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Oil, Orbs, and Open Eyes

They look like regular dust orbs in most of the pictures, and the one in the video too.

The oil, probably they need to check with the cleaners as to what they are using to clean the wood. It could be residue from polish or something similar.
 
First Texan I ever heard of being shocked at discovering oil.

The dust which causes orbs is not usually on the camera lens. It can be a tiny speck drifting by, which is illuminated by on camera flash, or by sunlight. The out of focus 2-d appearance is characteristic of something small and close to the lens. Orbs are extremely rare in macro shots, which is just what you would expect if they are close , o-o-f artifacts.

Dust can also be inside the lens (especially with telephoto zoom units. ) or on the moire filter or IR filter (if there is one) above the CCD.

What shocks me about orb believers is how quickly they reject all the obvious optical causes. I once saw a woman get excited about a ghost in a digital photo, which was quite clearly her own, out of focus finger.

The point of light in the video looks to me like an insect which takes off from near the floor, is lit by one of the many spotlights on the ceiling and flies towards the camera and away.
I can't see it passing through anyone, that's just a matter of contrast. Any data on the video frame rate?
 
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I recently saw a video of a supposedly haunted house. The camera was tripped by passive IR motion sensor. There was a putative moving orb in the video which showed the classic, erratic movement of an insect. The apparent high velocity was all angular velocity- it was inside the minimum focal range of the camera , so looked like a large, fast moving object with no detail. My conclusion was a small fly within inches of the camera.

I think the same here. The flat depth of field confuses the issue, making the light appear to start near the people in the distance. I suspect it actually is very close to the camera.
 
More evidence that people will believe whatever the hell they want to. Shame on the TV station for even reporting it.
 
As a fellow Orb I am simply shocked at the behavior of my brethren! Streaking at church! Shame on you! And go on a diet, geesh!
 
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LeCynthia said:
For orbs, check here, http://www.starthinker.com/starthinker/orbs.html . Was done up in a hurry, but explains it pretty well.
Click to expand...
This quick little site sums it up pretty well. Although I think there is one error, that is that the light from the flash hitting the dust speck isn't reflected back as an out of focus blob. The opposite is what usuually happens, the dust spec is reflected back in focus (or close to in focus). That is why we see them. The reason that we see so many is the common digital camera has a very short focal length lens. Short focal length lenses have lots of depth of field. One of the most common CCD sizes is 7.2 X 5.3 mm. A normal focal length lens is the diagonal of the frame. Pythagoras says that a normal length lens on this size CCD is about 9mm. A four time optical zoom might range from 7mm to 28mm. A disposable 35mm camera probably has a focal length anywhere from 28mm to 35mm (a normal 35mm camera lens is 50mm). This predicts that if you find a box of photos shot with 110 film or the infamous Kodak Disc film that their small negative size means short focal length lenses and therefore more orbs.

I've also seen many orbs that in my opinion are lens flare. If the general scene is dark and the orbs are randomly distributed then we know that dust or air born moisture is the most likely cause. If the scene is brighter or has a fairly bright light source and the orbs lay on a straight line, often intersecting the light source, then lens flare is the most likely cause. While lens flare usually has the telltale hexagonal or octagonal shape, lenses with a fixed aperature would have round flares. Airborn particles do seem to be the most common.

The most frustrating thing is that even when you know what is going on and provide rational explanations including math and measurements these people don't want to believe that they have merely taken a bad picture. I guess the paranormal is more fun. I have no idea why.
 
jimlintott said:
This quick little site sums it up pretty well. Although I think there is one error, that is that the light from the flash hitting the dust speck isn't reflected back as an out of focus blob. The opposite is what usuually happens, the dust spec is reflected back in focus (or close to in focus). That is why we see them. The reason that we see so many is the common digital camera has a very short focal length lens. Short focal length lenses have lots of depth of field. One of the most common CCD sizes is 7.2 X 5.3 mm. A normal focal length lens is the diagonal of the frame. Pythagoras says that a normal length lens on this size CCD is about 9mm. A four time optical zoom might range from 7mm to 28mm. A disposable 35mm camera probably has a focal length anywhere from 28mm to 35mm (a normal 35mm camera lens is 50mm). This predicts that if you find a box of photos shot with 110 film or the infamous Kodak Disc film that their small negative size means short focal length lenses and therefore more orbs.

I've also seen many orbs that in my opinion are lens flare. If the general scene is dark and the orbs are randomly distributed then we know that dust or air born moisture is the most likely cause. If the scene is brighter or has a fairly bright light source and the orbs lay on a straight line, often intersecting the light source, then lens flare is the most likely cause. While lens flare usually has the telltale hexagonal or octagonal shape, lenses with a fixed aperature would have round flares. Airborn particles do seem to be the most common.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I hope you guys didn't gobble up my bandwidth as I lost my server and this is just being hosted at home (thanks alot, le). In anycase this was supposed to be followed up by two more pages one showing how if you focus on a point, I used the head of a push pin, in focus you can tell it's a dot but as you you focus on something in the background, and this demonstrates well with a video camera, the head of the pin becomes more and more out of focus and becomes more transparent in the center with a ring on the outside. If you look at the orbs I photographed that's what you mostly see. So while I partially agree that some may be in focus, it's the out of focus specks, and out of focus insects, that are usually mistaken for orbs as they look more like hollow balls than solid specks.

I didn't touch on lense flares because they are more obvious and that was going on the last page. I had many demonstrations to put up but alas, I haven't had the time. Like I said, the second page was going to be more in depth, with videos of moving orbs and orbs "hiding" behind things and showing how orbs magically appear when I wave a duster through a room. I was then going to follow up with some "ghost" pics and perhaps even fake a bigfoot or two. In any case, I kept it simplified for the casual person to see the basics behind what causes orbs and didn't want to get into focal lengths and things a non-expert wouldn't be able to follow. I also wanted to do it in a way to show these things don't have to be staged, how anyone pointing a camera can capture something that appears paranormal.

One more note, this little project started with a book called "How to Photograph the Paranormal" (can't remember the author) and I was going to scan in so-called paranormal pics from the book then recreate them and show how it was done, but I decided against attacking that specific book and made it more general.

Does anyone think it worthwhile to continue with these pages? With some prodding I could find the time.
 
Rather than a moth, I think the moving light is just a dust mote being carried upwards on warm air. The camera seems to be looking downards on the congregation. On a balcony? One would expect rising air currents.
 
Starthinker said:
Thanks, I hope you guys didn't gobble up my bandwidth as I lost my server and this is just being hosted at home (thanks alot, le). In anycase this was supposed to be followed up by two more pages one showing how if you focus on a point, I used the head of a push pin, in focus you can tell it's a dot but as you you focus on something in the background, and this demonstrates well with a video camera, the head of the pin becomes more and more out of focus and becomes more transparent in the center with a ring on the outside. If you look at the orbs I photographed that's what you mostly see. So while I partially agree that some may be in focus, it's the out of focus specks, and out of focus insects, that are usually mistaken for orbs as they look more like hollow balls than solid specks.

I didn't touch on lense flares because they are more obvious and that was going on the last page. I had many demonstrations to put up but alas, I haven't had the time. Like I said, the second page was going to be more in depth, with videos of moving orbs and orbs "hiding" behind things and showing how orbs magically appear when I wave a duster through a room. I was then going to follow up with some "ghost" pics and perhaps even fake a bigfoot or two. In any case, I kept it simplified for the casual person to see the basics behind what causes orbs and didn't want to get into focal lengths and things a non-expert wouldn't be able to follow. I also wanted to do it in a way to show these things don't have to be staged, how anyone pointing a camera can capture something that appears paranormal.

One more note, this little project started with a book called "How to Photograph the Paranormal" (can't remember the author) and I was going to scan in so-called paranormal pics from the book then recreate them and show how it was done, but I decided against attacking that specific book and made it more general.

Does anyone think it worthwhile to continue with these pages? With some prodding I could find the time.
Click to expand...

I was thinking about what I said about focus and realised that I was basically wrong but sort of right. The orbs become enlarged because they are out of focus but I think we still see them because the large depth of field keeps them enough in focus to see them. If they were out of the depth the field they would be obliterated, so far out of focus, that we wouldn't see them.

Yes. I think that the site should be continued. If you detail experiments on how to create these effects I would gladly participate in duplicating them. Repeatability being important to science after all. Hopefully if people could see that there are methods to deliberatley capture what they got by accident they won't think it is so fantastic.
 
Sounds like the 'orbs' have pretty much been dealt with.

But what about the oil? The story said oil on wood AND brass. Probably harder to leave a residue on brass.

But.... I'm not suggesting anything "woo". Any other likely explanations?

And...I'd be wondering if someone may have "helped" the situation along? Seems like the story helped the church get some free publicity.
 
I think the most supernatural thing in that whole video was the 'psychologist'...

"No no, of course it's not God and spirits, we have many different types of explanation for this type of phenomenon, and obviously these are MANIFESTATIONS OF PSYCHOKINETIC ENERGY!!!" [Eyes bulge, voice rises in pitch, colleagues glance at one another]

Re: the oil - hard to know, without a sample, but could be just about anything, from someone sneezing a lot, to a new cleaner, to a spillage, hoax, leak, whatever - or, yes, I suppose it could be Jesus sneaking in when no-one's looking and leaving very small amounts of grease around as a 'hilarious' jape.
 
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