Shadow People

[Nugget]

 Historically, the idea of "demons"  caused so much suffering.

I think exalting one ethnic group of people above all others falls in the same catagory as demonic. It has certainly done the world a world of harm.

[NobodySpecial268]

I was looking for information of the rods and cones and the parts of the light spectrum they "see". I was wondering if the rods can "see" into the ultraviolet and infra-red.

For example, the cones are colour-sensitive and according to the medical texts there are three types corresponding to red, green and blue. Orange light stimulates both red and green cones. That gives us the usual colour spectrum of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Whereas the consensus seems to be that the rods can only detect the amount of light hitting them. So, someone with only rods would see the world in black and white.

The question of do the rods "see" into the ultraviolet, is something I have no answer for. Perhaps someone who can answer the question might chime in?

That said, here is an interesting, for me at least, point to consider.

Ordinarily, our eyes are drawn to objects that are brighter than the background. For example, when we look at a tree in daylight, we habitually focus on the green leaves, and not the shadows between the leaves. We also focus on colour rather than the black and white in a landscape.

So we have to make an effort to train our vision to notice the shadows.

Now, most shadow people sightings are said to be seeing shadows out of the corner of the eye. That is the peripheral vision. So we need to take movement into account, as our peripheral vision is very sensitive to movement.

That said, I have one young lady who visits here who can see the shadow people by looking straight at them in daylight. The young lady doesn't like dark corridors and always sleeps with a bright night light. That suggests to me her eyes (rods) are more sensitive to movement than normal, or perhaps she simply never lost the ability to see the shadow folk from early childhood.

I should ask her if she is colour-blind. When she draws the shadow folk, she always draws them in black and white.

Which, I guess, brings us to the subject of dicyanin glasses . . .

   

[Michigan Swampbuck]

Good stuff, thanks for the research.

I was hoping you'd look more into the ability of rods to see near-infrared light. Here are the quotes from the ATS thread.

"Here is some other information that claims flashes of light may allow humans to "see" infrared light.

'In some special conditions, the human eye can indeed detect infrared light according to scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “We experimented with laser pulses of different durations that delivered the same total number of photons, and we found that the shorter the pulse, the more likely it was a person could see it,” Vinberg explained. “Although the length of time between pulses was so short that it couldn’t be noticed by the naked eye, the existence of those pulses was very important in allowing people to see this invisible light.” '

'“The visible spectrum includes waves of light that are 400-720 nanometers long,” explained Kefalov, an associate professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences. “But if a pigment molecule in the retina is hit in rapid succession by a pair of photons that are 1,000 nanometers long, those light particles will deliver the same amount of energy as a single hit from a 500-nanometer photon, which is well within the visible spectrum. That’s how we are able to see it.” '

So near-infrared light (1000 nm) under these conditions appears to the eye to be cyan light (500 nm), which is what the rod cells are most sensitive to. Perhaps paranormal ghostly images may be emitting near-infrared light that is being seen by rod cells as cyan light. A couple of questions that come to mind are how rapid are these photon pulses and do the infrared photons need to be aligned in a laser beam to be seen? Both of these aspects could somehow be factored into how a near-infrared camera may be used to capture these images and prove that they are not just figments of the imagination. "

LINK

[NobodySpecial268]

Good stuff, thanks for the research.

I was hoping you'd look more into the ability of rods to see near-infrared light. Here are the quotes from the ATS thread.


LINK

I think I confused myself reading too much sciencey stuff looking into it.

I've been meaning to reread The Human Atmosphere by Walter J. Kilner. That is the textbook on dicyanin and seeing outside the normal visual range. From memory, Kilner says something similar.

For everyone, here is a link to a good, legible copy of the book in PDF format: The Human Atmosphere - Walter J Kilner. It is also free without signup to anything.


A quote from the book (footnote, page one):

The author considers that ninety-five per cent. of people with normal eyesight can see the aura. One gentleman states that only one person out of four hundred, to whom he had tried to show the aura, was unable to distinguish the phenomenon.

[NobodySpecial268]

It is a good thing We are still a young site here at MPP, the threads are not fast moving. Since I am spending most of my time on my house roof repairing for repainting, I haven't been able to sit back and do some research at this point in time.

Nevertheless, I don't like to leave this thread hanging. So here is a picture I took of what it is like to look through the dicyanin glasses.

   

[NobodySpecial268]

Good stuff, thanks for the research.

I was hoping you'd look more into the ability of rods to see near-infrared light. Here are the quotes from the ATS thread.

"Here is some other information that claims flashes of light may allow humans to "see" infrared light.

'In some special conditions, the human eye can indeed detect infrared light according to scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “We experimented with laser pulses of different durations that delivered the same total number of photons, and we found that the shorter the pulse, the more likely it was a person could see it,” Vinberg explained. “Although the length of time between pulses was so short that it couldn’t be noticed by the naked eye, the existence of those pulses was very important in allowing people to see this invisible light.” '

'“The visible spectrum includes waves of light that are 400-720 nanometers long,” explained Kefalov, an associate professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences. “But if a pigment molecule in the retina is hit in rapid succession by a pair of photons that are 1,000 nanometers long, those light particles will deliver the same amount of energy as a single hit from a 500-nanometer photon, which is well within the visible spectrum. That’s how we are able to see it.” '

So near-infrared light (1000 nm) under these conditions appears to the eye to be cyan light (500 nm), which is what the rod cells are most sensitive to. Perhaps paranormal ghostly images may be emitting near-infrared light that is being seen by rod cells as cyan light. A couple of questions that come to mind are how rapid are these photon pulses and do the infrared photons need to be aligned in a laser beam to be seen? Both of these aspects could somehow be factored into how a near-infrared camera may be used to capture these images and prove that they are not just figments of the imagination. "

LINK

(Bolding is mine)

Thanks for the contribution!

Interesting.

You've jogged my memory about experiments in the 1970s here in Australia. This was back in the days of black and white TV. What they did was to broadcast an image in black and white and asked viewers to telephone a number if they saw colour on the black and white TVs. I saw one of these, and it was in green, magenta and maybe a purplish colour and, A rocket space ship and stars I think it may have been according to my old memory. The image was rather quick and unexpected. Everyone made fun of me explaining: you can't possibly see colour on black and white TVs : (

So I went searching and found something similar:

The Squirt Soft Drink Subjective Color Acid Test

On July 25, 1967, television viewers with black-and-white TV sets were startled to see flashes of color on their monochrome screens for about ten seconds during a 60-second soda-pop commercial. A letter to a columnist in the September 14, 1967 Detroit Free Press asked, "Before I see an eye doctor, let me ask Action Line: Is it possible to pick up color TV on a black and white set? I SWEAR I saw a Squirt soft-drink commercial in color. Not pink elephants Green Squirt!" The image was described in the newspaper column as a red, green and blue sign that had flashed on the screen.

A viewer in Chicago told Popular Photography magazine (July 1968), "I saw pink! It knocked me for a loop...the letters S-Q-U-I-R-T looked greenish or light turquoise...and it kept up for maybe 10 seconds." (Meanwhile a viewer in San Francisco claimed he didn't see anything colorful.)

It was the national debut of an experimental television commercial using a special production process that would give the optical illusion of color. The commercial first aired a few months earlier locally on KNXT, the CBS-owned television station in Los Angeles, and viewers there were just as stunned. Squirt and its advertising partner Color-Tel Corporation of Los Angeles, at the time decided to make no prior announcement of this experimental commercial, preferring to see just how viewers would respond. And respond they did. Within hours, thousands of viewers were asking if they really saw what they thought they did, color on their black-and-white TV screens, according to Popular Electronics magazine (October 1968).

Source: Anyone remember experimental color images on black & white TV?

In the article, they reference another article:

The burst of color was not "living color" (as NBC frequently touted in the 1960s), but something called "subjective color." The process was developed by James F. Butterfield of Color-Tel, a corporation founded in Los Angeles in early 1966. It gave the illusion of color by pulsating white light in a particular sequence for each color with a rotating device attached to a regular black and white TV camera lens.

Source: The Squirt Soft Drink Subjective Color Acid Test

This goes back to an article in an old Popular Mechanics magazine from 1968, that talks about the nerve codes.

Slightly over 15 years ago, Butterfield
reasoned that, if the frequencies of the
nerve codes for specific colors could be
mathematically analyzed, it would be
possible to feed the cortex synthetic
color data.

This could be accomplished
by stimulating the cones with flickering
pulses of white light, keyed to match the
known nerve frequency for a given hue.

If the theory was correct, such flickering
white light would then appear to the
viewer to have color.

I'll tidy up the article and post it here.

This kind of research has been going on for quite some time.

[NobodySpecial268]

Article from Popular Mechanics magazine October 1968.
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COLOR TV THAT ISN'T

OPTICAL ILLUSION CREATES COLOR IMPRESSION IN VIEWER’S MIND By LAURENCE R. GRIFFIN.

CAN AN ORDINARY black-and-white TV receiver reproduce a color image? “No,” you say. Wrong! Believe it or not, the answer is a resounding yes —provided the telecast is in “electronic” color using the Color-Tel subjective color process*.

Developed by James F. Butterfield, Sherman Oaks, California, electronic color is a remarkable TV broadcasting technique using relatively unknown optical principles to transmit a monochrome picture that appears to be in color when viewed on an ordinary black-and-white TV receiver. Actually, no color appears on the TV screen—it exists only subjectively in the brain of the viewer. Although most viewers see colors, there are some viewers who do not—for reasons not completely understood. On the other hand, normally color-blind people frequently report being able to see the electronic subjective color display.

Light. Light waves are a form of radiant electromagnetic energy of which the visible spectrum is only a small part spanning the apparent color range from red to violet. Each color has a distinctive wave length, from violet at 16 millionths of an inch, to red at 32 millionths of an inch. Outside of this very narrow band of frequencies lie the optically invisible radiations that include ultraviolet, infrared, X rays, and even radio waves.

Vision begins when light strikes the retina, a light-sensitive nerve membrane covering the hemispherical back wall of the eyeball. Composed of three layers, the retina contains two types of special sensory bodies called rods and cones. These nerve cells respond to light stimulation by “telegraphing” a pulsing sequence of coded information along the optic nerves to the brain’s sight center in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex. All color perception occurs in the cones and by evaluating the varying frequencies of the neuron impulses, the cortex is able to distinguish what hues are acting on the retina.

Slightly over 15 years ago, Butterfield reasoned that, if the frequencies of the nerve codes for specific colors could be mathematically analyzed, it would be possible to feed the cortex synthetic color data. This could be accomplished by stimulating the cones with flickering pulses of white light, keyed to match the known nerve frequency for a given hue. If the theory was correct, such flickering white light would then appear to the viewer to have color.

   
Above: Television camera equipped with a Color Translator transmits pictures which appear to the viewer to be in color on a standard black -and -white receiver.

Subjective Color. Experiments in subjective color have taken place throughout the past one and one-half centuries. The first known experiment appears to have been conducted by the French monk, Benedict Provost, who discovered that when a black-and-white object was moved through a ray of sunlight in a darkened room, a spectrum of colors mysteriously appeared. In 1838, Gustav T. Fechner, a German physicist, using a disc composed of black-and-white areas discovered that, when the disc was rotated, portions of the disc ‘‘subjectively” appeared in colors. Fechner advanced a theory to explain the mechanism of the phenomenon. Helmholtz, among others, investigated this strange effect.

At the end of the nineteenth century, C. E. Benham devised a dise which presented these colors in a very striking manner. In appearance, the Benham disc is half black and half white. The white area is subdivided into three equal sections, each containing a black design composed of two closely-spaced parallel curving lines. A facsimile of the Benham dise is shown in Fig. 1. You can cut out this pattern and paste it on a piece of cardboard. Pin the center of the dise to a pencil eraser so that the disc may spin freely. AS you spin the dise in a clock wise direction as you face it, you will see subjective color just as Benham saw it 75 years ago.

   
Fig. 1. Cut out or copy this duplicate of the Benham disc. Use rubber cement to adhere disc to a circular piece of cardboard. Punch a hole in the exact center of the disc and support it on a pushpin stuck in the eraser of a lead pencil. Rotate the disc at speeds between 3 and 10 rotations per second. The speed of rotation will affect hue and saturation of the colors. Changing direction of rotation reverses the colors.


As the disc rotates, the black lines— almost as if by magic—appear to take on shimmering colors. The lines nearest the hub are reddish, the middle lines appear greenish, and the outer lines are bluish. If this isn’t sufficiently surprising, rotate the disc in the opposite direction and watch the display of colors reverse, blue nearest the hub and red on the outside.

In 1953, Butterfield consulted a Dr. Derek H. Fender and asked the famed eye expert to help analyze the Benham disc phenomenon so that it might be used to generate synthetic color codes.

TV Applications. When Butterfield and Fender had completed their tests, the next step was to apply their theory of subjective color to TV broadcasting. This resulted in the development of the Color Translator, a special TV-camera attachment that contains a modified form of the Benham disc. The disc is inserted in the light path between the scene being viewed and the TV camera lens. As shown in Fig. 2 what would have been the white section of the Benham disc is instead comprised of three tinted filter sections. Viewed from the front, the filters are, from right to left, cyan (bluegreen), magenta (purple), and yellow, each a complementary color of red, green and blue respectively. When a colored object is seen through a tinted filter of a complementary color, the subject appears black against a pale background.

The Butterfield disc is rotated at 5 rev/m which means that one of the 12 filter elements is between the scene being viewed and the TV camera lens for 60 TV fields. When the cyan filter is in the light path, all red light is blocked out and only green and blue light appears. Therefore, all red areas are transmitted as black. The green, blue, and white areas pass through this filter and correspond to the white spaces of the original Benham disc. The magenta filter blocks out green light (which is transmitted as black), and passes the red and blue light which now acts as the white areas. The yellow filter blocks out the blue light.

   
Fig. 2. Disc for use in TV has three sectors in colors that are complements of those seen on reception.

Mixed colors are combinations of two or three primary hues and when they appear in the scene, they cause some grey or black to be transmitted in the subjective color primaries. When the Color Translator is in operation, a flickering color picture of medium saturation and fidelity can be seen on a black-andwhite TV receiver. The flickering is the result of two different effects. First, there is the opaque half of the disc that blocks out all light reaching the TV camera for 50% of the time. This causes a black flicker at 5 Hz (rotational speed of the disc). Secondly, the subjective red, green, and blue colors are each produced during a different sixth of a revolution of the disc. These color areas appear white during the remaining third of the disc revolution. This causes a white flicker in the color area. Mixed colors do not have the latter type of flicker since they are combinations of more than one pnrimary color. Red seems to flicker more than green or blue, but this appears to be a physiological effect.

While Butterfield isn’t the first to come up with a workable subjective-color process for black-and-white TV, his method is, by far, the most efficient and flexible system yet devised. The Nagler process, patented in 1958, requires specially prepared film to achieve the desired subjective-color effect. Butterfield’s system, on the other hand, needs, no preprocessed material, and can be used to shoot live color sequences, make color video-tape recordings, or even, if fitted to a motion-picture camera, turn out full-color movies, on black-and-white film.

What Next? While this optical system will broadcast pictures in natural color, it has a number of inherent flaws that have to date restricted the use of electronic color to certain types of “special effects’ commercials.

The slow speed of the filter rotation— necessary for color definition—also makes the picture shimmer, flash and appear generally unsteady. The color quality isn’t uniform and some viewers see hues almost as saturated as those of a conventional color TV receiver. Other viewers discern only one or two tints, and a minority of viewers apparently can detect no color whatsoever.

Yet despite its shortcoming, electronic color does seem to be a commercial success, and Color-Tel Corporation, Hollywood, California, is using the Butterfield process to make successful television commercials.

When electronic color was first publicly demonstrated in the Los Angeles area over KNXT, no prior announcement had been made at the request of a softdrink manufacturer sponsoring the test. The beverage firm wanted its color commercials to be a complete surprise to viewers of black-and-white receivers. And, the telecasts were that, to say the very least. Within hours of the electronic-color broadcast, thousands of viewers began asking the same question, “What happened? Did I really see color on my black-and-white receiver? Or am I having hallucinations?”

Right now, Color-Tel engineers are checking into the possibility of using electronic color for such things as color radar displays, color computer readouts, and perhaps even color sonar pictures. It may be true that, in its present stage of development. Butterfield’s process is nothing but a scientific curiosity - however, 25 years ago, so was television.


* “U.S. Patent 3,311,699, and other patents and patent applications outstanding in the United States and foreign countries.

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[NobodySpecial268]

There is an animated gif of the Benham disc via wikipedia. It is really annoying on the eyes, so I won't post the gif here. Here is a link instead.

Benham disc.


------------------------------------------------

ETA:

Butterfield reasoned that, if the frequencies of the nerve codes for specific colors could be mathematically analyzed, it would be possible to feed the cortex synthetic color data. This could be accomplished by stimulating the cones with flickering pulses of white light, keyed to match the known nerve frequency for a given hue. If the theory was correct, such flickering white light would then appear to the viewer to have color.

I wonder if Butterfield's reasoning was not quite correct.

Butterfield may have presumed the cones were at play here, what if it is the rods that are stimulated instead?

Then that would mean the rods are capable of perceiving colours. Rather than 'simple colour' to denote a frequency that corresponds to, say green, we might use the term 'compound colours' where two or more frequencies combine to create Butterfield's subjective colours.

If so, then maybe clairvoyance is not so "spiritual" an ability. Rather, a mundane ability of the physical flesh and blood human body. There may be a knack to it.