She May Know Ghosts, But She Doesn't Know Orbs

Skeptical blogger Hayley Stevens (who describes herself as a "ghost geek") has a new post trying to push the untenable “orbs are dust” theory that I have thoroughly debunked in this post. In the post she scolds some people for doing a “lack of research,” but she gives us no sign that she has done any serious research on the topic of orbs.

She speaks as if orbs are something photographed only in dusty old buildings, for she concludes her post by asking, “Is it so odd to photograph out-of-focus particles in the air when taking photos with a flash in an old, dusty, draughty building?” But the truth is that 99% of orb photographs are not taken in buildings that are old and dusty. 99% of orb photographs are taken outdoors or in buildings with ordinary clean air, such as the homes of orb photographers. If you doubt this, look at the photographs on this blog, and look at my “Paranormal Photos by Others” link which has links to the photos taken by many other orb photographers.

The “orbs are dust” hypothesis falls apart once we do some simple math that Haley forgot to do. The area in front of a camera lens is about 10 millimeters in  length or 10,000 microns (a micron is a thousandth of a millimeter). That means the area (length times width) of the region right in front of the camera is about 10,000 microns times 10,000 microns, or a total of 100 million microns. But indoor dust particles in ordinary air get no bigger than about 10 microns in length (which is an area of 100 microns). That means a dust particle in ordinary air can block no more than about a millionth of the area right in front of a camera. Such a degree of blockage obviously can't explain orbs that appear as 10 percent or more of the original photo height. In fact, ordinary dust particles are about 1000 times too small to produce decent-size orbs in photos. The dust particles in dry outdoor air are even smaller, with an average size of only about 1 micron. 

Below is an orb I photographed that took up 15 percent of the original photo height.  Try throwing dust right in front of your camera, and you will never get something that looks like this. Notice also the sharp, clear edges and fine details, which is completely different from the way "out-of-focus" particles look (Hayley would have us believe that orbs are "out-of-focus" particles). When you throw dust in front of a camera and photograph it, or squeeze a dusty rag in front of the camera, what you get (as shown here) are tiny circles that are dim, featureless, colorless, and with blurry edges, looking nothing like any of the more impressive orb photos.

 

Such math proves that dust cannot explain the more dramatic orbs appearing in photos. But there's another way to prove the same thing without math. You simply consider the fact that if dust particles in ordinary air were sufficient to produce orbs, then everybody would be constantly getting orbs in most of their flash photos. No such thing happens. 99% of people who have no interest in getting orbs never get a noticeable orb in their photos. But those who have a sustained interest in photographing orbs get orbs in their photos in astonishing numbers, even when photographing in clean, dry air. I never got a single orb in a photograph until I first expressed an interest in getting something paranormal in my photos. Three photos later I had my first orb photo.

Haley mentions looking down at a flashlight pointing up, a consideration that is irrelevant. Such a thing causes an amplification effect in which invisible dust particles suddenly become visible. Such a thing is irrelevant because no orb photographer ever photographs with a high-beam flashlight underneath his camera. It is a known fact that ordinary air contains invisible dust particles. It is also known that in ordinary air such particles get no bigger than about 10 microns, way too small to produce orbs in photos.

Of course, an “orbs are dust" hypothesis is completely unable to explain the dramatic colors that so often appear in orb photos – such as blue, purple, orange, green, yellow, and pink. On this blog I've published more than 1000 such photos, including 875 photos of blue orbs and 373 photos of purple orbs. And such a hypothesis is completely unable to explain the fact that photos very often show orbs moving at astonishing speeds, with a “string of pearls” effect showing very rapid motion. You can't explain that with a dust hypothesis (indoor dust particles move about at a speed of only 2 miles per hour). On this blog I've published more than 500 photos of speeding orbs.

As shown here, I have photographed more than 200 orbs with dramatic stripes, and no one ever reported seeing a stripe in a dust particle prior to my first photographs of striped orbs. Many of these striped orbs show recurring patterns, in which you will see the same very distinctive pattern repeated between 2 and 11 times. See here for a post collecting these recurring patterns, which are completely inexplicable under any dust hypothesis. If there were 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 orb photographers scattered throughout the universe, and they were photographing merely natural particles like dust, we would not expect that even one of those photographers would coincidentally get as many distinctive pattern recurrences as I have documented. 

I may note that all of these 200+ photos I have taken showing striped orbs are all photos showing sharp, clear details in orbs, something we would never see if orbs are just "out of-focus particles" as Haley maintains. You cannot see sharp, clear details in some out-of-focus particle near your camera.  The existence of sharp details in so many orb photos is one of the reasons why the physics Ph.D Klaus Heinemann has concluded that natural particles such as dust absolutely cannot explain such anomalies.