Drone Ghost!

In my previous post I demonstrated how UFO sightings of the future will be more lobe and less probe. It’s one of the unintended (but positive) consequences of America’s drone war on terror. Humans will end up adopting a more scientifically accurate understanding of extraterrestrials because they will be required to explain why a given UFO sighting is not simply a toy airplane.

In a similar vein, I’m hoping that camera phones will help disprove the existence of ghosts. But unfortunately for humanity, this one has a much lower probability of success. Belief in ghosts (both noisy and quite) is an ancient one and it is interwoven with the human condition making it difficult to break free.

Belief in aliens, not the other hand, is a relatively new phenomena, and because of its young age it is forced to co-exist with newer, more-verifiable ideas. Aliens also happen to be from in a place (space) that humans regularly visit and study. Ghosts remain elusive because no one has yet been able to take a high-resolution photograph of where they live.

And I’m *not* talking about the ancient abandoned indian burial ground and pet cemetery.

This is my understanding of how ghosts work: when people or their beloved pets die, their non-physical components (whatever that is) leave this world and go to a non-physical place but sometimes this non-physical part comes back to the physical world. We don’t know exactly where they will appear but we do know where they will *not* show up – well-lit, nationally televised, broadcast-in-high-def, live, sporting events / award shows / high-profile weddings / political rallies / surgical procedures.

With that in mind, all ghost encounters fall into two broad categories:

• I heard something that I can’t explain.
• I saw something (not in the sky) that I can’t explain.

The category one claims (sound) can be dismissed outright. There are huge missteps in logic for someone to hear a strange voice and jump straight to “dead grandmother” skipping over radio, tooth radio, voice in head, person just out of view, and meddling kids. In a debate, it should be no contest – there are just too many plausible readily-available explanations for unknown sounds.

The category twos (visual), are a different beast all together. This is because the effect of actually seeing something with ones own eyes is so much more powerful than simply hearing it. In the past people had to use eyewitness testimony (which is notoriously unreliable and compelling) to verify claims of ghosts and ghost-like activity.

But now, almost everyone has a camera with them twenty-four seven. Instant, high-resolution evidence of mysterious apparitions should be easy to come by. If you can see it with your eyes, you can take a picture of it. The exact same principals apply to cameras and human eyeballs. Look it up. If it doesn’t show up in your instagram, it’s a hallucination.

Or you don’t know how to operate the camera.

Eventually people will get tired of hearing excuses about why the witness was unable to snap a photo with her iPhone. But even with all this I think belief in ghosts will survive because acknowledging their non-existence means facing our own mortality – something humans have been just terrible at.