A friend just directed me to this Huffington Post article, from June 2014. OK, it's been out there a while, but it ties in to other more recent articles on a similar theme. It is interesting to consider how a Quantum Mechanical understanding of nature may eventually offer an explanation for mind-body duality - the soul, if you like. We're not nearly there yet though.
Consciousness - what is it? How do we define it? Where does it reside? How does it interact with the physical body and brain? Is there such a thing as a soul? Does human consciousness persist after bodily death? Is the soul, then, eternal? These are all very big questions, some of which are being addressed by mainstream scientists while others lie at the fringes of science, or outside its current borders for consideration. Scientists, Quantum Physicists in particular, get annoyed when we amateur paranormal enthusiasts - we pseudoscientists - start hijacking QM to try to explain our ghosties and things. But most of the out-there thinking is coming from the scientists themselves. The more they delve into Quantum Mechanics and the sort of counter-intuitive ideas flying off and around it, the more it looks like the universe is capable of accommodating Dualism (or some more modern version of it) and the possibility of the existence of ghosts, telepathy and other currently pseudoscientific concepts. I think that science will offer explanations for many phenomena currently termed 'paranormal' before we amateurs, searching through abandoned hospitals with our EMF meters and sound recorders and trying to communicate with the dead, even begin to get our heads round things. Excusing the punctuation error in the headline, this is also an interesting article. And if you want a reasonably easy to follow introduction to the out-there concepts surrounding Quantum Mechanics, I can recommend the book Quantum Enigma - Physics Encounters Consciousness, by Rosenblum and Kuttner, as a good place to start.
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Lens flare
Experiments
Analysing photos, Exif data
Pareidolia
Judging by the comments, people appreciated the humor of the post, as has the Dom Post. And attention seeking media whore that I am, I was amused and actually quite chuffed to see it in print. It's the third time a social media post of mine has made the Dominion Post. The previous two were from Twitter, one of which ended up on the front page as a response to a news story. I don't know what the decision-making process is around what runs, but I imagine they think something like, 'He won't mind. He's been in the paper plenty of times before with eccentric tales of ghost hunting, and he has a sense of humour.' Maybe there's a tacit agreement between me and the newspaper there. Whatever - I'm perfectly fine with it. But it does beg the question: what if I was not fine with it? After all, it was a post intended for my Facebook friends - an audience I have at least some degree of control over (via Facebook's 'Privacy' settings and control of my friend base). This experience certainly reinforces the advice meme that you may have seen: The only privacy setting you need: If it's private, don't put it on Facebook. Twitter, I regard a little differently; if I tweet a thing, I want it to go out to the world, the wider the better. But what exactly are the ethics of the professional press in lifting items without consent from social media intended for a restricted audience or readership? A little irony
This is a draft of a magazine article, written in early 2014 and never published. I just came across it on my computer so decided to place it here instead of wasting it. Strange Occurrences formed in Wellington, New Zealand, late in 2005, as a result of a heavy duty coffee drinking session I had with good friend Mark Marriott. The group name probably came out of that session – I can’t remember – but we liked that it was less predictable than Wellington Paranormal or whatever. To be honest, the four of us (including my partner (now wife) Denise and another friend, Karen, both press-ganged in) weren’t that serious about real paranormal investigation when we first started the group. We put up a web page that sat there for the best part of a year while we had meetings in strange locations and talked (mostly) about paranormal stuff, always over tea and biscuits. We at least had quite a lot of knowledge about photography, with Karen being a keen photographer and both Mark and me being seasoned pro photographers; knowledge we put to good use by offering reasonably well-informed opinions on paranormal photos that people emailed in. (This remains a specialty area for Strange Occurrences, and photography has remained my full time occupation since the mid 1980s.) But as far as real paranormal investigation goes, we knew only as much as we’d seen on TV, on shows such as TAPS and Most Haunted. I guess most paranormal groups formed as a result of watching those and similar shows, wanting to emulate them to some extent, so we were no different. “We were watching TV late one night and there was an episode of the The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) Ghost Hunters showing. Fiction aside, I’d never heard of paranormal investigation before seeing this show, and my immediate response was, ‘Hey, we can do that!’ I think Denise may have groaned, but I was too overwhelmed with enthusiasm to notice.” - From “Spooked – Exploring the Paranormal in New Zealand” by Jo Davy and James Gilberd, published by Random House NZ, 2011 At the time, there wasn’t a lot happening in the paranormal scene in New Zealand. There was only one existing group in the country (Spooks Paranormal, based in Christchurch) and they dissolved about the same time we began to actively investigate, so we never got to meet them. We had the field to ourselves for a short time, and the resulting media attention from late 2006 forced us to lift our game quickly. The group grew slowly over the next six years, and now consists of ten team members. We have so far had only one person leave Strange Occurrences, so the membership has been very stable. We’re all friends and the group is quite social. The growth of the group has led to making friends with people from different walks of life that we wouldn’t have otherwise met. Jo and Helen are both scientists, and British. Rob is a professional scuba diver (and now an accomplished photographer as well), Patrick an airport security officer. The last two to join are a hospital ER doctor from the US, Scott, and a recent university graduate in psychology, Jayne - our youngest team member. The age range of the group is 24-54 and we all live in New Zealand’s capital city, Wellington. A string of publicity including major newspaper coverage, national radio and national network television news slots, led to a major book publisher approaching me in 2010 to commission a book on the paranormal in New Zealand. “We’ve been following you guys in the media and we’re interested in what you do.” Luckily we had a real writer in the group; Jo Davy. (Not content with a mere Ph.D in marine biology, she had recently completed a masters degree in fiction writing.) When I rang and told her that Random House had just called to ask if we could write a book for them, she was over the moon, to say the least. So was I, since I couldn’t have done it without Jo’s input and guidance. The book was completed while Jo was both pregnant and overseas, so Skype came in handy. We also did a research and investigation trip through Canterbury and Otago, in the South Island, during which Jo was jetlagged from flying direct from the US to Dunedin, feeling sick, and still pregnant. The book Spooked rolled off the press a few days after baby Alice was born.
The paranormal scene in NZ is still relatively small, and it appeared to peak a year or so ago. Nationwide, there were a dozen groups operating then, including some that did not run websites but maintained Facebook pages. At the start of 2014 this figure has since shrunk to eight active or semi-active groups (some rather less than semi-active, perhaps). With the oldest buildings being a century and a half or so, and combined with the difficulty of getting permission to investigate larger sites, and also because New Zealanders tend to be reticent, low key and publicity shy, Strange Occurrences is not exactly busy every weekend. Part of this is due to our positioning, and the public perception that we are one of the more skeptical groups. Although we have a range of beliefs in the team, we do lean towards the skeptical and scientific side. This means that people who are already convinced that they have a ghost in their home or workplace and are already strong believers in things paranormal will most likely not call us. They may not want to be offered rational, natural explanations for what they are convinced are paranormal goings on. We would more often hear from people who have experienced strange things that they’re unable to explain, and who don’t really want to have a ghost. Rather than remove the ghost by spiritual means (or psychological methods, depending on how you view it), we seek to explain the events by rational methods. But we are not always able to do this. It is fairly usual for us to visit a site and be able to explain some things while remaining at a loss as to the cause of other things, all of which leaves open the possibility of paranormal phenomena, however unlikely they may actually be. And we would love, like everyone else in this field, to not only experience but also record what we think is a genuine paranormal phenomenon, preferably a ghost! We haven’t achieved this yet (otherwise you’d be hearing about us via the Nobel Prize website, rather than here ;-), but we have had the bejesus scared out of us a few times. One such occasion was in 2010, the first time we investigated Wellington’s old Fever Hospital, a then disused complex on the slopes of Mount Victoria, above Wellington Hospital in Newtown. The hospital was completed in 1919 in order to get the TB cases up out of the hubbub (such as it was in 1919) and into the fresher air and sunlight. It was decommissioned in the early 1980s and for a time was used as a music school. Many of the students and a few of the tutors hated being there at night, swearing the place was haunted. A common occurrence was doors slamming for no apparent reason. One reported ghost was named Sister Slipper, supposedly a matron who was overly protective of the female nurses under her charge, but she is most likely a myth.
The investigation, which included a contingent from the then-active Phoen-X Paranormal – good friends and frequent allies on investigations – had been long and uneventful, and by 1.30am most had lost interest and left for the night. Rob, Patrick and I remained, mainly because we had to wait for the security guard to show up and lock the buildings. So we were upstairs in the Nurses’ Home, sitting round in the glassed-in verandah chatting about cars or something inane – not ghosts – when there was a mighty bang from downstairs. We felt it through the floor, and we stared at each other for a few seconds before going down to find out the cause. We expected to find some trespasser wandering round, as security on this quiet, disused site up in the bush was always a problem for the City Council. We found no one, and our DV Infra-red camera system would later show there was no human beings other than we three present at the time. (We had two cameras covering the ground floor main room and corridor, and a third looking down the stairs, making it near impossible for someone to move through the ground floor undetected, even if they knew the cameras were there.) We checked for other causes. The place was a building site, with renovation work already begun, and all the downstairs internal doors were off their hinges and stacked against the walls. A door could easily have fallen over. But no. We tracked the noise to the door we’d been using for egress. It had been windy earlier, but the nor’wester had dropped to nothing and the faintest hint of a southerly breeze was present. Not enough to slam a door, we thought, so Patrick closed and fastened the latch behind us as we went out to patrol the grounds, still expecting to find our trespasser.
“This is hopeless,” I said. “Let’s leave this running and go and check out the main building again.” Which we did, relieved to get out of the Nurses’ Home. It really felt like we three males were not at all welcome in there. It’d long gone 2am when Rob said he had to get home to his pregnant wife. Patrick and I did one last check of the complex, including what we believed to be the old morgue downstairs – anything but go back in the Nurses’ Home. It wasn’t until the two security guards drove up a bit after 3am that we went back in there. That was with the company of the two guards, and just long enough to pack up our DVD system. “Thanks guys, we’re outta here.” We managed to leave the remote control behind in our haste. We investigated the Fever Hospital on two later occasions, but the Nurses’ Home was unfortunately off limits both times due to it being a hazardous construction site. Both times we heard strange sounds in the main wings late at night, after most of the team had left. It sounded like intruders in the building, and we armed ourselves with large torches and camera tripods to go and check. Negative (thankfully). The thumping noises remained unexplained. One of the times, when the security guard turned up he said he was surprised we were still here. “Most people say they’re going to stay late but they’ve taken off by the time we get here. Scared off, eh.” He told us that when he’d been there the previous evening he’d heard loud noises, and on another occasion had heard something he described as, “The sound of something metal and very heavy, like a car engine, being dragged across the floor.” The Fever Hospital has only just been taken over by the SPCA, which is what the ongoing renovations have been for. They began moving in just before Christmas 2013. We wonder how the dogs are going to react to being there at night. We are hopeful of a final investigation of the Nurses’ Home early in 2014, before it also becomes occupied by the SPCA. Paranormal photographs - free analysis service With regard to photographs that may show paranormal phenomena, we are very happy to offer an opinion on them. It is helpful if you sent the original photo file from camera (if it’s digital), or if it’s on film, a good quality scan and as much technical information about the camera settings and photographic situation as you can muster.
With the digital files, we like to look at the Exif data, which is a small packet of information that most cameras append to the image file. It tells what the camera settings were, the date and time (according to the camera’s clock, at least), and other technical information that is always helpful in establishing what might be happening in the photograph. We always treat submitted photographs as confidential, and respect the owner’s copyright. Photos are usually circulated within our group for various opinions, but we never publish them without express permission of their owners. Sometimes, publication of a photograph has solved a great riddle, though. One of the best is described here: http://strangeoccurrencesparanormal.weebly.com/uncategorised.html We never would’ve figured this one out without posting it on the US forum Paranexus, from which we received the extraordinary answer. James Gilberd, 2014. (Posted here 1st October 2015.) After some discussion over tea and biscuits, we've decided to change the name of our group from Strange Occurrences - Paranormal Investigators to New Zealand Strange Occurrences Society. This is because we've been 10 years as 'Strange Occurrences - Paranormal Investigators' and it is time for a change to reflect a wider scope of activity than just paranormal investigation.
Things have shifted, the scene in NZ has changed, and we've all got older. And although we'll still grab the next opportunity to explore an abandoned hospital into the small hours, the name change reflects that we're doing other kinds of things as well. Increasingly, it's about communication. And we still like getting involved in people's various creative projects. As a team, we look forward to the next 10 years of involvement and exploration in the field of the paranormal in New Zealand. Inverlochy House: A Paranormal Investigation Experience, with Strange Occurrences This is an opportunity to participate in a full paranormal investigation of Inverlochy House, Wellington, on Saturday night, 22nd August 2015, guided by members of Strange Occurrences. We will be taking 8 people only. At the time of posting, some places have already been filled. You will need to be quick! This is a fundraising event for Inverlochy Art School - a non profit organisation providing art classes for adults and children in Wellington since the 1980s. 100% proceeds will go to Inverlochy, 0% to Strange Occurrences! (Inverlochy has given us a lot over the years, so this is a way we can give something tangible back.) We will work with a small group on a full paranormal investigation. You will learn how we do our investigations, get to use all of the equipment we have, and conduct vigils throughout the location, indoors and outside. At this stage, the plan is to meet at 7.30pm Saturday evening at Inverlochy and investigate through till 1am Sunday morning. You will need to pay for this event in advance by internet banking, $60.00 per person. Please email [email protected] for more information. Please, first read Conditions (below). Once you are on board for the investigation, details will be provided by email. If you have any questions, please ask. Email contact: James Gilberd - [email protected] Conditions - please read Money: sorry, but as this is a fundraiser, your payment will not be refundable. If you are unable to attend, you will have at least made a donation to a worthy cause! (Sorry, it's not tax deductable.)
Limited places available: there are only 8 places, which will go to the first 8 people who make payment by internet transfer. No payment by credit card, Eftpos, cheque or cash, sorry. Mobility: for safety reasons, to participate in this investigation you will need to be mobile enough to climb stairs unassisted. Other health issues: if you have any, or are on prescription medication, please advise James Gilberd by email. Such discussion will be totally confidential. Alcohol and other recreational drugs: for a number of very good reasons these are not permitted before or during our paranormal investigations. Anyone showing up intoxicated will not be allowed to participate in the investigation. Scientists seem so sure that things we term paranormal phenomena simply do not exist, and we as paranormal investigators are deluding ourselves that they do and are wasting our time looking for them.
As one example; taken as a whole, the work of parapsychologists over several decades in the mid-late 20th century to measure psi ability by laboratory experiment has been a failure. Those experiments that have allegedly shown statistically significant results to prove (say) ESP ability have not been able to be repeated and have therefore been written off. Also, Dr Susan Blackmore and others have exposed shonky experimental procedure and even outright fudging of results in some cases. I'm fine with that because I think it unlikely that ESP could be shown to occur under such mundane, repetitive testing conditions. But let's say that ESP does happen in more emotionally extreme and less predictable scenarios, such as with 'crisis apparitions' - a commonly reported and well documented phenomenon and one that ESP could explain. The scientists agree there is no such thing as ESP. Yet they cannot understand what human consciousness is. Consciousness is a crucial aspect of Quantum theory. Quantum is the strongest theory in science, yet it requires a 'conscious observer' to work. Physics has (historically) tried to escape this reality by means such as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (way too complex to describe here, and the Wikipedia article on it is quite heavy going and extremely counter-intuitive, as is everything to do with QM), but this is a cop out. Another cop out is to say that the mind is nothing more than a creation of the workings of the brain. That is the Materialist argument, one that has been built upon the ability of classical (Newtonian) physics to describe the physical operations of the brain. The human mind is a way too complex, individually varied and changing thing to yield its secrets to such a simplistic and Deterministic viewpoint. Can physics explain how and why we make and appreciate art? What if, say, the mind is the observer and the brain is a physical system in a state of more-or-less constant quantum superposition? What if the mind can Influence (Niels Bohr's word) the brain (or other minds) using what Einstein uncomfortably-termed 'spooky interactions at a distance'? (See Quantum Entanglement.) These are just a few examples of the sort of questions that QM throws up. If ESP does actually occur, a Quantum understanding of the brain and consciousness would likely allow room for it to do so and explain how it is possible. This would change everything. And once one skittle falls, more will follow. Other than via the links provided, if you want to read a well-written and thoughtful book, I'd recommend 'Quantum Enigma - Physics Encounters Consciousness', by Bruce Rosenblum & Fred Kuttner, as a good starting point (1) for reading and research into this fascinating field. By James Gilberd, co-author of Spooked - Exploring the Paranormal in New Zealand, and leader of the Strange Occurrences group. (1) Rosenblum & Kuttner are skeptics of the paranormal and frown upon dilatantes like me fumbling about in the field of QM in search of explanations for paranormal phenomena! (See their 'Paraphenomena' on page 192 of 'Quantum Enigma'.) During a recent visit to the Mokena Hotel, in the historic Waikato mining and spa town of Te Aroha, I was trying to record and communicate with an entity that reportedly lingers in room 113. The Maori lady is said to sometimes be seen sitting on or near the bed and gazing out the window, and there is a slight depression on the bed that resembles an imprint of a sitter, an imprint that it is said cannot be permanently smoothed away. The friendly hotel owner and staff informed me about other 'residents', and events in the hotel's past. I wasn't able to perceive or record any of them on my first visit but I hope to try again in future. So, what is a 'residual haunting'? The word residual obviously comes from residue - a small amount of something that remains after the main part has gone. In regard to haunting, this means that something of a person remains in a place after they're gone. It can also apply to multiple people, animals and objects. Residual hauntings have been downplayed in books on paranormal investigation and ghost hunting as something rather insignificant that we shouldn't be too concerned with; mere distractions from the quest for a full body apparition or real-time communication with an intelligent entity. OK, I exaggerate, but there is nothing trivial about the concept of residual haunting. If I had strong documentary proof of such a thing - hard, science-grade evidence to back a theory - I wouldn't be writing about it here. I'd be submitting a paper to Nature or some other major science journal and quietly hoping for a Nobel Prize! There are many published reports of residual hauntings, worldwide and in New Zealand. Their believability comes down to how reliable, and independent, the witnesses are, and things like the quality of interviewing, the credibility of the writer and publisher, or if they have some agenda. What is lacking, overall, is hard evidence that will withstand scientific scrutiny. So far we are reliant on testimony. A thing I hear or read often is that the ghost in a residual haunting is locked into a loop, endlessly repeating the same pattern or chain of events. Well, that may be so in some reported cases; but is not our daily life fairly routine? We usually eat, sleep, watch TV or sit at a computer at about the same time and place on any given day, work at the same place, etc. If someone from another time was somehow observing our activity they might easily think they're seeing some poor soul doomed to repeating a chain of events for eternity. We living humans are creatures of habit as much as any ghost. One of the most famous cases of a residual haunting, and a personal favourite that I hope might actually be true, is that of the Roman soldiers in the basement of the Treasury House in York, UK. Here is a video that gives details of plumber Harry Martindale's account of seeing the soldiers, as well as information about other independent encounters. Martindale's account rings true for several reasons: - Details given, such as the soldiers' shields being round, rather that rectangular as was commonly thought, mean he didn't just see a picture of Roman soldiers in a book or in a movie. And clearly he was not an expert on Roman military history. - He describes the soldiers as appearing solid and real, not translucent or wispy - the way ghosts are usually shown in popular media. - He had nothing to gain from inventing such a story, and he has accepted no money for his story. - He has not changed his story over time. - There are other independent witnesses, earlier and later, who knew nothing of Martindale's account. - Archeological evidence from the area aligns with the details. There is a lot of information, in books and online, about this example of residual haunting. I intend to do more research on it and I would encourage you to as well, and to decide for yourself if you think it's genuine. I haven't yet heard of anything that debunks the account. If it is true, it really is a game changer. At this point I feel obligated to mention that old chestnut Stone Tape Theory. But I think it's one that's safe to dismiss as nonsense, nice-sounding as it may have been. I'm sure that if there were anything to it we would've come to understand the mechanism by now, yet it remains in airy-fairy land. The linked Wikipedia article agrees. Residual hauntings are closely associated with, or sometimes described as, Time Slips. More about time later. In New Zealand, the books edited by Grant Shanks and Tahu Potiki; 'When the wind calls your name' and 'Where no birds sing' together give some 80 accounts of paranormal experiences. They're well told in the language of the witnesses, but in most cases the witnesses' names and the exact locations have been deliberately left out. There are some compelling accounts of residual hauntings and/or time slips in these twin volumes. Two that really strike me both involve waka (Maori canoes); in one case on a river (viewed from a low-flying helicopter, yet the paddling warriors did not look at the chopper despite the racket it made); in the other the waka was being carried through the bush by warriors, led by a chief. The witnesses in both cases were parties of hunters - hardly types to make this stuff up! And it was impossible that such waka and warriors could actually have been in those areas. The books are out of print but are available second hand and from libraries. I cannot recommend them enough to those interested in the paranormal in New Zealand. Some details on this page, along with other NZ books on the paranormal. Personally, I have some doubt that there's such a thing as an 'intelligent haunting' (but I'm well prepared to change my view in the face of compelling evidence.), and NZ's world famous paranormal investigator Andrew MacKenzie - a significant member of the SPR for several decades, backs me up in his book Hauntings and Apparitions (Granada Publishing Ltd, London, 1983). In its concluding chapter, he says, There does not seem to be evidence for the operation of any intelligent agency in most hauntings, though in the occasional case where there is a response to questions or taunts in the form of raps . . . there are indications that a rudimentary form of intelligence may be operating. Intelligent hauntings require the ghost, spirit or other entity to be aware of us in our present time and also be capable of some form of communication with us. This ability seems more consistent with and reliant upon the Spiritualist understanding that ghosts are souls that have survived bodily death, or perhaps with or upon the existence of demons or other entities that are tied in with religious beliefs. I don't think intelligent hauntings will ever be addressable through science, and so will likely remain an area for subjective experience and belief. On the other hand, I have interviewed people who have experienced time slips - where they've walked into a room or to an outdoor location and seen events and people as they were in that place decades earlier, and without the people from the past apparently being aware of them. I understand that our senses really aren't that reliable, our memory that accurate, and various other psychological missteps might interfere with our subjective reality and our memory of experiences; but I have, with careful assessment, believed these people. Although I'm not certain that I've experienced such myself, I think for now that residual hauntings and time slips are a thing. Residual hauntings and time slips require no supernatural belief if we consider that they are related to time, and so are potentially explicable by the science of physics. Edwin A.Abbott's 1884 book Flatland was intended as social satire but became more valued for its original and imaginative way of explaining dimensions of space. (In 2007 Flatland was made into a film. It looks fascinating. Must track it down.) Flatland describes geometrical beings - circles, squares, triangles - living in a two-dimensional world. They perceive each other, viewing edge-on, as lines with various shadings. (Let's not worry about actual thickness, or how the light gets in there - it's just an intellectual model.) A.Square, an inhabitant of this 2D world, is unable to imagine that he might, as a three-dimensional being, visualise his world from above, as he is conceptually trapped in two dimensions. Where this gets interesting and perhaps pertinent in relation to our paranormal question is when A.Sphere - a three-dimensional being from a higher plane of existence - visits Flatland. A.Square perceives A.Sphere passing through Flatland as at first a point, then a shaded line that gets longer, (reaching maximum length when the circumference of A.Sphere is in Flatland), and then diminishing in length, then a point, then nothing. A.Square's experience of seeing something appear, rapidly grow, shrink and disappear, defies his concept of reality, as experiencing ghosts and time slips do for most of us. But what we understand, and can easily visualise, is a sphere passing through a plane - a solid object moving in three-dimensional space. Where the plane of Flatland intersects A.Sphere, a circle is formed. A.Square perceives the moving three-dimensional object as a two-dimensional object changing over time. Edwin A.Abbott encourages us to make this extrapolation: what if, like A.Square, we were to encounter a being from a universe with one more spatial dimension than our own - a four-dimensional alien - moving through our 3D world? How would we describe this event? Could we possibly see this creature passing through as something changing in time? A thing appears from nothing, changes in some way (maybe it grows, or spreads out, or does something), then it disappears (without necessarily moving off or being bound by time). Or another possibility (albeit a stretch); if it were, say, a cosmos-exploring cat, we might see the sudden appearance of a newly born kitten and watch it grow rapidly into an adult cat before our eyes, then grow old, die, shrivel and vanish. In other words, we see the visitor's entire life development as it moves through our space; we see it in every state of its own existence within the amount of time it takes to transcend our plane of existence. We see its movement as change over time. Meanwhile, in 4D world, Kosmo Kat is able to move around in four dimensions quite freely, back and forward in time as we would understand it; but, in its perception, the 5th dimension might be called Time, and it might be as much at the mercy of progress in that dimension as we are in our 4th dimension of time.
Stepping back to the end of the 19th century, it was widely thought (mainly thanks to Sir Isaac Newton's brilliant work) that physics was near complete, with just a few details to fill in. Then along cometh Albert Einstein with his damned Relativity theories (Special and General) to turn our concept of reality on its head.
Quantum mechanics gives us the Many Worlds Interpretation. By this, or some other concept of multiple or parallel universes, it might be that dimensions can somehow rub up against one another, momentarily intersecting to allow some perceptive (or lucky) individuals to perceive events in parallel but time-shifted dimensions. (Tying knots in my hanky now, as I type - which is indeed quite tricky.) Fast forward to now. Only a very smug, ignorant person would say that physics is basically complete except for the the last minor details, or that it will from now on merely progress in small increments. Just because they can't imagine how our understanding of nature might again undergo forced, radical change doesn't mean it can't happen. We've been here before, remember. The next way of re-understanding the cosmos might turn up next week, year, decade, or tomorrow. And, if we're lucky, with it might come an understanding of time that allows for and explains ghosts of the past or the future, for time slips, maybe even for Roman soldiers to march through our living rooms.
By James Gilberd, co-author of Spooked - Exploring the Paranormal in New Zealand. I just spent some time writing this reply to a genuinely concerned person who took the trouble to email Strange Occurrences for advice. (This is a slightly modified and expanded version.) I hope it doesn't come across as scornful or grumpy; that's not the intention. It's just that, more than anything, I'm feeling exasperated. Why are paranormal investigators, in 2015, still hung up on orbs? Propagating the belief that dust orbs are spiritual in nature makes the paranormal community look like idiots in the eyes of skeptics and denies us any degree of credibility. I'm not going to print the received email, but here's my reply: "J___, please don't worry about the orbs in photos. They're not paranormal, they're totally harmless photographic anomalies. "Frankly, it amazes me that people who should know better (i.e. those running 'ghost tours', or people in paranormal investigation groups) still treat orbs as paranormal phenomena. Often, they're just winding people up - giving the impression that something paranormal is happening when really there's nothing except dust. This is mostly to make their commercial activities seem more exciting, when, in reality, most of the time nothing remotely paranormal occurs during paid-for paranormal investigations or ghost tours. "These orb thingies began cropping up in large numbers early this century, about the time people lots of people started using compact digital cameras. Here's an explanation of how orbs occur. (Admittedly, this article was written a good few years ago, before there were cellphone cameras with LED flashes, which produce orbs that look a little different, but the physics is the same.) "With each different camera model and type you use, the orbs will appear different in colour, size, texture, etc. More professional-type DSLR cameras don't show orbs at all, which is why professional photographers are often puzzled by them. "Orbs can look amazing, especially when you zoom up on them. They don't look like anything from the natural world (except maybe microscopic organisms, which they are not). They can have strange looking surfaces, corona, patterns within them that sometimes look like something recognisable, and they can come in all sorts of colours (due in part to lens coatings) and shapes (due to the shape of the lens aperture blades - see photos below). They can even look like they're partially behind things that are far back in the photo. But it's all to do with optics, lens coatings, lens imperfections, camera design, and digital sharpening, compression and interpolation. And of course psychological factors in the interpretation of the images - see pareidolia. "If you are lucky enough to see - with your own eyes, not the camera's - a little light source floating around in the middle of a room, then it may well be something paranormal! Take a photo of it; take heaps of photos; shoot a video. But the orbs that you can't see with your eyes but which keep appearing in your digital photos are easily explained, and they are extremely unlikely to be paranormal in any respect." ADDENDA: This part of my reply has less to do with the photographic orbs, but here it is anyway: "The behaviour of your cat and dog will be totally unconnected to the orb photos. Rememeber that they have much sharper hearing than we do, and can probably hear tiny, faint sounds like maybe a beetle chewing through wood deep in the walls somewhere, or they can smell something we can't. Dogs and cats are especially sensitive to human emotions, so if you're getting a bit freaked out by something, the dog or cat will probably also react, even if it is unaware of the source of your fear. Also, these animals are intelligent and have the capacity to imagine things, just as we do. "Once we get thinking about a paranormal reason for odd things occurring (for example; a poltergeist as a reason for something falling or turning up in an unusual place), our minds naturally make the jump to attributing other, unconnected events to the same cause. But in all likelihood these things are totally unrelated. Looking at things more objectively requires stepping back from them, which is where paranormal investigators (sensible, experienced ones) can be of assistance. "However, in the meantime, I would advise you to take a note of anything strange that happens - the time, place, weather conditions, who was present - a detailed description, with photos. Keep a diary, in other words. Then if you decide to get paranormal investigators in, they will have specific things to take a close look at. We love it when we can go to someone's house and find they've kept an accurate record of a bunch of stuff that's unexplained. Then we can examine it piece by piece and see if we can find natural causes, and any rational connections between events. Also see 'What to do if you see a ghost'.
"Please let me know if anything else interesting happens, or you get any more intriguing photos." |
Ectoplasmic Residueis a blog by James Gilberd - leader and co-founder of Strange Occurrences. Views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the Strange Occurrences team. AuthorJames Gilberd is an amateur paranormalist, writer and musician, and a professional photographer, living in Wellington, New Zealand. Archives
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