(photo credit: Mercury Press/Harper Kurtz. Reproduced in
accordance with copyright guidelines on fair use)
It seems I am in a skeptic-bashing mood at the moment.
Therefore I'm going to address a skeptic analysis of a supposed ghost
photograph that was taken back in July. The photo is a selfie made by a
thirteen your old girl called Harper Kurtz. It is a sunny day and the shot is
well-lit; it's also on a fast exposure setting because you can see her hair in
detail even though it's blowing around in the wind. She's sitting in the front
passenger seat of a car and her mother, Melissa Kurtz, is driving beside her out
of frame to her left (It's a left-hand drive car because they're in Florida
USA). The camera Harper is using is her mother's and you can see it is being held
in both her hands, reflected in the lenses of her sunglasses. Behind her can
clearly be seen what looks like a human head. It has a very thin face with a
narrow pointed chin. Its skin is pallid and its hair is light brown and curly.
It has a high forehead. It has been described as looking like a small boy and
to me it does; perhaps a boy who is black or of mixed race. His head is in the
position you would expect if he were sitting in the back seat behind Harper. It
appears he is holding two fingers up in front of his chin palm backwards; an
inverted victory sign which is not an abusive gesture in
North
America as it is in
Britain.
The head is slightly out of focus to the same degree as the whole back seat
area is; which is to be expected seeing as the principle object of the photo is
Harper's face which is within a foot or two of the lens. The lighting is the
same for the boy's head as it is for Harper's. Unfortunately the head is
obscured by Harper's hair and the headrest of her seat. However this should all
be impossible anyway because Harper and her mother say they were alone in the
car. They never discovered the anomaly for a whole month because Melissa hadn't
got round to studying the contents of her camera. When she saw the image in
question she published it on social media and the press ran a story. It turned
out that there are some curious additional facts surrounding this mystery. The
day the photo was taken was the first anniversary of a major road traffic
accident on the same stretch of road. Melissa could find the details, but she
believes a child died in the incident. If this is the ghost of the victim he
might have been drawn to Harper to warn her because, as you can see, she didn't
have her seatbelt on. There is also a history of paranormal activity in the
family centred on Harper. This is not the first ghost photo she has taken. From
the very start her life has been tinged with fate. Melissa's brother had been
engaged to be married to a woman named Harper while Melissa was pregnant with
her daughter. Yet the couple were killed in a car accident and Melissa named
her daughter after her deceased sister-in-law to be. Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3934176/He-came-warn-wear-seatbelts-Mother-shocked-discover-GHOST-boy-sitting-seat-car-thinks-appeared-daughter-safe.html.
Several paranormal investigators have examined the photo and
passed it as genuine. However one of them disagrees, Mick West of Metabunk.org,
a good old fashioned pre-Facebook nostalgic internet forum that describes
itself as: "...dedicated to the art and pastime of honest, polite,
scientific investigating and debunking." I'd have thought
"investigating" would have been enough if your goal was to be
scientific. Mr West thinks that the photo is not of a real ghost. Nevertheless
even he admits that this image would very difficult indeed to fake. The
layering would have to be exactly right and this would be close to impossible
seeing as Harper's hair was obscuring it. As you can see, every strand of the
girl's hair is in front of the object behind her. The lighting effects are
exactly right too, as is the focus. This also is a good reason to believe the
Solway Firth Spaceman photo, see:
http://hpanwo.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/solway-firth-spaceman.html;
you can see that all of
Elizabeth's
hair is in front of the white-suited entity. An example of a badly layered fake
ghost photo is this one, also of a ghost in a car, see:
http://www.skeptic.com/insight/double-exposure-in-the-back-seat/;
notice how the "ghost's" collar overlaps the door frame slightly? We
see nothing like that in Harper's photo. Mr West instead thinks that Melissa
and her daughter are lying or mistaken about them being alone in the car and
they actually did have a real living boy in the back seat, probably one of
Harper's school chums. It was about a month before they even noticed the
anomaly so they may have forgotten the details of the day in question. West
says it's more likely they concocted a lie because they're both unlikely to
have conflated the same error (This, as an aside, contradicts the standard
skeptic explanation for the Mandela effect, see:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/ive-got-mandela-effect.html).
The problem here is that the boy in question might well recognize himself in
the media and come forward. There would be an incentive because no doubt he'd
become a five-minute sensation himself. Melissa and Harper do profess to recall
what they were doing that day, driving to a beauty pageant where Harper was
competing. Mr West says he has worked all this out using Occam's razor, a
problem solving method that states you should always address the most likely
explanation first, the one that involves the fewest additional assumptions. He
has therefore assigned the possibilities in order of likeliness:
1. There was a boy in
the car and Melissa and Harper lied about it.
2. There was a boy in
the car and Melissa and Harper forgot about him.
3. There was no boy
in the car and the image is of something else blowing around in the back seat.
4. It is a fake
photo.
5. There was no boy
in the car and it's a photo of something truly supernatural.
The problem with number three is that the object really
looks like a boy's head. The answer could be that it's just a coincidence and
it looks to me like a boy's head through pareidolia. However that brings up the
coincidence fallacies that I've discussed before, see:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/pan-pareidolia.html.
Unlike most skeptics, Mick West appears to have an awareness of this obstacle.
In fact he admits:
"This
possibility is more complex because it requires us to image something that
precisely forms into the shapes we see in the photo, something that resembles a
human head and two fingers. Something that seems to have the correct three
dimensional shape and the skin tone." However he saves the real ghost
explanation for last, number five. This is because he considers this the least
likely explanation in accordance with Occam's razor. This is one of the big concerns
I have with Occam's razor that I've also addressed elsewhere, see:
http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/skeptics-who-are-they-why-are-they.html.
West has composed his little hierarchy of plausibility unilaterally. He has
deduced for himself what he considers to be more or less likely completely on
his own terms and this is a mistake. In the background links I give the example
of a radio. If it stops working, try changing the batteries before you open it
up and stick a screwdriver into its innards because flat batteries are the most
common cause of a radio not working. However
you have to know how the radio works in the first place to make that
judgement. West simply says this about Possibility number five:
"That requires us to introduce
something incredibly complex and entirely new world of science: life-after-death
with spirits returning to walk the earth..." That's a highly
subjective statement to make. We don't know how many spirits there are walking
the earth or how often they make themselves visible to the living and
photographic film. Until we have exact proportions we can't assign the
possibility a place in the league table of likelihoods. To understand those
proportions there needs to be a congress of opinion between various experts in
the field and that has never taken place. That being said though, by skeptic
standards, West's article is a very good effort. However I still think this case
is probably a real ghost photograph. Incidentally, Mr West has made an extra
interesting discovery that the other investigators missed. The ghost photo is
one of a series that are on the same film chip and the one before was taken
just a second or two earlier. Originally it appeared there was no sign of
anything unusual, but Mr West has noticed that you can see what looks like the
boy's shoulder in it. Source:
https://www.metabunk.org/explaining-the-ghost-boy-in-the-back-seat-photo-with-occams-razor.t8156/.
