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.

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.