Eeny, Meeny, Chili Beanie, The Spirits Are About To Speak

Ah, the classics. That line from Bullwinkle is perfect for the title to this post. Because the subject is (cue theremin music) orbs! Yes, orbs. Glowing, weird globs of light that appear in pictures. The Daily Mail asks if this is proof that spirits exist. (Cue theremin).

At first, it seemed no more than a curious coincidence. Professor Klaus Heinemann, a researcher for NASA, the U.S. space agency, was studying a collection of photographs his wife had taken at a gathering of spiritual healers when he noticed that many of them featured the same pale but clearly defined circle of light, like a miniature moon, hovering above some of the subjects.

Like most rational people, he assumed that the pictures were faulty. 'I presumed the circles were due to dust particles, flash anomalies, water particles and so on,' says Prof Heinemann.

'But I was sufficiently intrigued that I returned to the room in which the pictures were taken, in the hope of finding an explanation - like a mirror in the background. None was forthcoming.'

Nor could he find any faults with his wife's camera. And as a scientist with considerable experience in sophisticated microscope techniques - examining matter down to atomic levels of optical resolution - his methods were nothing if not rigorous.

Still puzzled, Heinemann set out to discover what else might have caused the mysterious circles. He and his wife began taking hundreds of digital photographs at random events to see whether they could recreate the mysterious effect.

The answer was that they could make these shimmering 'orbs' appear again, but only - absurd as it may sound - if they 'asked' the apparitions to make themselves visible to the camera. And they found this method worked particularly well when the couple photographed spiritual gatherings.

Why that's just plain eerie, right? Nah, as usual, it is much less than it appears - or is being trumped up to be by a man about to publish a book, as the good professor is. Benjamin Radford smoked the "orb phenomenon" some time ago and has recreated orbs rather easily. As can you.

In a series of experiments, I was able to create orb photos under a wide range of circumstances. Orbs can be found in the most un-spooky of settings, and are actually fairly common in daily, amateur photography. They are usually only noticed when a person is actively looking for them as evidence of ghosts. For example, this photo is one of several images I snapped at a New Year's wedding reception that later revealed odd glowing orbs. Proof of spectral party crashers, or a simple photographic trick of light?

The easiest way to create an orb image is to take a flash photograph outdoors on a rainy night. The flash will reflect off the individual droplets and appear as white, floating orbs (the effect is most pronounced in a light rain, though even a little moisture in the air can create mysterious orbs). As researcher Joe Nickell notes in his book Camera Clues , unnoticed shiny surfaces are also common sources of orbs. (As well, flashes reflecting camera straps can produce other ghostly photo effects.)

As Radford points out, if even true believers admit - as they will - that some of the "mysterious" photographs are caused by natural phenomenon, why in the world would you then accept that some must be caused by spirits? Put another way, why would spirits look exactly like photographic errors? The entire spiritualist movement traces back to the Fox Sisters. Despite the fact that two of them publicly confessed that they were frauds, there is still an active group that believes. (And you should see all the defenses of the Fox Sisters on the interwebby.) James Randi has more on the Fox Sisters.