Lets Talk About Things Science Cannot Explain

BigBadBob141 said:

Another interesting photo(very famous) is The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, Norfolk taken on 19th September 1936.
This shows a ghostly figure on a staircase which was also seen by witnesses at the time.

Click to expand...

Interesting image. How many times has this one been photographed?

BAYLOR said:

Jack also could have been more then one person committing the copycat crimes. It's just a thought and after last official killing wasn't there a addition spree of similar to the Ripper murders in another city in England at that time?

What do you think on The Ghostly Airman and Zeitoun ?

Click to expand...

Well, Jack was never caught so therefore he could have gone on to other crimes - there were plenty of gruesome killings afterwards.

As for the ghostly airman - personally I think it is an artefact of the photography process. The pictures of Zeitoun - I've not seen before. They look suspiciously like a few well known fakes but still pretty cool!

Right, time for me to find my Ghost pics, this one always scared the bejesus out of me (because they were in my beloved Mysteries of the Unknown: Monsters, Ghosts and UFO book which I recieved in Xmas '78 or there abouts when I was about 6) -

1) the mother-in-law who had just died but somehow appeared in the back of this poor man's car


2) the famous brown lady photo:



and 3) for good measure it also had the monk photo on the same page:




Unfortunately all three have good reason to be either double exposures either taken deliberately (the brown lady one is particularly suspicious because the stairs, which seemingly still exist, are in fact straight and do not have a 'mezzanine' level that the picture implies that it has - which suggest some serious photo manipulation.) The monk looks more like a plastic skeleton wrapped in a few sheets, and the one that always inspired terror in me - the mother-in-law on the back seat, might be some form of double exposure (if you look carefully at the image apparently...)

Giant Balls of Costa Rica & the Yakutia cauldrons.

pH

Yes I would say there is a whiff of pre-Photo Shop double exposure hanky-panky here.
I have the Brown Lady photo in a book called "Ghosts Caught On Film" by Dr Melvyn Willin.
To be honest half the shots in it look a bit dodgy.

Having spent many happy pre-photoshop hours working away in my black and white darkroom I would say that I have had many images not dissimilar to those; usually due chemical issues. For example one part of the image surfacing in the tray and so not getting fully developed or maybe an undissolved crystal creating a localised chemical concentration. There are so many innocent mistakes that can create equally spooky effects and that's before you even start trying to manipulate them.

Venusian Broon said:

the mother-in-law on the back seat, might be some form of double exposure

Click to expand...

Or she might really have been in the car - and it was simply forgotten that the shot was taken before she had died.

Brian Turner said:

Or she might really have been in the car - and it was simply forgotten that the shot was taken before she had died.

Click to expand...

Apparently it was definitely taken after her death - hence the reason the couple involved made a big song and dance about it.

However if it really was a real photograph with the living mother-in-law in the back, what's with the burning laser eyes!!!

Venusian Broon said:

Apparently it was definitely taken after her death

Click to expand...

And apparently no one was around during the spaceman photo.

Human memory seems to be a fickle thing...

Brian Turner said:

And apparently no one was around during the spaceman photo.

Human memory seems to be a fickle thing...

Click to expand...

Always, it always is

But no - seemingly there is a tiny overlap of the image of the scary woman in the back over the top of the frame of the car door - so unless she was actually a real 'ghost' in the picture floating in some sort of semi-visible ectoplasm, the image can't be real and must be some sort of double exposure.

Everything about that one looks all wrong to me. I don't even think it is a double exposure. You can see the windows at the back and far side of the car through all the windows except the driver's where, other than the 'mother-in-law,' there is only black behind the driver. From the angle you should be able to see the light of both the rear window and the far rear side window. Also the scaling is wrong; the 'mother-in-law' does not appear to be sitting on the back seat at all but in the middle of the driver's seat back.

Vertigo said:

Everything about that one looks all wrong to me. I don't even think it is a double exposure. You can see the windows at the back and far side of the car through all the windows except the driver's where, other than the 'mother-in-law,' there is only black behind the driver. From the angle you should be able to see the light of both the rear window and the far rear side window. Also the scaling is wrong; the 'mother-in-law' does not appear to be sitting on the back seat at all but in the middle of the driver's seat back.

Click to expand...

Here is a more detailed discussion of the whole thing, along with close ups on the anomalies in the photo:

http://www.skeptic.com/insight/double-exposure-in-the-back-seat/

You probably know a lot more about photography then me Vertigo, so you can tell me if the article truly makes sense!

I would agree with a lot of what is said there (they also make the observation that the mother-in-law's position is too far forward. But I would also say that an accidental double exposure is rather unlikely as almost the entire image area of the 'original' other than the head and shoulders would have had to be completely black to have had no impact on the rest of the second (double) exposure of the car and driver. But it would have been extremely easy to do when printing ie. deliberately.

The doubt about the timing at the end of that article could be problematic, but only if we stick to the accidental double exposure. I'd like to know what has happened to the negative as that would almost certainly clear up the whole thing. I notice no mention of the negative in any of the articles. And people would not normally throw negatives away. Also, frankly, I don't believe anyone can positively identify who the image is of; it is simply not a good enough image. In fact I personally think it looks far more like a man with a moustache.

The disappearance of the ore ship USS Cyclops in 1918 .

REF: Baylor
It's fairly easy to explain as with a lot of the so-called Bermuda Triangle disappearances.
The ship was a bit of a botch up (it's design had been poorly altered) and the cargo it was carrying was highly dangerous.
Nearly all the vanishings can be explained, it's a large area subject to sudden bad weather.
As for all the aircraft, planes are not designed to float, they tend to sink like a stone.
A lot has been made of this area over the years but like UFOs it's all talk and no trousers!

Yes, the ship losses in BT are no worse per volume of shipping than anywhere else, taking account of weather, There is nothing to explain.
Now also with documented proof of the single giant waves, virtually every unexplained open ocean loss is covered.

The Stone Balls of Costa Rica .

BigBadBob141 said:

REF: Baylor
It's fairly easy to explain as with a lot of the so-called Bermuda Triangle disappearances.
The ship was a bit of a botch up (it's design had been poorly altered) and the cargo it was carrying was highly dangerous.
Nearly all the vanishings can be explained, it's a large area subject to sudden bad weather.
As for all the aircraft, planes are not designed to float, they tend to sink like a stone.
A lot has been made of this area over the years but like UFOs it's all talk and no trousers!

Click to expand...

Upon further reading yes, the Cyclops was an accident waiting to happen.

Here's my problem with UFOs.

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams

Question 1: How far away are the aliens? Are they only a few light years away? If so, maybe - maybe - they have access to high-powered telescopes that can detect life here on Earth - if they're even looking in our direction. And why would they be?

If they're hundreds of light years away, then when they look into their telescopes, they're seeing the Middle Ages, or earlier. Why would an advanced space faring civilization want to go visit that era of human history? Or do they have some way to extrapolate the future of humanity to calculate the probability of where our civilization will be when they finally arrive?

Question 2: How far away are the aliens? Yes, same question. Assuming they saw us through telescopes (or whatever) and liked what they saw, and had a means to get here, then:

If they're only a few light years away, do they get here using some advanced sub light speed propulsion that gets them here in less than a lifespan? What are the chances of that happening? Why would they spend the resources to do that? And if they're that close, then why haven't we definitively detected them yet?

If they're hundreds of light years away, have they developed FTL? If not, are they using slower than light tech? Generation ships? Cryosleep? Why would a civilization spend such a huge amount of resources just to say hello to a random blue green world so very far away?

If they HAVE developed FTL, then how do they get over the "arriving before the event you're seeing in your telescope" problem? A civilization that is 100 light years from us looks through their telescopes and sees the year 1916. They go FTL, and arrive in 50 years - in 1866. This opens up a problem with FTL generally, but that's for another time.

So the ultimate question is this:

How does an alien civilization ultimately see us now and get to us now?

sinister42 said:

How does an alien civilization ultimately see us now and get to us now?

Click to expand...

Live on Earth in your jungle base, spy by CCTV and then arrive by aircraft? Even that doesn't work.
Actual beings from offworld, unless it's something Mars or Europa, visiting by stealth is as much fantasy as the Fair Folk and the Fairy Otherworld.

sinister42 said:

Here's my problem with UFOs.

Click to expand...

Here's my problem with your definition of UFOs

(I agree with your comment as you've set it out, but it's one my pet bugbears when the hoary old UFO = aliens in flying saucers straw-man is brought up )

It's a very narrow and tight definition - little green men coming in to visit mechanical saucers from another planet. It's set up to be dismissed.

It's Unidentified Flying Object, not aliens a bit like us visiting in a mechanical spaceship. Although I'm completely aware there are years of baggage with the term, I personally prefer UAP now - which is coming back - unidentified aerial phenomena.

There are loads of alternative explanations for what are indeed very strange things that are happening. I myself have witnessed two good encounters, that unfortunately will remain unsolved, although I have my own strong suspicions. I fully suspect there is a great number of different effects being interpreted as UFO's - for example, taking Ray's comment, there are some very strong parallels with fairy encounters reported hundreds of years back and current tales of alien abducting or visitation, which suggests some common psychological motif recurring within us as humans. But there are also tentative explanations for real physical sightings, ranging from the mundane (top secret government projects - at least I'd call that mundane!) to new physical science/interactions ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." )

Personally, I don't think there are any civilisations anywhere near us - I suspect 99.999999% of all life in the universe is bacteria and the closest civilisation 'now' like ours is probably in the Andromeda galaxy, but I'd really like some alien visitors. They'd have to have some really weird science, be inter-dimensional or from another universe (or something similar!) But I fully admit such a possibility has no evidence and is very unlikely .