Chile: Ghostly Image Captured on Cellphone

SOURCE: IIEE and Crónica Newspaper
DATE: 02.24.07

CHILE: CELLPHONE PICKS UP GHOSTLY IMAGE
by Tania Merino

Technicians believe the phenomenon is "bizarre"

The time was 11:02 pm on February 4, 2007 when after a family get-together in a house at Villa Cap, a 25 year-old man tried to take a photo of his mother with his cellphone camera. All of the guests were gone and only the young man and his parents were in the house. It was for this reason that uncertainty gripped them all when they saw the images that the cellphone had captured.



Only in one of the snapshots, taken in a quick sequence of four photographs, did the woman appear. The rest of them picked up sections of the face of a man who looks straight into the lens and who was never in the room.

"My mom got nervous, I put the cellphone away, we checked the house, but there was no one there but us," said the young man, who preferred anonymity rather than face public questioning of his sanity. He said that "a heavy atmosphere" weighed over the house at the time, that it was "saturated", and that strange things had already occurred them, such as objects moving without any reason whatsoever.

Upon seeing what had happened, he fired another volley of three photos and the same thing occured. The man's face reappeared.

He nervously showed us the time and date of the images captured by the cellphone. All of them correspond to the hour and minute he indicated and each sequence falls within the same minute: 23.02, 23.03, 23.05 and 23.06 minutes. the photos remain inside the cellphone until their origin can be ascertained.

The next day, he informed his brother of the event and they uploaded the images to a computer through a USB cable. They assembled the parts of the jigsaw puzzle and were surprised to clearly see the features of a man aged between thirty and forty, wearing a white suit and shirt. "This is a person that doesn't exist in the household; no one knows him. No one in my family wears three piece suits, to begin with."

"I even asked the old owner of my mother's house and she had never seen him either," he added.
Furthermore, he added that "the other day a neighbor who drives a taxi cab was getting home at 3 a.m. when he saw an image appear in the backyard of our house, a man wearing a three-piece suit and smoking. The driver turned oun the headlights, but by the time he did so, there was no one there." Our interviewee showed the cellphone images to the neighbor and the driver recognized him - not by the face, but by the shape and the suit.

"Now I want to know who this person is, what he wants and what he needs," he concluded fearfully.
We consulted with an expert from a cellular telephony company and explained the situation. "Nowadays, cameras have a VGA system with pixels, and capture the image that is before them. These can only be manipulated and rearranged by editing, but there is no way that they can invent an image or create that of a person that isn't standing in front of the camera," explained Roman Montero. He admitted that it is "bizarre, because I can't find a logical explanation for it. It is impossible that it should occur. A camera cannot photograph something that it can't see," he added. He suggested taking the photos to a lab and to have them analyzed. He understood the urge to associate the images with a ghost. In earlier times, the exposure of a negative could justify such a thing, but it is not possible with a digital photograph.

(translation (c) 2007, S. Corrales, IHU. Special thanks to Raul Nuñez, IIEE)