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This photograph was taken by Vika in his church.

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What can explain the eerie figure by the altar?

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In this girl's photograph was taken in 1917, were there really fairies at the bottom of

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a Yorkshire garden?

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This weird picture of a London bus was taken by a man who claims he could think photographs

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straight onto film.

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Can the camera really capture the psychic world?

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Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, scientist, writer and visionary, the scientist

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who invented the communication satellite, the writer of 2010, and now in retreat in

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Sri Lanka, the visionary who ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.

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Investigating the supernatural can be a very frustrating experience.

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So much depends on second hand reports and eyewitnesses' powers of observation, yet

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a single good photograph could settle the matter once and for all.

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Most apparently psychic photographs seemed to turn up by accident, but in the 1960s one

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man claimed that he could take them at will.

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His name was Ted Sirius, and he asserted that he could imprint images on film merely by thinking

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at the camera.

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Ted Sirius called his technique a thoughtography.

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He usually used Polaroid cameras and sometimes extraordinary photographs emerged, blurred

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and distorted but often showing buildings miles away from the cameras.

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This 1967 session was organised by Ted's champion psychiatrist Dr. Jules Eisenbud.

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Today, Ted and Jules are reunited for another thoughtographic test.

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Dr. Eisenbud has taken time off from his busy practice.

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Pausing only to collect essential supplies, they're bound for Dr. Eisenbud's cabin outside

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Denver in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

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In his heyday, Ted astonished the psychic world with his performance as a thoughtographer.

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When he was hot, when he was in the groove, what happened was that first he would start

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by alternating whiteies and blackies.

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Blackies is total obstruction of the light, no light getting in.

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Whiteies is total over exposure, which shouldn't have been.

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Then the pictures would start getting darker and darker and darker, and then he would start

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to imprint parts of people or scenes.

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Like this church in Germany, where Ted had never been, all this blurred writing identified

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as a sign from a mountain's building.

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But in Ted's version, the word Canadian seems to be misspelled.

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This is a Star-Growing airplane.

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This is what Ted got.

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Here you will notice that the strut here is an inverted V. Up here he has re-inverted

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it so that this is his typical signature.

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Now this type of rearrangement is exactly what we do in dreams, exactly.

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Don't even trigger it.

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When I say now, bang, like that.

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Could Ted have been cheating?

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Impossible, says Eisenbud.

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Ted was continually observed by dozens of people, sometimes six, eight in a session.

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Ted usually held a tube of paper in front of the lens.

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He called it his gizmo and said it helped concentrate his thoughts.

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Ted's last thoughtograph was of curtains, but that was ten years ago.

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Can he produce anything now?

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I'm after one thing and that's a person that's holding something.

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Okay.

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But all he got was his face.

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Now you press the button.

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All right.

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Good.

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Undaunted, Ted and Jewel work on into the night.

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Trying everything they know to recapture the spirit of success.

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Come on, take some film Jews.

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You know.

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Randy's like this is a...

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We did this night after night for three years.

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The sessions would last six, eight hours and at the beginning nothing would happen.

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But later in those original sessions weird pictures would often emerge.

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How did it happen?

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Two observers who watched Ted in action for a whole weekend suspected his gizmo, the rolled up tube of paper.

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Charles Reynolds and David Isendrath, experts in both photography and conjuring,

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speculate that Ted might have used the gizmo to hide a pocket magnifying lens with a tiny slide stuck on the end.

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By taking a piece of a transparency, a piece of a photographic transparency and fastening it across the end,

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when light passes through the transparency and then through the lens,

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is picked up by the optical system of the Polaroid camera and voila, it becomes a photographic image.

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This is a big Ben and let's just see how it looks on your camera.

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Using a device like this, they reckon Ted could have produced any picture he wanted.

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Charlie is going to hold it.

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The light from the wink light is going to bounce off Charlie's shirt and jacket.

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And pass through this lens, through the lens of the camera and hopefully make a good image on the film.

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You want to mask off as much of that lens as you can.

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Now you must realize that when Ted is doing this, a great deal of chaos is taking place.

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And it's very possible that he could have ditched that as I just did.

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And when they said, let me see this thing, you could say, yeah, look at it, you know.

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And in the meantime, he's drinking beer and people are running around and a great deal is happening.

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And it's very, very easy under those circumstances for somebody who doesn't even have to be a magician.

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And it's very, very easy under those circumstances for somebody who doesn't even have to be a magician.

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So have Reynolds and Isendrath proved that Ted was never psychic?

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I cannot say that he doesn't have supernatural or extraterrestrial power.

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But in three days, I never saw him do anything that led me to believe that he did have them.

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Of all alleged psychic photographs, perhaps the most famous are these of fairies in a Yorkshire Glen.

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Francis Griffiths has brought her daughter to see the house in Cottingley where she lived with her cousin Elsie Wright during the First World War.

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And they thought, well, it's nice. And where is the back?

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The back's down the side.

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Francis and Elsie used to go down to play by the back, the stream at the bottom of the garden.

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And it was by that stream, they said, that in 1917 they took photographs of fairies.

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That summer, ten-year-old Francis kept falling into the back and getting into trouble.

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When her mother asked her why she went there, she said to see the fairies.

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To back up the story, sixteen-year-old Elsie borrowed her father's camera to try and photograph them.

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The girls came home an hour later. Elsie begged her father to waste no time.

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He had a dark room in the cupboard under the stairs.

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He remembers watching anxiously while he developed the plate, impatient to see how it was going to come out.

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That says, I'll tell you what it's coming up like, that picture you've taken.

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It says it's very untidy. It says you've been eating sandwiches, the sandwich papers all sticking up.

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And then he says, oh, what's these little things down here?

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And Elsie shouted out, they've come, they've come, they've come out.

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Month after this first picture, they produced another of Elsie with a winged gnome.

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These two photographs are maised to Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

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He published them in The Strand Magazine and pronounced them genuine.

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The story hit the headlines and within days went round the world.

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Though some critics were skeptical, Conan Doyle remained convinced.

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He arranged for the girls to be given new cameras. They took more pictures.

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Francis and the leaping fairy, Elsie and the winged fairy offering a pose of flowers.

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And finally, the fairy bower.

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For 50 years they stuck to their story.

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Did you in any way fabricate those photographs?

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Of course not.

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You tell us how she could do it and we'll tell you.

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Remember, she was 16. I was 10.

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The case was finally cracked in 1982 with evidence from the Brotherton Collection in Leeds University.

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It holds what is supposed to be the original negatives and prints.

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But Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, soon realized that the midge camera which the girls used

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simply wasn't good enough to have taken the first photograph.

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In particular, the simple lens could not have produced such a sharp negative.

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This negative is quite lively. The edges of the fairy figures are quite sharp.

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And it clearly could not have been produced by that lens in that midge camera.

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Crawley reasoned that this cannot have been the original print.

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Amazingly, he unearthed, incottingly, what he believes is an original print. It looks quite different.

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The original print is much softer. Exactly the type of, shall we say, less lively image that you would expect from a camera of this type.

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Consequently, a lot must have gone on between that and that.

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Crawley believes that the photograph was retouched by an expert.

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So what you would have to do is, first of all, make yourself a fresh negative of this.

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And you retouch that negative, you improve it with an airbrush and people very skilled in those days, possibly more skilled than today even.

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Now it's the fairies that everybody's interested in.

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So he subdues the face, brings out the fairies. And this is the first thing that people noticed.

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And they said they were glowing with a theory of light.

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And on the negative plate, he found evidence that the face had been subdued, probably by rubbing with Brasso.

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He thinks that the man behind it was Edward Gardner, believer in fairies and friend of Conan Doyle.

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When Crawley published his findings, Francis and Elsie confessed that the pictures were fakes.

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What really happened was this. After Francis had claimed she'd seen fairies up the beck, both girls were teased by the adults.

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Elsie hit on a scheme to stop the teasing.

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Elsie said one night we're getting ready for bed. She said, I've been thinking, kid, she was real cinema girl with Elsie.

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She says, what about if I draw some fairies and cut them out in cardboard and we'll stick them up in the grass and take Uncle and Dad's camera and we'll take a photograph.

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She said, if they see them, they'll have to believe it. They'll stop all this joking.

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So she lent Elsie this book and from page 104, Elsie traced this group of dancing girls, took off their wispy drapes, drew wings on them, cut them out and arranged them in an artistic group.

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Then she took the photograph. To stand them upright, they used hatpins.

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What we did, I said, we, with the long hatpin, put it down the back like that and stuck the tape at the back like that and then gradually warmed that down.

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They were longer than that though. They were about that, then 18 inches at least and then warmed that down into the air.

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They said that the thing was that they could see them, that the fairies were moving when the photographs were taken, but that's because they did it in the breeze.

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I never even thought of it being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand it to this day why people were taken in.

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They wanted to be taken in, but people keep often saying to me, don't you feel ashamed that you've made all these poor people look fools?

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They believed in you, but I don't because they wanted to believe. Look at this photograph. That fairies all have to draw.

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That leg doesn't belong to that fairy and somebody pointed it out in the newspaper and one of our dear believers said, fairies aren't like humans.

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They haven't got bodies like we have of the skeleton and the arms and legs. They sort of put it together with thought and sometimes it doesn't come out right.

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We didn't have to tell a lie about it at all because always somebody came out and justified.

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It was very embarrassing because I mean two village kids said a brilliant man like Connendale, but we could only just keep quiet.

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It has the back yielded all its secrets. Though she admits the photographs were fakes, Francis still maintains that there were fairies at the bottom of the garden.

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I swear that there are fairies up there, or there were they, but there aren't now.

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The Kottingly fairies were great fun while they lasted, which was most of the century. And the case is very instructive.

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It shows that claims made by sweet innocent children must be treated as cautiously as those by adults.

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Some photographers have been astonished by their own pictures, like Gordon Carroll.

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I stood in this church and I took this photograph and it looked as if it's got a ghost on it.

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I'm absolutely sure there was nobody in the church at the time.

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The song was coming through from the south-southwest position. It was about, I should say, between 1.30 and 2.00.

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I took this picture on a brief time exposure of about two seconds and there was nothing there.

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But when the slide was processed, it showed a hazy, kneeling figure.

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The figure was totally transparent. You could see the altar rails through the figure and also the steps.

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One of the possibilities is that somebody, you know, having walked in front,

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but how in two seconds of my looking at the camera taking a brief time exposure,

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anybody could walk in, kneel down and disappear, it's just impossible if it had been another human being.

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Maple Chinnery took this picture of her husband, Jim, and her mother appears to be in the back seat.

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But the Chinneries say they had just photographed her grave, for mother had died a week before.

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My wife took the photo at the grave, so yeah.

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And when we got down to the car, I got in the car, she said, wait a minute, she said, I'll finish this film off.

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And she took my photo, and that was the finish of that.

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When I looked through the viewfinder, all I saw was Jimmy in the car and snap foot, and that was that, and thinking more about it.

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But there in the photograph was this unmistakable figure.

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Well, I took it and she wrote to somebody and they said, your mother in the back.

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And I said, don't be so stupid, that she was there.

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Well, I could see it was my mother, of course. I could see it was her.

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The most extraordinary thing about this is that she always used to sit on that side of the car when she was out with me,

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so that she could talk to me and see me as I was driving.

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Jim remembers his mother-in-law's last words.

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She said, Jim, you'll never come to any harm. She said, I'll still be with you.

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Over the years, quite a few mysterious photographs have been published, which appear to show ghosts.

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Here's a famous example made by a respected solicitor in a church in Arlandale, Sussex, in 1940.

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It shows a weird, luminous figure standing in front of the altar.

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And here's another church ghost made by the Reverend Kenneth Lord.

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It is church unit in Newby Yorkshire, and it shows a hooded figure with a ghastly, skull-like face standing beside the altar rail.

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Well, do these pictures really prove the existence of ghosts, or can it be that even when photographers are honest, cameras can lie?

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In this Home Office laboratory is the world's most advanced equipment for the examination of photographs.

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Using a computer, forensic experts help the police to snare criminals by enhancing photographic images to bring out hidden detail.

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Today, the computer is focused on the phantoms.

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The photographs are optically scanned and fed into the computer for analysis.

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Tim Newton and Dr. Steve Gull begin with Gordon Carroll's photograph.

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This is a picture, is allegedly of a ghost in front of an altar, but let's have a look at it in a bit more detail.

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Now I think we can see on the screen that it's a kneeling figure.

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Now if we look over here, perhaps we can see a dustpan.

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Do you think that's possible?

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Certainly possible. It's a bit beyond the resolution possible with this film, but as you say, it could be a dustpan, so do you know.

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Their unique, deblurring software, often used to decipher the number plates of getaway cars, reveals that this figure may have moved more than once.

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So what seems to have happened here is that somebody in a very long exposure picture in a very dark church has been cleaning the step and moved several times during the course of the exposure.

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Their conclusion? The picture shows a cleaning lady. But what about Mrs. Chinnery's photograph?

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There are some very strange things here. This scum definitely does pass this line here, but further down the picture, the line is definitely in front of her.

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There's also this feature on the other side of the barrier between the two windows.

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It does seem to be, as if it might be a shoulder, then that does make her very wide person.

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Perhaps the best explanation in Tim is that some mistake has happened here, some very short exposure some time before, has been superimposed upon the picture of the car.

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In the Arendl photograph, they've noticed a bright streak to the left of the figure.

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Isn't it strange how the streak seems to end on this candle?

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Yes, it certainly does seem to be heading that way. We can increase the contrast of this picture.

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It does seem strange that the priest should be wearing a skirt.

207
00:22:41,520 --> 00:22:42,520
That's definitely a start up.

208
00:22:42,520 --> 00:22:44,520
So we should conclude that this is probably a woman.

209
00:22:44,520 --> 00:22:45,520
Yes, certainly.

210
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We can now see this streak is definitely very clearly defined, and since it's ending up at this candle, we can probably say it's a taper used to light a candle up here.

211
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If their hunch is right, and the picture shows a woman carrying a lighted taper up the altar steps, that would explain the bumps in the streak, and the height of the bumps should be the same as the height of the steps.

212
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So if I measure the top point here, and the bottom point down there, gives me a height difference of about 24 units on this.

213
00:23:20,520 --> 00:23:30,520
And if I repeat the operation, and go from the height difference from one step to the step below, gives me a height difference of 25 units.

214
00:23:30,520 --> 00:23:34,520
That's very close indeed, that's almost definitely due to her walking up the stairs.

215
00:23:34,520 --> 00:23:35,520
So that seems pretty conclusive.

216
00:23:36,520 --> 00:23:38,520
We can be pretty sure this isn't a ghost.

217
00:23:38,520 --> 00:23:39,520
I think we can be as...

218
00:23:39,520 --> 00:23:46,520
And there's a perfectly natural explanation for this, that somebody came into the church and up the stairs to light the candle while the picture was being taken.

219
00:23:46,520 --> 00:23:51,520
Yes, and she's just moving slowly across the altar, lighting each of the candles in turn.

220
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But what about the sinister figure snapped by the Reverend Kenneth Lord in his church at Newby in Yorkshire?

221
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Even the most rigorous computer analysis cannot provide a simple photographic explanation.

222
00:24:15,520 --> 00:24:20,520
I don't think at this stage there's anything unusual about the picture at all.

223
00:24:20,520 --> 00:24:29,520
So I think our conclusions from this is that it's unlikely to be built up by a superposition of photographs, so this could be a candidate for ghosts.

224
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Although a very few photographs are difficult to explain away, not a single one of them offers convincing proof that a ghost has been captured by the camera.

225
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And this, I believe, provides conclusive evidence about the nature of ghosts.

226
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From all the nests century, millions of cameras have been clicking all over the world.

227
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By this time there must be billions of photographs in existence.

228
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If ghosts could be photographed, by now we'd have entire galleries full of portraits.

229
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But we don't, because these images exist only in the minds of the observers.

230
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I believe that ghosts are at least as real as dreams, and no one has ever photographed a dream.

231
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Yet one day that might be possible, and then we'd have cameras that could really capture ghosts.

232
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Next week, reincarnation. Have we lived before?