Boo!

by

“Change the channel” (Summoning the dead)


CHANNELPIC
Channeling is when someone claims to have been overtaken by a deceased person who is speaking through them. To date, no one has channeled a janitor. It is invariably someone prominent or from an interesting period. The channeler usually appears trancelike and speaks slowly in varying volume. So it’s similar to being drunk, except you can get paid for it.

Probably its best known proponent is Shirley MacLaine, though the spirits don’t speak through her. She endorses other persons, such as Kevin Ryerson. He channeled John, a being who spoke perfect English despite being a compatriot of Jesus. John told MacLaine she was co-creator of the universe, an assertion she heartily gulped. In fields like this, people are more persuaded if you tell them what they want to hear, although this example seems especially egomaniacal.

MacLaine is also fond of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior who stopped by J.Z. Knight’s kitchen one night for some Doritos and a body invasion. In the almost four decades since, Ramtha has taught Knight about out of body experiences, quantum mechanics, and therapeutic healing. Knight has also invoked less than 35,000-year-old ideas by copyrighting the character and charging $1,000 per performance.

Ramtha insists his was a great civilization. He may be speaking in relative terms, since persons in the Upper Paleolithic Era lived in caves, wore caribou hides, and proudly pointed to the flint blade as their preeminent accomplishment. He also reports commanding a 2.5 million man army, which would have comprised 1,000 percent of the men at the time.

Part of the reason people gobble this up is a wistful desire for a better time. It gives them a chance to briefly escape their existence and live a more exciting one vicariously. There is nothing wrong with appreciating elements of another era. It is fine for a 25-year-old to sport a Bowler or listen to Jimmy Dorsey. But if that person starts pining for an era in which he never lived, there’s a problem. It’s an indication he finds his current circumstances unfulfilling. The same principle applies here, even though the time period is several millenniums. To those caught up in the romantic idea of Ramtha, the men were braver, the women more virtuous, and the mead sweeter.

Jose Alvarez, in conjunction with James Randi, demonstrated how easy it is to fool people through channeling. He invented a 2,000-year old character named Carlos and toured Australia in 1988. Alvarez mimicked every channeler he knew and included every horrible cliché he could uncover. His press releases touted interviews with non-existent publications. Towns he said he performed in weren’t real. Audience members and reporters went along with it. Even after Alvarez revealed the ruse on the Australian version of 60 Minutes, some refused to accept it. While it went further than he expected, Alvarez had succeeded in showing that deception often requires the cooperation of the deceived.

Channeling is one of the easier charades to pull off. If the channeler invokes Ramesses II, who talks about his personal life, there’s almost nothing he could say that would reveal fraud. Even if a historical inaccuracy slips in, the channeler could claim the voice in his head got it right and the historians got it wrong. After all, Ramesses II was the one who was there. And now he’s in the Milwaukee Convention Center!

By contrast, a séance is more difficult since you can’t just make up any incident. In a séance, the medium is supposedly mentally transcribing messages from someone audience members knew. This requires cold reading skill or doing one’s hot reading homework.

Séances are one of the most fraudulent paranormal businesses. Some astrologers, palmists, and Tarot readers may think they have the skills. This is seldom the case with séance mediums. Séances are done with lights off, partly to heighten suspense, but mostly to allow undetected trickery.

Skeptics have turned on lights during séances to show that spirits were actually the medium’s assistant lifting items playing an instrument. The medium may have his or her hands “tied” to a chair, but the chair’s arms will be loosened. This allows the medium to slip free and ring bells or move objects. A similar trick is to have the victim put their feet on top of the medium’s to guarantee the medium can’t use them. However, the shoes have been hollowed and glued to the floor, enabling the medium to remove their feet and use them in the deception. Another fraudster used a ball that seemed to rise and move. However, a clandestine cohort had snuck and picked it up with a stick. This was easy because the ball, like séances, was full of holes.

by

“Polterguise” (Ghost hunting)

polterguisepicAlthough most people who believe in ghosts fear them, the poltergeists and less malevolent spirits may paradoxically be offering comfort. That’s because belief in ghosts can stem from an aversion to mortality and can serve as a coping mechanism when a loved one dies.

But while believers may get reassurance from the overarching concept, the primary emotion in individual manifestations is fear. That is also the impetus driving the modern ghost hunting movement. Although poorly-defined technical terms have appeared over the last couple of decades and the field is awash in anecdotes, there is no scientific evidence for ghosts. As such, trying to track down and capture them would seem extremely arduous at best. Thirty years ago, the idea of ghostbusting was so silly that a blockbuster comedy centered on the idea. While it is no more feasible now, persons are making their living off the idea and a host of television shows are dedicated to the concept.

Even the most fervent believers offer no idea for what would constitute proof, how a capture would take place, or how to dialogue effectively with a deceased spirit. There have been hundreds of documented hunts with nary a capture. Any draft, squeak, knock, or feeling of dread constitutes evidence since no other solution is considered.

Subjective validation and communal reinforcement sustain this field. The first step in the pattern is the person becoming convinced their place is haunted. Then a ghost hunter with an authoritative-sounding title shows up sporting electronic equipment. Any electric current or funny noise that gets picked up counts as proof. The sounds are highly subject to interpretation, so only the most sinister or spooky translations of ghost speak are heard. There was even a case where ghosts in a German castle were said to be speaking English. Garbled noise or words that don’t fit the narrative are tossed asunder.

The ghost hunter invariably confirms there is a spirit present, galvanizing the homeowner’s belief and heightening the fear. This despite there being no training or standards required for ghost hunting, and even though the electronic equipment is not being used for its intended purpose.

It all has a deleterious effect on the homeowner. Skeptic Kenneth Biddle relates the story of man who thought his place was haunted. He had strange experiences that he couldn’t explain and failed to realize that unexplained does not mean inexplicable. If fact, Biddle deduced that allegedly mysterious movements were the last remnants of a car shadow. Faint voices with occasional chilling laughter proved to be coming from a room upstairs next door.

However, the homeowner’s girlfriend insisted the place was haunted, and pointed out she could detect a ghostly presence. In the ghost hunting field, if you think you sense a ghost, it’s evidence you’ve got the power.

The homeowner and two ghost hunters were sure it was the previous homeowner, which is almost always the case. The ghosts are never in an apartment, a field, or the 7-11. Despite being freed from their bodies (though somehow still wearing clothes) and having the ability to travel anywhere in the world for free, they spend an eternity in the same place. This consistency is a sign of the communal reinforcement and group think endemic in the ghost hunting community.

In the Biddle case, the ghost hunters offered that bricks wrapped in tinfoil throughout the house would have been used by the previous owner to ward off demons. The poor man bought it, as he was so subject to suggestion that he had lost all ability to reason and think independently.

This creates a cycle where you are forever looking for and expecting anomalies. When you think another strange incident has happened, you become stressed, causing muscles to tighten, your heartbeat and blood pressure to increase, and your senses to shoot to a heightened state of alert. This psychosomatic panic is itself further evidence for a ghost. In the case of the man Biddle knew, he sold his house for a loss.

While a ghost hunter is going to have an incentive to declare a house haunted, I have not detected much fraud in the business. Instead, ghost hunters are mostly a self-deceived lot. And owing to the lack of standards and definitions, they never seem to question each others’ methods or findings or seek further proof. Stories are passed from one credulous hunter to another, none of them terribly well-grounded in physics or acoustics.

Purported video and photography evidence are due to distorted shadows, faulty equipment, out of focus objects, and reflections of fixtures. Another factor is apophenia, in which persons see meaningful patterns in random objects and occurrences.

Other than sleep paralysis, most ghostly experiences are self-fulfilling prophecies by people freaking out because they believe so strongly and have been told by someone they trust that their fears are justified.

by

“Seeking spooks and Sasquatch” (Ghost and Bigfoot reality shows)

BIGFOOT

If someone struggles through two weeks of incompetence at work, that person will likely have a talk with the boss. If it goes on for another month, that talk is put in writing. Still another month means another meeting with the boss, who is probably the ex-boss by meeting’s end.

And a decade of incompetence and total failure means a million-dollar contract and being brought back for more. “Ghost Hunters” is in its 10th season on Syfy. Ten years so far, with nary one captured spirit. In fact, no ghost hunter in history has captured one. If ghosts exist, their hunters are the planet’s most inefficient workers.

Among the issues with shows like “Ghost Hunters” is that only one solution is considered. Noises can never be the house settling, a board creaking, or the wind blowing. Let’s say the search is on for the ghost of a man whose fiancee, named Leigh, met a premature death. A high-pitched noise that vaguely sounds like, “Icy” has to be the poltergeist announcing, “I miss Leigh.” It can never be a pipe whistling or, for that matter, the apparition declaring, “I kissed a tree.”

These shows attempt to have an air of validity by using electronic equipment and scientific-sounding terms, however poorly-defined. They employ electromagnetic field measurements, Geiger counters, geophones, and night vision devices. But no explanations are offered as to how this equipment would reveal the ghost’s existence. No criteria are given for what constitutes a capture, the alleged point of the show. The practitioners try to appear scientific, but they have no established standards, no stated goals, no checks and balances, no critical peer review, and no definition of proof.

Those who hire ghost hunters think there’s a spirit present, so they already have feelings of dread or fear when in the house. This causes a self-fulfilling confirmation in someone who has decided ahead of time the place is haunted. That fear itself becomes more evidence in the continuing cycle, and the feelings are themselves claimed as proof by the hunters. The hunts are almost always done at night, even though there’s no reason to suspect this would lead to more success. It’s done only to make for a more theatrical production and to heighten the feelings of fright and mystery.

“Ghost Adventures” airs on the Travel Channel, an irony since ghosts never seem to travel. They are always sought out in the home where they lived and died.

Considerably more mobile is Bigfoot, the animal kingdom’s most rapid and stealthy offering. They are so fast and cunning that a sustainable population of 10-foot bipedal apes has lived within 50 miles of Seattle for a century without being caught. Not once have they been successfully hunted, captured, or hit by a vehicle. They keep moving even after death, as no camper or hiker has happened upon their remains.

Undeterred, producers of the History Channel’s “MosterQuest” trudge ahead in pursuit of this giant walking carpet. My idea for a History Channel episode: A story about the days when the History Channel covered history.

Like their ghost-chasing brethren, Bigfoot hunters have spent more than a century in the precise places they expect to find their prey and have yet to bag one. The strongest evidence, of course, would be the capture of a live creature, verified by biologists to be an undiscovered species. Other examples of strong evidence would be a corpse, skeleton, or sizable patch of fur. None of these have materialized. There have been thousands of pieces of weak evidence, in the form of eyewitness claims, shaky videos, and widely varying footprints easily faked with plaster. But 5,000 pieces of unverifiable evidence does not equate to strong evidence any more than 5,000 cups of weak tea dumped in a giant vat would make for a strong drink.

Cryptozoologists point out that Western science only confirmed the existence of the somewhat Bigfoot-like gorilla in the 19th Century. Okapis were found later still, and the coelacanth was thought to be extinct for millions of years. These points are not entirely without merit and, of course, the search for undiscovered animals should be encouraged. But using your desired conclusion as the starting point, then seeking support for that position, isn’t how science is done.

Furthermore, if discovery is the incentive, there are options that will yield more fruit. Entomologists estimate there are 10,000 undiscovered species of ant. But to a cryptozoologist, ants are boring. Also, it requires years of tedious study, learning the characteristics of all known ants, before foraging for their newfound crawling cousins.

So cryptozoologists spend their time looking for Bigfoots (Or Bigfeet, maybe. They’ve never found even one, not sure what they would call two). They also search for an extinction-defying plesiosaur in Scotland or for Frosty’s antithesis on the world’s highest mountain. At a minimum, they hope to land something with a backbone, like Chupacabra.

Since neither the poltergeist nor crypto camps have had success, maybe they should pool their resources and start hunting for Bigfoot’s ghost.