings of a range of digital cameras (maybe you work in a photography store), then perhaps you can help me with the workshop. Some people will need help finding the various modes and functions on their camera and I may not be able to get around and help each person individually, so if you can assist with this and will be available on Friday at the conference, perhaps email me.

Kiwis - make a weekend of it.

Tickets for Paracon 2017 are one sale now - see website.

It would be cool to see a few more kiwis over there, as it's been in the low single digits for previous Paracons. The will never be anything like this event in New Zealand so Australia offers the best opportunity to experience a paranormal conference. Personally, I never have enough money and taking time out from my photography business is an issue, but still, last year I was able to get good, cheap plane tickets via Air NZ's Grabaseat. We also had a night in Sydney on the way, using Trivago to find a hotel room in Darlinghurst, which worked out really well. It was a nice holiday, and staying at The Carrington in Katoomba was a special experience. This time it will be different, which is great too. I'm really looking forward to it.

A novel project

I've been working on a side project - a novel about paranormal investigation, with the working title: Edwin J Smith, Paranormal Investigator. I think this will be part one of a trilogy, as there are ideas introduced that aren't fully explored but leave room to develop in future stories. I'm not going to give much away here, except that the novel will be launched at Paracon and it includes the venue of the last two Paracons - The Carrington Hotel, Katoomba - as the setting for the climax of the story. The Blue Mountains National Park also comes into it as a location.

So I was in a bit of a quandary after hearing of the Paracon venue change. I hadn't written the Katoomba part of the novel at that time, but decided to keep it as a location because I have no knowledge of the new Parramatta venue and couldn't justify a research trip there on the basis of projected long term sales of 30 or so copies! Maybe part two of the trilogy will be set there - who knows? Anyway, don't expect great literature - Eleanor Catton I ain't - but maybe just a lightweight, hopefully amusing story that explores some of the good and bad aspects of the world of paranormal investigation. More on this later.  I plan to get maybe 20 copies printed and bring them over with me to sell on the Paracon bookstall, along with  a couple of remaining copies of Spooked - Exploring the Paranormal in New Zealand.

I hope to see you at Paracon 2017 and get to have a natter about paranormal stuff. And I hope this venue has good coffee and snack food available nearby. Walking down to The Elephant Bean in Katoomba was nice, but it meant leaving the venue too often.
Mine's a long black (coffee).
Cheers
James Gilberd