Naked-Eye Sightings of Mysterious Orbs (Part 1 of 4)

People seeing things with their eyes that they cannot explain is a common experience, much more common than the average person realizes. For example, a scientific study of apparition sightings by widows attempted to interview all of the widows or widowers in a small area of Wales. It found that 14% of widows or widowers reported seeing an apparition of their deceased spouse, with 39% reporting feeling a presence of their deceased spouse, and 13% hearing their deceased spouse. Then there are people who report seeing with their own eyes mysterious orbs. 

Mysterious orbs mainly show up in photographs, as if they were fleeting manifestations appearing too quickly to be seen with the naked eye. Orbs of many colors have showed up countless times in my photos, in which there have been almost 1500 mysterious blue orbs, and more than 800 mysterious striped orbs.  For example, below is a photo I took showing two mysterious striped orbs, one orange:

But in many cases people will report seeing a mysterious orb with the naked eye. Let's look at some of the very many such cases I have collected. 

The site www.nderf.org and the site www.iands.org are two of the main sites presenting accounts of near-death experiences. Looking at  some of the most recent accounts at the first of these sites, I quickly found the account below:

"This is about my wife, Vera Gonzalez, who passed on May 7th, 2016, and the attending physician assistant/NP-C and I witnessed a light orb leave her body within minutes of dying. A concentrated white orb-light came out of her chest through the sternum, rose and hovered momentarily and then departed the room while accelerating. I thought I was imagining things until the physician assistant asked me if I saw the light. He said he had seen it before and that it was Vera's spirit."

The book Beyond the Impossible is a fascinating read about mysteries of the unknown, told in chronological order. On one page we read this:

"Glowing spheres have startled many travellers along the lonely stretches of road that criss-cross the vast expanse of Alexandria Station....Mysteriologists have uncovered several locations around the world where balls of light variously labelled will-o-the-wisps, ghost lights or spook lights, are regularly seen....The most famous examples are probably the American varieties, the Saratoga and Marfa lights of Texas, the Brown Mountain lights and Maco lights of North Carolina, and the Hornet spook lights of Missouri." 

On the page here we read that some of these "ghost lights" are associated with reports of ghost sightings.   I was surprised to read of a "Spook Light Road" near Neosho, Missouri, where my late  grandmother lived most of her life. On the page here we read this account:

"In November 1977, a married couple climbing Mount Snezka...lost their way and found themselves in serious difficulties when it began to snow heavily. Realising their position was becoming serious the two climbers were suddenly confronted by a large blue globe which floated several feet off the ground, shining with a clear, warm light."

We are told the strange globe guided the two to safety.  At the page here we read this:

"Bobbing and bouncing along a dirt road in northeast Oklahoma is the Hornet Spook Light, a paranormal enigma for more than a century. Described most often as an orange ball of light, the orb travels from east to west along a four-mile gravel road."

In the video here, a young PhD candidate describes a near-death experience during a very severe medical problem. Around the 2:55 mark, she describes encountering three colored orbs that seemed to her like guardian angels, having colors of ruby, amethyst (purple) and emerald. It's quite an astonishing tale. 

At this link you can read "Immortality Proved by the Testimony of Sense" by Abraham Cummings, which has some astonishing testimony. On page 38 Cumming gives the following story of an orb "in the air" turning into the form of a woman:

"Sometime in July, 1806, in the evening, I was informed by two persons that they had just seen the Spectre in the field. About ten minutes after, I went out, not to see a miracle, for I believed that they had been mistaken. Looking toward an eminence, twelve rods distance from the house, I saw there, as I supposed, one of the white rocks. This con­tinued my opinion of their spectre, and I paid no more at­tention to it. Three minutes after, I accidentally looked in the same direction, and the white rock was in the air ; its form a complete Globe, white with a tincture of red, like the damask rose, and its diameter about two feet. Fully satisfied that this was nothing ordinary, I went toward it for more accurate examination. While my eye was constantly upon it, I went on four or five steps, when it came to me from the distance of eleven rods, as quick as lightning, and instantly assumed a personal form with a female dress, but did not appear taller than a girl seven years old. While I looked upon her, I said in my mind, 'you are no tall enough for the woman who has so frequently appeared among us.'  Immediately she grew up as large and as tall as I considered that woman to be. Now she appeared glorious. On her head was the representation of the sun diffusing the luminous, rectilinear rays every way to the ground."

Many of the testimonies in this case are dated, particularly following page 41, where we have dated witness statements from quite a few people who give their names. On page 31 we read this summary about the same apparition:

"Sometimes she appeared to two or three ; then to five or six ; then to ten or twelve ; again to twenty, and once to more than forty witnesses. She appeared in several apartments of Mr. Blaisdel’s house, and several times in the cellar. She also appeared at other houses, and several times in the open field, as already observed. There, white as the light, she moved like a cloud above the ground in personal form and magnitude, in the presence of more than forty people. She tarried with them till after day-light, and vanished : not because she was afraid of the sun : for she had then several times appeared when the sun was shining." 

A Brown University professor of philosophy (Curt John Ducasse) said this about the case, mentioning some experience of his own:

"Several of the witnesses report, as does the Rev. Mr. Cummings, that the apparition begins as a formless small luminous cloud, which then grows and in a moment takes the form of the deceased Mrs. Butler. (This incidentally, was what occurred when, over fifty years ago in New York, the present writer witnessed in red light but not under test conditions a purported gradual materialization of a man’s body.)"

At the site Stan Gordon's UFO Anomalies Zone, there is a very long post on recent sightings of UFOs and other anomalies. We read this:

"The year 2022 will be remembered, however, for the unprecedented increase of reports of low level encounters with mini-UFOs- those small orbs or balls of light reported close to the ground, or on the ground, and in some cases approaching within feet of witnesses....Over the years, I have interviewed numerous witnesses and I have received information from widespread areas on cases concerning observations of these smaller objects on the ground or just above the ground. These objects have ranged in size from a few inches to about a foot or two in  diameter. They are often described to be about golf ball to baseball size. The shape is commonly spherical. However, other configurations have been reported. These objects often are light sources of various colors. They sometimes look solid, while in other cases they look transparent or translucent. There have also been some reports of a swirling mass inside of the sphere. There have been other encounters where these objects appeared to be made of metal. For many years, there have been encounters with these objects pacing vehicles and entering them through open windows. There have been other cases of these objects also entering homes through open windows or hovering in front of windows and even tapping on the panes".

On page 109 of the 2007 book Ghost Worlds,  Melba Goodwyn states this:

"My first experience with orb phenomena came at the age of twelve...Suddenly, from seemingly out of nowhere, a huge orange sphere appeared before me. It was a little above my direct sight and as large as a big beach ball. It was pulsating and its very distinct color would fade and deepen in intensity as I watched it....I was astonished as it gently floated right through my midsection! I gasped as I felt it pass through my body...Deep down I knew that I had experienced a spiritual visitation of some sort." 

My Facebook page "Spirit Orbs" now has over 2000 followers, and consists only of photos I took myself. You can see the photos here:

https://www.facebook.com/GhostlyAppearances/photos_stream

Replying to a recent album I published at that site, one Facebook user states this: "An orange orb entered my room and turned my whole room orange. I'll never forget it."

A book offering some startling evidence for the paranormal is the book "Materialisations-Experimente mit M. Franek-Kluski" by Gustave Geley and Albert von Schrenck-Notzing M.D.   The title can be translated as "Materialization Experiments with M. Franek-Kluski." The book is in German, but with the help of Google Translate it is fairly easy to get an English translation of any page. 

On page 58 we have this remarkable account, which may be of great interest to anyone getting mysterious orbs in photos:

"I asked him if he could see my sister in the 'Astral' who has been dead for 3 years. Answer: Yes. At the same moment I felt a woman's hand gently placed on my forehead, making the sign of the cross there and encircling it with a circle, as my sister always did when she was alive when she said goodbye to me. I recognized her hand, dimly lit, against the edge of the fluorescent screen that lay on the table in front of me. It moved several times before my eyes, and more and more I thought I recognized it. She squeezed my hand, patted my face. I can no longer doubt that it is her hand that I feel. A short time later a glowing orb forms in front of my face and moves away; then she comes very close to my face and to my great astonishment and also to my great joy I notice the fully recognizable facial features of my sister, who smiles at me as in real life. However, she seems much younger to me, about the way she was when she was 25. She died at the age of 54. The upper part of the head is surrounded by cloudy veils."

Was the idea here that the orb turned into an apparition of the narrator's sister?  It is hard to tell whether that was seen or whether the orb was a kind of harbinger of such an appearance. 

 At www.archive.org, readers who have done the free registration with the site can read the very interesting book Miracles: A Parascientific Inquiry Into Wondrous Phenomena by D. Scott Rogo, who died an untimely death at the age of only 40. On page 227 Rogo describes events of September 13, 1917 at Fatima, Portugal, a month before the more famous October 13, 1917 event involving a disk-like sky anomaly. We read this account of September 13, 1917:

"The sun began to dim mysteriously around noon, stars could be seen in the sky, and an orb of white light appeared and settled in the tree. One of the witnesses was Monsignor John Quareman....He was one of many observers who actually saw the mysterious orb of light that had often appeared when Lucia claimed the apparition was arriving at the oak tree. 'To my surprise,' he later testified, 'I saw clearly and distinctly a globe of light advancing from east to west, gliding slowly and majestically through the air.' "

On page 106 of the same book we read this about someone having out-of-body experiences (OBEs): "Blue Harary usually perceives himself as an orb of light or as a speck of awareness free-floating while undergoing his OBEs." On page 209 we read this:

"Maximin Giraud (age eleven) and Melanie Mathieu (age fifteen) were playing when suddenly they saw a large orb of glowing light approaching them from the heavens. As it neared a small stream bed, it opened to reveal the figure of a beautiful woman."

Rogo's research work with Blue Harary (Stuart Blue Harary) is described in Chapter 8 of his book Mind Beyond the Body: The Mystery of ESP Projection, which can be read here. 

A web site documenting reports of the paranormal tells us "encounters with small spheres low to the ground and in some cases approaching near witnesses have reportedly been taking place for months from various areas of Pennsylvania." The site's latest report on orbs is entitled "More Mysterious Close Encounters with Ground Level Orbs of light (Mini-UFOs) Reported In Pennsylvania-October 23, 2022."  One witness says he saw a "glowing white ball of light" outdoors 10-12 inches in diameter, and another witness reports seeing indoors a strange blue sphere about a foot and a half in diameter.  

A poll by YouGovAmerica surveyed 1000 Americans about any paranormal experiences they may have had. More than two-thirds reported having some type of paranormal experience. Some of the most common experiences were:

"Feeling a presence or unknown energy": 37%

"Hearing a voice of someone who wasn't there": 29% 

"Feeling an unexplained change in temperature": 28%

"Seeing lights or other devices turn on or off without explanation": 25%

"Seeing an object move without explanation": 22%

"Seeing unexplained orbs of light": 22%

"Seeing a door open or close without explanation":  20%

"Seeing a ghost or spirit": 20%

"Seeing an angel": 13%

The page describing the poll gives one interesting bit of testimony from one of the people polled:

"I was in a 100-year-old hotel in Brazil with abandoned floors that were accessible. As my friend and I explored, the temperature dropped and we saw orbs of light."

In his "Mysterious Universe" post "Strange Lights in the Sky: Secret Experiments or Living Beings?" Nick Redfern discusses some visual sightings of orbs:

"It didn’t appear to be a solid, nuts-and-bolts aircraft of some sort. Rather, it was a ball of light, around five times the size of an average traffic light...He could only sit and stare as the pair of lights bobbed in the air, like floating beach-balls. Suddenly, there was a development; an astounding one. As Angelucci looked on, a voice emanated from one of the balls....Running through the heart of the Big Thicket is a long, thin, and incredibly sandy old road called Bragg Road. That’s not what the locals call it, though. To them, it is known as Ghost Light Road. There is a very good reason for this: for at least three centuries, people have reported seeing weird, small balls of light flitting through the trees late at night. But, we’re not talking about anything quite as down to earth as fireflies. These particular lights vary in size from – approximately – a tennis ball to a beach ball. They also exhibit evidence of intelligence: witnesses describe the lights approaching them, even circling them, in what is occasionally perceived as a playful fashion."

The strangest part of the article is below:

"A small body of individuals have sworn that the large cats and the hairy humanoids – when spotted by the astonished and sometimes terrified onlookers – vanished before their eyes. We’re not talking about them making hasty getaways into the woods. Rather, we are talking about the 'animals' – in an instant – changing form from big cat and Bigfoot to a small, brightly-lit globe of light."

On the page here we have this headline: "UFO Activity Ongoing in Pennsylvania- Encounters with Small Spheres of Light Close to the Ground Increasing-August 13, 2022." We read the following:

"What I consider to be even more fascinating are the increase in reports of smaller generally spherical objects that are low to the ground and reportedly have been approaching within feet of witnesses in some cases. These encounters with mini-UFOs as I have called them for many years, are taking place in daylight as well as during the night."

The author reports that the objects range in size from a few inches to about a foot or two in diameter. He says, "In some cases, the objects appear to be solid metal, however most witnesses describe these objects as luminous globes of various colors." 

Page 194 of the Volume 2 of Phantasms of the Living tells us this:

"In  another,  a  luminous  ball  was  seen  in  a  corner  of  the  room. A  fourth  very  remarkable  instance,  of  the  brilliant  illumination  and then  sudden  darkening  of  an  empty  room,  is  described  to  us  by  the Rev.  Edward  Ram,  of  Norwich,  as  a  personal  experience  of  himself  and his  wife — but  this  was  in  a  house  where  other  unaccountable  phenomena have  been  observed ;  as  was  also  the  case  in  a  fifth  instance, where  a  light  is  described  by  one  percipient,  Mrs.  W.  B.  Richmond,  as  a  glow  over  the  whole  room,  out  of  which  (according  to  her recollection)  two  bright  little  balls  of  light  seemed  to  flash  out ;  and by  the  other  (her  mother)  as '  flickering  about'  specially  in  a  particular part  of  the  room.  In  none  of  these  cases  does  it  seem  possible that  the  light  was  in  any  way  cast  or  reflected  into  the  room  from outside." 

I have very many additional accounts of this type, which I will include (over the next 12 days) in a Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of this series, each of which will be as long as this post. There are many cases of mysterious orbs seen during thunderstorms or lightning storms and called "ball lightning." But none of the cases I have cited or will cite in this series are orbs seen during thunderstorms or lightning storms. Some papers reporting the sightings of mysterious orbs outside of thunderstorms or lightning storms will use the term "ball lightning," but such a term seems to be inappropriate whenever neither thunder nor normal lightning is observed. An example is the paper "Ball Lightning and Strange Phenomena in the Po Plain Valley (Near Rovigo, Italy)." We read that for "many years" a scientific research group has reported seeing two types of light phenomena: (1) bubbles of yellow-orange light about two meters in diameter, and (2) red floating spheres about two meters wide, lasting between seconds and minutes. There is no claim that such things were observed only or mainly during lightning storms or thunderstorms, and only in one case was the group able to pick up an anomalous electrical reading. The authors resort to implausible speculating about a "possible relationship with lunar cycles" and that "the Anomalous Luminous phenomena in the Po Valley may be related to tectonic activity."

A scientific paper entitled "The Ball Lightning Controversy – Empirical Case Studies " states this:

"The main observational and object parameters of six national BL [ball lightning] datasets show more similarities than differences. Although their BL data come from places 3,000 km distant with different climatic conditions, basic features like thunderstorm association, duration, distance from observer, size, color and brightness form a cluster with defined range. One out of three BL events happen indoors with a wide spectrum of possible object relations. 30-50% of the objects terminate with an audible explosion."

There is no basis for calling mysterious transparent or glowing balls observed indoors "ball lightning." Lightning is not an indoor phenomena. It would seem that the author quoted above is conflating different phenomena, trying to call diverse types of phenomena "ball lightning." None of the very many reports that I cite in this four-part series will be reports of something terminating with an explosion or reports of something occurring during thunder storms or lightning storms. Below is a flowchart giving a reasonable algorithm to follow in classifying such reports of mysterious ball-shaped phenomena:

A page in The Encyclopedia of Strange and Unexplained Physical  Phenomena describes a red orb passing through a closed window. We hear no mention of a thunder storm or lightning storm:

"In the summer of 1960, as Louise Matthews of South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania lay on her living room couch, she looked up to see a huge red ball coming through a window and the Venetian blinds, both closed and neither damaged in any way by the object's passage. When the ball, which was making a sizzling sound, passed by her, Mrs. Matthews felt a tingling on the back of her neck...The ball went through the living room and into the dining room, exiting -- again without damage -- through a closed window. She called her husband, who came home from work to find the back of her hand burned. The hair at the back of the head fell out, leaving the skin there as smooth as that in the front of her face."

Was this ball lightning? Lightning is electricity, and glass is an electrical insulator, not a  conductor. Glass stops electricity, just as rubber does. The rule about lightning and glass is that lightning will only pass through a closed window if it shatters the glass. So it would seem to make no sense to call such a sighting ball lightning. 

Its News App Makes Apple Rather Like Orwell's Ministry of Truth

George Orwell's novel 1984 is a classic of dystopian fiction. It depicts a totalitarian state which requires absolute obedience from its subjects. The citizens of the oppressive regime are kept in control through a wide variety of methods, such as posters everywhere saying "Big Brother Is Watching You," home electronic devices that spy on them, a government agency called the Ministry of Truth that grinds out misleading propaganda, and a government agency (called the Ministry of Love) that tortures citizens who dare to break the rules.  The novel 1984 was referenced by a classic 1984 television commercial produced by Apple, one that ran during the 1984 Super Bowl. 

In the commercial we see a giant screen in which an old authority is lecturing a group of people. The people are all dressed the same, and all have shaved heads. After we see the people marching robotically in lockstep, we see the people all look kind of hypnotized, like unthinking thought slaves. The old authority lecturing the people says this:

"Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause." 

Pursued by some kind of police, a young woman runs into the large room. She is carrying a huge sledgehammer. The woman hurls the sledgehammer toward the giant screen, and it is shattered.  We see some text announcing the first Macintosh computer, and a claim that this would show why "1984 won't be like 1984."

You can only properly understand the commercial if you know something about the 1980's competition between Apple and IBM. Often called "Big Blue," IBM was the behemoth of the computer industry in the early 1980's. IBM had enjoyed great success marketing bulky refrigerator-sized computers in the period between 1960 and 1980. In 1981 IBM made its big move into personal computers. Around 1983 the vast majority of personal computers were either IBM computers or what were called IBM-compatible computers, which could run the same software used by IBM personal computers. 

At this time Apple was a kind of a rebellious upstart. To use a Star Wars analogy, it was like IBM was the Galactic Empire of the first Star Wars movie, and it was like Apple was the Rebel Alliance. In Apple's early 1984 commercial alluding to the novel 1984, the old head on the giant screen represented IBM and its near-monopoly on personal computing. The young woman hurling the sledgehammer represents Apple and its rebellious new ways,  which around 1984 included introducing a computer with a graphical user interface, which no IBM computer had at the time.

Now Apple has become the behemoth of computing devices. After enjoying great success in selling personal computers like the Macintosh, Apple's greatest success came in selling smartphone and tablet devices such as the iPad. People love such devices because you can use them while doing little typing. 

I have an Apple iPad, in addition to a personal computer with a regular keyboard.  At the center of the iPad experience is the Apple News app. The News app is something that allows me to access a vast number of articles from many different sources, on many different subjects, without typing anything or using any mouse or menu. 

Let me describe how it works for those who have never used it. When you open the News app, you get five stories at the top of your tablet device. 

Scrolling down by finger-swiping, you can find very many sections called Channels. In addition to sections marked "For You," "Reader Favorites," and "For You in News+," you may see thirty or forty different sections or channels, each of which can be reached just by finger-swiping to scroll the screen down.  A typical channel will show about three to seven stories, each of which has a photo next to it. For example, below we see a "Science Fiction" channel and the first part of a "Biology" channel:

By clicking on any of the channel titles, you will get many articles on the topic you clicked on. So, for example, when I click on the title of the Science Fiction channel shown above, I get many articles about Science Fiction, not just the articles shown below, but many other Science Fiction articles I can reach by using finger-swiping to scroll the screen down:

I can use my finger to read any of these articles; and reading any of them is easy because all I have to do is finger-swipe to scroll the screen down when I come to the bottom of the screen. Once I have finished reading the story, there is a convenient back button allowing me to return to a double-column page like the one shown above. When I want to switch to a different channel, I can use a back button at the top left of the tablet to go back to the main News app page, which allows me to find stories on many different topics. 

This interface is a masterpiece from an ease-of-use standpoint. With this interface I can access many hundreds of stories on 30 or more topics without typing anything and without ever using a mouse. The News app of the Apple iPad is so easy to use, and has access to so many stories that I would imagine a typical iPad user probably spends 30% or more of his iPad time only using the News app. 

But there is a huge problem with Apple's News app. The News app  restricts you to a very limited number of information sources. It therefore acts as a very severe "reality filter," extremely restricting the type of articles that you will read when using its interface, and severely restricting the type of viewpoints you will be exposed to. 

Let's look at the Channels that are available to me. We see below some of them:

If I scroll down more to get more items on this list, I also get these Channels:

If I scroll down more to get more items on this list, I only get this:

There is a Discover Channels button at the bottom that allows me to add some more sections or channels, each of which will be a particular section showing up in the News feed.  But the choice is only very limited. When I press Discover Channels, I get only 36 possibilities, about half of which are city-specific channels such as a Los Angeles channel. 

Despite the great ease of use, there is something very wrong here. One minor irritation is that the Apple News app is filled with promos for stories that are only available if you have a paid subscription to Apple News+.  If you haven't yet learned the trick of not clicking on stories marked Apple News+ unless you pay for that service, you might find such promo links to be annoying. 

More seriously, this interface has enormously restricted the type of content I can view. I cannot get any Philosophy channel, or any Religion channel. I cannot get any channel on New Age topics, or any channel related to the paranormal. I cannot get any History channel or any Psychology channel or any Viewpoints channel. I can get a Daily Mail channel, but the articles are only the more bland articles from the Daily Mail, not the more provocative articles the Daily Mail regularly publishes that criticize the US government, the US president, or US social trends.  I cannot chose any channel that gives me a critical analysis of the claims made by US science authorities. The articles in the News app have a liberal bias, and tend to favor the current Biden administration. If you ever get a religion-related story in the Apple News app, there's a good chance it will be some "trojan horse" article like a recent article I saw with a title mentioning someone's "far-seeing faith," but which turned out to be an article suggesting that one major religious group had "profound afflictions," and consisted of racist anti-intellectuals.    

What Apple's News app has done is to pretty much restrict me to articles that parrot the "official party line" of America's ruling class of politicians, professors and pundits, and also a vast variety of entertainment articles and articles such as sports articles and real estate articles and celebrity-oriented articles. What's wrong with that? Well, for one thing there is the problem that the stories that I get from the News app are very often stories filled with very bad  falsehoods, misrepresentations and groundless boasts. This is largely because nowadays the articles of so-called "science news" are very often articles filled with errors and misstatements. 

Many branches of scientific academia are currently in a sad state. Professors are judged by how many papers they have written and how many citations such papers have got. With such metrics being used to judge performance, there is a huge incentive for scientists to produce poorly-designed "quick and dirty" studies that are guilty of questionable research practices (called QRP), such as way-too-small study group sizes, lack of pre-registration and a lack of a blinding protocol. In some fields such as neuroscience, the use of questionable research practices is more the norm than the exception. Eager to get as many paper citations as possible, scientists very often make claims in their paper titles and abstracts that are not justified by any observations reported in their papers.  

After a scientific paper has been written up and published, it is announced with a press release issued by the main academic institution involved in the research. Nowadays the press releases of universities and colleges are notorious for making sensationalized claims that are not warranted by anything discovered in the research being discovered. Often a tentative claim made in a scientific paper (basically a "perhaps" or a "maybe") will be stated as if it is was simply a discovery of a definite fact.  Other times a university press release will make some important-sounding claim that was never made in the scientific paper writing up the research.  An example was that when  there appeared a scientific paper merely claiming that "Regional synapse gain and loss accompany memory formation in larval zebrafish," there appeared a great number of press stories repeating the headline of a press release claiming that the formation of a memory had been observed (a claim not made in the paper).  We have every reason to believe that synapse gains and losses occur  continually in the human body, regardless of whether some new memory is forming. 

Authorship anonymity is a large factor that facilitates the appearance of misleading university and college press releases.  Nowadays university and college press releases typically appear without any person listed as the author. So when a lie or misleading statement occurs (as they very often do in university press releases), you can never point your finger and identify one particular person who was lying.  When PR men at universities are thinking to themselves "no one will blame me specifically if the press release has an error," they will feel more free to say misleading and untrue things that make unimpressive research sound important. 

 

Misleading press releases produce an indirect financial benefit for the colleges and universities that release them.  When there occurs untrue announcements of important research results, such press releases make the college and university sound like some place where important research is being done. The more such press releases appear, the more people will think that the college or university is worth the very high tuition fees it charges. 

Besides such press releases, additional exaggerations, distortions, misstatements and hype occur when writers produce articles based on the press release. Such writers are encouraged to behave in such a way, to produce click-bait that is economically profitable. If a web site has an article with an untrue or half-true title that sounds exciting, such an article can entice many people to click on some headline that takes them to a page where there are ads. The web site may therefore get revenue proportional to how many people saw the page. 

Some of the economic and professional factors that encourage misstatements in science papers, science press releases, and science news articles are shown in the diagram below. The Apple News app is part of this profit complex, and I wonder whether Apple richly profits from all the untrue clickbait headlines it has routing you to pages that have advertising, and generate revenue not just for the site that has the page, but the site that routes people to such a page.  

Today's so-called "science news" articles very often contain falsehoods, groundless hype and shameless exaggeration, largely because of economic motivations charted in the diagram above. The diagram above tells only part of the story, failing to even mention two other gigantic factors tending to produce misleading or dubious claims in scientist literature:

(1) how financial influence from the pharmaceutical industry is a major factor leading to junk science studies and junk science news;

(2) how scientist belief communities (such as the neuroscientist belief community, the evolutionary biology belief community, and the dark matter belief community) leads scientists to keep producing research that sounds supportive of the ideology of such belief communities, and the dogmas of particular scientist tribes. 

There are other huge reasons why so many errors and falsehoods occur in what we read in the so-called science news. One reason is a large amount of fraud in experimental research. A recent article in a leading science journal cites a researcher who "estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized."  Another very large reason is that scientists such as neuroscientists and cosmologists and evolutionary biologists are members of belief communities dedicated to the perpetuation of cherished dogmas held by their belief communities. Many of our "science news" articles are written by authors attempting to bolster belief in their favorite belief dogmas. When acting in such a way, which we might call "Sunday school mode," scientists and science journalists can be guilty of very bad errors and very bad misstatements, just as some person zealous to advance his political ideology may make very bad misstatements. 

Because so many scientists are following Questionable Research Practices leading to shoddy research that is not highly reproducible, there is a replication crisis in fields such as psychology and neuroscience. In their 2017 paper "Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature," Denes Szucs and John P. A. Ioannidis concluded that the replication crisis in cognitive neuroscience was even worse than in psychology. They concluded that most reported effects in neuroscience were probably false alarms. In their paper we read this:

"Assuming similar true effect sizes in both disciplines, power was lower in cognitive neuroscience than in psychology. Journal impact factors negatively correlated with power. Assuming a realistic range of prior probabilities for null hypotheses, false report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature."

And don't think for a moment that you can tell good research by looking for some paper published in some "high impact factor"  journal such as Cell or Nature or Science. Those journals very often publish junk research guilty of Questionable Research Practices, and publish papers with titles proclaiming results not matching anything observed or demonstrated in the described research. Referring to statistical power (a measure of how robust and trustworthy research is) the preceding paper made the remarkable claim that "journal impact factors negatively correlated with power."  

Apple's News app reflects all of these very bad problems, without doing anything to mitigate them. Almost every day I read in the News app some headlines that are false or groundless, and "news stories" containing very bad errors. Often very untrue headlines are repeated in multiple different News app stories on the same day, with the misleading headline merely being rephrased, as the same erring press release is covered by different science journalists. I often read some bunk claim made in the headline of some story in the Science channel of News app, and then read an equally bunk headline about the same research appearing in the Biology channel of the News app, and then read an equally false headline in the Neuroscience channel of the News app. 

An example of the false statements we get every week from the Apple News app is an article this week that made the untrue claim that "many lab experiments have successfully reproduced different stages of abiogenesis." No such stages of abiogenesis (an accidental origin of life) have occurred in any lab experiments realistically simulating the early Earth, and not even building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life (amino acids) have been produced in any such experiments. The article refers to the "iconic Miller-Urey experiment," failing to mention how scientists now believe the experiment used a wrong mixture of gases to try to simulate the early Earth atmosphere (only one of many reasons why the experiement was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions).  

Some of the falsehoods I very often read in the headlines and stories of Apple's News app are untrue claims that will give you wrong ideas about who you are, how your species and your mind arose,  and what kind of universe you live in. It seems the curators of Apple's News app are blissfully ignorant of all the problems associated with today's scientific papers and the boastful and untrustworthy press releases promoting them. 

There seems to be no way to customize the News app to reduce such problems. The Apple News service is free for those who have bought a device such as the iPad. There is an Apple News+ paid subscription you can get for 10 dollars a month. But that subscription  only offers the set of sources listed here, which almost never challenge the hype, dogma and groundless claims so often appearing in mainstream sources. There is no such problem on information sources such as Youtube.com. For example, if you search for some videos on near-death experiences or other spiritual topics on www.youtube.com, you will find your subsequent list of displayed videos reflecting the interest in such topics that you previously displayed. Although it is called a News app, the Apple News app often includes pure opinion pieces, which are often atheist propaganda pieces, but almost never opinion pieces challenging any of the more dubious dogmas of today's science professors.

The factors above and the News app's restrictions on independent analysis and viewpoint diversity mean that nowadays Apple's News app is kind of like a Pravda for materialists. Between 1918 and 1991 the newspaper Pravda was the official party organ of the Communist Party that ruled the Soviet Union. During that period whenever a Moscow communist opened up his morning paper, he would find a newspaper telling him that the world was working just exactly the way a Moscow communist would expect it to work. The pages of Pravda contained very many falsehoods, and prevented its readers  from reading about very many things they should have been informed about. And so it is for Apple's News app.  The reader of Apple's News app will always read headlines telling him that the world is working just exactly the way an atheist materialist would expect it to work. Restricted to a filter bubble, such a reader will be carefully prevented from discovering a thousand facts and observer reports that conflict with such ideas. 

In this respect Apple has become rather like the restrictive behemoth it mocked in its early 1984 ad referencing the novel 1984.  The curators of Apple's News app seem rather like the workers of the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984, who only informed the masses of an official party line, one that contained many a falsehood.  Such curators rather seem like people under the control of rules rather like the "Information Purification Directives" mentioned in Apple's 1984 commercial. 

If you look at my posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, you will find examples this year of shoddy research or groundless "science news" claims that were promoted in Apple's News app as if they were important science progress. If you didn't realize that Apple's News app is largely a kind of party-line echo chamber filter bubble "Ministry of Truth news feed" affair, it's partially because people who have for many years got defective news streams come to think of them as normal (like 1970's Moscow Pravda readers who didn't notice how bad the newspaper was), and also because Apple did such a good job of mixing up all its ruling class propaganda with entertaining tidbits, glitz, razzle-dazzle and sparkly neon glitter. It's kind of like what goes on in The Hunger Games series, where lots of untruthful government propaganda is delivered by some slick stylish  charming celebrity with the folksy pizazz of a "Tonight Show" host. 

600 Dreams I Had About the Deceased

In the memorable movie The Sixth Sense, there is a famous line in which a young boy says, "I see dead people." If that boy was the "I see dead people" guy, I guess you can call me the "I dream dead people" guy. Below are about 600 dreams I have had about the deceased since November 2020:

• 104 dreams involving my late mother.
• 103 dreams involving my late father. 
• 31 dreams involving my late sister, the first-born of my siblings.
• 13 dreams (after her death) of another late sister, the last-born of my siblings. 
• Three dreams involving one of my late grandmothers. 
• Five dreams involving my late grandfather on my mother's side. 
• One dream involving a late grandfather mentioned only as "Grandpa." 
• A dream involving my late sister-in-law, who lived outside of the US.  
• A dream involving a late relative named Ursula. 
• A dream involving a late aunt of mine. 
• Many dreams in which I saw pets I had previously had, who died (with me sometimes stroking such pets). 
• A dream in which I heard the late Karen Carpenter singing "For All We Know."
• Three dreams involving the late actor Richard Burton.
• Three dreams involving the late actress Elizabeth Taylor.
• A dream involving the late actor Peter Lorre. 
• A dream involving the late actor Jack Larson. 
• A dream involving the late actor Sidney Poitier. 
• A dream involving the later actor Jack Lemmon. 
• A dream involving the later singer and actress Carmen Miranda. 
• A dream involving the late singer Whitney Houston. 
• A dream involving the late actor Dan Blocker. 
• A dream involving the late actress Greer Garson. 
• A dream involving the late hi-tech executive Steve Jobs. 
• Two dreams involving the late singer and composer John Denver.
• Two dreams involving the late actor Burt Reynolds.   
• A dream involving the late German poet Hans Sachs. 
• A dream involving the late dancer, actor and director Gene Kelly. 
• A dream involving the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright. 
• A dream involving the late actor George Peppard. 
• Three dreams involving the late actress Lucille Ball (in one I could see her very vividly, almost like she was standing in front of me). 
• A dream involving the late actor George Kennedy. 
• Three dreams involving the late US president George Washington. 
• A dream involving the late singer/actor Bing Crosby.
• A dream involving the late composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. 
• A dream involving the late Icelandic medium Indridi Indridason. 
• A dream involving the late singer Peggy Lee.
• A dream involving the late actor James Coburn. 
• A dream involving the late actor Lee J. Cobb.
• A dream involving the late actor Sean Connery. 
• Two dreams involving the late actor Paul Newman. 
• Two dreams involving the late composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
• A dream involving the late composer Ludwig van Beethoven. 
• Six dreams involving the late singer and actor Mario Lanza.
• A dream involving the late senator Barry Goldwater.  
• One dream involving the late labor organizer Cesar Chavez. 
• Three dreams involving the late US president Richard Nixon.
• One dream involving the late senator and vice-president Hubert Humphrey.
• Two dreams involving the late US senator George McGovern. 
• A dream involving the late actor Robert Culp.
• A dream involving the late US senator John McCain. 
• A dream involving the late actor James Mason. 
• A dream involving the late commedian and director Dick Martin. 
• A dream involving the late US president Grover Cleveland. 
• Three dreams involving the late singer and actress Doris Day. 
• A dream involving the late actor and director Jerry Lewis.
• Two dreams referring to the late composer Richard Wagner.
• Two dreams involving the late composer Peter Tchaikovsky. 
• Seven dreams involving the late president Ronald Reagan.
• Four dreams involving a famous deceased political leader I won't mention. 
• Nine dreams involving the late actor Peter Falk.
• Five dreams involving the late talk show host Johnny Carson.  
• Five dreams involving the late actor Leonard Nimoy.
• Three dreams involving the late actor Laurence Olivier.
• A dream involving the late actor Michael Landon. 
• Two dreams involving the late singer Perry Como. 
• A dream involving the late US president Theodore Roosevelt. 
• A dream involving the late baseball player Ted Williams. 
• A dream involving the late actor Richard Deacon. 
• A dream involving the late Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
• A dream involving the late actor/dancer Fred Astaire.
• Two dreams involving the late baseball player Babe Ruth.  
• A dream involving the late singer James Brown. 
• A dream involving the late painter Rembrandt. 
• Two dreams involving the late Princess Diana. 
• Three dreams involving the late US president Lyndon Johnson, and one dream involving his late wife.
• Two dreams involving the late US senator Robert Kennedy. 
• A dream involving the late US senator Edward Kennedy. 
• Three dreams involving the late opera singer Luciano Pavoratti. 
• Four dreams involving the late actor John Wayne.
• Two dreams involving the late actor Jimmy Stewart.
• A dream referring to the late musician Benny Goodman, mentioning "the King of Swing," which is what people called him. 
• A dream mentioning a very famous historical figure born in ancient times. 
• Four dreams involving the late actor Gregory Peck. 
• A dream involving the late actor Dudley Moore.
• A dream involving the late US president Franklin Roosevelt. 
• A dream involving the late actor Raymond Burr. 
• Two dreams involving the late evangelist Billy Graham.
• Three dreams involving the late Albert Einstein. 
• Two dreams involving the late Neil Armstrong. 
• A dream involving the late actor William Holden. 
• A dream involving the late poet Lord Byron. 
• A dream involving the late Carrie Fisher. 
• Two dreams involving the late William Shakespeare.
• Eleven dreams involving the late US president John Kennedy. 
• Two dreams involving the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 
• A dream involving the Beatles (two of whom are deceased).
• Three dreams involving the late actor Marlon Brando.
• A dream involving the late theorist Immanuel Velikovsky. 
• A dream involving the later actor Charlton Heston.
• A dream involving the late explorer Christopher Columbus. 
• A dream involving the late US president Gerald Ford. 
• Eleven dreams involving the late composer and singer John Lennon. 
• Twelve dreams involving the late composer and singer George Harrison. 
• A dream involving the late director and actor Charlie Chaplin.
• Two dreams referring to the late physicist Isaac Newton.
• A dream referring to the deceased founders of a large company.
• A dream referring to the late philosopher Rousseau. 
• A dream involving the late scientist and writer Benjamin Franklin.
• A dream involving the late scientist Antoine Lavoisier. 
• Four dreams referring to the late biologist Darwin. 
• A dream involving the late actor/celebrity Orson Bean.
• A dream involving the late actor John Garfield. 
• A dream involving the late actor Robert Mitchum.
• Five dreams involving the late opera singer Franco Corelli. 
• A dream involving the late actor Jimmy Cagney.
• Two dreams involving the late psychologist and ESP researcher Joseph Rhine.
• Four dreams involving the late science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke.
• A dream involving the late commentator Rush Limbaugh. 
• A dream referring to a biographer of English poets, probably a reference to the late biographer Samuel Johnson. 
• A dream involving the late novelist George Orwell.
• A dream involving the late Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
• A dream involving the late medium Margaret Fox.
• Four dreams involving the late film director Stanley Kubrick. 
• A dream that was probably a reference to the late novelist Victor Hugo (ta dream in which some man gave me Hugo's novel Les Miserables). 
• A dream involving the late actress Diahann Carroll. 
• Three dreams involving the late actress Natalie Wood. 
• A dream involving the late talk show host Tom Snyder.
• A dream involving the late actor Walter Pidgeon. 
• Two dreams involving the late actress Betty White. 
• A dream involving the late actress Marilyn Monroe. 
• A dream involving the late actor R. Lee Ermey.
• A dream involving the late writer Jules Verne.
• A dream involving the late philosopher  Plato. 
• A dream involving the late writer James Joyce. 
• A dream involving the late actor Danny Kaye. 
• A dream involving the late US Supreme Court judge Ruth Ginsburg. 
• Two dreams involving the late actor Jim Garner. 
• A dream involving the late actor Fernand Gravey, mirroring a scene in a 1938 movie in which Gravey was humming a Johann Strauss melody (interestingly, I could not recall the melody the morning after having the dream, but it played exactly right in my dream).
• Two dreams involving the late actor Christopher Reeve. 
• Five dreams referring to the late singer/actor Elvis Presley.
• A dream involving the late actor Richard Basehart.
• A dream involving the late philosopher John Stuart Mill. 
• Four dreams involving the late actor Cary Grant. 
• A dream involving the late actor Eddie Albert. 
• A dream involving the late actor Andy Griffith.
• A dream involving the late actor Fred MacMurray. 
• Two dreams involving the late civil rights champion Martin Luther King.
• Five dreams involving the late singer/actor Frank Sinatra. 
• A dream involving the late composer Franz Shubert.
• A dream involving the late composer Robert Schumann. 
• Two dreams involving the late singer/actor Dean Martin.
• A dream involving the late singer Bobby Darin.
• A dream involving the late writer Voltaire. 
• Two dream involving the late TV and movie executive Carl Reiner. 
• A vivid dream involving the late actress Audrey Hepburn. 
• A dream involving the late actress Kathryn Hepburn.
• A dream involving the late composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein.
• Three dreams involving the late US president Thomas Jefferson.
• A dream involving the late actor Leslie Nielsen. 
• Three dreams involving the late actor Roger Moore. 
• Two dreams involving the late dictator Saddam Hussein.
• Four dreams involving the late actor James Gandolfini. 
• Two dreams involving the late singer Sammy Davis Jr. 
• A dream involving the late singer Peggy Lee.
• Three dreams involving the later actor Robin Williams.
• A dream involving the late actor Martin Milner.
• A dream involving the late TV host Allen Ludden. 
• A dream involving the late actor Burgess Meredith.
• A dream involving the late gangster Al Capone. 
• A dream involving the late actor and comedian Bob Saget.
• A dream involving the late actress Anissa Jones.
• A dream involving the late actress Angela Lansbury.
• A dream involving the late evangelist Oral Roberts. 
• A dream involving the later director and writer Joshua Logan. 
• A dream involving the late US senator John Warner. 
• A dream involving the late actor William Frawley. 
• A dream involving the late US general Douglas MacArther. 
• A dream involving the late German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
• A dream involving the late poet P. S. Shelley. 
• A dream involving the late actress Valerie Harper (one in which I improbably remembered that she had been fired, a recollection matching her firing from a TV role in 1987). 
• A dream of the scene in the movie Patton in which General George Patton (played by George C. Scott) was hearing about the famous "Nuts!" reply of General Anthony McAuliffe (the dream therefore managed to refer to three deceased people, Patton, Scott and McAuliffe). 
• Two other dreams involving Patton, one mentioning the late actors Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan.
• A dream that may have mentioned the ancient Greek urban planner Hippodamus, a name I had never heard mentioned before the night of the dream (I wrote down the name "Hippodemus" after having the dream). 
• Four dreams involving the late US president Dwight Eisenhower. (In the last dream Eisenhower was saying that people from Texas could be good presidents. I was not aware when having the dream that Eisenhower was born in Texas.) 
• A dream involving the late US president George H. W. Bush. 
• A dream involving the late character actress Alice Ghostley (oddly, I had never learned her name prior to having the dream). 
• Seven dreams involving Jesus. 
• A dream involving the late actress Charlotte Rae. 
• Two dreams involving a late professor Bernard F. Riess.
• A dream involving the late United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld.
• A dream involving the late medium Laura Edmonds.
• A dream on February 20, 2021 involving the late actor Edd Byrnes. 

Last night I had a dream that ended with a teacher telling me, "Call Laura Edmonds." I recognized the name after waking up. Laura Edmonds (the daughter of John W. Edmonds) was a medium, one of the most astonishing figures in the history of the anomalous.

In Volume 2 of the 1855 work Spiritualism by Judge John W. Edmonds (who served as Chief Justice of the New York State Supreme Court), we have a remarkable account of a psychic who is not named. Edmonds says he will give "a brief account of one medium whose whole progress I have witnessed with intense interest." 

First we are told the woman developed powers of clairvoyance. We hear a reference to the sea disaster in which more than 300 people on the SS Arctic died in 1854:

"Since then this faculty of knowing things at a distance has greatly improved. She saw the wreck of the Arctic when it was occurring. She saw and detailed with great accuracy, as subsequent accounts showed, the recent collision on the Canada Railroad, and that a few moments after it happened, and while the dead and wounded were being lifted out of the ruins. She has seen and described the state of things at Sebastopol and its vicinity, and she has frequently described scenes and conversations going on at the moment, at the distance of several hundred miles from her ; and all this, not when she was in a trance, but in a state of mental consciousness to all around her."

The account gets even stranger when we are told that the woman could speak in languages she never learned:

"She next became developed to speak different languages. She knows no language but her own, and a little smattering of boarding-school French. Yet she has spoken in nine or ten different tongues, sometimes for an hour at a time, with the ease and fluency of a native. It is not unfrequent that foreigners converse with their spirit-friends through her in their own language. A recent instance occurred where a Greek gentleman had several interviews, and for several hours at a time carried on the conversation on his part in Greek, and received his answers sometimes in that language and sometimes in English ; yet until then she had never heard a word of modern Greek spoken. About the same time her musical powers became developed. She has repeatedly sang in foreign languages, such as Italian, In- dian, German, and Polish."

On the same page we get this remarkable claim:

"Her next advance was to see spirits and spiritual scenes, and now scarcely a day passes that she does not describe the spirits who are present, entire strangers to her, yet very readily recognized and identified by their inquiring friends. This has of late been witnessed by very many persons, and many an, unbeliever in spiritual intercourse has been overwhelmed with the evidence of identity which thus by sight and by communion has been presented."

On this page of a book by another author, we read that this woman was a  daughter of Judge Edmonds: Laura Edmonds.

"Miss  Laura  Edmonds,  a  daughter  of  the  Judge,  also  pursued  her researches  in  the  same  direction,  and  became  developed  as  an  excellent medium  for  trance  speaking,  the  discerning  of  spirits,  the  gift  of  tongues, including  several  dead  and  living  languages  utterly  unknown  to  herself,  the ability  to  travel  clairvoyantly  to  distant  places,  and  communicate  with  absent friends  by  the  mental  telegraph."

How strange that last night I had a dream telling me to "call Laura Edmonds," when Laura Edmonds was a figure reported to have such astonishing powers of contacting the dead. Just after having the dream, I went into my bathroom, where I again saw something very spooky I have seen about 12 times in the past year. 

Below we see the electrical outlet in the bathroom next to where I sleep. It is a modern-type GFCI outlet that normally shows a green light, except when the circuit is broken. The outlet is about 13 inches above the bathroom's toilet, which is an inch away from the wall containing the outlet. When I go the bathroom in the middle of the night, I see the green light very clearly, because it is the only light source in the bathroom. I don't turn on the regular light in the bathroom when I use the bathroom in the middle of the night, because I have heard that turning on a full light in the middle of the night will make it more difficult for you to fall back to sleep. 

Just after awaking from the dream about the late medium Laura Edmonds, I saw the green light above mysteriously turn off and then turn back on about two seconds later. I have seen this happen about 12 times during the year I have lived at my current location.  

To read more about my dreams, which include 300+ dreams seeming to refer to life after death, see my post here, which I have been updating almost daily for two years.