Benjamin Radford, the deputy editor of "Skeptical Inquirer" science magazine, a "LiveScience" columnist and author of hundreds of articles and several books on science, skepticism, and the paranormal, was invited at the request of "The New Mexican" to do research on the phenomenon. After the first day of his investigation he had ruled out a number of potential causes including camera artifacts, reflections and hoaxes. Of the chances of the image being a hoax he said "It was almost certainly not a hoax, because it's unlikely anyone would think to make a blurry, indistinguishable blob on a courthouse surveillance video". Having investigated many similar ghost videos of this type, he said that "the quality of the image is often inversely proportional to the belief that the object is a ghost; the fuzzier and more ambiguous the form, the more likely a ghost will be offered as an explanation".