A MINIATURE MYSTERY
Why did the “tiny humanoid-shaped figure” cross the road?
A woman out walking her dog in St Helens, Lancashire, claims to have made an amazing discovery after returning home and examining the photos she’d taken with her new smartphone. One appeared to show a tiny humanoid seemingly crossing a disused road covered in fallen leaves and about to pass over some double-yellow lines in front of a lamp-post and heading towards park railings on the left.
The photographer, local woman Mellisa Braham, recalled: “It was my birthday recently and as a gift I received a new smart phone. On Friday, February 26, seeing as it was a nice day I decided to take my dog for a walk in the afternoon. I also took my new phone to test out the camera. During the afternoon I took several short video clips and a selection of random photographs at different resolutions. Later on in the evening I uploaded the photography to my PC to have a look at it. It was whilst looking through the still photos that I spotted on one of them what appears to look like a tiny humanoid-shaped figure walking from right to left. Now I am not saying that the object is a tiny living and breathing being of some kind, but looking at the enlargements of the object one can clearly see what does resemble a bipedal creature of some kind: a head, eye, body, arms, legs, hands and feet can clearly be seen. Whatever the mysterious object is... it is reflecting sunlight and also casts a shadow on the ground…”
Ms Braham says the photo was taken at full resolution with a 12MP camera set to fully automatic, and with no zoom. The weather was dry, mild and sunny, and the picture was taken at 4.05pm. The location is Balker Drive, between Victoria Park and a demolished healthcare centre. Mill Street Barracks, claimed by some to be among the most haunted places in the UK, is less than half a mile away. She admits the strange figure could well be “something very ordinary like a scrap of rubbish captured at a strange angle” or a trick of the light, and acknowledges she is not a photographic expert.
Ms Braham’s curious image – together with her account of how and when she took the photo – has been uploaded and shared to several popular paranormal mysteries websites, where she has been mocked, ridiculed, and accused of fakery. The figure certainly has a distinctly twodimensional quality, and lacks detail, despite the high-quality phone camera. Since the weather was bright and sunny that day, one of the more sympathetic online commentators pointed out that with bright sunlight falling on the object or entity, one would not expect details to be visible. This commentator suggested that its two-dimensional appearance may have resulted from a combination of the distance, the size of the figure, and the sunlight all over it.
Ms Braham, who told a local newspaper she intends to ask photographic experts to analyse the image, reiterated that she hadn’t seen the figure at the time she took the photo. “If someone left it planted there for a joke, a model, toy or cardboard cut-out,” she argued, “then why didn’t I see it, and surely some eagle-eyed little kid would have spotted it and kept it for themselves?” Although several critics have suggested the figure is a paper cut-out, Ms Braham assured the newspaper that while it hadn’t been a windy day, there was a breeze sufficiently strong to send a lightweight paper figure flying away. Besides which, she concluded: “Who can get a piece of paper much less than a millimetre thick to stand upright on a breezy day on its own with no visible means of suspension?”
Although some have suggested the photo was deliberately faked for financial gain, it was sent to FT by Ms Braham with the words: “Please feel free to publish my story, I ask for nothing in return, I just thought it was interesting and worth sharing.”
Comparisons have been made with the famous Cottingley Fairies photos ( FT356:30-35), and with a picture taken in Argentina in 2008 allegedly showing a sinister gnome ( FT235:4-5). Both cases were subsequently revealed to have been hoaxes. This latest image does, however, highlight a wider issue. It is estimated that 3.8 billion people worldwide currently own a smartphone – 48 per cent of the global population – yet despite many of these phones being equipped with high-quality cameras, there has not been a significant increase in photographic evidence for anomalous entities. wigantoday. net, 8 Mar 2021.