Orbs.

We all know they are a reflection caused by the flash hitting a particle and doing something technical but quite explicable, that results in little circles on your digital photos.

Dust, not ghosts.

I have been saying this since series 2 of Most Haunted,and I said to Phil, Karl and Yvette that orbs were dust.. (Series One I was holding out for a possible thoughtographic explanation – Andrew Oakley of Parasoc gave the first technical/optical explanation of orbs as dust. I had previously been confused by having taken many hundreds of digital photos in dusty locations for work, with never an orb appearing. A change in chip architecture was the missing factor here.

My early skepticism about orbs arose from the fact they did not appear on non-digital pictures (with a few exceptions, but they may not be classic orbs), are not visible to the naked eye, and that they enter the history of ghosts in the 90’s with few if any precursors – I think BOLS (balls of light) can usually be distinguished from orbs, as BOLs are visible to the naked eye.

However my rigorously skeptical brain today made me think “Is dust an adequate explanation?” Parasoc did a series of trials (I was not present) on making orbs appear in specified places, and got results which seemed to show orb/mind interaction – but they were suggestive only, and they have not yet as far as I know tried to replicate the effects.
Odds are they were just random chance, and will not be repeatable.

I am also pretty much 100% certain dust is what causes orbs. The question, and it is a much bigger question the more i think about it, is does the dust origin actually rule out a ghost involvement, or a paranormal on, in the positioning of that dust? It clearly does not:  yet the dust/spirit issue is constantly presented as “one or the other” – yet both COULD be involved. We have been conned in to a false choice:  but actually dust makes perfect sense as an agent for psi events, being small and easily manipulable by psychokinesis– if such exists, and also moving dust would be within the capacity one assumes of the puniest spirit’s “energy level”

Dust moves on air currents, which might show a ghosts presence, and dust is a fine agent which was used historically along with smoke and incense for giving invisible spirits form in the ritual magick practice of “evocation to visible appearance.”

So why one or the other? That is just sloppy thinking. Occam’s Razor suggests dust alone, but Occam’s Razor is frequently dangerously misleading. So are we throwing out the baby with the bathwater, or should you take my argument with a pinch of dust?

cj x