Miroslav in America

I’ve previously posted about my desire to witness or experience something paranormal; about the loneliness of being Scully in a world of Mulders.

So surely, with the ubiquity of the internet and the bottomless well of belief that this taps into, I should have been presented with something odd by now. With all those UFOs in the night sky, coupled with the millions of people walking around with a camera built into their phone, surely a few shots should have gone viral by now? Experts should have been unable to debunk a particularly convincing image. I should’ve seen a clip of a ghostly apparition where I thought, actually… is that real?

Well – almost.

You might have seen this image at some point on your cyber wanderings:

Honestly, what is that? My rational side says it’s been Photoshopped, or it’s some weird animal caught at an odd angle. If neither of those are the explanation, then we have to go down to the basement and ask Mulder what he thinks. I did, and his best guess is a hobgoblin.

I plugged the image into Google’s new Image Search tool which tells me that it first appeared online on www.fiski.net on 12/4/2006, posted by Tom Hendrix: “Here is a strange creation, I filmed, photographed when the parents' home in Florida (translated from Russian).” The word ‘creation’ here seems odd, but maybe that’s an artefact of the translation engine.

The only other explanation I can think of is that it’s a photo of the guy on the far right in this picture:

This one first appeared online at www.kalerab.sk on 30/7/2007. Perhaps this young man, let’s call him Miroslav as this is a common Slovak name and the website is from Slovakia, fled the Nazis (or perhaps his uncouth brother, second from left) shortly after this photo was taken. Escaping to America he worked for many years on the General Motors production line, but was continually persecuted for his unusual appearance. Eventually Miroslav was retrenched from his job and forced to live on the streets. Years later, old and thin, he was snapped by Tom Hendrix running across his parent’s backyard.