The Mysterious Case of Mysterious Mr. Ye

Ah, and therein lies our mystery...

Chinese Man Can't Be Photographed!

from Sploid

Police in China's Henan Province are baffled by a local man who can't be photographed.

Ye Xiangting showed up at his local police station to be photographed for an ID card. Cops were shocked when he sat for a picture and didn't show up in the image.

Workers at the station checked everything. The digital camera worked fine. Ye carried nothing on his body or in his clothes that could interfere with the electronics.

They tried shooting pictures of him at different angles. Nothing. Finally, they took a picture of him standing with other people in the station.

Amazingly, the other people appeared in the photograph...but not the mysterious Mr. Ye.

The story was published this week in Henan Province's Dahe Daily newspaper.

"In the end, the staff had to give up," the newspaper reported. "Ye Xiangting said that he has never encountered this kind of problem before. Normally, he could be photographed."

The situation was not unheard of at the police station, however. The chief told the paper there were two other cases of people who couldn't be photographed for their ID cards.

The remarkable story seems to combine several paranormal claims: that certain supernatural beings can't be photographed, that regular people sometimes suffer a frightening condition known as Human Spontaneous Involuntary Invisibility, and that invisibility can be learned through the study of Eastern mystic practices or Western magical orders such as the Rosicrucians and the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Several North American Indian tribes believe in a Sasquatch that becomes invisible, while many aboriginal tribes around the world fear being photographed - whether because it "steals their souls" or because the image can be used in witchcraft against the person.

But vampires are the only supernatural creatures reliably known to be invisible to cameras.