NOTE READ FIRST!!!:* If you don’t want to play, then find another thread. I get it that plenty of you don’t believe in any paranormal activity, but saying that it’s pointless etc, doesn’t help when you are trying to debunk something. There are plenty of people out there who claim to experience odd things that simply would like answers, whatever they may be. Calling everyone a liar, a hoaxer, or insane is not productive.*
In the efforts of advancing science, I want to develop a set of protocall and controls that can be used to investigate paranormal claims. ideally these would be designed to meet two standards:
Standard of credibility: Controls designed to ensure that any strange, or unusual activity caught is NOT the result of hoaxing, fakery, or accidental contamination.
Standard of skepticity: Controls designed to quickly and decisively eliminate mundane occurrences that can result in supposed paranormal activity.
Controls must also meet the following criteria: They must be reasonable, They must be financially sensible, and they must be able to be applied by a person of reasonable intelligence.
So, supposing you are contacted by a person who thinks that their house may be haunted, and would like you to conduct an investigation to debunk, or confirm the existence of unusual phenomena in their residence. How do we assure that our positive results, if any, are acceptable evidence to present to hard science as need for further investigation?
Impossible to design, because most claims require a specially designed set of procedures, and most claimants claim the right to interpret any tests after they are complete. People with years of expeerience over at the JREF have been doing this for years, and have found that there are major stumbling blocks:
First, you have to get the claimant to specify what their claim is in the first place.
Second, you have to see if the claim is testable(“I can calm the auras of other people at will!”)
Third, you have to get the to agree to a set of protocols that are not open to judging and/or interpretation. It has been found that, among the very few that have actually gotten this far, interpretation after the fact will still be done by the claimant.
True, I hadn’t considered all aspects of paranormal activity. Frankly, i was referring mostly to the usual ghostly phenomena, not psychics, interdimentional bigfeet and the like.
You would have to clarify exactly what a “ghost” is, what properties it would have and how it could be falsified. You seem to be operating under the impression that it is necessary to prove the negative – that the goal would be to prove something is not a ghost – that’s wrong. The default presumption is that it’s not a ghost. The person wanting to prove it’s a ghost has the burden to to first define, in scientific terms, what a ghost is and what predictions could be made about it that can’t be made about anything else. That is, you need to design a falsifiable test by which a result can only be explained by a ghost and nothing else. The hard part of that is defining what a ghost is.
This is a strawman. The most common assumption about these claims, by far, is simply that people are honestly mistaken, and misinterpreting data. All of those other options are still much more likely than ghosts, though, and all happen with great frequency. Still, most people who think they see ghosts do not have malicious intent or mental illness. They’re mostly just imagining things.
This, exactly. It would be like trying to design a test that proves, without a doubt, that an unnamed governmental agency isn’t controlling(by some unknown means) some of your thoughts.
You guys are missing the point, or I’m not being clear. (Probably the latter)
The presumption is that it ISN’T a ghost, but I want a set of controls that would allow any reasonably unexplainable evidence that might be gathered to be looked at as worthy of further investigation.
Let’s say that we catch on a recorder what we recognize as the sound of footsteps walking above us on the second floor. How can we design a control set to eliminate the inevitable: You faked it, someone else faked it, type stuff. I’d love to see an experiment prove for example that footstep sounds are caused by a cascade of boards expanding and contracting. You’ll never even figure that out though if you can’t get past the Hoax/ liar claim see? I’m trying to devise something that assures that any results gathered are clean enough to be worthy of looking at. Nobody is made of money and can just go around tearing up houses and developing expensive tests for every theory, so I want to be certain that evidence worthy of a further look is tight and clean.
You need a ‘crew’ of people that actually have expertise in diverse fields. You need plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, scientists of various types [a geologist would be great] You cant go into a huge ass building with 6 people and cover it in one night. You need a week, and at least a couple dozen people to cover it properly. Also way more cameras. You literally need to put a camera into each major space, not just the 4 or 5 main ones. Instead of people wandering around aimlessly, station a pair of people where there is a camera and leave them there. Also hook up a camera on a hat pointed at what they are looking at. So much stuff is only discussed because the cameraman is focused on the persons face. Keep the cameraman on the face, but put a cam on the person to catch what they see.
Look, mrAru spent 20 years as an auxillaryman in the submarine fleet. He has experience in how ships are slapped together, and most of the subsystems [other than the actual nuke generators, and electrical stuff] and he shudders anytime TAPS goes onto a ship to investigate. His biggest peeve is when they go all lights out on a ship and then get all amazed when they find electrical fields. Unless the damned ship just got degaussed, there will be plenty of juice stored in the ship. When you have so many different kinds of metals in contact, you get bimetallic field generation. Machinery frequently stores electrical charge internally, it is in the nature of the beast. Creaks and groans and odd sounds are going to happen because a ship is just as organic a creation as a house, it floats on water so always has some sort of tiny [or large depending on wave action] movement going on, even if we don’t feel it.
Throughout the entire episode, he was pointing out what was causing the various crap that was happening and why it was happening.
The best way to do it would be to go upstairs and wait for the sounds to happen again. If they don’t happen again, you can’t test anything.
If you’re asking for a way to investigate the sounds based solely on the verbal claims of a person saying he heard them, then you can’t do a test, other than maybe going up and having a look around. You can’t test anecdotes. You would need to actually observe the phenomeon in question.
“I’m sorry, but the sound you tested wasn’t like the one I heard”
“Science can’t test the paranormal.”
“There are skeptics here throwing out negative vibrations.”
“Just because you found a mundane cause for the last 1047 mysterious noises doesn’t prove that they all have a mundane cause.”
okay how does this sound: given that we have unrestricted access to the property.
Security: One pair of team members is Stationed outside the property and is responsible for monitoring both other team members locations as well as preventing outsiders to interfere. They must maintain irregular rounds.
General:
Assuming a multi level building, no more than one pair of investigators per floor. They must maintain radio silence unless checking in with other members for some reason. They may not leave the assigned floor unless directed by the HQ or unless their assigned shift is over. Movement should be kept to a minimum and talking between investigators should be kept to a very low volume. Camera operators should be either panning the room or set in a position where it can view the majority of a room.
Establishing baselines:
Equipment: All meters/ recorders/ and other equipment used for interactive work should be inspected by a third party and sealed prior to investigation, the seals are to be broken on camera to prevent accusations of tampering of hoaxing with equipment.
Radio/ EVP/ noise: To eliminate radio contamination, each room should establish a human free run of 15 min recording. Is it fair to say that if it doesn’t bleed in in a quarter hour it can be safely eliminated if it shows up later?
EMF : Baselines should be established both before and after pulling the main breakers. Differences should be carefully noted by placing a flag of some sort in those areas. Rogue EMF in a flagged area is to be ignored.
All static cameras are to be motion activated when not operated by a human.
All static cameras should be streaming online to prevent fraud.
rule of three for “interaction” If using devices to interact with an alleged paranormal “entity”, it must directly respond a minimum of three times to be considered evidence of anything other than coincidence. It must repeat this interaction three times at different intervals of time to be considered for further investigation.
Great-you’ve scared off all the ghosts.
Really, who do you hope to impress with this setup? The skeptics have seen all this before in spades, the true believers will dismiss it as trickery, and the rest of the public will yawn. The only conclusion you can possible come up with is that you] are incapable of finding ghosts, unlike all those nice people on all those entertaining television programs.
Who says I’m trying to impress the public? or find ghosts for that matter. Frankly I don’t care what the true believers think either. What I would like to do is run a comprehensive investigation to either confirm or deny the existence of phenomena that does not conform to standard explanations that is all. The point is that if someone is experiencing something weird, I would like any investigation to be scientifically sound rather than either resorting to woo, or curt dismissal. The point is that if I come with something that I or some experts in the their respective fields cannot explain, then it might be worthy of further looking into. You can’t do that if your evidence is all compromised.
The real problem is that even if you catch nothing they can just say that the ghost didn’t feel like showing itself, or was scared, or was on vacation while you were there.
You need some kind of placebo effect to test, which would probably be really difficult for a haunted house. Fake some noise and ask if that’s what the ghost normally sounds like? :dubious:
I don’t know about that. I think that of you can keep a tight control on the usual suspects then you are left with something odder at work. It certainly does not mean that it’s a ghost, but it could be some unusual effect at work, and I think that would be worth knowing. Lots of interesting technological advancements have come from mistakes, accidents, or just noticing something weird happening.
It would be next to impossible to account for every single anomaly that can occur in an old house, and in such a situation every single anomaly will be seen as evidence of the paranormal.
You would have to look at each individual claim one at a time. “The door opens and closes by itself.” Point a camera (or several) at the door for a few days and see if it opens or closes without someone touching it. Hint: have something to detect if there is a draft in the room.
Then move on to the next one.
Having a bunch of people standing around the house waiting for something to happen will be too crowded, and (as has happened in cases in the past) the paranormal stuff will always happen someplace where no one was watching.
Agreed, but the point isn’t to change the minds of the unswayable, it is to expand understanding of phenomena that frightens everyday people and perpetuates woo. When we discovered the connection between many “haunted” locations and infrasonic noise for example, we were able to make the “haunting” go away by altering the acoustic properties of the location. Without people looking into it, we never would have figured it out. It turns out that at certain frequencies it can actually be pretty dangerous stuff that causes some significant problems in humans. That is the problem I have with the arrogant dismissal of claims. It really could be something going on that needs to be addressed. On the off chance something even weirder is found and documented, I’d like that documentation to be as beyond reproach as possible.
Sure, it would be an even better idea to have contractor examine the door first to look for issues. I’d tell them to change the door, or install a latch lock before I’d bring the cameras in. There are lots of things that could cause that.
Keep looking until you find it, and until then we must keep an “open mind”? What you are proposing will do nothing but bolster the cause of woo-“There MUST be something to it, otherwise they wouldn’t go through all this time and trouble!”
