Yet Another Experiment Debunking the "Orbs Are Just Dust" Idea

Photo date: March 20, 2015. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

The site www.youtube.com has some videos attempting to debunk orbs. One incredibly silly video features a skeptic pouring huge amounts of dust directly in front of the camera, with the suggestion that this technique can be used to show that orbs are just dust. The approach suggested is, of course, utterly ridiculous.  The people who photograph orbs and post them to the Internet as unexplained mysteries are photographing orbs in ordinary air, and are not at all photographing orbs in any condition bearing the least resemblance to a condition in which dust is poured in front of the camera.  One cannot explain a phenomenon by using testing conditions totally different from the conditions under which the phenomenon was observed.

A somewhat less ridiculous video shows an experiment in which someone crinkles a wad of dry toilet paper in front of a camera. This method is also objectionable, because virtually never does any one photograph orbs under such a condition, with little specks of dust falling directly in front of the camera.  But I decided to give this test a try, just to see whether anything would show up bearing significant resemblance to the orbs that I have produced in my photographs. No such thing happened.

I  took 82 flash photos while crinkling some dry toilet paper in front of a dark background, as shown below (the little white specks at the top are falling pieces of dust).

The test does produce a few dust orbs, but none of the 82 photos showed any type of orb that an intelligent person would ever post to the Internet as an example of a possibly paranormal orb or an unexplained mystery. The only orbs that were produced were small, dull, and colorless. All were pale-looking looking little things without any brightness, and without any color other than white or gray. None had interesting outer rings, and none appeared to have faces. None of these dust orbs was  any larger than about 5 percent of the photo height.  These dust orbs typically had blurred edges quite different from the sharp outer edges shown in very many orb photos on this site.  There was no sign of any motion other than the ordinary motion of a falling particle.

A typical example is shown below (and most of the photos showed nothing):

This experiment shows that even when one is causing dust to fall directly in front of the camera lens, this still does not produce orbs anything like the dramatic orbs shown on this site, which are so often bright or large or colorful or having outer rings or facial characteristics or seeming to move in inexplicable ways.

See this post, this post,  and this post for similar tests with similar results.  The "orb zone theory" is one that does not stand up to scrutiny, and is also an idea that is incompatible with a little thing called the law of gravity.  The law of gravity tells us that dust very rapidly settles to the ground, the same thing that one actually observes when one raises dust and uses an electronic dust detector to measure how quickly dust settles. The idea that ordinary air is filled with particles of dust sufficient to create dramatic photo anomalies is a fantasy.  Typical, ordinary air at camera level has very little dust, and that invisible dust is not sufficient to show up in flash photos, partially because dust is not a very reflective material.