Have you ever received your pictures back after an investigation and poured over them? Do you remember that one orb that you would swear on that stack of proverbial bibles contained a face?

This is called pareidolia. Pareidolia (from Greek para- amiss, faulty, wrong + eidolon, diminutive of eidos appearance, form) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image) being mistakenly perceived as recognizable. Common examples include images of animals or faces in clouds, seeing the man in the moon, and hearing messages on records played in reverse.

One example of this happened in Canada in the 50’s when people swore they could see the Devil’s head inside the Queen’s hair on a dollar. The Rorschach ink blot test uses this phenomenon to get a better understanding of a person’s mental state.

So, are we as investigators guilty of such. Do we see things in pictures or hear things on tape that we swear are proof or are our eyes and ears playing tricks on us? The human mind is “hard wired” to recognize shapes and sounds in things that it does’t recognize. Why is this you ask? No one knows for sure, maybe it’s the minds way of dealing with things that it doesn’t understand.

Let’s face it folks, we as a community deal with a lot of things that our minds can’t comprehend or don’t want to comprehend. The face in the picture or the voice on the tape could be hard evidence or it could be us wanting it to be. We may, as human beings, try to project things onto certain media to try and prove to ourselves that there is something beyond this realm of the mundane.

So I throw this out to the masses in hopes of enlightening all of you. So maybe we all will give that picture or that EVP more scrutinizing eyes. Heck, ask your fellow investigators to lend you an ear or an eye. The better our evidence is, the better we are.