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I am a photographer and run a co-operative photography lab for hundreds of people a year. They regularly come to me with their photos, asking why "such & such" happened in their photo. In most cases i can tell them what happenned, in terms of exposure and chemical processing.
Since the beginning of photography people have mistaken photography for truth. Even when it is not manipulated by someone deliberately, there are all manner of things that can go wrong during exposure and development that to most people are inexplicable. You can get ghostlike abberitions, shadows, additional images, strange coloring, in black and white film some objects can go all black or all white, there can be textures or air bells, fogging, and that's just for starters. It's almost infinite what can go wrong.
Have you ruled out x-ray exposure, light leakages in the camera, film can, or processing, fingerprints, bad chemistry, dirty camera lens, dirty enlarger lens, dirty felts on the film can or in the camera, irregular aggitation, the film touching another part of the film during processing, double exposures, film that picks up non-visible light? To name just a few!
One of my best photographs has a ghostly appearance of a hand over my face. There were 30 eyewitnesses that can say that there was no hand on my face at the time of exposure and no mirrors or projectors present, and experts can tell you the negative was not manipulated, and yet it is there on the negative, a hand erily on my face. I've had professional photographers ask me again and again how i did it. It was accidental. I figured out how it happened though and when i've told it to photographers they agree it makes perfect sense. A reflection had happened on an inside surface of the camera, bouncing a duplicate of my hand, in reverse, onto the film, coincidentally over my face. The chances of it happening are extremely rare, and then only when using a penlight for illumination, as i was.
I'm seeing a pattern in Tom's arguments. He is attached to a certain conclusion... paranormality. Any time he can not explain an observation, he assumes the absence of other obvious explanation proves it's paranormal, rather than it is yet to be explained.
History is chocked full of such beliefs that have fallen by the wayside once new evidence or explanations were found. We once thought the earth was flat. Then we thought that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around the earth. All sorts of beliefs seemed plausable for a time. Until evidence is found one way or another, paranormality is a possible explanation for some of these strange things. But that is "POSSIBLE," which is very different from proven.
Paranormal occurances can't be proven through a process of elimination in uncontrolled conditions outside of a lab. There are just far too many factors involved in these situations, and it is clear that we do not yet have a complete understanding of our physical reality as yet (our understanding of animal communication and behavior continues to develop, for example. Only recently have we come to understand that bees have a rather sophisticated language in the form of "dancing").
Tom, you might wish to take a look at the television series Arthur C. Clarke did investigating various paranormal phenomena. He may have some written work on the subject as well, i don't know. I remember the series... it was quite fascinating, and he would conclude each article with his opinion of whether each phenomena was bogus, unlikely, possible, he didn't know, he thought there was something to it, or it was definitely true, and WHY, from a scientific point of view. They are very entertaining and i think you will find his methods of investigation enlightening.
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