Well, that was an interesting twist. TWO unexplained cases.

Raystown Ray

After going through their usual screening of videos (or in the case of the Ray, a photo) the team decides to check out Raystown Ray (a Loch Ness-like creature in a man-made lake) and a case where “Ghost writing” appears on polaroids taken in a house.

The first slightly-more-than-half is devoted to Ray and Ben, Austin, and Jael head to the lake. The person who took the “famous photo” wants to remain anonymous, so they speak with a few other witnesses who saw very similar things. The first is John Pendel who in 1994 saw bubbles rise to the surface and a big black shiny something or the other surface and twist over and submerge.

The next witnesses are Mike and Ann Evans who saw it from the pier and watched it for a few minutes from about 500 feet away before it submerged. Mike confirms that it looks like the object in the photo.

The first “theory” is that it is a log so Ben and Austin go out looking for logs while Jael stays at the observation point to take pictures. They eventually find a suitable log and hook it to the boat and drag it past the point while Jael snaps a “ton” of photos. The results did not look anything like the photo.

Next they start building a multi-part silhouette of what is seen in the photo and send Jael back up to take photos while Ben and Austin haul the contraption out to the point and start towing it behind the boat. Jael takes more pictures. It looks good but not perfect and they only go after perfect.

Jael talks about how much time and effort went into what they did and the fact that people would be seen committing this hoax. They neglect to go into the fact that it could have been “quickly” moved into position from land (divers) for a quick photo shoot. Jael’s photos are also much clearer and focused than the one with the actual Ray in them. Would some softening and darkening obscure things enough to make the silhouette more convincing? She also talks about the movement that it had and that the eyewitness saw…well, all they are trying to explain is a photo so movement is a non-issue I’d think.

So now it’s time to stop replicating and go in the water looking.

Austin gets out his boat and sonar while Ben and Jael suit up ready to go into the water after whatever Austin might find. And so they go out at night for some reason (even though the photo was taken in daylight) Austin gets a “huge” hit on sonar and Ben and Jael go into the water looking.

The water is quite murky and cold so they can’t see much at first but once they get deeper the visibility improves but they still don’t see anything and after a few minutes (at least on screen) they are told to come up because they must be almost out of air.

Next they try some bait (a large carp) and set out some buoys with the bait hanging down and start trolling it around the lake over where the sonar reading was. They soon get activity on the bait and it’s affecting the boat even. Course it turns out they had just run aground!

Back to headquarters and a run down for the other team. They talk about all the witnesses and the fact that they couldn’t replicate it perfectly and leave it in the unexplained category.

It appears that someone is trying to capitalize on this (rather poorly, though) and the website even has a blurb right on the home page about filming of the Fact or Faked show there in April of 2010

http://www.raystownray.com/

This domain was registered in 2006 and on their sitings page, there is a listing of sightings but with the exception of the early one in 1994, they are all from 2006, 8, and 9…I guess Ray was on vacation in 2007 :) Odd that that all the ones listed are from after the website being created. Although, given that even the Merchandise section is pretty blank (the poor capitalization I mentioned) perhaps the site owners didn't do much research into earlier events except for the 1994 one.

In a siting in 2009 the person and his son were in a boat fishing, he (the father) tried to snap a shot with his cell phone but the creature blended into the water so there was nothing to see.

The site has the photo that Fact or Faked showed us, but they indicate that it is a "Part of the sequence of shots" The rest of the sequence of shots is not on the site, nor do I remember Fact or Faked showing us any other shots last night during the program.

Ghost Writing

Bill, Chi-Lan, and Larry head to Los Angeles to meet John Huckert who explains how this all started. For Christmas of 1991 he had gotten the Polaroid for his dad (oh, and he had felt things there since he had moved in in 1990 for a couple years…1990 to 1991 is only one year but okay)

The bathroom door had opened and people had joked about if you could get a picture of something so he did. Nothing happened on the picture. The next time it happened, he tried to take another picture and got various shapes of light showing up on it…no words, though. They got their friends to come over and showed them. The friends were amazed and asked how they did that and then one asked if “he was here now” and took a picture. After 45 minutes they realized that the light on the photo said something…”Yes”

They continued this asking what the person’s name was and got a “response” on the Polaroid. Is it a good ghost or bad ghost and it turns out it was a “friend” according to the writing on the next picture.

The owners explain that they had gotten a psychic involved who said there was a dead body under the house (there was no evidence or reports that anyone had died in the house). The psychic showed right where “or within a certain parameter” where this body would be. A certain “parameter?” Okay. Bill offers to crawl under the house when the time comes.

Next John shows them where the vortex is supposed to be (always have to have a vortex in these cases) and it’s right in front of the bathroom and is where all the spirits enter the room from and then shoot across the room from.

They start the investigation and try to replicate the photos by just shooting a Polaroid normally while asking questions. Nothing appears on the photos. They offer that the entity may not be ready to communicate but, to their credit, they acknowledge that they may have to explore the possibility that the event is man-made (ie faked) Well, I would hope they would explore that angle!

They start with the “Polaroid Acetate Experiment” where they create a mask using a transparent film. The mask has a word or words on it that is left clear while the rest of the transparency is blackened. This is then overlain on an undeveloped Polaroid and the film is exposed to light. This will expose just the word portion of the Polaroid and the rest is still undeveloped. Basically doing a double exposure. The idea being to do this on a pack of shots, replace the pack into the container, reload the camera and then take pictures with pre-determined questions which already have an answer on the corresponding Polaroid.

When they take the photos in the house, though, they get big light spots on the photos (no one notices that this is pretty much what the first shots the home owner got were) They were able to get the words to show up in tests, but not when they took the photos in the house.

Next they set up a piece of plexiglass and write a few words on it in white and set it up in the room to emulate a video that they were shown which has the owner taking a picture and then showing the word developing (supposedly as proof of what he was doing and that he wasn’t tampering or substituting photos)

Bill writes some words in white and Larry will film the picture-taking sequence. If the words are written low enough, Larry can film above them so they aren’t in the shot, and Bill and take the photo low enough so that they show up on his Polaroid shots. It works somewhat but reflections off the glass from both sides convince them that this was not how it was done.

So they give up on that and go looking for bodies. They bring in Ground Penetrating Radar to map the area to see where the body might be buried. Why they didn’t just take the word of the psychic and dig where the body was indicated, I don’t know.

Bill and Larry crawl under the porch back under the house with the radar antenna and they soon find some promising reflections and start digging and find three bones.

Back at FoF headquarters the speech analyzer indicates that John was telling the truth about the photos. The bones are revealed to be from a cow and a chicken and the case is left unexplained since they couldn’t duplicate it.

I wonder how many times they tried the polaroid test and got the flares on it instead of the text. They proved it could be done in their test but because it didn't work right off in the house they dismiss it as an explanation? Perhaps I missed it, but did they interview any of these other people who came in with their own cameras and film and got the words showing up?

Thanks for the link, interesting read. Also interesting is that FoF used the same method (the less elaborate cheap route) described there. I suppose they could have come up with that on their own but using the flash to expose the polaroid just like was explained in the article is getting close to "making a person wonder"

Either they knew about this in advance and still managed to not duplicate it, or they really need to do more upfront research before going to these places and spending the time…just like how a simple phone call last week would have saved them the trouble of launching their own UFO!

Egads, the cars and the railroad track indeed HAS been shown to be fake. There was a show on about a month ago that did a very detailed investigation into that one.

In it they surveyed the road and showed that the road actually sloped TOWARD the tracks (it wasn't uphill), the story of the bus was in the local paper there, but it was of a story that happened in Utah I believe. The street names that supposedly were named after the kids on the bus were some developer's grandchildren(?), and the screams that people heard were some animals in a nearby yard (can't remember the animal or bird type off the top of my head). There were a few other items that were explained, too.

This one should be interesting!

Edited: The term 'faked' for this one may be a little too harsh. From my understanding, things happen just as the videos show, but the story and conditions are misunderstood in a way that makes us think we are seeing something supernatural.

Peacocks! You're right, that's what they were. Wasn't Dartmoor a MonsterQuest episode? No…that was Exmoor.

I never thought I'd say this, but even Kris could probably give them some pointers on how to do research!