  Study of color transparency (CT) effects at moderate energies is more
problematic than is usually supposed. Onset of CT can be imitated by other
mechanisms, which contain no explicit QCD dynamics. In the case of the
$(e,e'p)$ reaction the standard inelastic shadowing well known in the pre-QCD
era, causes a substantial growth of nuclear transparency with $Q^2$ and a
deviation from the Glauber model, analogous to what is assumed to be a signal
of CT.
  In the case of exclusive virtual photoproduction of vector mesons, CT is
expected to manifest itself as an increase of nuclear transparency with $Q^2$
in production of the ground states and as an abnormal nuclear enhancement for
the radial excitations. We demonstrate that analogous $Q^2$-dependence can be
caused at moderate energies by the variation of so called coherence length,
which is an interference effect, even in the framework of the vector dominance
model.
  One should disentangle the real and the mock CT effects in experiments
planned at CEBAF, at the HERMES spectrometer, or at the future electron
facility ELFE.
