I'll share a few thoughts about my own encounters with psychic photographs. When I was doing my doctorate in religion at Harvard, I went through phases in which my faith was on shaky ground. One day, I complained to God, "If only I could experience a convincing vision of You!" That night, someone brought a psychic photo of Jesus to my dorm room. A young man had been attending his mother's funeral in Dallas. After taking all the pictures he wanted, he was overcome with grief. In frustration, he just pointed his camera to the clouds without looking. The photo that develops displays what is apparently the figure of Jesus raising His hand in blessing in the clouds. The guy who brought me this photo had no idea that I had just asked God for a vision of Jesus. Quite a synchronicity! Naturally I pointed out to God that I had asked for a vision, not a snapshot!
But then I was offered another photo of Jesus out of the blue. This one was taken in China. A Chinese agnostic walking down a road on a rainy day, had experimentally asked God to reveal Himself, if He existed. At precisely that moment, he tripped and heard the click of His camera. The resulting photo fits the stereotype of a close-up of Jesus raising His hand in greeting. Jesus' face arises in dramatic detail from the background of ground and water. What startled me about this close-up was that the face was identical to the face of Jesus on a much older psychic photo of Jesus that my aunt gave me when I was a boy. My aunt's photo was taken in my home town (Winnipeg, Canada) in the 1930s. Two women were sitting on a park bench during a wintry day. One remarked to the other, "It's too bad we don't know what the Lord really looked like." She had just bought a new camera and it was sitting on the ground. The camera clicked by itself and a close-up of Jesus appeared against a background of snow and trail. I compared this photo with the Chinese photo for a long time. I was awestruck that the face and contours of His robe were identical in both photos, and yet, different from any artistic portrayal of Jesus I'd ever seen. But the physical features that formed Jseus' face and robe were shaped by different background features: ground and water in one; snow and a trail in the other. It was not possible to compare these 2 photos with the Dallas funeral photo because Jesus is too distant in that photo.
What was most convincing to me is the timing of my reception of the last 2 photos with my prayerful plea for a vision of Jesus. I showed these 3 photos to photography experts who claimed there was no sign of fakery. It would have been harder to fake the Winnipeg photo with 1930s camera technology. I went to a photo store to get these photos copied so I could give them away to friends. The shop owner told me he lost my photos. Obviously, this man imagined I had faked the photos and was hoping to profit from them financially.
Don
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