November 17, 2012
Partial Media Explanations

I want to tell you about a gifted friend of mine. For safety sake let's call him Jack Tourmaline. Jack is an Illusionist, but not in the sense that you are likely thinking about. Certainly he could work in the entertainment industry, but people working with him would soon be tipped off by the lack of trickery involved. It must be easy to imagine that a gifted person could make another person think they saw something that was not really there. Is it just as easy to imagine that one could make something actually appear? Something recordable on video? Well start thinking hard, because it can be done, and Jack does it.

Here's a scenario for you. It's late at a night. A security guard is making his rounds. His partner sitting at reception is watching the monitor screens. He sees his buddy making the rounds. The patroller exits a room and the watcher is about to look away when a figure materializes in the now empty room. The watcher radios the patroller who turns around and rushes back into the room just in time to see the figure disappear into a wall. Is the place haunted? Did they see a ghost? Nope. It's someone like Jack at work.

I bring this up now because of a video creating a lot of buzz this week. You know the one I mean immediately if you've seen it. The ghost at the gas station that walks around the gas pump, approaches the car, swings its arm, and then gets into the car without opening the door. I'm sure a lot of people have written it off as the usual movie magic. Being a compressed video online from an unknown source makes it impossible to look for tell tale marks of the superimposing of the man into the scene because the quality is degraded. The big question is why make this happen? Well certainly it's more authentic because other people in the video, presumably real ones, react to the freaky goings-on. I suspect the actual motive is the same as for someone who fakes a ghost video with software.

I don't want to be upsetting, and I hope this hasn't disturbed anyone, but even seeing isn't believing all of the time. As you can imagine this goes a lot farther than one of the gifted making someone see something that isn't there, a something that can't be verified by anyone else. I guess that has its own impact now that I think about it. Either way it is best if these gifts are in the right hands that won't abuse them.

Tags: evidence, ghosts, illusion, Jack Tourmaline, news, perception, psychic, video.