Ask Lemmy

I get it. I know. Thanks again.

I mean, I agree with the general "people who are into space aliens or ghost videos are looking for patterns in the static -- there's no worthwhile material out there" sentiment.

There are real, serious "hunt for space alien" efforts, like SETI. They haven't found anything yet, and they tend to consist of a bunch of radioastronomers doing statistical analysis on a lot of data gathered by radiotelescopes, not people staring intently at grainy camcorder footage, but if you're honestly after space aliens, that's where you want to be.

However, I think that it's also too strong to say that every paranormal video is a hoax, even in the "grainy camcorder footage" class. Some people in the history of humanity clearly did see something that they didn't understand, and that doesn't mean that they created a hoax; it wouldn't be fair to them to say that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantell_UFO_incident

On January 7, 1948, 25-year-old Captain Thomas F. Mantell, a Kentucky Air National Guard pilot, died when he crashed his P-51 Mustang fighter plane near Franklin, Kentucky, United States, after being sent in pursuit of an unidentified flying object (UFO). Mantell pursued the object in a steep climb and disregarded suggestions to level his altitude. At high altitude, he blacked out from a lack of oxygen; his plane went into a downward spiral and crashed. The incident was among the most publicized of early UFO reports.[1] Later investigation by the United States Air Force's Project Blue Book indicated that Mantell died chasing a Skyhook balloon, which, in 1948, was a top-secret project that he would not have known about.[1][2]

Was that a craft piloted by little green men from outer space? No. But Mantell didn't go kill himself with the aim of creating a hoax, either. He legitimately saw something that he could not identify. It wasn't aliens or ghosts, but it was there and he made a good-faith effort to try to figure it out.

And there have also been physical phenomena that we didn't understand at the time that people have seen. That's not ghosts or demons or aliens either, but there was stuff going on that we didn't understand. Consider:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

Ball lightning is a rare and unexplained phenomenon described as luminescent, spherical objects that vary from pea-sized to several meters in diameter. Though usually associated with thunderstorms,[1] the observed phenomenon is reported to last considerably longer than the split-second flash of a lightning bolt, and is a phenomenon distinct from St. Elmo's fire.

Some 19th-century reports[2][3] describe balls that eventually explode and leave behind an odor of sulfur. Descriptions of ball lightning appear in a variety of accounts over the centuries and have received attention from scientists.[4] An optical spectrum of what appears to have been a ball lightning event was published in January 2014 and included a video at high frame rate.[5][6] Laboratory experiments have produced effects that are visually similar to reports of ball lightning, but how these relate to the supposed phenomenon remains unclear.[7][8]

In practice, you probably have a mixture of people making things up, not-entirely-accurately-recalling things, and what is probably multiple different phenomena getting bundled together.

We had theories, but nothing really solid to validate them in nature until 2014, where we had something that looks like it validates some previous theories explaining at least some cases: it was produced when lighting hit ground, vaporized some material in the soil, and the subsequent reaction of that vapor with oxygen in the air then produced a brief luminescent spherical ball:

In January 2014, scientists from Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China, published the results of recordings made in July 2012 of the optical spectrum of what was thought to be natural ball lightning made by chance during the study of ordinary cloud–ground lightning on the Tibetan Plateau.[5][45] At a distance of 900 m (3,000 ft), a total of 1.64 seconds of digital video of the ball lightning and its spectrum was made, from the formation of the ball lightning after the ordinary lightning struck the ground, up to the optical decay of the phenomenon. Additional video was recorded by a high-speed (3000 frames/sec) camera, which captured only the last 0.78 seconds of the event, due to its limited recording capacity. Both cameras were equipped with slitless spectrographs. The researchers detected emission lines of neutral atomic silicon, calcium, iron, nitrogen, and oxygen—in contrast with mainly ionized nitrogen emission lines in the spectrum of the parent lightning. The ball lightning traveled horizontally across the video frame at an average speed equivalent of 8.6 m/s (28 ft/s). It had a diameter of 5 m (16 ft) and covered a distance of about 15 m (49 ft) within those 1.64 s.

Oscillations in the light intensity and in the oxygen and nitrogen emission at a frequency of 100 hertz, possibly caused by the electromagnetic field of the 50 Hz high-voltage power transmission line in the vicinity, were observed. From the spectrum, the temperature of the ball lightning was assessed as being lower than the temperature of the parent lightning (<15,000 to 30,000 K). The observed data are consistent with vaporization of soil as well as with ball lightning's sensitivity to electric fields.[5][45]

It's pretty likely that some people in history saw that phenomenon and described it as ball lightning. Is it supernatural? Well, no, not in the sense that I think people generally use the term; it conforms to our understanding of the laws of physics at the time that we recorded it. But it was a process that we hadn't specifically nailed down.

😭