The paronormle

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Unless you can demonstrate that all of reality can be apprehended by objective, material methods (you cannot) this statement, even if true, proves nothing.

Are you confident of this? lets start with explaining how hundreds of thousands of people in Washington saw objects emanating light flying over Washington DC in 1952.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pJSGBgIAYE

The lights stayed so long over the nation's capitol that TV crews and anchormen were filmed with the UFO's as backdrops to their story.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HnMu_laHbk

Of which Robert is the most famous http://www.scaryforkids.com/robert-the-doll/

Oh and be careful of scams on ebay. There was recently a scam on there regarding a haunted statue. The scam played out at the unexplained mysteries web site. He was trying to sell the statue for large amounts of money and posted about its haunted history there to raise interest. In truth he had made the statue himself and had many more ready to flog to unsuspecting customers. The scam was blown wide open by one of the other posters on the board.

To the OP I have long been fascinated with Para-Psychology.

I believe in extra dimensional beings, aliens and I believe in God/Jesus. I used to be quite obsessed with researching the paranormal and aliens. I am still interested but I already have drawn my own conclusions from my many many hours of research.

I think people should be careful when trying to practice magick or rituals. There is much more to this world then humans can see.

I most certainly believe in the Paranormal. Aged 6 - 16 i actually lived in an 'Haunted Cottage'. I've seen at least a dozen Genuine UFO's (Alien Space Craft's), and i believe in the Afterlife N.D.E.'s etc

Unless you can repeatedly demonstrate a genuine psychic skill or other paranormal event, then any claim in favor of such skills or events is irrelevant. If the only difference between the existence of a thing and its non-existence is whether or not someone believes in it, then it is more reasonable to claim that the thing does not exist except in the mind of the believer. In other words, anything that's 'Paranormal' is a fantasy - nothing more.

Knowledge is belief with valid, objective, and material evidence to support it.

Belief without valid, objective, and material evidence to support it is faith.

Faith proves nothing.

Much of life proceeds without any rational analysis at all. Attempting to quantify EVERYTHING is an impossible task. At some point, a reasonable person admits that there are fundamental limits on what any one individual can know in any rational, quantitative sense. At that point, would such an individual stop living for lack of a fully rationally derived world view, or proceed, making their choices as a best guess to expected outcomes, relying both on what they can rationally divine and what they irrationally believe?

Those that insist that rational process will solve all of our problems are deluded. Rational process is a powerful tool, but it is insufficient. The sentiment "If only people would be more rational" is an irrational desire, in and of itself. Something of a paradox, no?

Easy one.

The visual sightings over Washington were misidentified aerial phenomena such as stars or meteors. The unknown radar targets were caused by temperature inversion, which was present in the air over Washington on both nights the radar returns were reported.

The radar contacts were not caused by solid material targets, and therefore posed no threat to national security. There have been thousands of such contacts, and modern-day air traffic controllers are now trained to discern the difference.

Among the witnesses was the crew of a B-25 bomber, which had been flying over Washington during the sightings. The bomber was directed to the unknown targets on the airport's radar, but the crew saw nothing unusual. Finally, the radar had a target which turned out to be the Wilson Lines steamboat trip to Mount Vernon.

Air Force Captain Harold May was in the radar center at Andrews AFB during the sightings of July 19-20. Upon hearing that National Airport's radar had picked up an unknown object heading in his direction, May stepped outside and saw "a light that was changing from red to orange to green to red again...at times it dipped suddently and appeared to lose altitude." However, May eventually concluded that he was simply seeing a star that was distorted by the atmosphere, and that its "movement" was an illusion.

At 3 a.m. on July 27, an Eastern Airlines flight over Washington was told that an unknown object was in its vicinity; the crew could see nothing unusual. When they were told that the object had moved directly behind their plane, they began a sharp turn to try and see the object, but were told by National Airport's radar center that the object had "disappeared" when they began their turn. At the request of the Air Force, the CAA's Technical Development and Evaluation Center did an analysis of the radar sightings. Their conclusion was that "a temperature inversion had been indicated in almost every instance when the unidentified radar targets or visual objects had been reported" (Peebles, 66). Project Blue Book would eventually label the Washington radar objects as "mirage effects caused by double inversion" and the visual sightings as "meteors coupled with the normal excitement of witnesses".

In later years, Dr. Donald Menzel, an astronomer at Harvard University, and Philip Klass, a senior editor for Aviation Week magazine, would also argue in favor of the temperature inversion/mirage as the cause of the events.

Simple, right? Experts in atmospheric events (Air Force officers, Airline pilot, Astronomers) testify that the lights were optical illusions caused by temperature inversions, meteors, and other atmospheric phenomenon.

The general public, especially journalists and reporters, are all too often unfamiliar with any of the natural phenomenae that cause the sightings. That they go from "They's lights in teh sky and doesn't know what they is!" to "This proves that We're Not Alone!" is a tremendous leap of faith (there's that word again), which proves nothing ... nothing at all.

... a person should try to learn as much as possible about these alleged 'limits' and try to circumvent them, and not throw up their hands and say, "It must be magic!"

Those who insist on subjective validation through feelings, emotions, and "revelation" (such as those who rely on faith-based claims for their livelihood, or who find rational thinking too difficult) are themselves deluded in their own self-importance. Only objective investigation of claims can determine their validity.

The question of perception seems important to me, and especially in this setting. If some people have access to sensory information that most others do not, the others will not have the ability to objectively verify the claims of the few. It's kind of the opposite of my experience of the Theory of Mind. I got lots of good advice over the years about social fluency, but I couldn't perceive the evidence and disregarded it. Now, I regret my hard-headedness.

Mysticism explicity claims to enhance unusual senses, but I don't expect a determined skeptic to put in the effort to cultivate the ability to verify the other claims. I don't even think people should bother with it if they don't care about it, but I wish they'd stop calling me delusional or a liar when I try to accurately report my experience. I can't even seem to convine one skeptic that it's just rude, and that's pretty annoying, too.

You entirely miss the point.

You cannot objectively assess all of reality. You can only objectively assess parts of it. Those that insist that objectivity should always take precedence over subjectivity are as delusional as those that insist on the opposite. Both are required to understand reality. Strict objectivity works best when the parameters of a discussion can be sufficiently narrowed to allow clear logic, concise definitions, and repeatable measures. MOST of what we experience cannot be so restricted, and, in fact, the very act of restricting the descriptions of our reality to the point that objectivity can be efficiently applied strips away large swaths of the actual experience itself.

This is false: "That which cannot be objectively defined does not exist".

This is true: "There is more that exists than can be objectively defined".

Amen, brother!

Since the topic of UFO's has been brought up, I might as well share my story.

I used to work at Kmart when I was 18 and didn't have a car so I would have to ride my bike 4 miles to get there at 3:30AM. I remember one morning I looked up and saw this strange light configuration I'd never seen before. Usually lights on planes blink but these stayed solid. There were 3 of them in a triangular fashion and the aircraft were moving slower then most aircraft. It was almost as if they were hovering (there were two). I remember I stopped my bike and watched for about 5 minutes and they just sat there. I continued to ride my bike until I got to work and they were no longer there.

I don't believe these were actually alien piloted UFO's considering I used to live an hour away from Travis Air Force base in California. I think it was some kind of experimental stealth air craft. Thats another thing too, they never made a sound.

I believe in alien life somewhere in the galaxy. If the galaxy is infinite then its almost ignorant to think we're the only species of intelligent life. In the grand scheme of the galaxy we just don't have the power or technology to look far enough.

Ufos i do believe but i think most of them are govermet air crafts and things they make and dont tell others. Btw im a very uncareing person so to the others here you fight i dont read idc.
-.-; Now im going back to bed ;p but yes i have seen ufos myself the last ones were in a city and i like to believe things but also make sure its not other things.

I had a special interest in the paranormal for about three years in my teens (comes with being an "X-Files" geek). Researched it something fierce. It's how I eventually became a skeptic and later, an atheist.

Presently, I have a fascination with mythology, folklore and legends, which often includes the paranormal. I currently have no good reason to believe in fairies, werewolves, ect., but it IS quite interesting from a cultural perspective. I'm particularly fond of ghost stories for some reason. Nothing better than a creepy graveyard.

Anyway, welcome to WP and I hope you eventually make some living friends. Not that there's anything wrong with dead people, but they tend not to have lives.

The temperature inversion model to explain the lights has long been discredited by "independent scientists" and Menzel and Klass were not independent as they had connections via grants from various US government agencies. There was always a conflict of interest not unlike Condon who's heavily biased report in the 1960's became the "debunking bible" used by every skeptic till today.

I'll quote a summary of the criticism of the weather inversion from wiki

Almost from the moment of General Samford's press conference, eyewitnesses, UFO researchers, and Air Force personnel came forward to criticize the temperature inversion/mirage explanation. Captain Ruppelt noted that Major Fournet and Lt. Holcomb, who disagreed with the Air Force's explanation, were not in attendance at Samford's press conference. Ruppelt himself discovered that "hardly a night passed in June, July, and August in 1952 that there wasn't a [temperature] inversion in Washington, yet the slow-moving, solid radar targets appeared on only a few nights" (Ruppelt, 170).
According to a story printed by INS, the United States Weather Bureau also disagreed with the temperature inversion hypothesis, one official stating that "such an inversion ordinarily would appear on a radar screen as a steady line, rather than as single objects as were sighted on the airport radarscope."[6]
Also, according to Ruppelt, when he was able to interview the radar and control tower personnel at Washington National Airport, not a single person agreed with the Air Force explanation. Michael Wertheimer, a researcher for the government-funded Condon Report, investigated the case in 1966. He found that the radar witnesses still disputed the Air Force explanation, but that did not stop the report from agreeing with the temperature inversion/mirage explanation (Clark, 660). Ruppelt related that on July 27 the control tower at Washington National had called the control tower at Andrews AFB and notified them that their radar had an unknown object just south of the Andrews control tower, directly over the Andrews AFB radio range station. According to Ruppelt, when the Andrews control tower personnel looked they all saw "a huge fiery-orange sphere" hovering over the range station (Ruppelt, 160). When Ruppelt interviewed the tower personnel several days later, they insisted that they had been mistaken and had merely seen a bright star. However, when Ruppelt checked an astronomical chart he found that there were no bright stars over the station that night, and that he had "heard from a good source that the tower men had been 'persuaded' a bit" by superior officers to state that their sighting was merely a star (Ruppelt, 169).
There were also witnesses who claimed to see structured craft and not merely "glows" or bright lights. On July 19 an Army artillery officer, Joseph Gigandet, was sitting on the front porch of his home in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. At 9:30 p.m. he claimed to see "a red cigar-shaped object" which sailed slowly over his house. Gigandet estimated the object's size as comparable to a DC-7 airplane and at about 10,000 feet altitude; he also claimed that the object had a "series of lights very closely set together" on its sides. The object eventually flew back over his house a second time, which led Gigandet to assume that it was circling the area (Clark, 657). When the object flew away a second time, it turned a deeper red color and moved over the city of Washington itself; this occurred less than two hours before Edward Nugent first spotted the unknown objects on his radar at Washington National. Gigandet claimed that his neighbor, an FBI agent, also saw the object (Clark, 657). Dr. James E. McDonald, a physicist at the University of Arizona and a prominent ufologist in the 1960s, did his own analysis of the Washington sightings. After interviewing four pilot eyewitnesses and five radar personnel, McDonald argued that the Air Force explanation was "physically impossible" (Clark, 661). Harry Barnes told McDonald that the radar targets "were not shapeless blobs such as one gets from ground returns under anomalous propagation", and that he was certain the unknown radar blips were solid targets; Howard Cocklin agreed with Barnes (Clark, 661).