Ten Pictures with Non-Creepy Explanations, Part II

Continuing our journey into the not-so-weird and the easily explainable, we begin in outer space.

6. The Black Knight Satellite

According to NASA, this is not an unexplained photo. This is a photo of an insulating blanket that was lost during an EVA during Mission STS-88. James Oberg, an award-winning journalist who made his name and fame covering space stories, put up this educational presentation regarding the odd-shaped object. He's quite certain it's a blanket, and has the pictures from NASA to prove it.

From what I can find, it's the latest in a collection ancient alien satellite legends that have all congealed into a single urban legend known as the Black Knight Satellite. It begins with Tesla saying he heard signals over his radio equipment, and he believed the signals were from space. We don't know what Tesla actually heard, but with what we know now, it's likely that he was listening to pulsars, which were formally discovered in 1968. Tesla made no recordings and had no pictures of this.

The next part of this collection of legends includes reports in 1954 of two satellites in orbit that we didn't put there. The problem here is that these reports were part of the publicity for a book about UFOs, and not factual reporting from any military or government source. It was something some UFO guy had heard from some air force guy who might have seen a UFO. Again, no pictures.

In 1960, Time magazine reported that there was some kind of dark satellite out there that neither the US nor the USSR had put up. What doesn't make it onto the UFO sites is that three weeks later, with no fanfare, Time retracted the story, saying that it was a known satellite that had earlier been lost. Mysteries are reported loudly, retractions are printed quietly. No pictures here, either.

And finally, we have this picture, which you will find all over the 'net if you google Black Knight Satellite. It's certainly weird looking, but we know exactly what it is. The only reason it was appended to this legend is that it's oddly shaped and has made it onto the 'net without proper attribution.

7. The Cooper Falling Body

The video says that "there is very little information about this photo." That would be true. All that's out there is the image itself, and this story that has apparently become appended to it.

Once you've worked that out, what we have here is a photo with unexplained origins more than anything else. One hoax researcher alleges that the first appearance of the photo was as an art piece on horror web site Ligotti.com in 2009. The story of the Cooper family isn't attached to it there.

What probably happened is that this creepy art photo, probably an old photo altered with Photoshop, got a story attached to it because it's just too disturbing and creepy cool to leave alone. However, I will admit that no one seems 100% sure of this. There are some questions, though, like why is the picture of the family framed in such a way that the people are so far off to the side? Is there a larger picture that this thing was cropped from or what? "Very little information" about a picture, especially in the age of Photoshop, does not equal a mystery. The only mystery is why people don't seem to know this.

If anyone recognizes this family, or knows for sure where this photo came from or who altered it, I'd sure like to know. Also, I welcome comments from people who have more experience with Photoshop with any views you have on whether this is genuine.

8. Geophone Rock Anomoly

The creepy video says that this photo was taken during Apollo 17, the last flight to the moon, and that this picture was listed as blank due to overexposure. So far, so good. All of that is true.

But then, they go on to, "Look! There's a pyramid on the moon! NASA took a picture of it!"

Disproving this is as easy as going to the source material. All of the pictures from Apollo 17 are online on NASA's website. The above is listed as picture # AS17-135-20680.

Let's look at the two pictures just before it, numbers 78 and 79 in the series.

Now look at that first photo again. Do you still think it's a pyramid? Or do you see that it's probably another picture of the seat of the rover, like the picture immediately before it?

In context, I think it's pretty clear that there aren't pyramids on the moon, or at least that this is not a picture of a pyramid on the moon.

Let's get back to ghost hunting, then.

9. Goddard's Squadron

This is a real photo. I don't think there's any modern alteration to it, nor is there any intentional trickery going on. The story goes that this group photo was taken the same day as a funeral for an aircraft mechanic, Freddy Johnson, who had died two days earlier of injuries caused by walking into a propeller. Sir Victor Goddard, the individual who first publicized the photo, was in this squadron when the picture was taken in 1919. Goddard believed that this was a picture of the ghost of their comrade. He also believed that he had experienced a time travel incident and he lectured about his belief in the existence of UFOs.  I'm not saying that this means the photo should be discarded out of hand, but I'm inclined to wonder about his story that everyone believed this was their fallen crewmate in the face of his credulity about other paranormal stuff. It may be that he believed, but at this point he's dead himself and so is everyone else in this photo. We can't ask what they thought.  

It seems clear, looking at the sides of the photo, that this is a crop of a larger photo. How many people were in this photo? Was it a panoramic shot? Could that be an even better explanation for how the double exposure came to be here? It's well-known that someone can prank a panoramic shot to look like they appear in it twice. These pictures require a long, slow pan while everyone stays still. People are bad at that. 

Taking that into account, I believe it's a double exposure, probably of the guy the "ghost" is behind with his hat off. I think this photo was likely to have been a long exposure, and one of the men in the back row either had his hat off and was taken by surprise when they were told to be still. 

Nonetheless, this one is tough because I wasn't there. I don't know anything about the camera this was taken with, nor do I know enough about how long the exposure time would have been here. I can't even verify how many people were in this uncropped picture of this, or whether it was or wasn't a panoramic picture originally. 

I'm going to keep looking. If anyone reading this knows anything about photography in 1919, especially with an insight as to what the British military would have used at the end of the war to take final shots of units before they went home at the end of the war, let me know. 

10. The Truly Strange Case of Elisa Lam

This is actually my favorite of the lot. According to our creep video, the elevator footage of Elisa Lam behaving strangely in a hotel elevator was taken "moments before her death." She was later found dead in the hotel's water tank on the roof. She was only discovered because people in the hotel were complaining that the water pressure was bad and the water tasted funny. She'd been missing for two weeks.

To ramp up the creep factor, if you track down the story further, the Cecil Hotel, where this happened, has a past worthy of a horror movie. Two known serial killers lived there, and it's rumored to be one of the last places the Black Dahlia was seen alive. It's a cheap dive that's uncomfortably close the Skid Row. It's probably not a safe place for a young woman staying alone under any circumstances. It absolutely fits the criteria for the kind of place that ought to be haunted.

This is the full video of Elisa Lam and her weird behavior in the elevator, presumably on the night that she died.

She looks like she's trying to hide from someone, and then going in and out of the elevator to maybe try to see if whatever she's hiding from is still there. She presses all the buttons. The elevator doesn't move or do anything until the end, after she leaves, at which point it closes and reopens on some other floors. 

So what's going on here? Why is she in the elevator acting like she's hiding from someone? And if she's hiding, why keep going in and out? Is she talking to someone outside the frame of the video? Where does she go when she leaves? And why doesn't the elevator work for her? If she's running from someone, why not go to another floor or down to the lobby? 

She's clearly agitated. Should we conclude that she's possessed? Being stalked by something paranormal that only she can see? 

Also, Elisa Lam had bipolar disorder. Was she having some kind of psychotic break? Was whatever she was hiding from only in her mind? Or was she having some kind of episode that left her vulnerable to a predator who took advantage of her condition to abduct and kill her? 

The coroner ruled the case an accidental drowning. They said there was no evidence of foul play on her body and the toxicology reports came back negative. 

I don't have an answer, but I have an idea of what I think happened. Elisa Lam was being pursued by someone when she got into this elevator. I think it was either someone who lived long-term in the hotel or one of the staff, someone likely to know where the surveillance cameras were and where to stand so they would not be seen. Some predator saw this young woman traveling alone and came after her, and she was trying to get away. When the elevator didn't work, she left it for whatever access she used to reach the roof. She may even have gotten into the water tank thinking that she could hide there for awhile and get back out, not realizing that once she got in through the unlocked hatch there would be no way to re-open it. 

It may also be that she was having a psychotic break and was running from a hallucination. It could also be that she ran from a real person who caught her and killed her in some way that doesn't leave traces that survive two weeks of decomposition in a water tank. 

The speculation on the 'net for what happened runs the gamut from "crazy chick drowned herself" to "OMG demonic possession cult murder!" mostly due to her strange behavior in the elevator that looks like she's reacting to something that isn't properly there. I think that either someone actually was there, or that she believed someone was. 

As usual, the simplest explanation is the most likely one. However, it's hard to know which simple explanation is the right one here. I'm going to keep an eye on this case, because I really want to know if the case ever has some real answers. Meanwhile, the Cecil Hotel has been re-opened, and is now operating under the name Stay on Main Hotel. You can stay there if you want to, but I'd recommend that you don't drink the water. 

And that's it for this crop of "unexplained" photos. I'm willing to call it seven completely explainable pictures, two ghost photos that as yet have not been debunked, and one genuine mystery.