I Love a Good Paranormal Story, but…
By Robert Delwood, an average guy
I love a good paranormal story. I can’t pass up shows about Big Foot, ancient aliens, Mel’s Hole, and other unexplained phenomena. There’s no harm in watching these for entertainment. Or so I thought. There is harm when people start to believe them as fact, when it minimalizes critical thinking, or subverts the scientific process.
As time goes on, the claims move from only entertainment value to the ridiculous, and then to the absurd. In no small part, by claims getting exaggerated. Every time I hear about the massive Baalbek stones, for example, they get heavier, or that ancient lost civilizations are now at the root of every mystery. My worldview could accommodate those positions, but the evidence and the likelihood just are not there. They are neither researched nor presented well. They have spokesmen like the clown-like Giorgio Tsoukalos to the joke methods of the so-called researcher Brien Foerster. To call what they engage in as respectable as pseudoscience is pushing it. They are doing nothing more than just making stuff up.
I say that because their whole careers are based on two premises:
1. They don’t understand it, so they assume no one else can either. Since they don’t understand just by looking at how ancient Egyptians cut stone, it has to be the work of interstellar aliens. Lazy as it is, to them, nothing could be more logical.
2. It looks like something. The Nazca lines look like airport runways, so they have to be airport runways. Are we to believe aliens can sail through thousands of years of interstellar space but can’t land unless they have a five mile runway? Requiring primitive humans to build?
Or ancient Egyptian stone works that look like they were cut with a laser saw and a computer, so they have to have been by a laser saw and a computer? Or a photo looks like a monster, so it has to be a monster?
Nowhere do these presenters show one credible piece of evidence. In fact, the very opposite. They don’t show the curvey Nazca lines, the circular ones, or the short ones. Aliens landed on that?
It seems all so disingenuous on their part and insulting to us.
But the scientific method makes almost no allowance solely for what it looks like. It’s a fair starting point, true, but it isn’t also the ending point. For example, when they go to the doctor, they hope the doctor doesn’t diagnose and treat them based only on what it looks like. The doctor makes observations, possibly with tests, and compares that with what they learned in school and from experience. Only after confirming everything are conclusions drawn.
One category is alleged paranormal evidence from photographs. Take the case of the smiley face on Mars.
In 1976, the Viking 1 spacecraft surveyed the Cydonia region of Mars. One photograph showed what clearly looked like a face. Immediately, UFOlogists used it as proof of an ancient Martian civilization. This, despite there being no other evidence such as cities, buildings, roads, quarry pits, or bridges. But by gum, this civilization left its mark by carving faces into mountains? That doesn’t make a lick of sense. And the evidence? It looks like a face.
An obvious clue is that information is missing. The photo is fuzzy, blurred, and with poor resolution. You can’t make good decisions with incomplete information. Nor can you just start assuming what the missing information is. Too many people have said they saw a UFO and then immediately conclude it was an alien. The U in UFO means unidentified. It can’t be both unidentified and identified. For example, let’s play a game. Guess the number I am thinking of. Since you don’t know what the number is, you can’t, therefore, conclude that it must be 5.
In 2001, the Mars Global Surveyor examined the area again and took a second photo of the area.
Clearly, there was no face. It had been the poor resolution, an awkward angle, and shadows that created the face-like appearance. That should have been convincing. Rather than admitting hasty conclusions, they changed it to that there still is an ancient civilization, just that this picture doesn’t prove it. Seeing the face is something our brains want to do. Our brain is wired to find recognizable images from random noise. It’s called face pareidolia, and it’s the illusion of seeing faces in everyday objects.
We don’t even always have to imagine human faces either. We’ve found a bear face on Mars.
How do they explain that? Having neither proven evidence nor disproven evidence isn’t going to stop these people. That alone should be a red flag.
Another common example is the Solway spaceman photo. In 1964, during a picnic, an English firefighter took a picture of his daughter.
It wasn’t until after the prints came back did he notice the spaceman in the background. UFOlogists came out of the woodwork declaring the photo legitimate. Use what we just learned, not taking things at face value. As with the Mars' face, there is information missing.
The image is fuzzy, and something is blocking the image. These are two traits common to almost all pictures purporting the paranormal. I don’t think it’s by chance either. If I wanted to fake a picture or mislead people, those would be the two tactics I’d use. Being out of focus obscures information. Photoshop aside, blurring hides strings, seams in the material, or supports. And blocking part of the image means I don’t even have to invest as much into the setup. I would only have to build half a model or a half-sized model. Yet, if I used the same investigation techniques as UFOlogists, that is, just by what it looks like, it looks like a cheaply made inflatable toy. I conclude the girl is blocking the Toys “R” Us price tag.
Another problem is that the only context we have about the photo is often by the very people who could benefit most from the story. They’re vague about what happened, won’t pinpoint where the photo was taken, there are no landmarks, and nothing to compare against for scale or distance, such as a building or a tree. It’s not by chance these key structures are always missing.
The irony is I’d be criticized for coming to shoddy, ill-conceived, and scientifically unsupported conclusions. The conclusion doesn’t prove my position in the same way their conclusion doesn’t prove theirs. It’s a stalemate because neither side has enough information. That said, one explanation is more plausible. You have to ask yourself which is more likely? Someone bought and inflated a Toys “R” Us costume, or that it really was an alien from another galaxy who also went unnoticed by the photographer? Given two choices, you really have to go with the more likely one.
This gets to my contribution to this arena. The few times I knew anything about a news story, I always found the reporting misleading at best, to just plain factually wrong at worst. Specifically, there is a famous photograph of WWI American airman Freddy Jackson. In 1917, his squadron was photographed and Freddy Jackson can be seen in the back row, his head sticking out behind another person.
The only problem is that he was reported to have died in an accident two days before the photograph was taken. He’s obviously a ghost, right?
Perhaps, but there might be more plausible explanations. This involves understanding the state of photography in 1917. It wasn’t an advanced art back then. To photograph a large group, they probably used a glass plate technique. Here, a glass plate was used to mount the light-sensitive emulsion. It was the same technique Mathew Brady used during the American Civil War, 50 years earlier. In fact, glass plates would continue to be used for another ten years. Often, they reused glass plates. This involved scrubbing off the previous emulsion and adding a new layer.
The problem was if they didn’t scrub all the emulsion, the faint, previous image would still show. That’s very much like what we have here. I’ve not seen the original, so I can’t say definitively but it’s consistent with what I’ve seen, including from other actual glass plates from the period. I would even add if we could look close enough there might even be a ghost work shed or a ghost woman walking her dog off to one side of the photo.
Another likely explanation is that the person moved during the exposure. Even in daylight, the film was slow and, so, had relatively long exposures, perhaps up to 15 seconds. Some observers have noted that the ghost image looks like the person in front of him, supporting this position. That person may have moved causing a blur.
The photograph below is from shortly after WWI (circa 1920) of children standing in front of a German war trophy gun, at the time commonly used as memorials in British towns. No one has alleged the children are ghosts but not only are there blurred images, but also an image can be seen through the child second from the left. Both are similar to the Freddy Jackson photograph.
To this day, that movement is still called a ghost image.
Freddy Jackson may be a ghost. Nothing I say here disproves that. However, if I can propose getting the same result by not using paranormal means, aren’t those explanations more reasonable?
