When I read “Stranger Than Science”, I was familiar with some of the subjects. E.g., I knew that John Ernst Worrel Keely was a conman (I loved the phrase he coined, ‘etheric vapor’). So I knew the stories were, if not fraudulent, at least, unverified.
Regarding the TriField meter: it claims to measure electric field, magnetic field, and RF field. Someone needs to explain to its inventor that an RF field is in fact a specific type of electromagnetic field (one that’s oscillating at RF frequencies). So it’s really a BiMeter. If they want to keep the name, they might want to make up another field and claim it measures that. How about ‘etheric vapor’?
A lot of these shows seems to run on the premise that there are no coincidences and that coincidence is never a valid explanation.
I read a lot— books, magazines, newspapers, Internet forums. Sometimes I will read something, an idea, a quote or a mention of a person’s name and then, over the next few days, I feel like that quote, idea or name starts turning up everywhere - One time it was that Nietzsche quote about looking into the abyss and the abyss looking back. Was this is “message” from the Universe, was God or some spirit trying to warn me off the darkness, or was it coincidence?
These shows would take that incident and mock anyone that believed in coincidence without offering any real alternate theory. How would this mysterious outside force drive my reading choices in order to send my a message?
It wouldn’t. Now it’s possible that I had some subconscious concerns about something that was going on in my life that was relevant to that quote, maybe I was getting too close to someone that wasn’t good for me. That subconscious concern might have guided my choice of reading material, or more likely I just gave extra attention to that quote everytime I saw it because of my life situation.
This might cause me to think “I had been slowly sucked into a bad relationship without realizing it and “the universe” saved my life. There is someone looking after me!”, but the truth is that it wasn’t magical - I went through a normal thought process, an outside stimulus helped me clarify a concern that I hadn’t been able to fully define and voice before.
All these conspiracy theories attempt to debunk the “official” stories - “there’s no such thing as ghosts, the World Trade Center wasn’t destroyed by terrorists, without giving an coherent alternate theory, and the evidence they use to debunk the official story never leads to a coherent alternate theory.
If you really believe a ghost broke a statue and put it back together, give me a coherent theory. Do ghosts have powers that living humans don’t? How would a ghost reconstruct a broken statue — does protoplasm double as Gorilla glue or does the ghost roll back the space time continuum to the time before the statue was broken? I can’t even begin to speculate on what kind of powers a ghost might have in order to abort a an unborn child, then put it back.
Notice that both events described in the OP, involve the ghost causing damage them immediately reversing that damage. So we are left we two explanations for each event.
The ghost broke the figurine and put it back together so perfectly that not even an expert can tell it was ever broken
or
The figurine never broke and the person that claimed it did is lying.
The ghost stole an unborn child then put it back.
or
The woman was always pregnant and is lying about the baby bump disappearing and returning.
Unless you can explain HOW a ghost can do these impossible things, I’m going with these people being liars, whether by accident or on purpose. Maybe they have exceptionally vivid dreams.
FWIW, here’s my contribution to the Skinwalker Ranch thread, in which I debunk some of the more obvious bulldookey.
I had that book, too! In fact, I still have it—I can see it on the bookshelf from where I’m sitting. I’ve kept it for purely sentimental reasons; it really freaked out the credulous 12-year-old me.
When I was in graduate school and had access to a huge research library, I took a crack at verifying the first story in the book, “The Mystery of David Lang,” about the guy who vanished into thin air in front of his family. I got nowhere; I couldn’t find any contemporaneous accounts of the event at all. I’ve since learned that many other people have tried to verify the tale and have found no evidence whatsoever.
Another interesting story in StS, “Icebergs in the Sky,” is about the enigma of huge chunks of ice falling out of the sky. Ice meteors from nowhere—that’s some weird, scary stuff! However, the Mythbusters made a compelling case that these are merely the result of leaky airline toilets.
To return to the OP: A lot of weird things have mundane, decidedly non-weird explanations. And sometimes people make stuff up.
