? Ghost on truck dashcam

"William Church, a truck driver who reportedly drove down Arizona State Route 87 on Saturday, March 11, noticed a bright glare in his dashcam, and he thinks the flashing figure could be a ghost..."​

So he never directly observed a "spectral figure" on the side of the road himself, just saw it later on the recording, or maybe looked at the dashcam's screen at the time of the event? The environment according to the mediating camera?

Master Po: "Know this, grasshopper, that (sans deepfake AI) an optical instrument lacks the capacity to lie or hallucinate."

Caine: "But master, can not a device's mere shortcomings yield grainy images, spurious reflections, pixelized glitches, and other contingent imperfections that facilitate the human and its motivated reasoning to interpret the data in a mistaken way?"
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Looks like the ghost of a child to me. Not an exactly promising prospect for an enjoyable afterlife..
 
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I'm with gmilam; the first thing you see in the still image is the light reflecting off a sign to the right, off the road some. It scatters off the truck's windscreen. It's a photographic effect, lenses and all that.
 
The figure is occluded by the structure extending from the front of the truck while the sign is still there (frame 25-26). Hence it can't be a glare or artifact in the windshield. It is actually there outside of the truck..It is also still lit up when the sign goes dim.

 
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No, "the figure" has the same shape as the sign, and it lines up with it.
It's just light from the headlights bouncing off the sign. The camera is better at picking up the image coming through the windscreen.
 
Virtual images can have a displaced quality of appearing to be located in the environment itself behind the medium that is reflecting the light (see video below).

The truck window is acting a bit like a mirror reflection-wise, but still retaining its transparency, while also moving, etc (several combined factors which makes things more complicated in terms of optical relationships, and multiplying a virtual object).

I feel the immediate or nearer "sign" seemingly floating in the air (latter indicated if the video is slowed down) is actually a reflection itself or displaced virtual image of the real sign (or whatever) glowing much further down the road. Accompanied by a secondary or weaker virtual image (the "ghost") that seems to be standing on the side of the road.

If the video is stopped on the last frame before the "ghost" disappears, it can be seen that it has a rectangular shape at a skewered angle and the fuzziness below doesn't really conform to legs.

Probably can't rule out the location of the dashcam even contributing slightly to the tangled mess of optical relationships.

LINK: Virtual image | Geometric optics

 
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