Spent 18 months trying to debunk that wobbling orb video from 2022

I kept finding new layers of reflection artifacts and lens flare patterns in the original footage that looked fishy but took forever to replicate. Has anybody else spent way too long tearing apart one clip only to end up more confused than when you started?

3 comments

3 Comments

brianreed1mo agoProlific Poster

It's funny how the more you dig into anything the less clear it gets, like a weird pattern I keep noticing with old photos too.

kim_ramirez31mo ago

I lived in an old house that had photos from the 1940s in the basement (like a whole box of them), and I spent way too long trying to figure out who was who. The trick I learned is to stop trying to make everything fit together and just accept some details will stay fuzzy. Old cameras back then had weird lenses and film that could bend light in strange ways, so a lot of those odd shadows or blurs are just the camera doing its thing. If you can find someone older in your family who remembers the people or place, ask them before they forget (seriously, do it now). I wasted years trying to match faces to gravestones and census records, but a 5 minute chat with my grandmother cleared up more than all that digging combined. Sometimes the mystery is the actual point, not the answer.

corap211mo ago

Did you ever try checking if the orb's wobble matched the frame rate of a specific projector? My uncle used to run an old 16mm film projector and swore that certain lens flare patterns only showed up when the bulb was about to burn out. I got obsessed with an old home movie once where a "ghost" appeared in the background, and it turned out the camera had a smudge on the lens that made a real person look see-through in just the right light. It's wild how much hardware glitches can mess with what we think we're seeing.