Ghost Hunters Guide:
Ecto and Smoke

We often see photos that claim to display 'ectoplasm' but actually show smoke.

Even if someone had been smoking 20 minutes earlier, smoke particulate lingers in the air and can reflect light. This is easy to confuse with genuine anomalies.

Here are some results from our initial study of cigarette smoke.

The photo above shows cigarette smoke that could be confused with 'ecto'.

When we took these photos, we were surprised at how difficult it was to create an 'ecto' effect with smoke. Normal smoking doesn't produce much 'false ecto' in tests, even around the lit cigarette.

These photos were taken on our patio, which is enclosed on three sides and should have kept the smoke from dissipating too quickly:

As you can see, even when the subject was actually smoking, most of the photos showed no actual smoke.

However, we were able to produce two good photos (out of five in this portion of the experiment) by having the subject deliberately exhale in front of the camera. One of them is the top photo, above. The more obvious photo is shown below.

Smoke from a cigarette looks like 'ecto'

We've discovered that smoke is a factor, but it's less predictable than we expected.

In our opinion, if there is any chance that someone's been smoking in the area within the past 20 minutes, photos that show something like 'ecto' must be discounted. However, smoke isn't as much of a problem as we thought when we conducted these tests.

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