One thing that came up in a blog over on PUG (ParanormalUnderground) by Kim Kowalczyk, of GhostBreakers, was a discussion about standardization of methods in the paranormal community. Kim makes some very good points in this blog, and much they say mirrors what I’ve said over the years. One of the things they touch upon is the resistance of groups to want to conform to standards since it makes them feel controlled. I too have seen this in the paranormal community and it amazes me how there are a set of standards that have emerged. EVPs, EMF detectors, and others. While not totally standardized, the basic concepts have become the norm with many groups, especially since ParaTV has made it’s debut.

But these standards are a far cry from the point that Kim is noting. There are no real standards or rules of evidence. Each group has it’s own way that it sets up equipment and collects data. Most of what I’ve seen simply consists of photos, videos, and audio recordings. There really isn’t much in the way of data logging other than some groups are now using EMF detectors that log measurements made by the device, but without any sort of control in place, and much of the time is the only device of its kind. This makes it virtually impossible for groups to compare notes. Without standards of how data is collected you cannot compare what one group found and compare it to what another group found at the same location, especially if the equipments capabilities differ. Take for instance audio recorders. If one group catches an alleged EVP with a cheap voice recorder while another does not this creates a conundrum when it comes to examining evidence. Was the EVP simply created from distortion caused by poor sampling rates and compression that alters ambient sound?

Another good point that Kim brings up is “Who would oversee these standards? There are no experts in this field.” This is very true. There are no experts in the field of paranormal investigation. In order to be considered an expert one has to have vast knowledge about the subject. Considering everything concerning the paranormal is up in the air and no facts have been established, there cannot be any experts. There may be many who claim to be, and they may have a lot of knowledge when it comes to folklore, but for them to claim to be experts in the field of paranormal investigation is a lie. They are simply experts in the folklore associated with the paranormal. So, who would oversee these rules or standards? And again I have to give kudos to Kim for the suggestion of having experts in various fields be those who govern over these rules, and I would go a bit further and say that the rules that the scientific community be the standards. For if those rules are what is used then there will be little reason for them to reject the evidence that an investigator collects.

Kim also notes a key issue in wrapping up his blog, and that is getting buy in from others in the paranormal community. In fact Kim notes something I have often wondered which is why is it so hard to get buy in from the so called professionals, and what’s their motivation to ignoring the issue. I’ll take it a step further and lump the ParaCelebs in there. To me it seems that the experts and ParaCelebs would be out of business if theories were tested, standards were set, and true knowledge were gained. They thrive on being able to spew untested theories and make broad statements that appeal to the masses who are caught up in groupthink. If they couldn’t offer these lofty ideas then I highly doubt they’d survive long since the overwhelming majority of them haven’t a clue as to go about investigating using methods that the academic community would accept. Obscurity is their friend and ally, just as are generalized statements that can be interpreted to fit any situation so they never appear to be wrong. Thus is the world of pseudoscience.

But I digress a bit. I think that there are several ways that a standard can begin to take root. In fact it seems to be. More and more I run into investigators such as Kim, or ones who have stumbled across a blog such as this or Kim’s. More and more I see the light bulbs begin to come on as investigators who have read these types of materials begin to think about what is said and look at their own methods. Granted there are going to be those who will fight tooth and nail to stick with the failed methods they’re currently using, primarily because they feel like they are accomplishing something whenever they capture some unexplained anomaly, but quite frankly I believe it’s because following the rules of academia are tedious, boring, and slow to produce results. Americans don’t like to wait for anything anymore. They want instant gratification, and science generally doesn’t provide that. But I think that if a group were to produce evidence that were accepted by academia, even if it was something small that didn’t provide definitive proof of the paranormal but did provide an answer to whether or not one of the countless theories out there was true or false, we would then see the tide begin to change.

So, in closing I would like to thank Kim and PUG from bringing up the issue. And I ask of those who read this and are paranormal investigators, “What are you going to do. Continue down the path of obscurity and never gain anything from it other than a collection of anomalies, or are you going to be a true contributor and work with others in the community to develop methods and tests to answer questions and gain knowledge? It’s your choice.”

Patrick Doyle gives us another good video on hoaxes, as well as some more sound food for thought. Enjoy!

I’ve seen this one go both ways. From the paranormal community this is often in the form of pure speculation as seen when I was discussing, “Grasping at Straws.”  But I’ve also seen this from the scientific community as well.

Take for instance an investigation I saw once on TV.  A family was concerned when their daughter started speaking of a “friend” she had.  At first the family simply wrote it off as a child’s imaginary friend.  Not an unreasonable assumption since many children have imaginary friends, but the family became more and more concerned as their daughter began to describe the person in detail and described an elderly gentleman whom she had a name for (sorry, can’t remember the man’s name).  The couple then decided this needed further investigation after they learned that the name of their daughter’s friend was a previous owner of the house.  What really concerned them was when they were checking out the name they found a picture of the man, which matched the description their daughter had given them.  Becoming concerned about this they decided to bring in a local professor to see if it might be a ghost.

Well, the professor came in and found high EMF near the child’s bed, and got together seven photos all fitting the description of the man, with one being the actual man himself and showed them to the daughter, just like a police lineup.  He was surprised when she identified the correct photo, but wrote it off and concluded the place wasn’t haunted and that the child was having EMF induced hallucinations.  As for identifying the picture he said that she must have seen his picture around town somewhere.

Now here’s where I have a problem with his conclusion, and where he seems to be rationalizing the inexplicable.  How does he know she saw his picture somewhere in town?  Also, even if she saw his picture in town, how did she learn his name?  And what are the odds that she’s going to see a picture of the man in town, get his name, and it turn out to be a former owner of the house?  That seems like reaching or grasping straws to me.  For one thing, he never went into town to see if there was a picture the girl may have seen.  The one the parents had found was in the library, and one they stumbled across.  Neither of them had ever seen the picture, or remembers seeing the picture, so how is it their daughter had seen his picture, if that is the case?  The odds of the child stumbling across the picture of a former home owner and learning his name to later use as an imaginary friend seem pretty remote to me.

Now the conclusion that the girl was having hallucinations brought on by EMF were interesting, and there was evidence to show that there was a high EMF field in the area where her head rested at night, but I’m curious why most of her ‘hallucinations’ occurred when she was outside, playing in the yard near her swing.  But at least there a strong basis for the EMF.  With his conclusion on the picture, I was amazed at how quickly and assuredly he jumped to his conclusion.  He did no fact searching and based the whole thing on speculation.  To me, this is no different than saying that cold spots are created by ghosts drawing in thermal energy from the air so they can manifest, or a number of other rationals to explain the inexplicable.

This is what Patrick Doyle asks investigators to think about when reviewing paranormal evidence, and I must say it is one of the best pieces of advice to paranormal investigators that I’ve heard.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with his work or website, Haunted Hoax, I highly recommend you check it and his videos out. He’s done an excellent job in producing informative videos on how things can be hoaxed.  Here’s his YouTube Channel: Haunted Hoax Channel

And one of his videos:

One thing I’ve seen asked numerous times on the Ghost Hunters forum on the SciFi boards is “Why do they go dark?” The main answer I’ve heard is that it will be easier to see the faintest of light sources. A sound reason, but it’s not what is actually observed when seeing how paranormal investigators implement the plan. What I always see is an IR camera with an IR illuminator spot light that does nothing more than illuminate an area that is similar to the lighting a flashlight produces; only in this mode it is monochromatic, making it far worse.

Here’s what I see:

Out of all the reasons I’ve heard, the most plausible is to catch the faintest of lights. That’s all and good until you look at how the investigators execute the method. First they turn off all the lights, which is expected. Then they setup an infra-red camera and turn on an IR illuminator. Here’s where I start scratching my head and ask, “What are you doing?” If the purpose of going dark is to catch the faintest of lights then why are we adding an IR illuminator and setting the camera in a mode that reduces its ability to record visible light?

Basically, all any investigator does by going dark in such a manner is to cripple a camera and make it so it’s no better than strapping a flashlight to a camera and turning out all the lights. In fact, strapping a flashlight to a camera would produce better video than being in IR mode, since IR mode reduces the camera’s ability to see in the visible spectrum of light.

One argument I’ve heard for shooting in IR is that the ghosts aren’t aware of it. Again I have to ask myself, where is the data to support this? If ghosts do exist, then how do we know what they are aware of and what they aren’t aware of? It seems to me that if a being is no longer bound by its organic body then it must be sensing things without the use of eyes, ears, nose, or touch. Therefore, how can anyone assume what a ghost can or cannot sense? If that’s the case then who’s to say it isn’t aware of IR illumination? Without proper data to support such an idea then it’s just as easy to say that ghosts can’t see anything other than people, including visible light.

I’ve also heard investigators claim that they get better results when using the IR method of going dark. Many of them claim that there are more shadows that manifest, which is true to a point, but when looking at their video what I see is a camera that is struggling in a low light situation. Putting cameras in such a situation isn’t much different than putting a person in the same setup. Neither does well to interpret images in low light and both will exaggerate minor differences in light levels, giving the impression there is something there when it’s not. For a person, this effect is further exaggerated by the composition of the human eye and how rods and cones affect vision. But at the moment we’ll stick with the camera, as that is our subject.

Basically, what this all boils down to is failed implementation. If investigators go dark so they can see the faintest of lights, then they need to abandon the IR mode and illumination on the camera and simply stick to shooting in the dark.

One of the biggest problems I see with most paranormal groups is how they collect their data. Many investigators wander around with a single EMF meter and get excited when they observe a spike in their reading. Many also will be quick to conclude that the spike was paranormal in nature with nothing more to support it. Some go on to claim that because they collected an EVP at the same time as the EMF anomaly, the EVP substantiates their EMF readings.

First, let’s deal with the single meter issue. By using a single meter you are only sampling one data point. Not much can be proven with a single data point, and drawing conclusions from a single data point can easily lead to false conclusions.

Example:
Let’s say a car manufacturer produces 100,000 cars of a particular model. Out of the 100,000 cars, 0.1% has a manufacturing defect. You purchase one of these cars and find that it’s defective. Now, because the car you purchased is defective, you conclude that the model of car is a lemon, or worse yet, you decide that the manufacturer produces junk cars. Does this seem like a fair assessment? After all, you can show people that the car you have is defective.

This is how much of the data is collected and analyzed by many paranormal investigators. Let’s go back to the single EMF meter. What most investigators do is very similar to the example above. They get a spike on an EMF meter and think that it’s something significant or that they can draw conclusions from that one spike. About all that can truly be concluded by their evidence so far is that there was a spike. With only a single meter they can’t even determine if the spike is confined to a small area, as in a particular room in a building, or if the spike is much larger, perhaps covering an area of several hundred acres. Determining that a single EMF spike is paranormal in nature is just as irresponsible as concluding that the model of car in the above example is defective.

For investigators to be able to start making any sort of reasonable conclusions from their data they must first look at their collection methods. Does the method create a single data point or does it produce multiple data points? If your data collection only produces a single data point, then it’s time for a change unless you wish to spend your time collecting useless data. In the instance of EMF, multiple meters need to be employed. The more meters, the more data points. The more data points, the more accurate your conclusions are likely to be, especially if you are trying to determine the area affected by an EMF spike.

Once again let’s look at the car example. Let’s say we buy 2 more cars so that we now have a total of three. Again, the two additional cars are defective. Odds are against us getting three defective cars, but it is possible. Now, while we’ve expanded our sample size, effectively increasing its size by 100%, overall we still have a very small sample in comparison to the total number of vehicles that exists. Because we coincidentally purchased two more defective cars, we mistakenly drew the conclusion that all cars of that model are lemons. But look at what happens when we purchase a total of 1,000 cars. Even if we did somehow manage to purchase all the defective vehicles (total of 100 out of 100,000 at a 0.1% defect rate) we would only find a 10% defect rate, not the 100% defect rate that we had previously assumed. This example with a larger sample size shows us that the car is not a lemon as we had initially concluded in our original samples and illustrates, in general, how easy it is to make an inaccurate judgment based on insufficient data.

So as can be seen, one data point does not provide sufficient evidence and surely does not give an investigator enough data from which to draw any sort of conclusions that would be considered acceptable by any peer group in the scientific community.