Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

“Out of this World” did a good take on the Wem Town Hall “ghost” that we mentioned as an impressive example of pareidolia. They present videos of the actual fire, present the case and myth, and the latest information I had that analysis by Vernon Harrison on the negatives didn’t find any evidence of tampering. Thus, it seemed it was either a real ghost or a simulacrum.

But they went further and had the negative examined at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. Keep reading to watch the second part and their surprising finds.

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Another impressive example of pareidolia, found by Jeremy Olden in his house at Lake Stevens, Seattle. Keep reading for the full image and a slightly creepy video showing our brain’s pattern-recognition machine – or something supernatural, you decide.

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Magonia is one of Britain’s oldest established magazines in the fields of ufology, Forteana and contemporary beliefs, running from 1966. Headed by John Rimmer, with John Harney and Peter Rogerson on the team, publishing illuminating articles by mostly all the luminaries in the field, it was the original Magonia website that deeply influenced the humble Pelicanist that writes here.

The old website is no longer available, though it can still be seen in parts in the Internet Archive. But that’s no longer a problem, since Magonia is back online!

With more than a hundred classic old articles already available, and some newer, never before seen in the Internet texts published, this is surely a holiday blessing.

Be sure to check the new Magonia blog too.

“My God… It’s full of stars”, said astronaut Bowman while he was being absorbed by the black Monolith in “2001”. A succession of psychedelic imagery (created with slit-scan photography) then followed, representing the contact with the Divine, or whatever it was, as Kubrick never made clear what for Sirius sake that ending actually meant. But it was something big, mystical, even religious.

Spiral images and tunnels of light often emerge in experiences with hallucinogenic drugs, and perhaps not by mere coincidence, in religious iconography referring to “visions”, such as eastern mandalas, Islamic art or even Christian cathedrals. Not only that, it also shows up in near-death experiences, synaesthesic hallucinations, migraines, epilepsy, psychotic disturbances, sleep disturbances, advanced syphilis and even in ancient rock art thousands of years old.

This universality of the theme seems to suggest something literally Higher, perhaps a contact with higher planes, even though migraines, advanced syphilis or psychosis are kind of out of place in this interpretation. Neuroscience offers an alternative explanation that seems to fit them all.

In the 1920s, German neurologist Heinrich Klüver dedicated himself to study the effects of mescaline (peyote) and noticed that some geometrical patterns were repeatedly and consistently reported by different subjects (including himself). The patterns were then classified by him into what he called “form constants”, of four types: (I) tunnels, (II) spirals, (III) lattices and (IV) cobwebs.

All very interesting, but this is just description. Recent studies however, combining discoveries on the workings of the visual cortex with models of the workings of neurons suggest that such patterns could be the result of something akin to a short-circuit in the brain. Simple disturbances in the visual cortex, when mapped to what patterns would be perceived by the subject show a striking similarity with psychedelic imagery.

On the left, the representation of the visions of someone quite high. On the right, the simulation of the perception generated from a simple disturbance in the visual cortex. Simple as that. No god, no spiritual plane, just an artifact of how our visual cortex process images and how it then reacts to anomalies in its workings. “It’s full of stars”, but they may all be inside your brain.

Well, perhaps things are not so simple, I must note. Those damn scientists, they keep insisting on having solid evidence and naming speculation and hypothesis as just speculation and hypothesis. So this oversimplified description of their work must not be taken as gospel, and I have to say that in their papers they make clear that this is just a work-in-progress, and that even the comparison above involves some fiddling with the model.

And as believers would say – as they said in response to a first Portuguese version of this text – who are to say the “disturbances” that create the imagery are not somehow “holy” in themselves?

To which I answered that this is missing the whole point here, that such seemingly complex and universal images are product of our brains, even if there could be countless root causes for the simple planar disturbances that may cause them. Including some kind of brain fiddling god. Fact is, our brain would do most of the work.

Amazingly, even to this day, many people still have doubts about that. Funny ape brains.

For a more rigorous and accurate description of these findings check:

- Physics Makes a Toy of the Brain (Science after Sunclipse);
- "What Geometric Visual Hallucinations Tell Us about the Visual Cortex" (PDF) Neural Computation 14 (2002):473–491.

Following our series of long exposure ghosts, we post here the image kindly sent by our fellow Brazilian reader, Paulo José:

“It was the night of February 19, 2008, and I and my neighbor Jessica were in the street talking and photographing things of no importance. The strange thing is that only some time ago, looking through the hundreds of photos we took that we found this one. Due to the exposure of one second, the image was blurred and the street lights turned into bright lines. But I can’t find an explanation for the man (?) that appears in the photo not having the lower part of his body, nor even having a shadow. As it was some time ago, I can’t remember if there was someone passing in front of the camera, but obviously there was. I just can’t understand why the photo turned out this way. I hope you can help me”.

Paulo also wrote he likes to explain ghost photos, and is damn right to note that the second-long exposure is part of the explanation for the man with no legs nor shadow. The other element is, as seen previously in long exposure ghosts, the interaction of this exposure with the flash light. That in this image was fired too. And the final ingredient is a handheld camera, moving quite a bit during the exposure.

Look at the inverted “L” that many of the lights in the image turned into. Those lights were originally just points, and that trail is an indication of all the movement the camera made during the exposure of one second. Now, if a point of light may turn into a large inverted L trail, how would a man who doesn’t like paparazzi be distorted?

Apparently, quite a bit, as different parts of the man were illuminated in a different way by the flash light, which has a range of only a few meters – all those people taking photos in stadiums with flash are just wasting their batteries, unless they want to capture the heads of people directly in front of them instead of the game hundreds of meters away.

That the man’s legs were also moving, perhaps hastily, would also make them more blurred, and thus less visible.

In all, several different effects interacted to produce that result. I won’t pretend to know exactly how they worked, so this may not be all the help to fully understand the image that Paulo wanted, but it may give some more tools to comprehend it a bit more.

[With thanks to Paulo José and the anonymous man who didn’t want to be photographed. He is now somehow a worldwide mystery.]