An Orb Transfiguration?

 The year 1874 might be considered a "high water mark" for reports of the paranormal. To read about some of the amazing things reported in that year, you can read my post  "Spookiest Years, Part 12: The Year 1874" using the link here. 

At the link here you can read an account by a newspaper reporter attending a seance in 1874.  After reporting the appearance of a mysterious light, the writer reports this:

"The features grew brighter, until it was a beautiful, womanly, fascinating face, all sweetness and exquisite mirth -- the ball of light developing into eyebrows, nose, eyes, a tinge of red on the cheeks and lips, all forming a miracle of loveliness, but never absolutely distinct nor seeming to be actually a tangible something. But as it finally became almost strongly distinct, it was a face artistic to the last degree."

 On page 159 of a 19th century book, we have an account in which it is claimed that a young girl "hundreds of times"  took on the appearance of her brother who had died years before. A doctor supposedly weighed the girl, and found that during these transfigurations her weight was almost doubled. In other accounts of transfigurations, it may be reported that some person's face becomes inexplicably illuminated. In the Sept 17, 1875 edition of The Spiritualist, page 142, we have an account by A. Joy claiming that a medium named Mrs. Crocker in Chicago underwent transfigurations in which "her face entirely changed its form, size and character," to match those of certain deceased figures, such as a man with a beard.  In a book on hypnotism, Professor William Gregory seems to describe a kind of transfiguration that may occur under deep hypnosis. Using the term "mesmeric sleep" for a hypnotic state, he states this: "In the highest stages of the mesmeric sleep, the countenance often acquires the most lovely expressions, surpassing all that the greatest artists have given to the Virgin Mary, or to Angels, and which may fitly be called heavenly, for it involuntarily suggests to our minds the moral and intellectual beauty which alone seems consistent with our views of heaven." 

It seems that certain mediums call themselves "transfiguration mediums," and claim to produce a phenomenon in which their faces transform to resemble the faces of departed persons, possibly with the help of ectoplasm. You can find some examples by following the links after using this search query, which searches for the word "transfiguration" in the archives of the Psychic News periodical. On page 287 of the publication here, we have an account of transfiguration,  in which someone claims that a friend saw him "enveloped in a cloud of purple" with his face then taking on the appearance of deceased people.  On the page  here we have an account of transfiguration in the clairvoyant Mollie Fancher. Describing Fancher, the author says, "I have seen her at times when she was strangely transfigured ; her features were illuminated."

It has sometimes been reported that a human faces has undergone a kind of transfiguration at the moment of death. For example, here is a news report on the death of the wife of US president William McKinley:

"One of those who watched at the death bed of Mrs. McKinley speaks of the last moments as follows:

'I will never believe that Mrs. McKinley did not know at the very moment of the soul's transition that she was passing from death unto life. I bent over her at that moment and saw her face transfigured as though animated by great Joy.' "

Such an account is "small potatoes" or "chickenfeed" compared  to the far more dramatic deathbed transfiguration account found on page 477 of the October 7, 1911 edition of the periodical Light. That account includes an enormously strange element of faces of the deceased appearing on the face of a dying person. 

"A well-known business man of New York passed away. His widow is a clear-minded and educated lady, without any morbid or superstitious taint in her nature, or any belief in Spiritualism. While bending over her husband shortly before his death she observed that the expression of his face was changing, and the next moment saw there, instead, the face of her dead brother. The two men were entirely unlike in appearance, one being light and having a blond beard, and the other very dark. Shortly afterwards the lady saw on her husband’s face the expression of another deceased friend, and a little later that of a third. Her morbid and overwrought fancy deceived her, someone says. Could two persons be deceived at the same time and in the same way? I ask this because three years ago this lady and her sister watched beside the dying child of the latter. The little girl’s face suddenly changed. One of the ladies saw that the other observed this, and said : ‘ Emily, who was it ? ’ ‘ Adelaide,’ was the answer. 'Yea, Adelaide. ’ The two ladies told our informant that they saw unmistakably the face of their dead cousin, a woman, shining out through the face of the dying child. She could offer no explanation of these phenomena, and we present them, because they seem unusual and interesting."

The Newspaper Story Described Mystery Orb Antics

 Below is a newspaper article written by the very mainstream source United Press International. You can read the full story here. 

Freaky Flip

 We see below two Corelle bowls in a dish container. While they were in a state looking very much like this, I saw one of them today mysteriously flip over and fall about 18 inches. No hand was nearby. 

Of course, the bowl did not shatter, crack or chip, even though it fell on a hard surface. Corelle bowls and dishes are pretty much indestructible, and I have used the Corelle bowls above steadily for 21 years. If I had to guess about any symbolic meaning to this spooky event, I might say that maybe we have some symbolizing of indestructibility related to the indestructibility of the soul. 

Postscript: The event seems to have a kind of "one left" motif that was matched by a dream I had three days later. I dreamed I was looking at my deceased father, who was wearing sunglasses that were missing one of their lenses.  So the dream had a "one left" motif, with only one of the two lenses remaining. Conceivably I may have received here two "one left" warnings that could symbolize the idea of one month left in my life, or one year left in my life. 

Mysterious Blue Indoor Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 21)

 Below is Part 21 of a retrospective showing some of the better photos I have taken indoors of mysterious blue orbs photographed indoors. 

The photo shows a mysterious striped blue orb I photographed at Grand Central Terminal in New York.

I took the photos below in Grand Central Terminal in New York in late 2016. 

Below are three photos I took of mysterious orbs in Grand Central Terminal.

The photo below shows a bright blue orb that I photographed at Grand Central Terminal in New York.

The photo below shows a mysterious blue orb I photographed near the tip of the US flag in Grand Central Terminal in New York.

Below we see two mysterious orbs I photographed in Grand Central Terminal. 

In the top right of the photo below is a mysterious blue striped orb that I photographed in Grand Central Terminal in New York.

"String of Pearls" Orb Motion: A Retrospective (Part 1)

 What I call the "string of pearls" effect is an effect in which a photo seems to show multiple position states of an orb traveling very fast. Below is Part 1 of a retrospective of my photos showing such an effect.

My photo below shows what looks like a blue orb traveling very fast. 

My photo below shows what seems to be a fast orb making a sharp change in direction.

The photo below shows a mysterious orb I photographed indoors.  

Below we see a mysterious speeding orb I photographed. 

Below we see a bright speeding orb I photographed indoors. 

We see below a mysterious speeding orb I photographed indoors.

We see below what looks like a fast-moving bright orb, one I photographed indoors. 

A Harvard Professor's Musings on "UAP Orbs"

 Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb has just written a post entitled "Are UAP Orbs an Extension of Ball Lightning?" He states this:

"Ball lightning represents a mysterious phenomenon in atmospheric physics, reported for centuries, photographed rarely, and still lacking a fully confirmed physical explanation, even though it’s almost certainly real.

Witnesses reported a luminous, roughly spherical object, typically of basketball size, lasting for a few seconds to a few minutes. The average ball lightning appears as a sphere with a diameter of 30 centimeters, a luminosity similar to a 100-Watt lamp, and a lifetime of about 10 seconds (as reported here). This duration is much shorter than most orbs associated with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), which were reported by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office in the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to have lasted hours (for example, here)."

There have been very many reports of mysterious orbs seen with the naked eye. You can read about such reports in my 200+ posts with a label of "orbs visible to naked eye," which you can read by using the link here, and continuing to press Older Posts when you come to the bottom right. The vast majority of these reports cannot be classified as "ball lightning." The flow chart below gives a reasonable method for whether a mysterious orb seen with the naked eye should be classified as "ball lightning."

Scientists have no understanding of how lightning or electricity could ever form into balls having the visual characteristics of the spheres reported in observations classified as "ball lightning." Experimentation fails to ever produce such spheres. So you are not doing much of anything to explain the phenomenon of people seeing mysterious orbs by saying that they are seeing ball lightning. 

At the end of the article Loeb says that "the uncertainties inherent in current interpretations of UAP orbs" will be resolved by "high-quality data collected by state-of-the-art instruments." He lists 13 types of technological gizmos that he thinks will reveal the nature of UAP orbs: acceleration/distance sensors, spectrometers, Geiger counters, wide-field visible camera arrays, high-resolution global-shutter tracking cameras, long-wave infrared thermal cameras, event-based cameras, short-wavelength infrared cameras, radio-Frequency spectrum analyzers with direction finding, precision clocks with atomic holdover,  cloud sensor/ceilometers, star tracker/astrometric calibration cameras and acoustic microphone arrays with infrasound sensors. 

But given how infrequently people report seeing mysterious orbs, it is very unlikely that any such devices will be of much use. You could also invest in such fancy and expensive technological devices to try to unravel the mystery of apparition sightings. But it would be a misguided approach, because it would be very unlikely that such a device would be present at the rare times when someone reported seeing an apparition. 

There is a much better and much simpler approach: spend lots of time gathering, classifying  and studying existing reports of mysterious orbs and all other spooky unexplained phenomena, instead of being so prone to discard and ignore reports of mysterious explained phenomena, which tragically is a very bad tendency of the average materialist science. During the past 70 years most physical scientists have been guilty of extremely bad dereliction of duty, by following a "nothing spooky allowed" principle under which they would discard or ignore any type of report that does not fit in with their assumptions and beliefs. 

Not Part of Any TV Show

 Photo date: July 22, 2026. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below some mysterious orbs I photographed indoors. The backdrop is a TV screen, and the TV was turned off. It is very rare for me to get a red color in an orb when I photograph indoors.  The last red orb I got indoors was in 2019 (you can see it here).