Yes, as crazy as it sounds, that is what happened according to author Annie Jacobsen claims to have spoken to over 70 former personnel of Area 51 and gotten them to talk. And they have told her a whopper!

So, remember when the Nazi’s were all the rage in Europe? The last great pillagers and rapers of our age also had a few scientists under their thumbs. Apparently they made a saucer like ship that was stolen by the Soviets when Germany fell. Stalin took the ship and some genetic play things of Joseph Mengele, the super nuttie insane Nazi scientist, loaded them all on the ship and sent it over the US.

The result? It crash lands in the desert and we scoop it up and put it on an army base. I imagine we figured out it wasn’t really aliens, the military did that is, and just kept it as a nyah nyah to Stalin. Still, could it really be true?

What is really shocking in this book, and yes that’s not the shocking part, is that then President Clinton, in the 90′s, asked to know what was going on at Area 51 and was told, you don’t need to know. I find that more shocking than Stalin sending over Mengele babies (mengbabies?, meng? Emperor Ming? Ming the Merciless? Is this all a buck rogers plot?). After all, the soviets did send the CIA on a wild goose chase many times over during the cold war. And often we bought into it.

Still, can anyone that works for the US Government tell the President to piss off? Shit. Those are some ballsy people. If that’s true they they certainly have something powerful to hold over the President. Do you think they told Bush Jr. to piss off? Cheney? I don’t know if I see the dark lord taking a back seat to anyone.

But really,  is this possible? Can this type of a secret really be kept for years and years only to be revealed by a random author after doing a few spot check interviews? Does that really pass mustard?

Just seems to me that somewhere at some point we would have heard some rumor of this. That is, of course, unless the people back in the 50′s who found the craft really did think it was aliens. The space kind. If that’s true then it kinda makes sense. The 50′s Area 51 people thought it really was aliens and that rumor escaped. The 80′s Area 51 people realized it was a Nazi / Soviet plot and just let the old rumors fly. I wonder what the current batch of Area 51 people have to say about it.

Really though, at the end of the day, it’s just some interviewees telling a probing would be author some interesting and sensational news. Here’s a thought, lets come up with a wild story, find an author to tell it, and everyone will forget about aliens at Area 51. Just blame it on the Nazis! Besides, this almost coincides with Iron Sky, a movie where Nazi’s fled to the dark side of the moon and are planning to come back, big time, so maybe this is all just a promotional stunt? We’ll probably never know. But good fodder for the masses regardless!

Granted, I am no where near as smart as Mr. Hawking, but if a species that has advanced enough to be able to travel the stars to another planet, do we really have to be afraid of them? The technology to do that, and the technology to support that, has to be such that anything they can do, they can do on their own. They would see us as ants on an ant hill.

Now, sure, they could choose to squash us, but again, any species that has advanced that far has had to learn a few things. I would hope one of those is how to get things down with out breaking out the magnifying glass and burning some bugs on the ground.

We also know now that planets like this one are probably all over the place, as is water and organic molecules. So, we don’t have anything that they could want. Hell, they found a planet with diamond mountains. We don’t have anything that can compete with that. What, are they gonna come here for the dim sum?

No, Mr. Hawking, I think any advanced species would only be curious about us. Maybe laugh a bit that we haven’t figured out how to charge our flux capacitor’s, even though we learned how in 1985. They may even throw us a bone or two. And a bone from a million year old species is bound to be mighty tasty.

The other thing Mr. Hawking said recently, today I think, was that there is no god and that the idea of an after life is a fairy tale. Well, way to really turn a bright day into a bummer Mr. Math.

I happen to agree that most religions are just wrong. I don’t believe any god is that concerned with us to give one of us enough strength to tear down a building, but not enough to get a hair cut. I think most are just ways that ancient man tried to explain the world they were living in.

However, that isn’t to say I do believe that there is no life after death. Not because I think the Ghosthunters found a jacket pulling entity on Halloween. But because of a quantum experiment that shows that consciousness has something to do with the universe.

I simply can’t get away from that one. Do a double slit experiment, get your minds out of the gutter, one with a camera observing the slit and one experiment without, and you’ll get different results. The act of trying to observe the particles of light change the nature of the light. That’s just scary to me. It means that this universe is somewhat dependent on our consciousness.

Now, of course that doesn’t mean you get to live after death. But I think it’s a strong suggestion that you might just be able to.

Mr. Hawking’s third point I do agree with. Life your life the utmost. Do as much as you can, don’t be afraid of anything and attack life. You have no guarantee that you’ll get to the Singularity event or that you’ll survive death. So might as well boogie woogie while you still can. I’m off to the party!

JB Rhine never once went into a deserted house and asked “Is anyone here”, “Tell me your name”, “OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT”. Not once. Why? Because he’s an actual scientist exploring several fringe topics like ESP and the paranormal. He’s not a plumber that thinks when someone goes bump in the night it’s a demon, residual haunting or some other bullshit definition that they plucked out of the air.

What’s really sad is that all this attention by these charlatans will simply take away from any real movement or research into this field. As the Salon article will point out, many real life parapsychologists are being cut out of speaking engagements for the more flashy, and full of shit, TV personalities.

Now, I’ve picked on the Ghost Hunters quite a lot but really, they are best in breed. And yes, they did fake evidence on live TV and still they are leaps and bounds over the idiots at “Ghost Adventures”. These brainiacs go into a room, say “Take my energy” and claim they feel something and so BOOM its a haunting. Jesus Christ are you kidding? Are people really that stupid? Well, people did believe in Crossing Over with John Edward, and he was a bona fide fake. I guess they can’t help but believe in Ghost Adventures.

The big problem is people will believe these losers and not any real science about what, if anything, may really be going on. The more that the speaking engagements go to the TV personalities the more that the real scientists will not be able to make money, and have to do something else. After all, there are no government grants coming down the pipeline for parapsychology.

It’s like Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures are the Sarah Palin’s of parapsychology. They don’t say anything true and people believe them because they have the best schtick. Sad.

Tonight the Ghost Hunters are having a live show with actors from Warehouse 13 and professional wrestlers. Yeah, that’s real science.  And even sadder, I’ll probably watch it….

Link to the Salon article: http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/2010/10/30/ghost_hunters/index.html

Now, does that mean it’s all untrue? If one hundred people in a train station are asking for money because their wallet was stolen, are they all lying? Ok, probably, but there is always the chance that they are not. However slim that chance is, it’s still there.

James Randi is a scientific skeptic and big time debunker of all that is paranormal. There was a challenge on his website once for anyone to prove they had psychic abilities, no one ever won. If it weren’t for this one little book I read on amazon I would probably have hung up my paranormal shoes for good and never looked back. After all, with the amount of camera’s that now populate our society, the amount of paranormal researchers out there in the world, you would think that concrete proof would have happened by now. It hasn’t and so therefore it’s all bunk. Right?

Enter J.B. Rhine. This much maligned scientist was someone that had a very curious mind. He conducted, over the course of years, thousands of experiments in the attempt to prove that some type of psychic ability does really exist. Well guess what, he actually did it.

Now is the point that all the skeptics in the world will hammer down my blogdoor and call me an idiot. Not that they would be wrong, but after reading and doing a little research, I had a very hard time finding any scientific body that actually disputed his results. Sure, they disputed him, they disputed his methods, and some did dispute his findings, but that’s all they did. They disputed it rather than point to any specific experiment and say “AHHA! Gotcha Rhiney!”

The book Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena, from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory (P.S.), delves deep into Rhine’s experiments and comes out scratching it’s head and saying “hey, no one said he was wrong”.

Now, don’t go thinking you can be a Jedi warrior, or even a member of the First Earth Battalion, but according to Rhine, the idea of telepathy isn’t so far fetched.

Here’s where we have to put the breaks on, however. Rhine and his group did not explore the entire body of the ‘paranormal’ . That’s just not feasible. One thing you simply must do is define what it is you are looking at. Rhine did that. He conducted experiments just about telepathy, nothing else, at least nothing else with conclusive evidence. He did find that over the course of perhaps a million tries, some people could determine an answer without having prior knowledge better than randomly guessing.

A bit of a let down isn’t it? I know we were all expecting jedi mind tricks “I am the man you are looking for ms. hot bikini model”, but no, all that he showed was evidence on minor telepathy.

Keep in mind he never really produced a theory, never said it was aliens, or god, or anything else, other than showing that the phenomena did exist. Which is really pretty freaky.

I don’t know if it really makes me a believe of anything, but the evidence, which I haven’t found has ever been disputed by any scientist or scientific body on the merits of the data itself, really makes you think about it. Now adays the subject is muddled in entertainment and charlatans and its really hard for anyone to do any real research on the subject, which is a shame. Perhaps that will change one day. And wouldn’t it be neat if it did?

Have you found where this was ever disputed? Do drop a note if you have.

I also don’t want to go into the depths of “What is science” in order to explain what a “scientific endeavor” is. That really a treatise of a far broader topic. Suffice to say, to really be a scientific endeavor you would first have to have a theory as to what you are investigating.

That said, a brief description is in order. A theory is really just an idea. Any idea you can think of. Well, not just an idea. Scientifically speaking, a theory is some collection of hypothesis on a topic that is backed up with some amount of evidence. In other words, you go out, see lots or apples falling to the ground, and eventually develop a theory as to why that’s happening.

Here is a good definition of theory http://www.nebscience.org/theory.html that is doing far more justice to the topic than I am.

Ok, well, is that what Ghost Hunters are doing? No. They have come up with an idea of something, Ghosts, and are going out looking for evidence to prove they exist. That’s backward. I can come up with an idea “I believe a giant mountain made of beer and buffalo burgers exists” and then head out looking for evidence to prove it. I can find bottles of beer. I can filled spilled beer. I can find left over buffalo meat. All things could suggest that such a mountain exists. Or at least I can make that evidence look like it does but we all know it really doesn’t. (As an aside, if anyone does find Buffalo Beer mountain please email me immediately with GPS coordinates, I KNOW its there somewhere.)

TAPS and Ghost Hunters in general have a dozen things to say about Ghosts. That there are demons, that some hauntings are just a ‘playback’, that some entities are good, some are evil, etc etc. Well, how they hell do they know that? The answer is they don’t “know” that. By trying to explain what evidence they do find under the umbrella of some other belief system that is itself unknown is not scientific in any way shape or form.

Another big blow to Ghost Hunting is that it really can never be scientific. Why? Because you can’t really replicate any findings. Go to an old building, look for a wisp, a voice, something, and it might be a ghost. That’s not really evidence. You can’t put a ghost into a laboratory. And because you can’t do that you can never really study it, analyze it, define it, and theorize on it.

Now, I am not saying that human consciousness does not survive the death of the body. How the hell could I say that? There is a substantial amount of eye witness testimony, personal accounts, personal experiences, to warrant further thoughts on the subject. I really don’t think you can just slam the door shut on it all because some jaggoff on Halloween in 2008 tied a coat hanger to his jacket and pulled on it. In truth, the Ghost Hunters are now doing more damage to the ‘idea’, and it’s an idea not a theory, of human consciousness surviving after death.

I for one think that the possibility for it is not zero. The biggest reason I can think of is we really don’t even have consciousness defined.  How can you argue that consciousness doesn’t survive the death of the physical body if you have no idea what consciousness really is? The universe is a strange and crazy place. According to string theory there are countless universes that exist in it all separated by an 11th dimension. The 11th dimension is closer to your skin than your clothes are, you just can’t perceive it. There are another 10 dimensions, four that we can perceive, in our universe. The others? Can’t tell you about it. That’s freakin weird. Here we have something that science is telling us exists but we have no way with our senses to perceive it. Well, doesn’t that open the door to other things that exist that we have no way to perceive? Not a theory, just a thought.

And that brings us to the spin off show Ghost Hunters Academy. Ahem. You may vomit now. Please, producers, directors, people that make these shows, do not ever use the word “scientific” in the same sentence with “medium” or “empath” because we’ll think you’re a loon. The academy provided us with a a team of twenty somethings, with two psychics undercover, investigating old places that the TAPS team have already looked at. They are training them to walk through dark places and shout “what the fuck was that!” at a VCR and then pee all over the floor (see southpark episode). Two of the trainees eventually reveal they are psychics of some kind and proceed to show us how silly and naive twenty something people can be.

The entire season was Steve and Tango, whose interaction is actually quite funny and fun to watch, yelling at the twenty somethings and telling them how they were not looking for ghosts the correct way. In the end, two of them got shipped off overseas to Ghost Hunters International, with the most intense Scottish ghost hunter in the world with a nifty multispectrum (technobabble) camera, to work them and hunt ghosts overseas. If I had known I would get a free trip around the world I’d say I was a medium too. All you had to do was setup some cameras and shout “What the fuck was that!” at a shadow and get a free world tour. Sign me up for that!

At the end of the day the credibility of the TAPS team is highly suspected. Their evidence looks suspicious in several cases, they don’t outright say “psychics are themselves an unproven theory and therefore shouldn’t be used to try to explain another unproven theory”. But, with three spinoffs and countless clones out there, the ghost hunting world is very much entrenched in reality TV and the homes of countless people thinking its real, or people who think its fun to watch, cause i’m not in the first group. Nope, no way. Yes, that’s why I watch these. The story I am stickin too.

This, if anything, has me quite puzzled. Ok, puzzled is the wrong word, this has me saying, WTF?!?! Once again I am presented with the great choice in these types of situations. Either it’s a total sham, or it’s so unbelievably true that everyone thinks its a scam. Now, I admit, just about every single time this choice is presented to me, it invariably turns out to be a sham. The Ghost Hunters Halloween 2008 special has largely been touted as the biggest scam of all time. After some you tube video’s replaying the event, I have to admit, the whole Grant’s coat being pulled looked very fishy, so much so that I think it was scam. But that’s a topic for another time. Right now we’re in Yeti hair samples world.

So if anyone out there in the interweb sees this, and it’s likely not many, where the hell is the shock and awe? A real sample that is an “unsequenced DNA sample from a primate” is shocking! Especially considering the area, Bhutan, and the fact that there are no primates in that area that are known about.

On the point of the Yeti itself, could it actually exist, that’sa tough question. We’ve never actually caught a glimpse of a giant squid, but we know they exist because we have the bodies. So the same question applies, where are the dead Yeti’s? Wouldn’t we have foundjust one of them? How long does a dead body the size of Andre the Giant take to decompose in a forest? Could we really have just not found a dead body in all the time Humans have been looking? I say that’s a solid maybe. Its one of the leading arguments against just about all ‘new’ creatures in the world.

But wait! Maybe there is evidence after all? Some time ago, in the 30′s, several teeth and a jawbone were discovered in a Chinese apothecary shop. They turned out to be a giant ape, named Gigantopithecus blacki, that stood about 9 feet tall. It was thought to have gone extinct some 300,000 years ago, give or take a few. More about that can be found here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1208_051208_giant_ape.html

Well, that leaves a big ‘what the F%## if in my opinion. We know something that big did exist once. We know it was a primate. Could it have survived in an extremely remote forest/jungle where the local inhabitants all believe completely that this create exists and most have seen it? I don’t know. But I have to admit, the evidence from the guys at DT is shocking. What is more shocking is that no one seems to have cared. Maybe everyone is gun shy about the Yeti/Sasquatch issue after so many fake claims. Would figure that when someone finally finds something interesting, no one seems to care.

Let me stress, I am not saying that they DID find something, I’m saying that they have compelling evidence that should be reconfirmed by a 2nd independent laboratory, and, oh, I don’t know, covered by at least one news agency?  But then again, the guys at DT did find alien bodies and some weird Imperial drone code speech in South America a few weeks ago. I can see how some may be natural skeptics. If I find anything anywhere i’ll be sure to post it here.

Last year, we were entertained with an irate Real Word cast member turned wrestler acting like a douche and Jay and Grant being attacked by an invisible hanger. I don’t care if you believe in the paranormal or not, it’s must see tv. This year? Josh whatshisname from the other gayest show on TV, a room full of wannabe ghost hunters and Jay and Grant answering questions from, what is clearly not live, some room somewhere in their home town.

Now, I can understand if the gang didn’t want do the special and instead spend one year with their family. But to give us this? Blech. Whether or not it was fake or not, the pulling of Jay’s collar by some unseen force was fascinating to watch. Was it real or a fake? Some on this site have said they think it’s a total fake. I don’t know. If it was, everything they have done has been faked and it’s one hell of a conspiracy. You would think that someone would have said “yeah, we rigged it” by now. Bear Grylls couldn’t fake a lousy horse roping, you’d think someone would come forward for a fake jacking pulling.

But, I digress. Suffice to say, if you tuned into the SeeFee channel’s Halloween special and were disappointed, you were not alone. Maybe someone from there will read this and think about having a real six hour haunting fest next year. Use the new recruits, who cares, no one wants to see five episodes of possibly faked spooky sounds. We want brand new possibly faked spooky sounds! Though I do have to admit, it was funny as hell watching the one dude with the tattoo’s calling out the idiot talking about how to use a Geiger counter again. That guy was rather douchie. But then, in a way, he was right at home.

So, this year, nothing to dispute, no controversy. No pulling of anyone’s collar or any suspicious evidence. Just 6+ hours of reruns and some live web cams of an empty hospital. Maybe next year, or next episode, before we can again look to the Ghost Hunters and ask, are you guys faking it or did you really find something?

I just want to know, will I ever see departed loved ones? Will I ever meet the likes of Einstein or Lincoln? Will I myself survive death and haunt my own house when some jerk moves in and paints it all some dreary gray?

One possible answer is coming from TAPS. They have accumulated some evidence that begs further scrutiny. One such piece of evidence, however, seems to make me think these guys are not legit. It is a raging question by the way, are the boys (and girls) of TAPS, The Atlantic Paranormal Society, full of bubcus or actually finding ghosts.

Once, they, TAPS, visited an old abandoned prison. This was the episode where one of these brave souls, and a cameraman if I remember correctly, ran down a hallway screaming that a hand moved in front of their face. At first look, to me, that is solid proof that 1. they aren’t faking and 2. that guy is a bit of a pansy. If they were faking something, why stage some elaborate fake run down the hall and scream scene? That’s a bit childish.

But then, they did provide some evidence that made me go hmmm. On one of the upper walk ways of this prison, they captured a figure moving closer to the camera and then receding from it into the darkness. I thought, when I first saw this, ‘holy shit’. It was a really interesting piece of film footage, honestly. They used to have links to it on their website, but now I don’t see them. Interestingly enough about this piece of footage, Grant said on the show, “it looks like some one’s pants leg” and wasn’t convinced it was anything.

Well, I looked at the footage, and looked, and looked. I realized something. The dust was was moving awfully fast. In fact, as I looked, it seemed as if the footage was being sped up. As if it was on fast foward. The more I looked the more I thought, yep, this is a fake.

Whether or not it was, we’ll never know. TAPS will always say it was genuine of course. To fake something like that though, it would take a lot of work. Bear Grills couldn’t get away with staging a lousy horse roping fiasco after all. For the plumbers to produce the footage they did from the prison and have had faked it would be an amazing feat. Still, it looked sped up to me and that something hanging was rocking back and forth at an odd rate of speed.

Final verdict? UNKNOWN. If it’s a real piece of evidence, it’s startling. If it’s a faked piece of evidence, it’s well done. All we can do is watch more episodes, which we will, and look for this instances where it’s blatantly faked, or absolutely real, either way, someone is going to scream “I TOLD YOU SO!”.

As a scientifically thinking person, I can not rule out any theory simply because I don’t like it. Is there a God? I don’t know. Is there not a God? I equally do not know. Science does NOT disprove anything. It just verifies or does not verify theories. It can never say, something does not exist, as it can never quantify the universe. It can only say, yep, your theory is right or no, your theory is wrong. By saying your theory is wrong, it does not mean your underlining point is wrong, just that your way to prove your point is piss poor.

All that said, I’ve just watched the most recent episode of Ghost Hunters. I’ve blogged about it before. An interesting show on the SciFi channel, excuse me Syfy (pronounced seefee), that I have watched for many years now. In this episode they produced a piece of evidence that is very hard to dispute, if genuine. Apparently, ten feet in front of the two lead investigators, Grant and Jason, a thermal image was seen running in front of them. Now, they didn’t see anything with their eyes. On a thermal camera, which captures infrared radiation,they saw a large image, wearing a hood or a bonnet, run directly in front of them. I saw the image, saw the footage, if it was real, it was stunning.

So that leads me to the point of the post. Is it real? I have watched many of their shows. Most recently the controversial last Halloween episode of 2008. Clearly the lead investigator, Grant, was having his hoodie pulled down. They have footage of it. It happened. The question is, what caused it. It looked mechanical, like a fish hook was on it and pulling it down. It did not look like someone was grabbing it, or something. It was always being pulled from the same spot, never deviating. What was it?

Hard core skeptics would jump up and down and say it’s all fake. It may very well be, the show gets good ratings, has a spin off, and brings in the advertising for Seefee. They seeing something, capturing something, would only serve to make those ratings better. But, these two, Jason and Grant, have said repeatedly that they are 100% sincere. Further, they are part of a legitimate infrastructure of people that call themselves ghost hunters. Are they all full of it?

Honestly, from what I have seen, I don’t know. A purely scientific analysis has to say, either they are absolute fakes, or they are absolutly for real. If they are for real, they have captured some footage that must be further examined. With 96% of the universe as ‘unknown’ we can’t just simply dismiss the fringe. Can we?

I want to keep following all the Ghosthunters and Ghosthunters International episodes to critically look at if what they are seeing is genuine. Some of it isn’t. A good example, in the last episode, they claimed they captured a voice saying “i am guilty”. No, guys, sorry. No way that is what that crazy sound you captured said. “Necto, verada, nepto” sounded closer, and that sounded nothing like it. Further, you can’t say “it’s a demon” as opposed to a “haunting entity”, from a previous show. Last time I checked, demons were the realm of religion and fairy tales. If you want to be scientific, drop the demon bit, it invalidates you as scientists and validates you as nutballs. And all your theories about entities draining batteries, making cold spots,  there isn’t any one shred of proof suggesting it, stop claiming it’s what an unknown entity is doing. You can’t explain something unknown with something else that is unknown, again makes you look like nutjobs.

But some of the things they show is very intriguing. They aren’t pure scientists, but if they are honest, they may have found something. If what they have shown isn’t fake, and I’m not saying it is, it may very well be evidence of something not before identified to modern science. After all, whale sharks, giant squids and planets were all once thought to be mystic phenomena. Perhaps what they have capture is just an echo in the quantum spectrum of reality? Who knows. I’m going to watch more to find out.