Odd Features

 Photo date: February 24, 2025. Photographer: Mark Mahin.

 We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. 

Orange Sky Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 1)

 Below are some photos I previously took of mysterious orange orbs in the sky. All of the photos were taken in clean, dry air when there was no fog, mist, rain or precipitation. None of the objects photographed was the moon. 

The photo below shows a mysterious orange orb (with a kind of purple tinge) that I photographed near the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. 

The photo below shows a mysterious orange orb I photographed near a building on Park Avenue in New York City.

 

The photo below shows a mysterious orb I photographed above a building. The moon on this night was less than a half moon.

In the top right of my photo below, we see an orange sky orb that rather seems to be inside a larger red sky orb.

The photo below shows a mysterious orb I photographed in the sky in 2019:

Below is my 2017 photo showing a very unusual pair of orange-colored sky orbs near a building in New York. 

The photo below shows a mysterious striped orb I photographed in the sky.

Mystery Orbs Mentioned in a Scientific Paper

 The scientific paper "The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena (UAP)"  (which you can read here) has many authors. The paper has this passage on page 13:

"During the last years of World War II, Allied pilots, in both the European and Pacific theaters, began reporting unidentified aerial phenomena that in daylight appeared to be small metallic, sometimes translucent, spheres; and at night appeared to be spherical lights ranging from red to yellow in color [74]. These objects, which earned the nickname 'foo fighters', would often pace the airplanes, sometimes flying right off their wingtips. Reports were made by pilots from the RAF, the Polish Division attached to the RAF [73], the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), the South African Air Force (SAAF) [75], and the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) [75, 73, 65, 76]."

We also have this reference on page 17:

"One of these events was witnessed by test pilot Major J. C. Wise as he prepared to perform a test of the XP-84 jet. The object was spherical in shape and was flying against the wind at an estimated speed of at least 200 mph."

Around pages 20-21 we read of the observation by many of "green fireballs," seen in New Mexico in December 1948 and January 1949.  We read this:

"Throughout December 1948 and January 1949, the number of green fireballs observed in New Mexico continued to increase and were observed by Air Intelligence Officers at Kirtland AFB, Air Defense Command officials, a number of distinguished scientists at Los Alamos, as well as La Paz, himself. In addition, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto (and more than 15 asteroids), had observed a total of three green fireballs during the wave, which he claimed 'were unusual in behavior compared to normal green fireballs' [95]."

We are told that in February 1949  a conference was called to discuss their origin, a conference including the famous physicist Edward Teller.  We read this:

"La Paz insisted that the green fireballs could not be meteors because their trajectories were too flat, their color too green, and that no meteoritic material had been recovered. Teller maintained that since no sound, or sonic boom, was associated with them, they could not be meteors but must be some kind of electro-optical effect [65]. The conference ended with the consensus being that the green fireballs were some kind of natural non-meteoritic phenomenon."

The paper also has this passage on page 57:

"The 'Hessdalen lights' [259] represent the prototype of anomalous light phenomena in the atmosphere. They generally consist of multi-shaped and multicolored balls of light, characterized by a long duration, and sometimes by high-energy emission. The lights range in size from half a meter to 30 meters. Very short-lasting 'flashes' in the sky most often precede Hessdalen Light phenomena. Sometimes plasma-like orbs overlap with the transient appearance of apparently structured phenomena. The reason for this connection is not known yet, but it should be investigated in depth."

The next page refers to this:

"3. The constancy of temperature, the self-containment characteristics of the light balls, and the coexistence of white and red spheres of equal size. 

4. The sudden way in which the phenomenon turns on and off, and the formation of clusters of light balls, also with characteristics of the expulsion of secondary orbs."

An Orb Gradually Forming Into the Figure of a Child?

The 500+ page book "Essays From the Unseen" (which you can read here) is a massive 1885 testimonial by a person claiming to have seen many paranormal wonders.  We do not know the author's name, as he puts only a name of A. T. T. P on his title page. As evidence for the paranormal the book must be classified as less than first-class, only because of the author's refusal to give his name. There were very many people in the nineteenth century who claimed to have seen similar wonders, but who boldly gave their full names (and often even their addresses) when reporting their observations. When you have such a situation, the person too timid to give his name must be classified as a second-class witness. 

The orb-relevant part of the book comes on page 45, when the author states this:

"On one occasion I was sitting at No. 15, Southampton Row, in the company of several others, the Sensitives present being Miss Wood, and a Lady of the name of Fairlamb, and Mr. Herne, a well-known medium, when the figure of a small negro child of four or five years of age, whether boy or girl I did not know, gradually formed from a Ball of light at my feet. I put my hand on the crisp Negro hair of the child. This figure afterwards disappeared in the same manner as it formed, that is, gradually."

We should not exclude this claim merely because of its fantastic-sounding claim, as many similar wonders were reported by witnesses who gave their names and all the details of their observations, including relevant dates and places of observation. You can read about some of their accounts by looking at the 11 posts here. 

Pairs and Trios of Sky Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 3)

Below are some photos I previously took of pairs and trios of mysterious orbs in the sky. All of the photos were taken in clean, dry air when there was no fog, mist, rain or precipitation. 

Below is my 2017 photo showing a very unusual pair of peach-colored sky orbs near a building in New York. 

Below from 2018 is my photo showing two sky orbs near a building. 

My 2018 photo below shows two orbs near St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. 

In my 2018 photo below you may notice the second orb, as it overshadowed by the transparent orb above it. 

My 2018 photo below shows two blue sky orbs:

My 2018 photo below shows two transparent sky orbs seeming to nuzzle each other

My 2017 photo below shows a pair of sky orbs:

My photo below from 2017 rather seems to show a procession of three purple sky orbs:

Below are two photos I took of sky orb pairs in 2017. 

Bright, With Two Features

 Photo date: February 15, 2025. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. 

Do We All Start Out as Orbs?

Below (from page 153 of the document here) is a quotation from a writer who claims to be summarizing what he has read in other texts:

"In consonance with the foregoing extracts from various authors, we are led to summarize as follows: 

Man is a detached portion of spirit essence from the Deific Center. 

He is endowed with deific attributes. 

The detached portion of spirit essence is in the form of a globe or resembling a spherical ball of light. 

This globule or spheroid is dual in its nature and possesses the sex qualities of male and female, or positive and negative principles of relationship.

In the course of time the spherical globe is attracted to earth on magnetic or electrical waves and, dividing, take up their abode in the human fetus as separate entities at the moment of conception."

I don't know whether this speculation is correct, but I do know that the origin of each human body is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the heads of today's scientists, who have no credible explanation for such a marvel of hierarchical assembly, particularly given the lack of any specification in DNA or its genes of how to make a human body or any of its organs or any of its cells. Very many scientists have lied about this topic, trying to explain the origin of a human body by telling the fairy tale that DNA or its genes have a blueprint for building a human body. No such thing exists in DNA or its genes.  The hierarchical organization of the human body is depicted in the diagram below. None of the seven higher levels of organization are specified by DNA or its genes. In the post here I quote dozens of scientists confessing that DNA or its genes are no program, blueprint or recipe for building a human body. 

Besides lacking any credible explanation for how there occurs the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the vast state of hierarchical organization that is a full human body, scientists lack any credible explanation for the origin of human minds.  For a discussion of very many reasons why there is no credibility in  the "brains make minds" dogma of scientists, see my site here. 

For a post describing the failure of scientists to credibly explain the origin of the minds and bodies of adults humans, see my post here, entitled "Why We Do Not Understand the Origin of Any Adult Human Being."  The failure is of the greatest philosophical importance, as it points to the necessity of postulating a purposeful causal reality greater than humans. 

They Saw a Weird Sky Orb for 10+ Minutes

 On pages 104-105 of the December, 1905 edition of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Volume 19), which you can read here, we read this 1905 account of observations by about five witnesses of a strange spherical object in the sky:

"One correspondent (see 27o) reports that his attention was called, during the service, to a 'ball of light about the size of the moon,' with a slight mist over it. Then stars began to shoot out around it, the light rose higher and grew brighter but smaller. Another at the same gathering describes the light as a 'block of fire' rising from the mountain side and moving along for about 200 or 300 yards. It went upwards, a star 'shot out to meet it, and they clapped together and formed into a ball of fire.'  The form changed into something like the helm of a ship. The appearance lasted about a quarter of an hour. This deponent went home to fetch his wife to see the light, but from his house he saw nothing, although the house faces the same mountain side. Returning to the square he again saw it (see 27i). A third witness says that the light was a ball of fire, 'glittering and sparkling,'  and it seemed to be 'bubbling over' (27c). A Mrs. J. and her daughters saw the light at 12.30 a.m. as a ball of fire, white, silvery, vibrating, stationary. Mrs. J. also saw two streamers of grey mist emanating from the ball and in the space between them a number of stars (27rf)....Another witness, whose account lias not been written, described his vision to me as a ball of fire with 4 or 5 pillars of light on the left of the ball, the intervening space containing no stars. He was standing near the last-named witnesses. It will be sufficient here to point out that whilst all the witnesses saw a ball of fire, each saw something in connection therewith not mentioned by the others. All agree in thinking that the duration of the light was from 10 to 15 minutes, but whether 'vision ' minutes are of the same duration as those of solar time remains to be proved."

Bright and Rather Yellow

 Photo date: February 8, 2025. Photographer: Mark Mahin. 

We see below a mysterious orb I photographed indoors. 

Pairs and Trios of Sky Orbs: A Retrospective (Part 2)

Below are some photos I previously took of pairs and trios of mysterious orbs in the sky. All of the photos were taken in clean, dry air when there was no fog, mist, rain or precipitation. 

My 2018 photo below shows mysterious sky orbs with different colors:

My 2018 photo below shows two orbs near a US flag.

My 2018 photo below shows two sky orbs near a building in New York City. 

My 2018 photo below shows a pair of mysterious orbs next to the same building, the Marco LaGuardia hotel in the Flushing area of New York City. 

In front of the same hotel I also photographed the rare pink and green orb you can see here. My post here shows two dramatic orange orbs near this hotel. 

My 2018 photo below shows a pair of sky orbs that seem like a cozy couple: I see three differences between the orbs: they are different shades of blue; one is transparent, and the other is not; and one has an outer ring and the other does not.

My 2018 photo below makes me wonder whether the mysterious orbs were following the jet:

 

My 2018 photo below shows two mysterious orbs near the United Nations building in New York City. 

My 2018 photo below shows three blue orbs near St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York:

My 2018 photo below also shows two mysterious orbs near the United Nations building in New York City. 

To Get More Evidence for the Paranormal, Go Further Down Paths That Have Already Been Successful

The Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (funded by the very wealthy businessman Robert Bigelow) sponsored prizes for the best essays attempting to answer the question of what is the best evidence for life after death. My long blog post here reviews some of the essays that won prizes in this competition.  One of the essays on the Bigelow Institute site is the essay "Advancing the Evidence for Survival of Consciousness" by Arnaud Delorme, Dean Radin, and Helané Wahbeh. Below is a critique of this long essay. 

Before making some suggestions on how to do experiments that might provide evidence for life after death, the essay presents some poorly-conceived ideas about what is and is not good evidence. On page 9 of the essay we have a misconceived "pyramid of evidence" attempt to rate the strength of different types of evidence. It gives these evidence strength ratings, from strongest to weakest:

Strongest

Meta-analyses

Systematic Reviews

Independently Replicated Experiments

Pre-registered Experiments

Planned Experiments

Exploratory Experiments

Case studies and field investigations

Anecdotes

Weakest

As someone who has for quite a few years been a critic of flaws in experimental neuroscience and other types of science research (for example my post here), I consider the "pyramid of evidence" presented above to be misguided and fallacious.  Here are some points to consider:

(1) Although experimental science has a certain glamour in the world of science, experimental results are not in general better evidence than observational results that are not experimental. Non-experimental evidence can be the strongest type of evidence. For example, humans observe certain characteristics in the weather. Such results are the best type of evidence, although they involve no experiments. 

(2) For certain types of experiments, it is very desirable for the experiment to be pre-registered, in the sense of stating an exact research plan and hypothesis to be tested, before any data is gathered. However, pre-registration is merely one of quite a few features that good experimental research should have, and pre-registration by itself does nothing to guarantee a fairly reliable result. You can have pre-registered experiments that are utterly unreliable because of things such as inadequate study group sizes and poor measurement methods.  

(3) A use of either a meta-analysis or a systematic review is no guarantee at all of high-quality evidence. In fields such as biomedicine and neuroscience, there are many very bad and unreliable systematic reviews and meta-analysis examples.  You have a "garbage in, garbage out" situation. If a meta-analysis or systematic review is done on poorly designed Questionable Research Practice experiments, then the result will not be reliable evidence. And, sadly, Questionable Research Practice experiments are very abundant in certain fields such as neuroscience. In some fields a meta-analysis or a systematic review will tend to have a strong bias that reflects the dogmas and prejudices prevailing in such a field.  John P.A. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and data scientist, has stated this: "The production of systematic reviews and meta‐analyses has reached epidemic proportions. Possibly, the large majority of produced systematic reviews and meta‐analyses are unnecessary, misleading, and/or conflicted."

(4) It is a huge mistake to belittle non-experimental observations by calling them  all "anecdotal." Some of the strongest evidence consists of observations not taken in any experimental protocol.  Jails are filled with countless thousands of people sentenced to long prison sentences based on sound observations that were made outside of an experimental framework.  

(5) There are innumerable ways for experimental research to go wrong, and my long post here discusses 50 types of Questionable Research Practices engaged in by experimental researchers. Judging whether research is good or bad is a vastly more complicated affair than the simplistic little scheme suggested by the pyramid graph in the essay "Advancing the Evidence for Survival of Consciousness."

The essay "Advancing the Evidence for Survival of Consciousness" then proceeds to give us a Table 1 which gives criteria as misguided as the criteria in its pyramid diagram. The authors senselessly claim that only "blinded" and "pre-registered" evidence is strong evidence, which is equivalent to making the senseless claim that only experimental evidence is strong evidence. The same Table 1 makes the silly assertion that things observed by more than 100 people should be merely called "suggestive evidence" and that anything reported by fewer than 100 people should be called "unclear or conflicting evidence." 

The evidence standards stated by Delorme, Radin, and Wahbeh are  misguided and confused, and if we used their standards we would have to end up freeing most of the people who are now in prison, and also disbelieving or doubting very many of the solid claims that scientists assert as matter-of-fact realities.  The essay "Advancing the Evidence for Survival of Consciousness" then proceeds to give school grades to various types of evidence for life after death. Most of the grades given make no sense, because they are based on erroneous claims about what qualifies as good evidence. 

 The essay "Advancing the Evidence for Survival of Consciousness" concludes by suggesting some ideas for experiments that might provide additional evidence for life after death or the paranormal.  We have this suggestion regarding experiments with water:

"(I) Apparition in the lab

This experiment tests if a deceased person could influence a physical system to reveal their presence. The physical system would be a controlled source of steam (or smoke) recorded by a high-quality camera. Steam would be used to provide a presumably easily manipulated substance that an apparition might be able to influence. A medium would be asked to invite a deceased person to influence the steam so that it appeared in the form of their face, or someone else’s face, or any recognizable shape. The picture frames of the resulting video would be analyzed using machine vision techniques to automatically identify frames in which faces or shapes appeared. Those video frames would be compared to control session frames, in which the medium did not summon a deceased person. Positive results would include reliably produced faces or shapes in the mediumistic conditions as compared to control sessions."

This would make an interesting experiment to try. But there is no particular reason to think that it would succeed, because no such experiment has previously succeeded (to the best of my knowledge). What would make far more sense is to do additional experiments using a protocol that has already succeeded in abundantly producing results "in which faces or shapes appeared" with extremely massive repetition of the anomalous results. That protocol does not  involve photographing steam, but involves photographing water drops falling against a black featureless background. 

The protocol is described in very exact detail in my post "How to Photograph Paranormal Patterns," which you can read here. Anyone willing to expend about 600 dollars for a camera as good as the Sony A6000 can perform the experiments. There is no need for a medium. 

Following this protocol I was abundantly successful in producing results "in which faces or shapes appeared," as anyone can see by finger-swiping through the free online book here, or by examining the same photos on this site by using the link here, and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right. For a subset of the photos producing face-like shapes in great abundance, use the link here and continue to press Older Posts at the bottom right. 

An example of one of the photos that I took on December 5, 2019 is shown below:

Below is another photo from the same day:

The pattern below (resembling an exultant human figure holding his hands high) appeared in more than 1500 photos one day, and is merely one of very many types of strange patterns appearing with enormous repetitions on individual days:

Besides many thousands of published photos showing effects like the ones shown above, I have published hours of video footage showing my camera viewfinder as I was photographing such photos, which you can see in the posts here. 

The other suggestions by Delorme,  Radin, and Wahbeh for experiments are a mixed bag. Some might be worth trying, and others are impractical. In general, the best rule about trying to get evidence for the paranormal is to try and do more of what has already succeeded, and to try and get more evidence of something already reported. Your chance of getting additional examples of a phenomenon that others have already reported are much greater than your chances of getting examples of some type of phenomenon that no one else has observed. There are innumerable classes of paranormal or anomalous-seeming phenomena that have already been reported. They are discussed in my long post "120+ Types of Paranormal  or Anomalous Experiences," which you can read here. Trying to get additional evidence of one of those types of phenomena is a better bet than trying to get evidence of some never-observed phenomena such as deceased spirits influencing random number generators or AI programs (something suggested by Delorme,  Radin, and Wahbeh). 

The trio has a suggestion on a reincarnation experiment, but a bad one that is impractical. I can give a much better suggestion for a reincarnation experiment. People could be hypnotized, and asked about past lives. Any accounts they gave could be recorded, but before being awoken from hypnosis the people would be told that upon awakening they should not remember anything they said during the hypnotic regression. When the people were awoken from hypnosis, they would not be informed of what they said.   Three months later the same people could by hypnotized, and asked about their past lives. A check would then be made about how well their latest accounts matched with their accounts from three months ago. I am aware of no researcher who has tried this protocol. 

The paper discussed seems like one of the lesser efforts of Dean Radin, who has produced some much better papers relating to the paranormal, some of which are listed here. 

The question of how to judge the quality of evidence is a complicated one, something too complex to be handled by simple little pyramid graphs like given in the paper discussed above.  A better approach might be one using a checklist, in which evidence could be given a score between 1 and 15, based on how many features of best-quality evidence the evidence had.  There would be separate checklists for experimental evidence and non-experimental evidence.  Some of the items on the checklist would be:

• Observer is identified with his real name
• Date of observation is specified
• Report of observation written on same day of observation
• Report of observation published very soon after observation 
• Photograph of observation provided
• Multiple photographs provided
• Multiple named witnesses
• Reported phenomena observed many times
• Observation was straightforward, not the result of some complex processing pathway
• Witness has no financial or career motive to slant or misstate results

The more items checked on the checklist, the higher the evidence quality rating would be. 

I may note that much of the evidence published in scientific papers might rate poorly using such a checklist. In today's experimental papers, we typically have use of a passive voice in which the exact observer is not identified, and the date of observation is not specified. We do not know how long a gap there was between the observation report and the observation. The results reported in scientific papers are often the end products of convoluted arbitrary analysis pathways. Also, the observers are typically those with financial or career motives to report in some particular way.  Conversely, I have no financial motive for any of my work on this blog. I have never financially profited (directly or indirectly) from my blogging activities, and my photographic expenses of several thousand dollars are a kind of negative profit. 

The Doctor Saw Orbs and a "Shadow Body"

On page 11 of the May 1929 edition of The Occult Digest, which you can read here, we have an account by Julia Seton M. D. She states this about an experience of applying anesthesia to a patient:

"Dr. Hunt bent his eyes upon me. I was almost spellbound with the intensity of his voice as he gave me a second command. I obeyed. Slowly but deftly I began steeping the patient’s senses. His pulse became almost imperceptible. I had reached a critical point—I looked at Dr. Hunt again, waiting for a signal to stop. He moved a little closer to the patient. Then suddenly something happened. To this day I cannot tell whether it was really the heat of the room, with the fumes of the ether acting upon my overwrought imagination, or if something actually took place. It might have been a complex-confusion in my own mind, but anyway, as I bent over the unconscious patient I saw a ball of soft hazy light gather around his head and face and from this a slender thread of light moved down and gathered into another flimsy ball of light just in the center of his body.

These two spots of misty light gleamed and seemed to act as the positive and negative ends of some occult electric battery. Then very abruptly from the center of this connecting thread another ray of light stretched out like a cord and lay over the sheet across the patient on the operating table. I followed it closely with my eyes and suddenly saw that it appeared to end in another body, standing very near the table. 

I looked up and caught the fixed gaze of Dr. Hunt as he leaned forward breathlessly. I followed his gaze and we both saw distinctly the shadow body of the patient standing beside the operating table looking at his own body; then, lifting his eyes, he looked at the surgeons, next at Dr. Hunt and at last slowly looked directly into my own staring eyes, and at that moment there passed through me such a dizzy shock of electricity that I struggled frantically to keep my senses."

You might be inclined to dismiss the whole account as nonsense until you consider that during out-of-body experiences people often report seeing their body from a meter or two away from it, or seeing their body from a viewing perspective at the top of the ceiling.  So it is far from unthinkable that an external observer might see something corresponding to such a person's out-of-body experience.