Sunday, November 10, 2013

Devil or Dust Devil?

One of the things that I like to point about my viewpoint on occult phenomena is that I believe in paranormal phenomena but not supernatural ones. To some extent it's a tautology, in that my perspective is that everything in existence is part of the natural world. And as I see it consciousness, spirits, magical operations, and so forth all exist - so they must essentially be natural components of the universe.

The concept behind paranormal is completely different - that is, it refers to phenomena outside the realm of most peoples' everyday experiences. So it includes psychic phenomena, but also especially unusual or unlikely occurrences. The video here shows what I think is unarguably a paranormal phenomenon, but at the same time one that conforms to known scientific principles. It is highly unusual, but not inexplicable in a "supernatural" sense.

In the video you can see a ghostlike mist flowing across a parking lot and taking a mirror off one of the parked cars. Since this parking lot happens to be at a police station and is therefore under constant surveillance it was captured by the camera. According to a local meteorologist, this is in fact a dust devil, a tornado-like vortex small enough that it does little damage to its surroundings - aside from the one unfortunate mirror.

And by the way, if anyone knows a reliable spell for conjuring one of these I'm all ears. I can imagine all sorts of mischief I could get up to with such a thing. I can think of a number of ways to do it that might work, but real experimental evidence always trumps speculation.

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