Water Vapor Test Debunks Another Natural Explanation for Orbs

When skeptics try to debunk dramatic orb photos like the ones shown on this site, they usually suggest that orbs are just dust. This hypothesis doesn't work, because so many of the orbs shown on this site are either too big to be dust, too bright to be dust, too fast-moving to be dust, too colorful to be dust, too regularly observed to be dust, too surrounded by clean air to be dust, or too closely resembling faces to be dust.  In the case of numerous photos on this site, several of these "can't be dust" conditions apply at the same time.

There is also the fact that virtually all of the orb photos shown on this site were taken in places that were not at all dusty. The photos in Grand Central Station were taken at a very clean balcony area, directly facing a huge mass of clear air, about 10 meters above pedestrians. Grand Central Station has a very efficient air filtration system that keeps its air very clean. We cannot plausibly imagine that at such a location you would have enough dust for dust to produce frequent orbs.

I previously tried 2 tests of the "orbs are dust" theory, and in both cases it flunked utterly. In one I took lots of photos while raising very heavy dust while cleaning a hair-entangled vacuum cleaner chamber, but all I was able to get were a few tiny, pale, orbs looking nothing like the dramatic orbs on this site.  See also this post which contrasts a case of 10 orbs seen in dust-free air,  and no orbs seen in very dusty air -- another case that debunks the idea that dust can explain the more dramatic orb photos.  See also the 9 photos on this site labeled "air orb too distant to be dust" and the 8 photos labeled "air orb too large to be dust" (as well as the 19 posts labeled "inexplicable orb motion," which show orbs moving in ways that dust never does).

But what about other possible natural explanations for orbs? Skeptics offer ideas such as reflection, water vapor, and pollen.

Reflection of ordinary light from a camera flash cannot explain orbs, as I show in the test described in this post.  In that test I took many photos trying to maximize reflections from a camera flash, by using multiple mirrors. But still no orbs resulted when this was done. It is true that if one points a camera at a very bright light (like the sun or a very bright spotlight), one can get lens flare, which can produce some natural orbs. But that cannot explain any photos on this site, since none of the photos were taken facing a bright light.

The pollen hypothesis is basically just a variation of the dust hypothesis, so it has all the same weaknesses, plus the additional weakness that one gets appreciable pollen only during two or three months outdoors (most commonly April and May). So pollen is worthless in explaining indoor photos, particularly indoor photos taken during winter (such as many photos I have already published here).

But what about water vapor -- could that explain orbs?  Could it be that when we see an orb we are just seeing a reflection from a speck of water vapor in the air?  To test this theory, I tried a test that is very easy to repeat. I let the shower in my bathroom run hot water for 7 minutes, until the bathroom filled with steam.

I then took 14 flash photos like the one above, to see if any orbs might show up because of the increased water vapor. But not a single orb appeared in any of the photos.

While water vapor may be an explanation for some orbs photographed outdoors in misty or rainy conditions, the test here shows that water vapor cannot explain orbs photographed indoors (unless one is taking photos in a steam bath or sauna, perhaps).

So the water vapor hypothesis fails as miserably as the other attempts to naturally explain the more dramatic photos of orbs, such as those posted here and on many other Internet sites.

Postscript: Later I took 67 photos, each made just after a plant sprayer was sprayed near the camera lens, with the sprayer set to produce a fine mist.  This type of test is not relevant to indoor conditions, since it produces air water so thick that water visibly accumulates on the ground; and no indoor spot (except something very unusual like a steam bath) has such conditions. But such a test may be relevant in simulating outdoor conditions of extreme dampness.

But even in this case, there were no results relevant to explaining any of the more dramatic orb photos. The photos showed lots of tiny round water vapor orbs, but the only colors were gray, white, or brownish. There were none of the dramatic orb colors shown on this site (pink, purple, green, blue, orange, and yellow).  None of these "mist orbs" was bright, none showed any sign of motion, and none of them was larger than about 3% of the original photo size.  So even a very thick "light rain" type of water vapor cannot explain photos of big orbs or bright orbs or colorful orbs or fast moving orbs, many examples of which can be found on this site. But I would recommend anyone trying to photograph orbs outdoors to try to avoid rainy or misty weather, and to describe the weather conditions when posting a photo of an orb anomaly.

The photos were taken of water mist using an ordinary camera showing a 3 foot wide area. If you "zoom in" the lens of a camera, and go into the "macro mode" used for closeup photography, it is possible to get closeup photographs of water mist droplets larger than 3%  of the photo size. But such conditions are so extreme (both in the camera setting and in the fact that you are spraying mist right in front of the camera) that they have no relevance in explaining orb photos.