Scientists Have No Explanation for Ghosts

While on the “Real Clear Science” web site (www.realclearscience.com) this week I saw a link to an article entitled “Six Scientific Explanations for Ghosts” (hosted here on mentalfloss.com). Below is a discussion of why none of these explanations do anything to explain the mystery of apparition sightings or sightings of ghostly figures.

Faulty Explanation #1: Electromagnetic Fields

The first attempted explanation refers to some research by Michael Persinger in which he bombards people's brains with magnetic fields. Persinger reports people have strange mental effects when their brains have been bombarded with magnetic fields, after some weird “God helmet” has been put on their heads. But such research is of no value in explaining sightings of apparitions or sightings of ghosts at haunted houses, by people who are not wearing weird helmets that bombard their brains with magnetic fields. Such research might be relevant if there was a strong tendency for apparition sightings to occur mainly about regions with high magnetic fields, such as houses next to power plants or houses next to power transformers. But there is no such tendency.

Faulty Explanation #2: Infrasound

Infrasound is sound at a level too low for humans to hear. Supposedly if you are bombarded with infrasound, you may feel uncomfortable, and feel some mental distress. But there is no good evidence that infrasound can cause hallucinations, so it's not a suitable hypothesis to explain ghosts. The article cites some claimed evidence trying to link infrasound and a ghost sighting, but the evidence is extremely weak. The evidence (given here)  is merely that a researcher was at a lab he was told was haunted. The researcher saw something strange-looking at the edge of his field of view, and when he focused on that area the “apparition” was gone. Later he found there was some fan that was causing infrasound, and after that fan was fixed, he didn't see any more apparitions. That's hardly good evidence that the fan malfunction was causing a hallucination of a ghost (and the "edge of vision" thing reported isn't really even a full-fledged ghost sighting). Such reasoning is no stronger than this reasoning: “I saw a ghost, but then I switched to a new breakfast cereal, and don't see ghosts anymore – so my old breakfast cereal must have caused the ghost.”

Faulty Explanation #3: Mold

The third goofy explanation offered by the Mental Floss article is mold. The article says, “Preliminary research indicates that some molds can cause symptoms that sound pretty ghostly—like irrational fear and dementia.” But I doubt whether there is a single verified case of anyone seeing a ghost because of breathing in mold. This file (around pages 60 to 85) by the World Health Organization makes a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the effects of mold. While the study notes lots of respiratory effects, it does nothing to substantiate any psychiatric problems caused by mold. The study's one comment on the topic is this statement: “"The Institute of Medicine (2004) included only a few case reports, with inconsistent findings for neuropsychiatric effects." 

Contrary to the impression you might get from watching certain TV shows that like to show ghost hunters treading around in dusty old abandoned buildings, the great majority of ghost sightings occur in ordinary places (as noted below), making the idea of mold not at all valuable in explaining such sightings.

Faulty Explanation #4: Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

Carbon monoxide is a gas that will kill you if you breathe in too much of it. The Mental Floss article suggests that carbon monoxide can cause hallucinations, but its only reference for this is an article written way back in 1921 – an article suggesting that some family had hallucinations which went away after they fixed a faulty furnace. But if it were really true that carbon monoxide poisoning can cause ghost hallucinations, would we would not have many more recent accounts of such a thing? Again, we have reasoning no stronger than this reasoning: “I saw a ghost, but then I switched to a new breakfast cereal, and don't see ghosts anymore – so my old breakfast cereal must have caused the ghost.”

About 400 people die each year from carbon monoxide poisoning in the US. If it were actually true that carbon monoxide was a major cause of ghost sightings, we would have very many cases of people reporting, “I saw ghosts until I got my furnace fixed,” not merely one such case every century. If it were actually true that carbon monoxide was a major cause of ghost sightings, we would also have lots of reports of sudden, unexplained deaths associated with ghost sightings – since we know that carbon monoxide commonly kills people. But there is no tendency for sudden, unexplained deaths to occur more often when there are ghost sightings.

General Problems With Environmental Attempts to Explain Ghosts as Hallucinations

I may note that all of the preceding explanations are kind of environmental explanations suggesting the idea of some weird conditions in some place where ghosts were seen. But according to the “Spectrum of Specters” study here, 64% of respondents reported perceiving ghosts “during mundane or normal times in their lives,” not during trips to some freaky haunted house where weird conditions might come into play.

According to page 12 of this survey of people who reported seeing ghosts, 70 percent reported seeing ghosts or apparitions who were persons known to the individual who saw the ghost or apparition. But that is not what we would expect from hallucinations. Hallucinations like those reported by drug users or schizophrenics involve random content.

Faulty  Explanation #5: Someone Else Said It Was Real

The fifth explanation given in the Mental Floss article is basically just suggestibility. So if someone goes into a haunted house and says he feels a strange chill, suggestibility might explain why a second and third person also report feeling the strange chill. But this cannot explain very much. The most convincing evidence for apparitions comes from people who reported seeing apparitions, something that typically involves a single person seeing the apparition. We cannot explain individuals seeing apparitions by themselves on any kind of “me, too” theory of social contagion. We also cannot explain cases of multiple witnesses seeing the same apparition under such a theory. If we're in a haunted house, and I say, “I feel a strange chill,” you may well say, “Yes, it is kind of cold in here.” But if we're in a haunted house and I say, “Look, I see Lincoln's ghost,” you will not at all tend to say, “Yes, I see it too,” just because I reported seeing such a thing. Specific visual hallucinations are not contagious.

Faulty Explanation #6: We Want to Believe

The sixth explanation given in the article is simply that people see ghosts because they want to believe in an afterlife. This explanation is not tenable because outside of apparition sightings there is no known tendency for humans to have visual hallucinations that reflect their desires. If there was such a tendency, people might often start seeing a hallucination of a pot of gold or a pile of cash in the middle of their living rooms – but no one ever has any such hallucination. If people had a tendency to hallucinate their desires, we might also expect that men would have hallucinations of sexy, willing women, which would vanish when the men tried to get physical with the sexy apparitions. But no one ever reports having any such hallucinations. Outside of apparition sightings, there is no tendency for humans to have visual hallucinations of things they want to see.

What we see in this Mental Floss article is a common technique of skeptics: what I call the smorgasbord technique. The smorgasbord technique works like this: when you don't have an explanation for something, list a whole variety of weak explanations, and hope that your reader is impressed (because he confuses quantity with quality). We see the smorgasbord technique often when skeptics try to explain UFOs. When faced with some dramatic UFO sighting, a skeptic may say, “There are lots of possible explanations – it may have been Venus, an airplane, a meteor, ball lightning, something being tested by the military, or swamp gas.” A smorgasbord like this may seem impressive, until we individually examine each of these possibilities, and find that none of them is tenable. We should remember: six or seven bad explanations don't add up to a good explanation.

Another reason why none of these explanations work is that none of them can explain photographic evidence of ghostly anomalies. Perhaps the most common evidence are photos of misty-looking anomalies that are variously called ghostly mists, ectoplasmic mists, light forms, or plasma clouds. The phenomenon of unexplained plasma-like clouds photographed at ground level is visually documented at this site, at this site, in the book "The Orb Project" by Miceal Ledwith and Klaus Heinemann, Ph.D, and in the book "Beyond Photography: Encounters with Orbs, Angels and Light-Forms," by  Katie Hall and John Pickering.

 An example of such a thing is below, where we see three consecutive photos I took in quick succession during a single minute on a warm night when the temperature was 66 degrees F. The middle one shows a strange ghostly mist. No smoke was visible, nor could any smoke be smelled (note that the ghostly mist isn't even appearing at ground level). Since we see no sign of smoke in the first or third photo, and I neither saw nor smelled smoke, we cannot explain this as smoke. Since the night was too warm for someone's breath to appear as mist, we cannot explain the photo as the photographer's breath.

I have also taken the photo below on December 22, 2014, showing a ghostly mist appearing while I was pursing my lips and pinching my nose, on a dry night when the temperature was 40 degrees, and I could not see my breath. There was no smoke or mist that I could see nearby. Why was I taking care to pinch my nose and purse my lips tightly? Because three days earlier I had photographed a similar anomaly in front of the exact same spot. 

If you do a Google search for “ghostly mist,” or look at links above, you will find many similar photos – often taken during dry weather and warm weather, ruling out the “photographer's breath” explanation.  Mya Gleny's page here offers a dazzling collection of such photos.  

Scientists cannot claim to have an explanation for ghosts until they can explain photos such as these and also the very frequent reports of visual apparitions of ghosts.  Currently they do not have a good explanation for either. 

If They Discover ET Life, Will Scientists Feel Smarter or Stupider?

Scientists recently found evidence of strange objects orbiting a distant star, leading some to speculate about the possibility that we have discovered signs of engineering by some extraterrestrial civilization. This could be a false alarm, but no one will be too surprised if one day soon the first indisputable evidence of extraterrestrial life is discovered. But if that happens, will it make scientists feel like brilliant geniuses – or will it make them feel stupider than they have ever felt before?

Two “Eureka, We're Geniuses” Scenarios

I can imagine two ways in which scientists might discover extraterrestrial life in a way that would make them feel like Einsteins. The first way would be if scientists were simply to discover evidence of extraterrestrial life or a technological civilization, without finding any evidence that there existed extraterrestrials more intelligent than us. Such a thing could occur merely by the use of advanced spectroscopy.

Spectroscopy is a technique that allows scientists to figure out what elements are associated with a distant light source, by analyzing the spectrum or pattern of lines produced when the distant light passes through a prism or something working like a prism. Using such a technique, astronomers may be able to detect oxygen in the atmosphere of a planet revolving around a distant star, which could be an indication of life (scientists don't think our atmosphere had much oxygen until life was widespread). They may also be able to detect elements or compounds that could be markers of civilizations.

Such a discovery would tell us nothing about how advanced a civilization was, but would at most tell us that some civilization existed. If such a discovery were made, scientists would have every reason to feel pretty smart. They would have made a long-awaited fundamental discovery, without finding anything that proved that man was inferior in intelligence to some other extraterrestrial race.

Another very different way to look for extraterrestrials is to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. Imagine if such a signal were found, and scientists were able to decipher or translate the signal. Then scientists would feel like geniuses. No matter how advanced the civilization turned out to be, there would be a certain type of "we're kind of on the same level” feeling, if we had managed to decipher or translate a signal extraterrestrials sent out. You may not be on the same level as Einstein, but when you read some difficult thing he wrote, and are able to understand it, you feel pretty darn smart.

Two “Oh My God, We're Dummies” Scenarios

But I can also imagine two scenarios under which the discovery of extraterrestrial life might make us feel very stupid. The first scenario is one in which we receive radio signals from extraterrestrials, but simply are not able to figure them out. This is all-too-likely a scenario. An extraterrestrial civilization might be millions of years more advanced than ours. So why would they “dumb down” their radio messages, making them simple enough to be understood by beings who only invented radio telescopes a few decades ago? It seems that if we were to receive radio signals from extraterrestrials, there is a large chance that we would spend decades knocking our heads against the wall, trying to understand the messages without success. We might feel a little bit smart for having received the radio messages, but we would feel a lot dumber because we couldn't translate the messages. Twenty years after the radio messages were received, we might see headlines like the one below.

Another possibility with a high chance of happening is that we might discover signs of some massive engineering project by extraterrestrials. We might analyze the light from some star, and find that there seems to be massive abnormalities that can only be explained by assuming that some extraterrestrial civilization has undertaken some vast engineering project millions of times more ambitious than building the Panama Canal (perhaps something involving dismantling and rearranging entire planets). Such a project could only be undertaken by a civilization many thousands or millions of years older than ours.

How would we feel after discovering such a situation? We would feel pretty stupid. We would know that there was some other civilization with godlike technical powers vastly beyond ours. We would also suspect that the more we looked, the more such civilizations we would find. Climbing down meekly from the pedestals we have placed ourselves on, we might sadly realize our rightful places as tiny little fish in the vast cosmic ocean, not the lords of creation we once imagined ourselves to be.

Or maybe we wouldn't. Maybe we are so hooked on thinking of ourselves as the most important creatures in the universe that we will refuse to believe almost any evidence contradicting such an idea. I can imagine humans of the future refusing to believe in any evidence astronomers produce that godlike extraterrestrials exist, no matter how clear and dramatic it is. Perhaps the only thing that will convince us of our cosmic inferiority will be if spaceships bigger than stadiums begin to hover in our skies night after night.

Do 90% of Americans Believe in the Paranormal?

There is a new survey by Chapman University that claims to have determined that roughly half of Americans believe in the paranormal. The study reaches the claim that “half of Americans do believe in something paranormal.” But the methodology used to reach this claim is very faulty, and a strong case can be made that up to 90% or more of Americans believe in the paranormal (although much fewer might answer “Yes” if asked if they believe in the paranormal).

To try to determine how many people believe in the paranormal, the survey asked the respondents whether they believed in any of the seven items listed below. The percentages are the fraction that answered “Agree or strongly agree.”
 

Places can be haunted by spirits 41.4%

The living and dead can communicate with each other 26.5%

Dreams foretell the future 20.9%

Aliens visited Earth in our ancient past. 20.3%

Aliens have come to Earth in modern times. 18.1%

Astrologers, fortune tellers, and psychics can foresee the future. 13.9%

Bigfoot is a real creature 11.4%

Apparently their thinking was: just add up how many people expressed belief in at least one of these seven things, and that gives you how many Americans believe in the paranormal. But it makes little sense to try to deduce what fraction of Americans believe in the paranormal from such a limited list of questions. The questions cover only a small fraction of the phenomena that can be considered paranormal. Also, the wording of some of the questions is poor. For example, “Dreams can sometimes foretell the future” would have got a higher response rate than “Dreams foretell the future.”

That raises the question: what do we mean by paranormal? When you type “definition of paranormal” in Google.com, you can get a definition that isn't too bad, but which gives particular examples that should not be included in a definition: “Denoting events or phenomena such as telekinesis or clairvoyance that are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding.” Telekinesis is one of the more poorly substantiated paranormal phenomena, so if you go asking people, in effect, if you believe in “stuff like telekinesis,” the great majority of people will say no. A skeptic might want to use such a definition, in hopes of getting some survey result saying that most people don't believe in the paranormal; but using that definition wouldn't be fair.

A better definition of paranormal is found at www.meriam-webster.com: “Very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world.” This is a good broad definition that doesn't “poison the well” by mentioning particular beliefs. How many Americans believe in the paranormal, using this broad definition?

To answer that, we would have to ask many more questions than just the seven asked by the Chapman University survey. We would also have to ask about belief in ESP, belief in paranormal premonitions, belief in faith healing, belief that you can sometimes get what you want through intercessory prayer, belief in reincarnation, belief in demon possession, belief in any type of miracles reported in the Bible, and a large variety of other phenomena that qualify as “very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world.”

I may note that there is no sound intellectual basis for saying that alleged phenomena such as ESP or UFOs should be considered paranormal but alleged phenomena such as biblical miracles or faith healing should not be considered paranormal, on the grounds that the latter beliefs have been around for so long that they are not “very strange” ideas. When talking about what is “very strange” here, we simply mean outside of what scientists can explain through scientific theory. From that standpoint, the idea that a human's prayers might be answered by God (or that God may have performed a miracle) is every bit as paranormal as items such as ESP or UFOs. 
 

So if we did in the right way our survey designed to find out how many Americans believe in the paranormal, it might look a little like this:

Do you believe:

Places can be haunted by spirits. Yes __ No __

The living and dead can communicate with each other. Yes __ No __

Dreams can sometimes foretell the future. Yes __ No __

Aliens visited Earth in our ancient past. Yes __ No __

Aliens have come to Earth in modern times. Yes __ No __

Some psychics can foresee the future. Yes __ No __

Bigfoot is a real creature. Yes __ No __

Humans can sometimes communicate through ESP. Yes __ No __

Photos can show strange things science cannot explain. Yes __ No __

Miracles were performed long ago. Yes __ No __

Faith healing sometimes produces dramatic healing. Yes __ No __

You can ask God for special favors, and have your prayers answered. Yes __ No __

There are special healers who can heal without using medicine. Yes __ No __

Some writers have written words that God sent to them. Yes __ No __

Miracles are sometimes performed in modern times. Yes __ No __

Some people get paranormal premonitions of disaster. Yes __ No __

Reincarnation sometimes occurs. Yes __ No __

Given a survey like this, I imagine that 80% or more of the American public would answer “Yes” to one of these questions. So it would seem that we should say that at least 80 percent of the American people believe in the paranormal.

But even a survey like the one above would not be complete. We should add at least one other paranormal item – one that is in the current canon of mainstream scientific thought.

I refer to the Big Bang. The Big Bang theory holds that our entire universe began in an infinitely dense point called the primordial singularity. This idea definitely does meet our definition of paranormal, which was: “very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world.” Scientists have no explanation for the Big Bang, which is a total mystery. There are a few speculative ideas floating about as to the cause of the Big Bang, but no such speculation has gained general acceptance. I may note that the super-speculative idea of the universe beginning as a vacuum fluctuation has no actual support from anything scientists have ever observed, because no scientist has ever observed any visible object appearing as a result of a vacuum fluctuation, not even an object as big as a grain of sand. 

The Big Bang: It doesn't get more paranormal than this

 

The Big Bang is really the epitome of the paranormal – a totally strange, unexplained event observed only once. It would not be as paranormal if we were to observe an entire galaxy instantly popping into existence, or an entire planet instantly popping into existence.

So we should add this last line to our survey designed to find the percentage of Americans who believe in the paranormal:

Do you believe:

Places can be haunted by spirits. Yes __ No __

The living and dead can communicate with each other. Yes __ No __

Dreams can sometimes foretell the future. Yes __ No __

Aliens visited Earth in our ancient past. Yes __ No __

Aliens have come to Earth in modern times. Yes __ No __

Some psychics can foresee the future. Yes __ No __

Bigfoot is a real creature. Yes __ No __

Humans can sometimes communicate through ESP. Yes __ No __

Photos sometimes show strange things science cannot explain. Yes __ No __

Miracles were performed long ago. Yes __ No __

Faith healing sometimes produces dramatic healing. Yes __ No __

You can ask God for special favors, and have your prayers answered. Yes __ No __

There are special healers who can heal without using medicine. Yes __ No __

Some writers have written words that God sent to them. Yes __ No __

Miracles are sometimes performed in modern times. Yes __ No __

Some people get paranormal premonitions of disaster. Yes __ No __

Reincarnation sometimes occurs. Yes __ No __

Universe suddenly began in infinitely dense point (Big Bang) Yes __ No __

With the addition of this last line, we finally have a fairly complete survey designed to find out whether the respondent holds any paranormal beliefs, defined as “very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world.” With the addition of this last line, the percentage of respondents answering at least one “Yes” answer would probably exceed 90%.

In short, a strong case can be made that 90% or more of Americans believe in the paranormal, in the sense of having a belief in at least one thing that is “very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world.” I may note that a large fraction of Americans that say they don't believe in the paranormal will actually find that they do believe in at least one paranormal thing, if they do a complete inventory of their beliefs, and ask themselves whether at least one of these beliefs is a belief in something “very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world.”

Postscript: A 2024 study of the 2534 in the Netherlands found that "55.6% of respondents qualify as paranormal believers based on the preregistered criterion that they believe in at least one phenomenon with considerable certainty." The study was collected by some skeptic organization, and there is reason to suspect that the detected level of belief in the paranormal would be much higher if it had been collected by a neutral body with polling expertise offering a secret ballot. One of the graphs in the paper is an outrageous example of deceptive graphical misrepresentation, in which you see things such as bars representing 50% looking four times longer than bars representing 25%.

A 2024 study says this:

"Like lucid dreams, precognitive dreams are commonplace with approximately 30%–60% of people claiming to have experienced a precognitive dream at least once in their lifetime (Eranimos & Funkhouser, 2023; Haraldsson, 1985; Pechey & Halligan, 2012; Sherwood & Roe, 2013; Van de Castle, 1977)."

"Floating City" in China Cannot Be Explained as a Mirage or Fata Morgana

Recently there was an astonishing report from China. According to the Daily Mail, “thousands of people in China claim they have seen a floating city in the sky.” There is even a video that shows this strange event.

It wasn't too long before skeptics attempted to debunk this sighting, trying to explain it as something natural and understandable. This Daily Mail story had the headline “Sightings of a 'floating city' in China are simply an optical illusion, say scientists.” The story then suggested that the sighting was an example of an optical illusion called Fata Morgana. A Fata Morgana is a rather complex form of mirage.

Is this explanation a credible hypothesis to explain the reported sighting? No, it isn't. The explanation is completely unbelievable, for some reasons I will now explain.

A Fata Morgana is a mirage that appears on the horizon, as mentioned in the first sentence of the wikipedia.org article on the topic: “A Fata Morgana is an unusual and complex form of superior mirage that is seen in a narrow band right above the horizon.” But the video does not show a floating city on the horizon. It shows what looks like a city floating quite far above the horizon.  If you fast forward to the 55th second of the video above, you will see the image below. It is something that occupies a large fraction of the viewing area, and is far above the horizon.

 

Another reason why the Fata Morgana explanation does not work is that when one sees a Fata Morgana or any type of mirage, it only appears as a relatively tiny part of your viewing area. You may see a mirage that looks like an object that is one percent of the viewing area in front of you, but no one ever reports a mirage that appears as a large fraction of their viewing area. For example, someone walking in the desert may see a mirage that looks like a distant oasis, but he will never see a mirage that looks like a huge ocean ahead of him. But the video of the sighting shows a huge “floating city” that is a large fraction of the viewing area. In fact, the buildings of the "floating city" look 10 times taller than any of the buildings on the horizon, which is not at all what one sees in a mirage or Fata Morgana (which may mirror something on the horizon, but never make it look many times bigger). 

Another reason for rejecting the Fata Morgana explanation is that the “floating city” looks like a set of buildings as you would see them looking up at them from the ground, with the buildings towering above you. But the video was taken from a high location way above the ground; and if some distant buildings were somehow to be reflected up in the sky through some Fata Morgana effect, we would not see the buildings from such a “towering above you” angle. You would instead see them looking as distant buildings might look if you viewed them from a high window of an apartment building.

There is no known natural effect that can explain seeing large floating cities well above the horizon. Hilariously, the Daily Mail article claims that floating cities in the sky are a “relatively common occurrence,” which simply isn't true.

What explanations can we give for this sighting? One possibility is that the video is just a fraud. But that doesn't explain the reported fact that thousands of people witnessed the sighting. (Of course, it's always possible that both the video and the news story are frauds.) 

The Daily Mail article does mention some weird conspiracy theory called Project Blue Beam, involving the idea that “Nasa will someday simulate an alien invasion of Earth or second coming of Christ through holograms.” That, of course, is nonsense. I think that it has been included in the article so that skeptics can say, “Why of course we should believe in the sensible idea of a mirage rather than the absurd idea of some weird NASA conspiracy to project holograms.” I've seen this countless times – when you want people to pay no attention to some paranormal-seeming phenomenon, always suggest the most ridiculous paranormal explanation you can think of, so people will prefer your natural explanation, no matter how untenable your natural explanation is.

I can think of a more intelligent idea, which is simply that some mysterious unknown intelligence is trying to gradually make its presence known to us, by a series of signs that are growing more dramatic in number and more spectacular as time goes on. Such an intelligence might be divine, extraterrestrial, spiritual, extra-dimensional or angelic. Using such a theory, we might explain several different phenomena, including crop circles,  inexplicable objects photographed on Mars, various types of UFOs, and some other bizarre phenomena. Of course, it's quite a conceptual leap to suggest such an idea, but when “thousands of people” start reporting a city floating in the sky, we should not necessarily be conservative in trying to explain things.