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.

What is a “ghost”?

 The definition according to the dictionary is “the soul of a dead person, a disembodied spirit imagined, usually as a vague, shadowy or evanescent form, as wandering among or haunting living persons.” The bigger question is, are they real? Do these things really exist? Let me say first and foremost, there is no, zero, nadda, nothing, no evidence at all for the existence of a “ghost” or the proof that life extends beyond death. It simply doesn’t exist. That is to say, the evidence does not exist. It simply isn’t or hasn’t ever been proven to be true. Does that mean that these entities do not exist? No, it means the evidence for their existence does not exist.

The Wrong Approach

Ok, now that we have that clear, what are the folks at Taps doing wrong? They are attempting to explain an unexplained event with an unproven “theory”. I say theory because the question of do humans live beyond death and can interact with this physical world is a theory. The Taps crew are attempting to explain voices, moving objects, and other things with the explanation of a “haunting”. Well, scientifically speaking, you can’t really do that.

You can’t explain X with Y if Y is itself an unproven theory. Not to mention that in this case Y is actually two separate theories. The first, that people live beyond death. The second, that in this new state of existence we are actually able to interact with the physical world we left behind. That’s two separate assumptions that ghost enthusiasts are making to explain things.

I am not saying that ghosts do not exist. I can’t say that. I have no proof of it. I am also not saying that haunting’s do not exist. Again, I can not say that, I do not have proof. This, however, is not something that is beyond the boundary of science. I have talked about this before, some things science can never address. The existence of a God, Alien life, etc. Science can never disprove that. But, it can possibly shed some light on the question of a haunting. Or rather, of a physical manifestation of something. If it is seen, heard, tasted touched or smelled, now you are in science’s ballpark. That’s science’s chief role after all, to explain the physical world.

If something is making a noise, a voice, a foot step, a light, an actual image of some kind appearing, that’s a physical occurrence. The ghost hunters are right to attempt to record it using camera’s or voice recorders. They have at times captured something that can not be explained by conventional thinking. Where they go wrong is saying that it is some sort of manifestation of a person that used to exist.

Compounding this even more is that they use EMF detectors. These devices detect EM radiation, that’s electromagnetic radiation, the stuff the sun puts out. The claim is that these things can detect a ghost, because a ghost emits EM radiation. Interesting. Also, there’s the idea of cold spots, that these entities suck up heat and use it to power themselves, or something along those lines.

That’s a good deal of interaction with the physical world. Emitting radiation, absorbing heat, which is itself one of the wavelengths of EM radiation, and chatting so that their voice can be heard. Again, there’s a lot of assumptions here. First, that ghosts exist, second that they can interact with this reality, third exactly how they interact with this reality.

The Right Approach

So, what can you do? You record something, sounds like a voice, you hit a cold spot, and your EM detector goes off. Must be a ghost right? Not so fast, we don’t have proof of those. We can say something occurred, an event. If we have it recorded, even better. Now what? You get it to do it again. You study it. Repeat it, verify it. Repeatable, verifiable evidence is your holy grail.

So, lets say we have a house and in that house we have recorded a voice. A real voice and we have solid proof that no one was there to make it. What now? Now, we build a camp around that house and fill it with as many recorders and devices that is possible to detect it again. Lets say we get a second hit. Wow. Next? More nights at the house of course. And more types of detection equipment. Having an EM detector is just silly. Further, it’s clearly not detecting light, heat, UV, so just what spectrum on the EM band is it detecting? It may be a valid point that if some type of entity that we can not normally perceive is responsible for this sound that some type of energy is being used. But a blanket ‘EM’ statement is just not good science. Get as many detectors that work on specific frequencies and see what you find. You must have specifics not generalities here.

Real Scientific Investigation

All that has gotten us here. A very long blog post and a simple idea I had from watching this show.  I do believe that a real scientific investigation into paranormal occurrences is warranted in some cases. Maybe they have already happened, and if so, please someone tell me. I have heard of a recent study with heart surgery patients where doctor’s are placing something in the top of the surgery room to see if their patients have an out of body experience.

If not, lets have one. One thing that bothered me about this Ghost Hunters show is, they appeared to on one occasion get something that seemed to be unexplainable by available evidence. So why leave? Get more equipment. Move in. Get a tent. Live there. Record, record, record. The more ambiguity you introduce into this topic the less any serious investigation will ever be done. I for one would love to see an actual purely scientific study done by the methods I described. Get equipment that can pick up UV, infrared, radio waves, everything. Apply real scientific techniques and people will listen, that is if you find something of course.

Is there something really there? Who knows. It would be incredible to find out though. Happy ghost hunting!

I myself saw something that I could never explain when I was a child. I was spinning around an old foundation poll in our basement and saw a bearded man walk right in front of a doorway. I was scarred to death! I ran over to my brother and stayed by his side all night long. Even eerier still, my Grandma once told me, the day after my Granddad died when I was no older than 5, that I came up to her the day after and said, “Don’t worry grandma, I saw grandpa last night and he said not to worry”. She said she never forgot that to this day. I do not remember ever saying it.

What is the Paranormal anyway?

By definition, the paranormal is of or pertaining to the claimed occurrence of an event or perception without scientific explanation, as psychokinesis, extrasensory perception, or other purportedly supernatural phenomena. Hmm. An event or perception without scientific explanation. Don’t like the sound of that. If we can’t measure it, sense it, weigh it, does that must mean it doesn’t exist right? From that definition, it sounds as if anyone who believes in the paranormal is believing in something that is blatantly unscientific. In fact, that’s exactly what it means. It is painting a picture that if you believe in the paranormal you’re a crackpot. That couldn’t be more wrong of a view to take. Thinking that something can never exist, that is the unscientific view. Scientists should be curious about everything, always asking if they are right, always testing, verifying, even our most sound theories.

What about the “Super” natural. I very much hate this word. It is defined as of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal. But really, how can something like this ever exist? If ghosts are real, that just means there are natural forces at work, natural law’s in play, that we are not aware of. In my opinion there is no such thing as a supernatural anything. If it exists then our understanding of the natural law is wrong. Note that in the definition, ‘unexplainable by natural law’. Well, then the law is wrong! What happened when Einstein tried to apply Newtonian physics to cosmology? He found the law was not adequate to explain things. Does that mean Einstein was studying the supernatural? NO! It means he had found that the law was not complete.

So are they real?

So what is happening here? All of that is terribly interesting but time for some science now. I love a good yarn as much as the next person, but is it for real? Are there really ghosts out there? I will say with absolute certainty, applying real scientific methods and procedures, that I haven’t a clue.

Ghosts have never been proven to exist. Period. They just haven’t. To be proven to exist you must have solid, verifiable, repeatable evidence, and it just isn’t there. Does that mean they do not exist? No! Remember, not proving something to exist does not mean that you have proven the opposite. Far too many people have reported seeing something to simply dismiss it as a form of mass hysteria and delusions. I myself am in that number. But, even though I saw something odd once, and even though there is a story from my Grandma, that does not prove that Ghosts exist. I may choose to believe they do, but this isn’t about belief. We can believe whatever we want, even then dreaded Spaghetti Monster of Richard Dawkins can be believed to be real, that doesn’t make it real.

I will say that people do have a propensity to spin a yarn. We love to tell tales. Go to any bar in any city and you’ll likely find someone telling something. And more likely, he’ll often try to stretch the truth a bit to make it sound better. We have whole cities devoted to this, Hollywood, we have industries centered around telling a story. So, yes, I could have seen my dad walking across the hallway and thought it was a ghost. I could have told that story over and over for years adding little bits to it. People love to exaggerate. And ya know, it’s ok. I say tell that tale and spin that yarn as long as you like.

But for science, and the tough question do they exist for real. We just don’t know. To all those out there that say to me, but they are just silly, they can’t possibly be real. Well, 95% of the universe is unknown, yes? All the visible matter and energy, if you add it up, is only 5%. So we, matter, mass, corporeal beings, that which you touch and feel, are only 5% of the universe. Well, if the rest is unknown, how can we be so certain we know what that 95% is not?

I think this topic is a fun one, honestly. They may exist, they may not. We may continue to exist on some level after we die, and we may not. The point here, and in all of my posts, do not assume something to be true simply because you want it to be. Or because it sounds silly. The universe is anything but ordinary. There are surprises in store for us around every new discovery.

So have fun, tell a yarn or two, get some candy. And above all else, have a Happy Halloween!!!