Orb phenomena

An orb, in the paranormal sense, is the name given to a seemingly spontaneously appearing ball of light in a photograph – an orb can appear in one photograph and not be in a photo taken of the same area taken directly afterwards and can appear solid or faint.

There are numerous theories attributed to the round balls of light caught in photographs worldwide, some of these theories make a lot more sense than others though. Some people claim that the orbs are the first sign of spirit manifestation and that they are ghosts/spirits manifesting energy in the earliest stage on the path of becoming a full apparition.

Some people claim that the theory that orbs are ghosts must be true due to their appearance in photographs on demand. Ghost hunters often report that as they ask for a spirit to show itself an orb will appear on a photograph they take. Often people will take a photo( like the one to the right), that shows them seemingly touching, holding or reaching towards an orb which they claim shows a spirit was present with them or was reacting to them.

However, common sense goes against this theory because for every photograph taken of a person with an orb appearing ‘on request’ or near them, there will be lots of photos with no orbs in them even though a request has been made – this appearance of orbs on demand is more likely to have been caused by sheer coincidence. The belief based on these coincidences is just confirmation bias as the photos with a miss (no orbs in them on demand) will be forgotten or deemed irrelevant, and those photos with a hit (an orb in it on demand) will be deemed relevant. This is called ‘The file drawer effect’.

There are also people who hold the belief that the colour of an orb holds a meaning about the spirit that is causing the orb. Colour in orb anomalies is actually simply caused by light refraction or chromatic aberration in the camera lens which causes colours in the photo to appear feathered, distorted and out of focus.

What is the truth about orbs? Well, it’s quite simple.

Orbs are photographic artefacts – specifically bits of airborne dust, water droplets, insects etc. caught in the flash of a camera. They appear out of focus because they are so close to the lens of the camera in an area called ‘The orb zone’ which is between the camera lens and the ‘point of focus’ in a photograph (namely the object you are taking a photo of, such as a person.)

When the flash of a camera goes off it will reflect off of the airborne artefacts in ‘the orb zone’ and the position between the lens and the ‘point of focus’ will cause the light reflection to appear as a circle of confusion.

An orb is what a professional photographer would call a circle of confusion, an out of focus highlight in the photo. When you take a photograph that has out of focus objects in it you will notice that the out of focus objects don’t just go fuzzy – they turn into small overlapping circles of light and the larger the circle, the fainter it is, because the light is more spread out until eventually the circles will become so large and faint that they disappear all together.

This could explain why some orbs appear larger and fainter than others rather than the idea that the spirit orb is further away from the camera. To confuse an artefact in front of a camera lens for a spirit manifestation is an easy mistake to make if you do not research into the subject and rely upon pseudo-scientific theories.

A study was done by ‘Paranormal Site Investigators’ who are based in Swindon into the orb phenomena. You can read about their sutdy and orbs in more detail by clicking here.