Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

“max is here
max is in control
max is probably creating something big for it

max is the solution for you
max is what you want
max is on top

max is cool because despite the fact that his father yells at us every time we’re there
max is so smart
max is not the killer

max is still in control
max is good for that kind of thing
max is no angel

max is useless hahahaha
max is not max
max is down

max is over”

Does that make sense? It’s the story of the rise and fall of dictator Max, by Max Jahnke. If it sounded a little strange, it’s because all the sentences were extracted from Googlism, which in turn extracted them from the web. Those are all unrelated snippets of text from across the web compiled into one story.

The results from Googlism can be hilarious, but most important to us, there’s something here in the fact they can be selected and organized to make a somewhat coherent short story. As it happens, another friend, Murilo Queiroz, also has a son named Max, and he got into it, creating a beautiful and quite long story from Googlisms which is actually related to his son.

A whole lot of meaning from random snippets of text extracted from the web.

If you are into Forteanism long enough, you may have realized a lot of coincidences and mystical synchronicities work like this. There’s a whole ocean of not entirely random things: that’s the web. Then a phenomenon filters this randomness into something less random, but the phenomenon in itself is not expected to produce meaning. That’s Googlism.

Then comes our minds. From Googlisms some quite amazing “coincidences” can be found. We can find meaning where there is none. Or better yet, there was none. We actually created this meaning the moment we think we saw them there all along.

Some of these ideas were discussed previously in Mind under matter, but even if you don’t quite swallow this pill, how about finding what story lies in the Googlisms for your name? Do share them in the comments.

Or are they hoaxed fakes? Fact is, they are amazing works by “The Faking Hoaxer”. Keep reading for much more, including making ofs and ghosts.

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I try not to post too many debunking posts in a row as it starts to get boring, but a bunch of images and claims have been circulating these past few weeks and I didn’t comment on them at the time. So I joined all of them into one quick debunking roundup, if you are still not bored by those.

I promise I will try to make the next post about something truly mysterious and wonderful, contrary to exposing some dubious, lame hoaxes.

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“My name is Marcio and I’m sending this photo for you to explain this phenomenon, I assure you this is no hoax. I don’t know when it was taken, I just know it was captured during a religious celebration, and it looks like an angel… what can you tell me about it?”

One of the most interesting photos I have received (click to enlarge), it no doubt looks like an angel, complete with wings and something in its hands… perhaps a harp?

Perhaps, fact is that there are some other white blurs in the photograph that don’t remind of any obvious religious imagery, and perhaps more importantly, there’s a little girl in a white dress in the same pose as the “angel”.

Or the opposite would be more appropriated.

We can explain the image as the result of long exposure of the film, which captured all the bright elements in the image – like those white and shiny – whilst the photographer shook his camera, by accident. Mix some pareidolia, and we have this image.

The illustration below may help to understand the effects in action here:

Highlighted in red are the sources of the blurs: the girl’s white dress, the white shirt of a man sitting at left and the shiny metal microphone stand up in the stage. All these elements were reflecting the ambient light, as well as camera flashes, producing the blurs that we highlighted in green.

The yellow arrows point the movement blurs produced by other sources of light and that are everywhere in the image. They also explain the “wings” of the angel, which are in fact blurs of the same white dress. Note the camera movement could be either going up or down, depending on the fact that the blurs were captured before or after the rest of the image.

Also note that the relative position between the white angel and the blur on its left side exactly matches the relative position between the little girl’s dress and the man in a white shirt. This match gives us reason to think our interpretation is correct, and this angel of light is just a blurred image of the little miss singing.

A real angel, indeed.

[With thanks to Marcio Silva for the image]

“Some physical mediums claimed to have experienced levitations. One of the most famous is Colin Evans. The photograph was taken by infra-red light during a seance in 1938. – Comparison of several photos of this event shows that he remained in the air for some time!” [Antigravity Power]

Or was he? I never paid much attention to this photo, having seen it many times, as I simply assumed it was a crude hoax and the “medium” appeared to be suspended by an invisible string.

It turns out he accomplished the feat by another method. Can you guess how? Keep reading for more photos of his levitations that may help.

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