To put it simply a debunker is someone who follows their skeptical intuition without any investigation to reject claims of the supernatural, paranormal, and otherwise unlikely. In other words, debunkers are assholes. There are, however, paranormal investigators who actually test these claims to figure out what’s going on.

We obviously can’t all do a full investigation of every claim. To a certain extent we have to accept the reports of scientific investigations and to hold on to a tentative rejection of the claim pending the availability of evidence one way or the other. After all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

When it’s claims like the magical powers of Power Balance wrist band, then it’s a little easier to call BS. Not only do we need evidence that it works, but we also need a mechanism for how it does what they claim and double blind studies to eliminate the placebo effect. This would be quite easy to do considering the fact that there is a company offering Placebo Bands.

Now, with all this in mind, consider this rose:

Nothing seems abnormal with this flower just based on the picture. However, this picture was taken in mid December of last year….at my parent’s house in Oregon.

This rose plant was our next door neighbor’s and it’s always been potted. When she died in mid December a good 10 or so years ago, this and a few other plants were given to my mom. The pot has been moved several times, from behind the deck, to by the house, to next to the garage. My mom prunes this rose and all her other rose bushes every February. The first frost of the year usually happens sometime in early to mid December, however that doesn’t impact the bloom. It’s done this every year for as long as my mom has had the plant.

It has its normal several blooms with all the other rose bushes during the summer, but for it to have a single bloom right before the solstice, when it’s dark, cloudy, foggy, cold, and in every imaginable way inhospitable for plant growth and flower blooms, it’s nothing short of extraordinary.

One explanation, which neither my parents or I buy into, is that it’s haunted by our late neighbor’s ghost. While that would be pretty creepy and even exciting, its too easy and lazy of an answer.. There has to be a natural explanation and it could be quite exciting to find out what it is.

I’ll leave it up to you, my readers to design an experiment. The only ground rule is that it cannot be destructive to the flower and cannot have high risk of stopping this phenomena. My mom likes having a rose bloom in December. It’s really cool to have that kind of a reminder of life when the world around is so dark, so no damaging it. But, if we could figure out how to reproduce it, then my parent’s could probably pay for their retirement with the marketing of solstice roses.

I’ll share the proposals with my mom and I’ll report back as to whether any are acceptable.