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Are These Pictures Valid?
Michael Hall, senior editor of Texas Monthly Magazine, once told me that if he had come across my website on his own, knowing nothing about me, he would have been extremely skeptical. His comment helped me face the reality that my own reaction to some one else's similar web page would probably be much the same. Was it Carl Sagan who once observed that, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof?" I don't make extraordinary claims but the pictures at this website (and in my books and videos) might be considered extraordinary by some. What proof can I offer supporting validity of pictures presented at this website?
Unfortunately, there is no acceptable way to prove pictures have not been faked in this age of computer generated images. Some times a careful investigator can prove images were faked by spotting small inconsistencies but the absence of obvious fakery can never completely eliminate the possibility of fake images.
What I can do is take the time to explain how pictures at this website were obtained and why they look the way they do. That might help. We need to start with the fact that almost all of my pictures are time exposures because at night that is the only practical way to take pictures. Fast shutter speeds so standard in day time photographs produce completely black pictures revealing nothing because in the dark there is insufficient light to record an image. If the light target happens to be moving while the shutter is open, then the resultant photograph will show a light track depicting where the light moved during the time exposure. You will see light tracks in all my photographs unless the light source happens to be standing still during the time of exposure.
Mystery lights have a habit of turning on and off and varying in intensity during their short life times. If they are moving cross country the off states appear as gaps in the light track. You will find examples of this phenomena, on "Mystery Lights 1 and 2" pages. On some of the images in my video you will also find rainbow-like strips of color. The colorful strips of rainbow-like color are light spectra. They are generated by the light in my camera as the rays of light pass through a diffraction grating that has countless tiny prisms to break the light down into its color spectrum. You would not see these patterns at all if you were present because they occur only in my camera. I am able to get both the target light and its spectra in the same picture by placing the diffraction gratings behind the lens near the light's cross over point.
All of the color pictures presented at this website were taken by me using either film or digital SLR cameras. One of my digital cameras has been modified to record infrared light in addition to visible light. The picture on the home page of this website was made with that camera. The light in this case was moving right to left during the time the shutter was open to create the light track. In acquiring this camera I had hoped to prove that a heat source was continuing to travel across gaps we commonly see in mystery light tracks. Because infrared can photograph heat this expectation seemed reasonable. The home page shows what has been recorded in a few cases by this camera. It appears that some thing hot is passing through the gaps but the heat does not remain stationary. It expands as a tube of heat clearly visible on the right in the picture on the home page as a tube of heat expanding away from the center where the heat source passed. The second gap does not show a tube of expanding heat probably because that gap was caused by an obstruction instead of the mystery light going out to create the gap.
The Snoopy and Roofus pages include a number of black and white frames taken by those two black and white cameras. In all of the cases presented at this website those pictures were created by stacking images to create each recorded frame. This stacking technique is used to enhance the recorded image by building up collected light. Depth of the stack is a user variable from 1 image to 256 images per frame save and the time required to compile the stack varies with the depth of stack. For example, it takes 4.267 seconds to create each stack of 128 images so when using that depth of stack saved frames are equivalent to 4.267 second time exposures. This causes moving light sources, such as aircraft, to leave light tracks proportional to their speed. The faster they are going the longer the recorded light track.
Roofus and Snoopy both use astronomy type cameras capable of providing marvelous detail. In order to fully exploit available light on dark nights intensity controls have been set to high gain values. As a result these cameras routinely capture faint/dim details that would otherwise be lost. But extreme light enhancement settings come at a price. Bright light sources such as the moon bloom, sometimes dramatically if they are bright enough. The meteor depicted on the Snoopy page is a good example. That was the largest and brightest meteor ever seen by Snoopy but its intense light caused the image to bloom making the meteor appear larger and brighter than it actually was. This same blooming effect can be seen in other Roofus and Snoopy images whenever light targets are sufficiently bright.
None of the images presented in this website (or in my books or videos) were faked. They are all real photographs taken in Marfa. Some of them look like they were taken in day light instead of at night because I do use computer enhancement to bring out back ground terrain whenever that is possible. Not all of them are mystery lights. Some are ground vehicles, aircraft, lightning, sprites, etc. but in each case they are labeled as to what I believe them to be. If later I find that a mystery light image was actually an artificial light source (an aircraft or ground vehicle) then I immediately remove the image or else add text explaining what it is believed to be. I am not in the business of trying to fool people. Non-fiction is so much more interesting than fiction. Mystery lights are out there. They are uncommon to be sure, but they are very real and they constitute a rich deep mystery well deserving of study, wonderment, and excitement because they are beyond the edge of what can be counted as known.
I hope you enjoy this website for what it is. You will find it best to open your minds really wide before proceeding into this unknown realm. It is not a scary realm but it is a realm of mystery.
James Bunnell