Ghost, bug, whatever

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Jeepers, it was just one of those creepers. An investigator specializing in all things bizarre has debugged the mystery of the Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost — a specter captured on a blurry surveillance videotape.

"Whooooooooooooo....," Benjamin Radford said in his finest ghostly Halloween howl.
"In the end, it was in fact a bug or insect of some sort that was on the lens of the surveillance camera," said Radford, an Albuquerque-based professional scientific paranormal investigator and managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
"To my mind, it's a case of where people typically say something is unexplained and all that means is they haven't worked hard enough to look for an explanation. They've given up," he said.
The image — a glowing spot drifting in front of a patrol car parked beneath some trees — generated more than 132,000 hits on YouTube since Santa Fe County Deputy Alfred Arana first noticed the image June 15.
"There were a wide variety of theories on what it was," said Radford. "Some said it was a ghost. Some said it was drifting cottonwood fluff. Some said it was a prank."
But the one that stuck was a ghost, he said.
Radford drove to Santa Fe to watch the original video, ruling out a couple of theories.
"If it was a reflection, what would be reflecting and why was the sun in the wrong place?" he said. "And why would someone conduct a prank on courthouse surveillance with deputies with guns watching. That didn't make sense."