Ask an Amateur Scientist: The Ghost Cat

By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

I don’t have anything against cats. It’s just that I’m deathly allergic to them. And I hate their guts. But I completely understand why they’ve become the unofficial pet of all the Internet. Sure, the web has opened up to most of us in the developed world by now. Any moron with a few hundred bucks and tiny, inbred fingers can trot down to Best Buy and pick up a netbook. And it doesn’t take a genius with self-repaired glasses to steal your neighbor’s unsecure wifi. But even though the nerds no longer dominate the online world, they’re still the gatekeepers. Every douchebag on the planet with a hard drive full of pictures of himself holding a plastic cup full of beer has a Facebook page, but it took a douchebag with some computer science knowledge to invent Facebook in the first place.

ghost-cat And cats are a nerd’s best friend. They’re self-sufficient, so you don’t have to worry about abandoning your guildmates during a raid to take your cat for a walk. They won’t bogart your Mountain Dew, because they know what death smells like. And it’s easy to pretend they have a certain kind of elitist intelligence just because they’re too stupid to understand your commands. Hence, a quick Google search will turn up thousands upon thousands of hits for cat-related novelty t-shirt stores, robotic cat boxes, pictures of cats with nonsensical word balloons Photoshopped over their heads, and videos of cats doing hilarious things like using the toilet, playing keyboards, and being flung into ceiling fans.

Not to sound like I have a certain kind of elitist intelligence, but nerds tend to be educated. And educated people tend to have a fair supply of critical thinking skills. Just look at the number of college science professors that believe in young earth creationism. And since nerds should be critical thinkers, and nerds also love cats, it should follow that people who love cats should also be critical thinkers.

But this is not always the case.

II. The Findings

Take Donna and Ross Sowerby, for example. They seem like a normal enough couple living in a lively New Zealand town. Any one of us would be happy to switch our life for theirs, since we all know New Zealand is a magical land of Hobbits and wizards. And according to the Taranaki Daily News, the Sowerbys are skeptical of ridiculous notions like ghosts.

Yes, I’m aware that many otherwise rational people believe in ghosts. Some even go so far as to wander around empty rooms with infrared cameras looking for slight breezes. But the fact that there have been billions of ghost sightings over the centuries with absolutely no hard evidence to show for any of them should indicate to you that many of us are so scared of winking out of existence upon our deaths that we’d rather believe our eternal souls can wander the earth playing charades with fortune tellers and moving kitchen furniture for laughs.

Anyway, I have no reason to doubt the Sowerbys sincerity in saying they don’t believe in ghosts. After all, it’s been printed in a major news publication. But I do find it curious that when confronted with security camera footage of an amorphous, out of focus blob, they immediately jump to the conclusion that they may have photographed the ghost of their neighbor’s beloved cat.

A little background. The Sowerbys set up a security camera pointed at their driveway after one of their bicycles was stolen. They hoped to catch the perp on tape, though I wonder why someone who stole a bike from a house would go back to steal another. Why not just ride home in victory? But I suppose orcs and trolls are mysterious creatures. Anyway, they didn’t catch a dirty thief, but they did film white-orangish speck moving from the right side of the screen to the left. And despite the fact that the speck is shaped nothing like a cat and definitely doesn’t show anything like a cat’s legs moving, Donna is convinced she sees cat legs somewhere in the blur. Even though she and her husband don’t believe in ghosts, they suspect they might have documented the disembodied spirit of their neighbor’s dead ginger moggy.

You can watch the video for yourself here.

Right away, you’ll notice that the speck doesn’t seem to follow the slope of the ground. Almost immediately after appearing in frame, it floats over some small plants around the base of the tree in the center of the shot. There’s no reason to think a ghost cat couldn’t just float wherever it wants, but why would it need legs in that case? The speck doesn’t change in perspective, either. It remains a consistent size throughout the video, which is what you’d expect if it was moving on a flat plane in front of the camera. Say, on a window or the lens itself. In which case, we have to ask ourselves what crawls around on flat, vertical surfaces like that? Bugs, maybe? And if a small bug was that close to the camera, wouldn’t appear so out of focus as to look translucent? In fact, wouldn’t it look exactly like the speck in this video?

Ah, but you’re forgetting that the Sowerbys are skeptics. They’ve obviously considered the bug hypothesis and tossed it. After all, for the same reason you can’t say a ghost cat wouldn’t float around all willy-nilly, you also can’t say it wouldn’t appear as a small, bug-shaped object crawling too close to the camera lens. What do you know about ghost cats?

Besides, the reporter working this story exercised due diligence and took the footage to a video expert. He said he doesn’t think it’s a bug, but whatever explanation he gave for this hypothesis must have been too boring to include in the story. However, he also said he doesn’t think there’s anything like a ghost cat in the clip. Instead, he believes the video was manipulated digitally, something that even an amateur could do easily.

But the Sowerbys don’t know anything about video editing. They don’t even have an Internet connection!

Where’s your explanation now, science?

III. The Conclusion

Actually, that last detail may be the key to unlocking this case. These people obviously love cats. They have two of their own, and they’ve anthropomorphized the whole species enough to consider the possibility that cats can have immortal, wandering spirits. But if they don’t have an Internet connection, then they don’t fall into my statistically questionable techno-cat lover stereotype. Ergo, they don’t have the requisite critical thinking skills. Which explains how they could look at mundane footage of some small thing moving in front of a camera lens and suddenly think, “I know! Ghost cat!”

Sure, this isn’t the most logically sound argument. But I’m pretty sure we lost logic somewhere around “I see legs”.

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About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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