How to put the Paranormal to rest.

Following is a hypothetical conversation that may sum up this thread.

Acid Lamp: Look at this! It sure is strange, and needs to be investigated, cause it might reveal some new force of nature! I never saw this before.

Musicat: I see that all the time. That’s a good example of an unwanted interference signal, magnified so greatly that it creates patterns that look familiar to humans. And I think my colleagues would agree.

Acid Lamp: But we need to investigate more!

Let me fix that for you.

Acid Lamp: Look at this! It sure is strange, and needs to be investigated, cause it might reveal some new force of nature! I never saw this before.

Musicat: I see that all the time. That’s a good example of an unwanted interference signal, magnified so greatly that it creates patterns that look familiar to humans. And I think my colleagues would agree.

Acid Lamp: Cool beans. Can you define the source or show me how to eliminate the problem? The people whose home I recorded this in are also hearing occasionally and it weirds them out.

Musicat: It’s technical, and I’m not going to waste my time on it. I already told you what it was. Tell Ma and Pa yokel to be satisfied with the explanation and ignore it.

Acid Lamp: Yeah but it is bothering them and they’d be a lot more comfortable if I could at least point them to the source or give them some advice to eliminate it.

Musicat: Quit chasing ghosts Acid Lamp.

Acid Lamp: (Head explodes)

And this is why you cannot devise an experiment to make the paranormal believers go away. There are people out there whose default explanation will be ghosts. They will want each and every instance to be debunked.

This statement means nothing. “ordinary” means nothing.

We haven’t hijacked the thread, we’ve given you direct answers to direct questions. You just don’t like the answers.

If you’re going to ask questions about scientific testing, you can’t be general. You have to be specific. You have to know what question you’re asking, what your hypothetical explanation is and how to test for it. Teasting for “anything out of the ordinary” is a scientifically senseless endeavor.

Evidence of WHAT? You can’t talk about evidence without a hypothesis. What you have with your videotape is a possible observed phenomenon, but an observed phenomenon is not evidence in itself, because you don’t have a hypotheses - a proposed explanation - yet. Evidence is that which confirms or falsifies a specific hypothesis. You can’t have evidence without a hypothesis. You have to have something specific in mind that you’re testing for not just wildly fishing for woo.

What is a “real oddity?” You use these terms that have no scientific meaning.

Your OP asked how to “put the paranormal to rest.” There is no possible test that can do that, and it’s a waste of time to investigate every possible claim without some very compelling reason to do so. A flash of light on a videotape (although not worth investigating, in my opinion) cannot be proven not to have a supernatural cause. There is no test that can do that.

I’ll tell you how to fix it, stop recording with cheap equipment and playing it back really amplified.

We’ve done this before. Those type of people aren’t worth trying to convince, but don’t let them color the entirety of people who claim to have encountered something unexplained. They are vocal minority, the paranormal equivalent of the frothing anti-evolution crowd. What I’m saying is that while an explanation might be correct, without being able to reliably demonstrate and eliminate it, you basically have done nothing more than offer a more plausible explanation. Good as that explanation might be, it is no more real to the person than the ghost is.

The point of the thread was ask how can we do good science when we run up against the wall of our knowledge? I understand some common causes of EVP. If i gather one that seems really odd, I’d like to take it to Musicat for his opinion. If I cannot prove that i didn’t hoax it, then his opinion, if he even agrees to give it, is useless. see? I’m neither trying to prove ghosts, nor categorically eliminate every bit of woo from the planet. It can’t be done. What we CAN do is try to create guidelines to insure that evidence of any sort is hoax free and as a legitimate presentation of the actual phenomena as possible. We also should be making every effort to help eliminate these problems wherever possible. THAT is how woo will be mostly destroyed. by nibbling away at it case by case, making a thorough and sound approach until the real weight of negative evidence grinds it away. By proving the concept and eliminating the occurrence.

I’ll be sure to tell them to get those ear transplants lined up then.:rolleyes: Try reading for comprehension.

Not all EVP is played back amplified to all hell. A lot of it is just barely out of normal everyday hearing range.

“See that cloud? It looks like Scrooge McDuck.”
“Hey, yeah, it does look like Scrooge McDuck!”
“Why does it look like that?”
“What do you mean?”
“What causes it to look like Scrooge McDuck?”
“Well…I mean…it’s a cloud. They move around randomly in turbulent air, and sometimes they’re going to look like things.”
“But can we rule out the possibility of the supernatura?l”
“Well,uh, I suppose, we can’t, strictly speaking, but why would you go there? It’s a cloud.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say? You haven’t proved anything! I demand tests! strict protocols! flights to the cloud thoroughly investigating it.”
“That sounds expensive and time consuming. Also it doesn’t look like Scrooge McDuck anymore. Now it looks like a salmon mousse.”

Dio, all I’m hearing from you is: Since I cannot disprove a supernatural causation there is no reason to investigate any phenomena that has ever been associated with one. That makes no sense. In my example you admitted that there was something on the tape. Neither us know what it is, You don’t care, but I think it is interesting so I’d like to take it to an expert who might have a better idea. How do I show that it is not a fake? THAT IS THE QUESTION. nothing else.

You say that there is “evidence” that needs to be examined, the you put forth yet another in a long line of hypotheticals, followed by an personal anecdote in a later post.
Forget the rigged hypotheticals-we can’t investigate those.
Forget the personal anecdotes filled with selective memories-we can’t investigate those.
Give us the best piece of evidence you’ve got that you think should be investigated. Give us the solid reason why we shouldn’t frackin’ give up and walk away from this several-thousand-year-old dog and pony show. While you’re at it, tell us why you think developing the perfect test will do jack in discouraging new ghost stories from popping up elsewhere.

um… no.
my OP was aimed at:

“Hey check this out, this video has a cloud shaped like Scrooge McDuck!”
“You shopped that.”
“No I didn’t I took it on vacation.”
" You totally shopped that, no cloud could ever look like that much Scrooge Mcduck. Besides even if it WAS real, that doesn’t mean it looks like Scrooge Mcduck."

You keep trying to assure us that you’re a non-biased impartial observer. The essence of your posting is “I never said I believed in ghosts, but there’s strange stuff going on that should be investigated.” Then you try to make it look like your interest is to help others cope with all that strange stuff, because somehow it’s the worst of their problems.

You want to know what the limit of research should be? OK, picture this: you assemble a comprehensive team of certified scientists and researchers. They’re not TV personalities, and they have no desire to make this excursion a spectacle. They have all the state-of-the-art equipment, no time constraints, and every conceivable method of analyzing the results.

You tell the people with the noisy attic you have the best team on the planet to investigate their creepy noises and ease their fragile mental state. Then you tell them they have to foot the bill.

There’s your cutoff.

What do you mean by “fake”? That’s what’s confusing everyone. If a tape plays a sound, clearly it’s not fake anything, it’s a real tape playing a real sound.

If you take it to every sound engineer in the entire world and none of them can come up with a natural explanation for it, the most radical thing you can say is “we don’t know”. You can all it a “ghost” if you want, but in this case it’s just a place holder for a lack of knowledge, and doesn’t actually further knowledge. You could equally call it a “snortblat”, which would probably be better since “ghost” is such a culturally loaded term, but still all you’ve done is dress up “No one knows” in a pretty word.

How do you show what is not a fake?? A “Ghost”"? To test something to see if it is fake or real, you must first what its claimed abilities are. There is no possible way to test if something is an an anomaly until we have a description of what the anomaly is and what it can do.

I’ll make you a deal, though-I will do my best to devise your tests for ghosts, if you do your best to devise a test for certain people to gleaneur at will.

No one is asking you to look into it. What I’m asking in the OP is how to we be certain that collected evidence is free from the accusation of hoaxing? Surely you could come up with generalities to address that. Instead you’ve spent the better part of a two hundred post thread, shitting all over the premise, accusing me of trying to prove the existence of something I don’t believe in, and arguing semantics about meteorites.

My premise is nothing more than if someone wants to investigate the paranormal, and reliably explain it away and correct the underlying causes, they will have to be certain of the veracity of their data. When they inevitably run into the limit of their personal knowledge about a particular phenomena, they will need an expert to look at it. If the expert can’t be sure they aren’t being trolled then they will decline to look, and a real problem will go unsolved. I don’t understand the problem here.

Cite for EVP played at the recorded level that is used as evidence for the supernatural, please.

Right on. Or if you’re looking at “anomalies” in JPG images, stop using a compression scheme that creates random patterns that weren’t in the original.

Acid Lamp, if you really want to know how some of the phenomena is created, why not just ask? I might not have the time to analyze any specific example to the Nth degree, especially if it has been done well before, but I’ll be glad to suggest some likely explanations. Do you really want to learn, or will you insist on skipping over the logical to the fantasy?

Since you didn’t ask, here is one explanation to EVP phenomena:

Cheap recorders are poorly shielded from RF (radio frequency) signals. Almost any short length of wire can act as an antenna and electronic devices commonly pick up RF. Better devices will filter it or reduce it; cheaper ones don’t.

When radio stations are recorded at very low levels, they are lost in the noise. Noise can be generated by Brownian motion, weak static discharges, motors rotating and vibrating, tape scraping against the guides, heating and air conditioning units in the room, wind, and cheap circuitry.

To hear anything other than noise, EVPers might amplify the signal, which enhances the random noise as well as the “wanted” parts of the signal. Distortion is added to distortion.

Now you have a bunch of total acoustic junk. If you listen very carefully, you may be able to pick out speech, words, phrases, music – humans are great pattern-matching animals, and even if what you are listening to came from the wind, you might be able to just make out something you recognize. And not everyone may hear exactly what you do unless you prep them for it first.

Experiments have shown that humans, if they are looking for something like “Paul is dead,” will tend to find it due to the power of suggestion. This is what gives rise to the funny misheard lyrics videos on YouTube. Another name for it is pareidolia.

While this may not explain every EVP example, it seems to explain most of it. So the next time you hear someone claim it is a paranormal event they have captured, see if it might lend itself to the explanation I just gave. What is your explanation?

Your question in the OP was about how to “put the paranormal to rest.” I’m trying to tell you that such an endeavor is not possible. There is no conceivable test to do that. Scientific method does not permit it.

There are an endless number of claimed “paranormal” penomena. Thousands of these claims have already been investigated. Nothing “aparnormal” has ever been discovered. These claims test positive at a rate of 0%. How many more thousand of these things do we have to investigate before that 0% success rate can be accepted as meaningful? It is not possible to debunk each and every claim, and a waste of time to try. To put it simply, impossible claims may be safely dismissed out of hand as impossible until proven otherwise.

If someone says they saw SpongeBob Squarepants at their local supermarket, I do not have to investigate anything to know he did not see SpongeBob Squarepants. It is the same with the “paranormal.” The claims are just as ridiculous, and there is no necessity to investigate them to knw they’re ridiculous.

I’m not understanding the misunderstanding.

Guy calls you up: Hey Yumblie you are a smart guy, We keep hearing weird shit in our house, and it’s scaring the missus. Could you come over and help me figure it out?

You go over and do some recording work and send everyone away for the night so that it won’t be contaminated. Turns out you DO hear some weird shit on that tape. Being the scientifically inclined person you are you look for some answers to help out. not having a masters in audio engineering, and being at the end of your knowledge, you decide to consult with someone who might know what is going on. You take your tape in, and explain the circumstances of the recording and that you couldn’t isolate the source. They decide you are playing them for a fool, and ask you to show that your tape was gathered honestly, and not just someone screwing around.

How do we do that? That’s all I’m asking. In these days of photoshop, after effects, and easy home recoding, how can we show that something beyond the observers level of knowledge is honestly captured?

EVP is exactly the same as making pictures from clouds. It’s a complete joke.