A Warm Evening Encounter with a Ghostly Mist

Photo date: October 7, 2015. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

The photo below was taken on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It was a clear, warm night with a temperature of 66 degrees. We see a very strange anomaly on the left side of the photo.  It  looks like one of the ghostly mists that I have previously photographed in this series of photos. 

This "ghostly mist" appeared suddenly, and was visible with my eyes for an instant.  In the composite photo below, the first photo is the photo I took a few seconds before the photo above, and the third photo is the photo taken a few seconds after I took the photo above. All three photos were taken at 9:02 PM.

There is no chance at all that this "ghostly mist" was my breath, because with a temperature of 66 degrees, it was way too warm for me to see my breath.  I could not smell or see any smoke nearby.

A photo such as this is not at all rare. Many photographers have taken similar photos, as you can see by doing a Google image search for "ghostly mist."  The phenomenon of unexplained plasma-like clouds photographed at ground level is visually documented at this site, at Mya Gleny's site here, at Yvonne Scouller's site here, in the book "The Orb Project" by Miceal Ledwith and Klaus Heinemann, Ph.D., and in the book "Beyond Photography: Encounters with Orbs, Angels and Light-Forms," by  Katie Hall and John Pickering.  These anomalies are sometimes called lightforms or plasma clouds, although the best way to find examples is to use a search term of "ecto-mist" or "ghostly mist."

My experience here is identical to one recently reported on the "Orbs & More" site, which reports the appearance of a similar object, which could not be seen in the next photo.

There was no fog, mist, rain, or precipitation on this night.  The air quality listed on airnow.gov was "good," with a rating of 28.  Weather.com listed the local weather on this night as "mostly clear."