The scientist who tells you that ghosts don’t exist doesn’t
exist.
When it comes to the paranormal, a scientist will more likely tell you,
“I wouldn’t know.” But science can be, and often is, conflated with religion.
What I mean is that the belief in science as a body of truth is equivalent to
religious faith and is just as unscientific. It follows that scientists (and
teachers) who rely on their credentials for credibility in an argument are
resorting to intimidation. They are casting themselves in the role of priests.
Scientific
American describes an encounter between a screenwriter and a
scientist from the point of view of the latter in the article “Ghosts, Aliens, Quantum Gravity, Extra Dimensions,
Sci-Fi--and the Rules of Science.” The screenwriter wants the scientist to authenticate a speculation by sanctioning the possibility of a scientific impossibility. Says the scientist, “Science
certainly is not the static statement of universal laws we all hear about in
elementary school. Nor is it a set of arbitrary rules. Science is an evolving
body of knowledge. Many of the ideas we are currently investigating will prove
to be wrong or incomplete. Scientific descriptions certainly change as we cross
the boundaries that circumscribe what we know and venture into more remote
territory where we can glimpse hints of the deeper truths beyond.”
Star Trek: Voyager
episode “Sacred
Ground” describes a similar encounter, albeit a fictional one, from
the point of view of scientists whose predictions prove laughably inadequate.
The story is a philosophically trenchant thought experiment.
Science functions by observation and measurement. The
process works well on things we know how to measure reproducibly and
repeatably. But observation alone can be suggestive. Indeed, there are numerous
examples of photographs
that seem to prove the existence of ghosts. That said, photographs are not
measurements because the ability to be photographed is an attribute, not a
quantity. It can also be technically undependable. In addition, no one has demonstrated
an ability to reliably invoke spectral phenomena.
Let’s get this straight; I don’t believe in ghosts. Belief
in the paranormal would be too much of a stretch for someone who sees himself
as a rocket scientist. Until recently, I didn’t see, hear, or otherwise come in
contact with anything spectral. I still haven’t recognized a ghost in real-time. None of that has kept
me from enjoying the film Ghost Busters,
or, for that matter, trips to Bisbee, Arizona, and the ghost tours therein. I
did take lots of pictures, including the one below, which I like as an
out-of-focus, long-exposure photographic sketch of a ghost tour in progress at
Opera Drive in Bisbee. The woman with the fascinator top hat and the lantern
was our “ghost host,” a mortal.
We stayed at the Bisbee Inn, the restored LaMore Hotel on OK
Street. It was April, still cold at night in the mile-high former mining town.
Our room, 23, the so-called “Cat Room,” named for the supposed ghost cat who
haunts it, lies in the corner of the building on the second floor between rooms
12 and 14.
Except for us, the hotel was empty, so I felt perfectly
comfortable hanging out on the darkened mezzanine trying to get a photo of the
closed doors to rooms 12 and 23 together. I was only able to do it by using the
panoramic feature of an iPhone while simultaneously scanning with an LED
flashlight. Messy, but the result seemed okay.
Two weeks later,
while examining the shot on a larger screen, I noticed an unintended image. I
showed the photo to friends and family with the disinterested demeanor of a
Vulcan. They all saw the same thing — the back of a slender woman with long,
dark hair (or possibly a black veil) in a white gown, hands behind her back.
“It’s someone’s reflection in the door, right?” they asked.
I explained the photograph to a young friend who has tech
expertise and science acumen beyond his years. His conclusion: “It’s stitching
algorithm error,” he said, proceeding to show me examples of vastly distorted
shapes. Maybe so, but the only similar “ghosts” I have seen
have been double exposures. To create one, you would need a model for the
spirit in question, which I have neither seen nor photographed. It’s not
Photoshopped, either, although I admit it looks like it could be. Another possibility I have considered is a “ghost”
image resulting from the movement of objects between frames during stitching.
The object in question is firmly within the left frame, however. Besides, there
were no moving objects in the area except for me, and I don’t look like that.
When we returned to the Bisbee Inn in April of the following
year, I examined, with some other explorers on a ghost tour, the surface of the
door to Room 23, looking for something, maybe a hologram, embedded in the
surface, but we found nothing.
On that same trip to Bisbee, we hooked up with an outfit
that had ghost-hunting gear, in particular a hand-held thermal camera and a
laser grid pen. Our guide shuttled us around Bisbee in a golf cart. It was
dark, cold at 5,000 feet elevation, and, well, spooky. We stopped at the old
cemetery, now a park, on Opera Drive. We were instructed in the use of the
laser grid (look for curved lines) and viewed each other with the thermal
camera. It was low resolution, but bare skin showed up as red, cooler surfaces
as green, and the coolest as blue. We were ready.
We visited many
sites, heard many sad tales, but I remember just two. We drove up a steep
narrow lane to an abandoned house and dismounted. I had been experimenting with
the instruments and an iPhone camera, but I never really figured out how to
capture an infrared image on the thermal camera. I just used the iPhone with
the laser grid, not knowing exactly what to look for and pretty much shivering
the whole time. Only later did I notice what I had captured, and even then, I
did not understand.
The first photo below I intended merely as an establishing
shot. I used the strobe. That’s our guide at the top of the stairs, looking
past the garden gate at address 816C, the site of lost love and suicide.
Note
the overgrown garden with a mass of small, white flowers to the right of the
stairs. Note, too, the fog to the left of the stairs. My daughter, also my
apparition consultant, later identified it as an “orb”, which I think of as a
more-or-less spherical mass of cold air. I would have ignored it, except for
the curved contour lines of phosphorescent green dots on the laser grid in the
following photo (no strobe). They say that is evidence of a large orb, an
artifact of spirit activity, hanging just off my port bow.
Later on, we
approached the rear of a decaying and abandoned hotel on Subway Street, crossed
a broken concrete bridge spanning a drainage swale, and arrived at a gated
doorway we had originally planned to peek into, but it was open. Lights in
hand, we entered. I was carrying what was by then my favorite tool, the thermal
camera. We moved cautiously over broken floors until we arrived at what had
been a kitchen. En route, we passed new-looking pull-down ladders giving access
to what must have been the attic. I decided not to speculate on their purpose.
As we exited, we heard movement. The new arrivals were a lightly clad trio, a
couple of teenagers and an adult. Our guide inquired if they had permission to
be there. I said nothing, perplexed by what was on the thermal camera’s screen.
I heard the girl saying how appropriate it was that the last thing she would
see before leaving was the hotel. I assumed she meant before leaving Bisbee.
They didn’t exactly disappear; they just rounded a corner and were silently
gone. I checked the camera against the two mortals with me. They showed body
heat as red pixels where you’d expect to see them. What I had seen with the
instrument trained on the three interlopers, though, was three blue
silhouettes, colder than the green background of the hotel walls.
I have no record of those events, just a memory. I suppose
you could say it was all happening in my head. But everything we call “real” is
in our heads, all of it sensory input mediated by our brains and registered by
bioelectric fields. In principle, you could create an alternative reality by
making electrical inputs to the visual, auditory, and other sensory centers of
our brains. I learned from my consultant on such matters that spirits can
appear indistinguishable from mortals. I will take these experiences under
advisement and await more data, but I will not actively seek it. I consider
that there is a causal connection between apparitions and the consciousness
they cross — no witness, no ghost. Therefore, I posit that there are no ghosts
on Mars. Not yet anyway.
Still, where there are sentients, I believe there will
always be some kind of mysticism, which is why you will soon see in Alien Landscapes
a new section called “Mystics’ Bay.” A real mystic will curate it, and real mystics will populate its shops. It will have its own weird story with its own spooky characters. I hope it will remind me of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina, only weirder. Better than Halloween. Happy Haunting.
