Explanation
Finally, Benjamin Radford, a managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine, a LiveScience columnist and author of hundreds of articles and several books on science, skepticism, and the paranormal, was invited at the request of The New Mexican to do research on the phenomenon. He believed the undetermined object was a piece of tree fluff or a spider or insect crawling across the camera lens. Having interacted with many similar ghost videos of this type, he said that the blurry video made it difficult to tell exactly what the image captured. Usually, the lower the quality of the image, the more likely the object is deemed to be a ghost. To find out what lay behind the mystery, he conducted two sets of experiments, including scattering the cotton from the cotton tree and using the insects. The first set appeared to be inconclusive, since the cotton didn’t make a glowing fluffy ball as the one in the ghost image. The second set using a bug, in the end, was more successful: Radford recreated an accurate "ghost" down to its color, size, shape and movement. It was agreed that the mystery had been solved thoroughly and the origin of the ghost was nothing more than a bug. A detailed report on Radford’s experiments was published in Skeptical Inquirer magazine's September/October issue that year.
Read more about this topic: Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost
Famous quotes containing the word explanation:
“Young children constantly invent new explanations to account for complex processes. And since their inventions change from week to week, furnishing the “correct” explanation is not quite so important as conveying a willingness to discuss the subject. Become an “askable parent.””
—Ruth Formanek (20th century)
“To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.”
—Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)
“What causes adolescents to rebel is not the assertion of authority but the arbitrary use of power, with little explanation of the rules and no involvement in decision-making. . . . Involving the adolescent in decisions doesn’t mean that you are giving up your authority. It means acknowledging that the teenager is growing up and has the right to participate in decisions that affect his or her life.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)