This is by Doctor Atlantis -- one of the hosts of Monster Talk and I’ll see him at Dragon*Con this year! Yay!
The 8/19/2010 episode of SyFy’s show “Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files” included an investigation of a graveyard phantom. The team missed something pretty obvious -- the actual solution!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I wouldn’t have thought about a spider, but that seems right.
The team jumped into the paranormal explanations too quickly. If that was ghost train, it seems awfully small, and why would the camera catch it, and not be visible to the observers?
So good! I think it should be pretty clear to anyone watching this show that these people have absolutely no interest in debunking these things.
While it has the general shape of a spider, when judging its size by its proportion to the guy in the video, it would be what, 5-6 inches across?
Perhaps more?
Aren’t the large-type spiders mostly burrowers, not web spinners?
Also, judging by …the speed in which the image first appears then disappears from the screen, this just doesn’t appear to be a case of the camera person walking past a stationary object.
The object/figure would seem to have movement of its own – at around 3x the walking speed of the camera person, but in the opposite direction.
It looks like a spider yeah, but home come the guy went straight to it and the cam to, and they did not see tht big ass spider?
The spider would be stuck on the cam…
Just my thoughts..
How can you miss this? It was a spiderweb with a spider in it…The infrared light caught on the web. If you watch closely, you can see the strands of the web as well as the spider. You can even count the spider’s legs.
Hassan–
The trick here, is that for both the camera and for your eye, the three variables size, distance, and speed, are all conveyed by the exact same stimulus–the visual angle on the retina or photo sensor. An object of a given apparent size could actually be small and close, or large and distant. The motion you perceive will depend on whether you believe it is close or distant; in this case, it is very close and at walking speed, but your assumption of 5-6 inches across puts it at quite a bit further distance, and thus a much greater speed.
Look at it again, knowing that the spider is likely no larger than your thumb-tip. It is close to the camera, and at walking speed, and not paranormal in the least.
I’ve heard a UFOlogist speak of watching a craft some 500 feet wide, a mile or so away, going twice the speed of sound and making 90-degree turns that defy physics as we know it. The exact same phenomenon you see explained in this video gives the real explanation–he’s looking through his expensive night-vision goggles at… a moth.
You must log in to post a comment.