Ghost at police station

[Mackdog]

This story has been showing up on many major news outlets the past couple of days. The claim is that a ghost walked across the fenced in area of a police station in a small town in New Mexico a couple nights ago. They have camera footage of it, however it is of low quality, but it shows what looks like a human figure walking across the grounds. There is no way that a person could have gotten in or out of the place because of the fences and barbed wire.

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/v...ficer-claims-ghost-caught-on-camera.koat.html

Google earth shows the police station but no fence around it, so it must be a new fence.

 

[Hevach]

They show the fence in the daytime shots, but not the whole area. The "ghost" appears to be walking towards some stationary objects (they look like they might be trash cans to me, but... it's really impossible to tell) on the left side of the screen, and there appears to be a wall there, which probably means a door somewhere.

I can draw one inescapable conclusion from the video: That police station really needs some new cameras. I sell some $150 kits to businesses that are basically bottom shelf junk that will never actually help you identify a suspect, but they'd at least be able to see where the person was going, where they came from, and what they're doing. This thing, I'm not even sure if that's a wall or what.

 

[Jason]

That police station really needs some new cameras.

Actually their cameras look pretty new and high tech. They show a shot of the camera in the opening clip.

 

[Hevach]

That style isn't uncommon, and they're not all created equally. You can get them from top shelf to bottom (The ones I sell range from $200 individual cameras to sets of five for $150. They also make fake ones with no camera and just the LED array, some fakes even have working LEDs to fool somebody with their own IR camera). The quality of a camera is in its image quality, not the assembly style, and... well, they show a lot of the image quality.

If the camera itself isn't just crap, it's either failing or improperly housed. If it were an older analog camera, I'd say it could be in the wires or receiver as well, but with a digital camera you get tile artifacts from that, not just degraded quality.

 

[Mick West]

Bug seems likely. See:
http://www.livescience.com/4509-exclusive-courthouse-ghost-video-mystery-solved.html

 

[NoParty]

There's something profoundly unsettling about persons in law enforcement
viewing such a low quality image and declaring: "We see a ghost!"


(I guess I'm not keen on the idea that if, say, my unattended car was damaged by a
hit-and-run driver, part of their mindset would be "Well, it might've been a ghost.")

 

[WeedWhacker]

(I guess I'm not keen on the idea that if, say, my unattended car was damaged by a
hit-and-run driver, part of their mindset would be "Well, it might've been a ghost.")

Maybe if it was on camera...? BOO!!