The Courthouse Ghost
Benjamin Radford debunks the Santa Fe courthouse "ghost" video over at LiveScience. He has managed to exactly duplicate the image captured on the video camera last week.
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO—Over the past week, a glowing, fuzzy white blob became an unlikely international star. It was captured on videotape early Friday morning, June 15, by a security camera at a courthouse here.
The “ghost video” has been seen over 75,000 times on YouTube; what started as a local curiosity soon became a national, then international, story.
Theories abounded: Some said that the image was the ghost of a murdered man. Others thought it was just a video glitch, or a hoax, or a spider, or maybe a reflection from a passing car.
As a scientific paranormal investigator, I was asked by a Santa Fe newspaper to look into the case. Over the past decade, I have conducted dozens of investigations into lake monsters, psychics, ghosts, crop circles, and many other “unexplained” phenomena. This was certainly unexplained, and I was intrigued.
What it is not
After the first day of investigations, I eliminated most of the theories. It was almost certainly not a hoax, because it’s unlikely anyone would think to make a blurry, indistinguishable blob on a courthouse surveillance video. Nor was it a reflection or a video glitch…..
……. I arrived at 7 a.m. and carefully placed ladybugs and other insects on top of the video camera. I waited for them to crawl around, and soon went inside the courthouse to check the videotape. While some of the images of ladybugs were obviously too large and dark to be ghostly culprit, at 7:26 a.m. we hit paydirt: The ghost appeared in the video.
Using the insects, I duplicated the ghost image. Everyone agreed that the image was exactly the same as the courthouse ghost in every respect, including size, shape, color, and movement.
The weeklong mystery is solved: The Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost was a bug.
Which is a real relief for us here at Blue Crab Boulevard. Because Uncle Guido wasn't in Santa Fe last week, apparently.
By Bleepless, Sunday, 24 June , 2007 @ 4:42 pm
Aw, this is old news. I’ve seen it many times on the X-Files.