I've decided that it is time to launch another of my Super Happy Great Fun Yeah intermittent series. The topic is one I've been thinking about for a while: it seems like paranormalists are really reaching for some of the "phenomena" they talk about these days. For the purposes of these posts, I'm using "paranormalists" to refer specifically to those that look (and believe in) ghosts, aliens, and strange creatures, and not to folks that push psychic powers and such. Unless, of course, I find a good example of the psi-crowd reaching for ideas, which I haven't yet.
What do I mean by "reaching?" What I mean is that the proposed phenomena in a certain field of woo was far more impressive in years gone by, and these day the paranormalists seem to be just grasping at straws, pointing to any old ridiculous thing and claiming it to be a supernatural mystery. I believe this to be at least partially a product of years of debunking by the likes of Randi, CSICOP (now just CSI), and Michael Shermer's Skeptics Society. It also probably has something to do with generally increased scientific literacy: fewer people buy your nonsense, you have less popular support, and so you get desperate. Shows like "Ghost Hunters" and "Most Haunted" certainly feed into the still-sizeable chunk of people who don't know a thing about science, but by and large the public knows far more about it than they did 50 or 100 years ago.
Anyway, on to the meat and potatoes of the post. In the spirit of Action Skeptics Storytime and Christian Answers, I bring you today's proof that Paranormalists Are Runnning Out of Ideas, this one from the realm of spirit photography: orbs.
To your right are some orbs. For those of you that might not know, ghost hunting types claim that those little spots on the photo are somehow supernatural in nature. One of the interviewees on the "Ghost Hunters" episode of Penn and Teller: Bullshit! claimed orbs to be "The basic energy pattern of the spirit world," whatever that means.
It is trivially obvious to the skeptic that these shiny dots are hardly mysterious. Floating in the air are any number of things that catch the light and reflect it into a camera lens, from dust motes to precipitation to small insects. This one looks to me like a perfect example of the paranormal phenomenon known as "rain." There's also lens flare to take into account. These photographic artifacts are not in any way mysterious. They can be readily explained by anybody who doesn't jump to credulous, preconceived conclusions, who isn't looking so damn hard for proof of the nonexistent.
Paranormalists, however, do just that. Oddly enough, different ghost hunters will tell you different things. Some will say that orbs are sentient while some hold that they are just "manifestations." Some will say they are ghosts in their own right; some will claim a combination. Some, of course, think that orbs are bullshit. They're not "real ghosts."
An interesting compromise comes from the twin dipshits that star in Sci-Fi's awful Ghost Hunters. They try to judge between "real" orbs and "fake" orbs. They make a distinction between orbs that really are paranormal in nature and those that are simple photographic artifacts. How they make this distinction is not entirely clear; they go through a process of judgement that involves subjective opinion and memory. It's essentially self-important bullshit guesswork.
Orbs qualify as reaching because they are such obvious transparent bullshit. Who in their right mind would look at these things and not assume they were just artifacts? Who would decide that these random bits of light reflection and lens flare were supernatural manifestations? Someone who is really reaching for pictures of ghosts. Somebody who really wants ghosts to exist, but just can't seem to capture anything on film that even comes close to the pictures of his forebears.
Pictures like this one:
That's one of the most famous ghost photographs in all of woodom: The Brown Lady of Raynham hall. The story goes that the ghost had been sighted in the house for years, first in the mid-19th century. The ghost was described as a woman in a brown dress, her face reminiscent of the portraits of Dorothy Wadpole, a former resident of Raynham Hall, but for her empty eye sockets. In 1936, a couple of photographers set up shop in the Hall hoping to get a shot of the ghost. This is what turned up. Though unimpressive given the previous descriptions of the ghost (it is, after all, just a woman-shaped glow) and quite easily faked with a simple double exposure, it is certainly far more impressive than any orb anywhere ever. Or what about the famous "Tulip Staircase Ghost?"
The fake-looking ghostie in that picture is still far better than an orb. The thing isn't even ascending the staircase, like the paranormalists always say. It's standing behind the damn thing, stretching out for some reason. This could potentially be a double exposure, though I tend to think it was simply a later addition to the negative; it looks suspiciously like it was painted and not photographed. And let's not forget the famous church ghost, one of the most transparent pieces of double exposure I've ever seen:
What the hell is that? Awful, that's what it is. The hoaxer even covered the face of his accomplice, probably to make sure nobody recognized him. But it's still far more ghost-like, more interesting, more evocative than a little white dot.
Thing is, humanoid shots like these haven't really shown for a long, long time. They were the result of a former era where people didn't as a general rule spend their lives hunting spirits. It was a time before multiple networks aired nightly romps through dark places, before hundreds of self-declared "parapsychologists" ran rampant around the country looking for the tiniest evidence of a haunting.
The psychic photography page of the Skeptic's Dictionary gives a short summary of the history of spirit photography. I find this significant:
The first psychic or spirit photographs appeared almost immediately after the first photographs. "As early as 1856, prints of ghostly looking ethereal figures sitting next to the person being photographed were being sold as joke novelties" (Williams 2000: 205). In 1862, William Mumler made a good living in Boston using double exposure to produce photographs with alleged spirits of dead people in them (Williams: 326). Many have followed in Mumler's footsteps.
Spirit photography began as a joke. People bought the openly hoaxed photographs as novelties. Hoaxing of this type is easy as hell, and the worse the quality your camera, the easier it is to make it all blend together. Eventually, some people began to take it seriously, and folks began faking pictures and claiming they were real. Back in the day, those that gave a damn about photographing "spirits" were entirely willing to hoax their little hearts out.
Nowadays, we've filled the airwaves with folks who honestly believe, through and through, that ghosts exist, and who want so very badly to capture them on film. Unlike the spirit photographers of yesteryear, this new generation of ghost hunters is painfully honest. They're not going to hoax the photographs because they believe that the ghosts will naturally show up in them. They go around using high-quality cameras and not deliberately faking their shots and, expectedly enough, they get precisely dick.
Think about it: We went from full-torsoed vaporous apparitions (to quote Dr. Ray Stanz) back in the day, to the "smoke ghosts" of the 70s, 80s, and part of the 90s (when people first started actively hunting ghosts), to the orbs of today. As the believability of ghost photos has decreased, the quality of camera has increased and so has the honesty of the ghost hunter. Modern ghost hunters don't get the good stuff because they aren't creating hoaxed pictures, and they don't get the smokes and vapors because their cameras are expensive and digital. They're left only with their sad, pathetic little orbs.
Hell, even if they were inclined to hoax the public, the ubiquity of Photoshop and like programs means that almost nobody would buy it. Sure, it looks better than the double-exposed church ghost, but everybody knows what they can do with computers these days.
During the days of the Brown Lady, people believed pictures like that because they didn't know anything about science. These days, people who still don't know anything about science (or basic reasoning, for that matter) are looking to take more pictures like that. Their honest belief in the veracity of the old photos means that they won't find anything remotely interesting, so they point to some normal photographic artifacts and make up a goofy story about supernatural origin while anyone with half a brain laughs in their faces. They're grasping at straws; it's a pathetic, desperate attempt to validate their pasttime, their life's quest, their rock-solid belief: "Look at that! Look! It's a ghost! It is! Believe me! They exist!"
The sad truth is that spirit photographers are just plain running out of ideas.
Keep your eyes peeled for more installations in this series. I've got a few more in mind, and if anyone else has any pathetic paranormalism they'd like me to tackle, just leave a note in the comments.
I do believe in spooks! I do believe in spooks! IdoIdoIdoIdo I do believe in spooks!
--The Cowardly Lion
Here's the link in case you want to see the cool pictures.
http://actionskeptics.blogspot.com/2007/06/paranormalists-are-running-out-of-ideas.html
Don't get me wrong a good ghost story needs illastrations. What's wrong with leaving it as a novelty? Why all the mystic pressure?
