Ghost Sighting On Tape

Great Debates
281

-Maybe if you’re going to claim such a thing, you ought to provide a cite for that information.

I can just as easily say maybe the camera records Gamma radiation, or maybe it can record Quantum interference, or maybe it can literally see magnetic anomalies. Do you have a cite?

-Or provide data otherwise, link to a photo, provide any proof or evidence for us all to analyze, or understand how a camera works. I know, I know. It’s painfully obvious by now.

-Such as? You haven’t shown me any. All you’re doing is saying “Thousands of people have seen it”, without further substantiation.

-As already noted, then why don’t they appear in more surveillance tapes, which will record a thousand times more frames over the course of a day than all the still cameras combined?

In that Ghost research site, why are the photos of such age? 1985? 1921? 1977? Today we have cameras in our phones- people are taking millions of frames per day. Where are those images of ghosts?

-Such as?

-Such as…?

-All we’ve seen so far is one page of blurry shit. Can you show us one that’s “extremely clear”, please?

-Again, for the tenth time, can you show us an example, please?

-That’s exactly right. Because I have yet to see those photos, in real life or online, I have yet to read those stories, and I have yet to hear the circumstances under which they occurred.

You’re telling me “Buncha people saw ghosts, they all took pictures. There’s your proof” without showing the pictures, pointing out where we can read about the stories, without detailing the location or circumstances, without any kind of cite or detail at all.

Damn straight I’m gonna call it a hoax- you haven’t given me any reason to think otherwise.

-Since the entirety of my information on that particular “ghost” is limited to just the image shown on the Ghost Research site, all I can say is that I don’t have enough information.

However, Ms. Brown is a known charlatan and cold-reader, and That’s Incredible regularly ran “ghost stories”. They also had Uri Gellar on multiple times, showing him “mentally” bending spoons and affecting compasses by “force of will”.

TV shows are designed to make money through viewership and advertising sales. They are not, typically, considered scientific journals.

-I wish I could believe you, but you haven’t shown us any such events yet.

-Actually, it’s an excellent starting point, if you could be bothered.

We know the date, 1924, the location (a ship, the USS Watertown) the people involved (the two crewmen, the captain, etc) the person who wrote the article and for what publication he wrote it, and so on. A wealth of details, all of which can be chased down one way or another.

The first part, like any investigation worthy of the name, is to verify the known details. Is there, or was there, such as ship as the USS Watertown, and was it a tanker? Were seamen Courtney and Meehan aboard during a Pacific crossing in 1924, and more importantly, did they die, overcome by fumes in an empty cargo hold? Were they indeed buried at sea?

All that information should be relatively easy to find and/or verify.

The questions to ask, though, include, can we see an original of the photo? That grainy 3rd-gen (at least) image could be of anything- we’re given precious little background or other features to even tell where on a ship it is. Are these faces in the water, or is that a cabin bulkhead in the background? What are the black shapes in the foreground? Railings? Crates? The deckhouse roof? The anchor winch?

More questions: We know the captain’s name, the names of the ship, the crewmen who died and the guy who wrote the article, but not the name of the man who took the picture.

That image is obviously a reproduction from a newspaper or a magazine- can we see the original article somewhere?

With some details, the whole story can come out. If those are indeed ghostly faces, the story will verify that. If they’re pictures somebody painted on a sheet and photographed out of boredom during a long, slow ocean crossing, that will likely come out too.

-That shadow on it’s chest, side of the arm and left half of it’s face. If it were transparent and unseen by the girls themselves, it could not have had a “shadow”.

-Who said it was sarcastic? That appears to be the case: one image has a single “orb” and is listed in what we’ll presume to be their gallery of “authentic” photos. The other has multiple “orbs” and is listed in their column of “fakes and forgeries”.

I can see no difference save for the number of such “orbs”, hence my statement.

-Agreed. However, those laws are not regularly turned entirely upside down, or wholly dismissed by new findings. The ‘understanding’ of which you mention, is more accurately termed a refinement- IE, while we have measured, say, the speed of light more and more accurately, we have yet to find something that invalidates that speed entirely.

The discovery of an ‘authentic’ ghost would make for a huge, wide-ranging change in all manner of sciences and disciplines, as well as psychology, religion and so forth.

Which makes it seem rather odd that you haven’t even defined what a ghost is, let alone how it exists or why, to say nothing of actually coming up with any evidence.

-Oh? I’ve been reading this thread since the beginning, and I’ve reread it a few moments ago- okay, I skimmed a bit- and I saw nothing where anyone defined what a ghost was (other than a few vague references hinting that they might be something like “ectoplasm” or some kind of magnetic anomoly.)

Could you please point out where you’ve defined what a ghost is, for me?

-Kettle, thy name is Black.

-Anecdotal impossibilities without substantiation.

-So? I’m not a “professional debunker”. I don’t belong to SCICOP or the JREF.

You’ve said several times you’ve had your own experiences. Those experiences were firm enough to cause you to believe in ghosts, so tell us about them. When, where and what?

Barring that, surely you must know of a better online reference than the Ghost Research page already linked, poke through one or two or eight or forty of those. Again, with “millions” of images out there, and assuming ghosts are real, then some of those photos must be authentic. Show us one.

-Is it? You’re giving us anecdotes and calling it proof. You say you’ve had ghostly encounters and expect us to believe you, even though you haven’t described the encounter itself, where or when it occurred, under what circumstances, etc.

You say “thousands” or “millions” of people have had such encounters, and that “millions” of (presumably authentic) ghost pictures exist, but you refuse to link to them, and disclaim verification if you do.

Ergo, “anecdotal proof” you expect us to swallow, hook, line and sinker. I suggest you check your own seams, son.

-Certainly. First we define Vehemence.

Then, we look at your previous posts:

Need I continue?

-And of that “complete body of evidence”, you have thus far linked a single photo, to which you disclaimed any suggestion of it’s authenticity.

That doesn’t strike me as a “convincing” argument.

-I see. So on the one hand, we have literally millions of fossils, spanning 250 million years or more, encompassing three hundred thousand species, to say nothing of testable genetic evidence and DNA traces, and on the other hand, we have a few blurry photos. Practically the same thing, aren’t they?

-Again, on the one hand, we have volumes of peer-reviewed work, spanning over a century, that have been checked, cross-checked, analyzed, reviewed and empirically tested in the laboratory, and on the other hand, we have some… blurry photos.

-That’s funny, because according to my direct, first-hand knowledge, ghosts are completely impossible.

They walk through walls- an impossibility- they’re supposedly disembodied souls (we won’t even get into the whole religious argument that the existence of a soul pretty much by definition then means the existence of a God, a Heaven, Satan, etc) they’re supposedly formed of some as-yet-unknown form of energy (that continues to be unknown and undetectable, but can, oddly enough, be captured on a common disposable camera) they can interact with the “real world” (IE, knock stuff off shelves, etc) but can’t do anything more useful (IE, tell us where Hoffa is buried, what happened to Ms. Earheart, tell us whether OJ is or isn’t guilty, ad nauseum.)

… for example?

-And you have yet to provide a single shred of reason I should believe otherwise. Worse, in your continuing refusal to provide any data whatsoever beyond the anecdotal, and your active denial of verification of images that are posted, all does very little but strengthen my viewpoint.

Simply put, you’re hurting your cause, not helping it.

-As witty a rejoinder as that is, you have used simple belief as a form of proof at least three times now. Yet you agree it’s not evidence? Whose side are you on?

-I used “we” to denote other posters in this thread.

Various people have also considered Zeus, Mephistopholes, Yggsdrasil and Ameratsu to be a “part of reality”. Norse mythology said a cloudy sky was the furry underbelly of the wolf-god Fenris.

Despite just now apparently agreeing with me that belief is not evidence, you use the word “considered” as a synonym for “belief”. Might want to give those seams another quick once-over.

-With what? Based on what data? Using what evidence? Defining what phenomena, condition or event? Explaining what?

If we just start rewriting blindly, without tests, data or information, well, we call the result “fiction”. It might be an entertaining read, but it’s not a redefinition of reality.

-Is it? In this case, the one, single source you linked to did indeed list a photo with a magnified and flash-illuminated dust particle (or, admittedly, a snowflake, bug, pine needle, etc) under a column that, while not listed as necessarily ‘authentic’, was not listed in the “fakes and forgeries” column.

Doesn’t seem like a straw man argument to me.

-Again, for the second time, on rereading this thread, no definition past a vague implication they’re “ectoplasm” is given. Could you please point out where you defined a Ghost for me, please?

-Actually they are. I’ve done so many times on this veryu board, and had a great deal of fun each time.

Much like this argument, the mental gymnastics they have to go through to mesh their mythology with reality is truly astounding. And that they believe it as well…

282

Aeschines – I’m just curious… what exactly are you debating here? So far your posts seem to be serving two purposes:

  1. Stating (without evidence) that skeptics are bull-headed and refuse to accept evidence, and
  2. Stating (without evidence) that you believe in ghosts.

Neither of those seem like they belong in Great Debates. Perhaps you should move this conversation to IMHO…

283

> Therefore, if a given object is present on the film, it MUST - in order
> to be registered on the film - have been physically present and bouncing
> light off itself when the film was exposed.

While I agree with most of what has been posted, I’ll have to add that camera film can be “exposed” by other things. A film exposure is simply a chemical reaction. Almost always, that is due to exposure to light, as designed. But, sometimes the chemical reaction can be triggered by heat, x-rays, or other radiation. That’s why you shouldn’t keep film in a hot car or take it through the x-ray machines at the airport.

Now, anything caught on digital-imaging equipment–like home video equipment–should be entirely as a result of the visual (and near-visual) spectrum of light.

Personally and currently, I don’t believe any of the ghost pictures. It seems to me that claiming that ghosts are outside the visible spectrum or specks of light too fast to be seen or whatever is just a cheap cop-out. IMHO, at least 99.9% of ghost images can be correctly explained as non-supernatural in origin.

284

-Such as? Charge-coupled devices (CCD, the part in a digital camera/camcorder that converts the impact of photons to electrical impulses that are then recorded for later playback) are not “magic”. We know, and can tell, down to the handful of photons, how each pixel-element will react both chemically and electrically.

You may not understand it, but that doesn’t mean those who invented and developed it don’t, and further, your lack of understanding doesn’t mean that device is therefore just maybe capable of also recording, say, ectoplasm, psychic fields or spirits.

-And which cases are those? You have yet to show us anything at all, let alone explain the difference between photographing a visible ghost, and taking a photograph only to find a previously-unseen ghost recorded.

-Okay, here I’m finally gonna call a hard and fast BullShit.

I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt in other places, and I’d be more than happy to discuss your data or evidence at length (if, y’know, you’d ever post some) but on this one? Nope, sorry. Now you’re spouting pure bullshit.

The first actual camera, a device that records images on a chemically-altered surface via light, came about, what, two hundred years ago? Cameras were used to take photographs during the Civil war (140 years ago) and were finally becoming affordable and popular by the 1930s (70 years ago.) Cameras that recorded images electronically went to the Moon with the Apollo missions (35 years ago) and by the mid-seventies, Kodak had sold something like ten million “Brownie” type and 110 Instamatic cameras.

The concept of using lenses to focus light for the purpose of recording images is therefore nothing new. We know that red light and blue light focus at slightly different points, we know about depths of focus, capturing high-speed events with ultrafast flashes and incredible shutter speeds, and we know how to speed up extremely slow events with time-lapse photography.

We’ve been grinding lenses for 450 years, we’ve known the different components of light for nearly as long, we can now make “magnetic” lenses and we can now focus high-energy photons like X-Rays and Gamma rays, which are wholly unaffected by conventional glass lenses. We can put cameras in orbits where they can resolve an object as small as a license plate from 250 miles away.

I dare you to post just one single photographic effect or artifact that cannot be otherwise explained by conventional means. Doesn’t have to be a ‘ghost’, it can be anything. Any object, blur or artifact that was caused by some phenomenon that just us at the SDMB can’t explain, ignoring for the moment the people at, say, MIT, or Kodak’s research labs, or NASAs imagery departments.

-So show us some. You have, as of the moment I’m typing this, linked to a single photograph, one lone image that you took pains to refuse to authenticate.

Yet you continue to state, time and time and time again, that thousands, nay millions of such photographs exist.

I don’t give a hamster’s hairy hindquarters if you can “personally vouch for it’s authenticity” or not. Pick one- just ONE- that by whatever standards you feel are appropriate, can be considered anything from “authentic” to simply “worthy of further study”.

You say there’s millions of images out there: Put up or shut up.

-What observations? You’ve linked to one photo, and less “observations”. It’s pretty damned hard to judge the content of nothing at all. Toss me a bone here.

-What data? What framework?

-Cite?

The way I understand it, and as aptly illustrated by the Ghost Research site, a “ghost” can be anything: an outline formed by the top of a tombstone and the trunk of a tree, an image superimposed over another, a grey, wispy blur, a solid-appearing figure that actually opens a modern fire door, an ephremal, translucent figure that nonetheless casts a shadow, a reddish blob standing in a creek, a greyish blob standing in the grass, a couple of grainy faces reflected in a storm door window, a fuzzy white ball… The list, it seems, is endless.

What “framework” do you have that fits all these things?

The common “giveaway” of a ghost is a “cold presence”, yet the “Toys R’ Us” ghost registered as a warm image, same as the rest of the people in the photo.

So according to your “framework”, a ghost can be an outline in the trees, a photographically-clear image of a person, a small floating ball of light, or a cloud of undefined, amorphous mist. It can apparently be either warm or cold, it can interact with real things (knock stuff off shelves) but it can also pass through them (walk through walls) except when there’s a convenient door, in which case it’ll apparently use it.

They’re also undetectable to modern science as we know it, being composed of some as-yet unknown form of energy “vibrating” at some heretofore-unknown frequency, yet can apparently be easily captured by a $3.95 disposable camera.

Do I have the gist of your “framework” correct, so far?

-Then if it’s that easy, there must be any number of actual, authentic, verifiable recordings, in a multitude of formats, to prove it. Please link to some that we may discuss it.

-There are? Where? On the GR site, the “clearest”- most in focus- image is that of the people in the foreground of this picture, and even that’s not all that clear. The relevant images, however, are blurry enough as to be little more than Rorsach inkblots; depending on how you look at it, the left one might look more like “Statler”, one of the two muppets “Statler and Waldorf” that sat up in the balcony heckling the others in the TV program The Muppet Show.

Why’s the one on the right a bulldog? Squint a bit and it looks like the portacullis of a gothic castle. The entrance to a mine shaft. A close-up of a belching frog.

Please show us these “clear” images, so there can be less wishful interpretation.

285

Whew. There is too much to this thread and I know I missed a lot of it.

A few things I’d like to ramble about:

I used to work in the art department of a photo lab. It was my job to correct negative damage and all sorts of weird wonky things that happened to film. Some if it looks pretty weird. I’ve been on ghost message boards and have seen people get all spooked out and frothy over the “supernatural meaning” behind something in a photo that was, very obviously to me, negative damage.

Personally speaking, I hope ghosts don’t exist. Because the idea really creeps me out.

However, at the aforementioned photo lab, I had a slightly creepy experience. Long story short, many people had reported feeling cold drafts of air or having their chairs jerked while they were working. (I was there when my boss yelped, startled, when something “moved” her chair. She wasn’t the type to just make that up.) I had previously experienced a mysterious “draft” in my workspace as well, and was constantly looking up to find where the vent was that was shooting this cold air on me. No vent, no one walking by, no nothing. I couldn’t figure it out. Creepy. (I experienced these “drafts” before I knew about the coworkers’ “encounters,” so I certainly wasn’t reading anything into the mysterious drafts. I just couldn’t figure it out.)

With that said, I hope that ghosts aren’t real, but I suspect that something creepy is going on out there. And I really don’t want to investigate it myself. Yikes.

286

-Technically, heat doesn’t “expose” the film, it simply changes how the film reacts when properly exposed.

You’re exactly right in that it’s a simple chemical process- originally, as I recall, it was very fine grains of silver halide that turned black when exposed to light. Modern color films are, of course, far more complex, but the idea is the same.

Excessive heat, however, can change how fast or to what degree those chemicals can react when exposed, altering the overall exposure level, or “washing out” a color, reducing contrast, etc.

Infrared 35mm film, however, can be “exposed” simply by the heat of the photographer’s hand through the body of the camera itself.

287

Yawn. Fighting 15 close-minded skeptics at once is indeed a challenge. I was hoping to have a few allies in the battle.

288

I didn’t see a fight. You have yet to engage in any real form of debate. :rolleyes:

289

Well Aeschines, when your “friends” out there make websites with contradictory and misleading info, you should begin to wonder “who needs enemies when I have “friends” like that?”

290

> it can interact with real things (knock stuff off shelves) but it can also
> pass through them (walk through walls) except when there’s a convenient
> door, in which case it’ll apparently use it.

Well, just to play Devil’s Advocate here, the classic “cartoon” perception of a ghost nicely covers this point. A ghost seems to be the spiritual remains of a real person. The ghost would seem to have the memories and habits of that person, so using doors is the preferred method. Many ghosts eventually realize that they are not limited to corporeal movements and can move through walls and knock stuff off shelves when they want to.

It’s similar to the way non-dead people approach things. When you are in a room, you have the choice of leaving the room through the door, window, or burrowing through a wall. In almost all cases, you will use the door because it’s easier and habitual.

Similarly, almost all of the time, you don’t knock things off the shelf. But sometimes you do, whether it’s an acident or on purpose.

Your other points were well received.

291

Alas, you need to pick better allies next time. Try to get some that will support you with coherent arguments and actual evidence.

292

Or pick a defensible position and learn how to defend it. That works too.

293

I already successfully defended my position. Many in the room are bloody at this point. I have admired your strength in battle, all of you, but at this point I would call it a draw. Since, however, it was the one against the many, I feel quite proud of my battle prowess at this point.

294

That seems to be a case of begging the question, i.e., calling something “ghost phenomena” without knowing what it is. Hey, look, this is a ghost phenomena, so ghosts must exist! Case closed.

::ROTFL::

295

Misleading, and lying to make it a “draw” should not be a good reason to feel proud.

296

Name one real point, one piece of evidence that you were able to prove. Heck, name one person who’s bloodied? You know it’s okay to be wrong. It’s even okay to look stupid now and then. What’s sad is to not learn a damn thing from it.

297

Gigo, are you calling me a liar?

298

I must admit I’m a little hurt by the comments here. I had thought we were having a mutually pleasant, stimulating discussion. I thought we were becoming friends of a sort. I have made many friends online, and not always with people I agree with 100%. There is room for disagreement and mutual respect to exist in the same space.

Now I hope that I’m just misunderstanding a word here and a phrase there, and that we can all become good friends. Let me know what you think.

299

OK, so this thread has caused me to look at a lot of ghost photographs, and I remain skeptical that they are all deliberate hoaxes. Clearly a lot of them are explainable by various operator errors, or errors in the lab, but for the sake of satisfying my curiosity and playing “devil’s advocate”, let’s hear the debunking of these:
http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Ghosts/WW1Ghost.html
http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Ghosts/Werm.html
I am not saying that these photos in any way prove the existence of ghosts, but I also don’t think that either is easily explained. Of course,I could be wrong. The one of the “little girl” in the fire seems particularily compelling. Just curious how the panel of experts explain the images.

300

I certainly don’t have the expertise needed to properly debunk those photos, but I will say that anomalies-unlimited is a great site to waste some time at. :wink: