The paronormle

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While I was apprenticed to my cousin the witch, I learned all the tricks of the 'psychic' trade. Most involved being just vague enough to elicit a response from the client, and then magnifying on that response. It's performance art meeting social engineering. In other words, it's all a confidence game. Google "Cold Reading" to learn what I've learned. Here's a story that shows how easily fooled some people can be, even to the point of denying simple science:

An associate of my cousin brought in an old Polaroid Land camera - the kind with the bellows-mount lens assembly. Her complaint was that the shutter was stuck, and could I fix it, please? While fixing the shutter, I noticed that the bellows was cracked along the folds, so I replaced the bellows. It took great pictures, and the associate gave me a twenty for my efforts.

A day later, she returned and demanded her money back. It seems that before I repaired her camera, she would use it to photograph ghost lights - streaks, spots, and smears of light overlaying the image. I pointed out to her that those "ghosts" were the result of light leaking through the cracks in the bellows. She denied this, and insisted that I restore her camera to its former state. Since I had already disposed of the old bellows system, I had to resort to a few cuts with a razor blade to open up the bellows.

She later claimed that I had made the camera more sensitive to "Ghosts", and began recommending my services to others. Each one sought out my services, and as the man said, there is a seeker born every minute...

Not long ago a started a topic called about "the taboo of psi" about this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew

I noted in the thread that the video clearly discuss scientific studies showing repeatable, empirical, falsifiable evidence/experiments of psi. And then NOT ONE SINGLE EFFING person commented on the actual content of the video. People are too lazy to pick up a book or even watch a video on youtube to see evidence of the paranormal. Therefore there can hardly ever be productive debate on the subject.

Most people just want to be closeminded or think "ooh mysterious.... we can never really know!" Fine then, stay ignorant. To people who are actually curious, pick up an actual book. The crap on tv and the internet is usually crap. Do a search on amazon and find actual books someone put time and effort into.

(By the way, a very good book on UFOs is "Operation Trojan Horse".)

Sue Allen, Spirit Release: A Practical Handbook (O Books p/b 2007)

Phil Cousineau, Soul Moments: Marvelous Stories of Synchronicity - Meaningful Coincidences from a Seemingly Random World (Conari Press, U.S. p/b 1997)

Catherine Crowe, The Night Side of Nature (Wordsworth Myth, Legend & Folklore S.)

A. Ellison, The Reality of the Paranormal (Guild Publishing, London h/b 1988)

H.J. Eysenck & D.K.B. Nias, Astrology: Science or Superstition? (1982; Pelican p/b 1984)

Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy

Patrick Harpur, The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (2002; The Squeeze Press p/b 2009)

Brian Inglis, Natural and Supernatural (1977; rev. ed. Prism Pr., Bidport p/b 1992)

Brian Inglis, Science and Parascience (Hodder & Stoughton h/b 1984)

Brian Inglis, The Hidden Power (Cape h/b 1986)

Jeffrey Iverson, More Lives than One?: The Evidence of the Remarkable Bloxham Tapes (1976; Pan p/b 1977)

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

Howard Jones, The Thoughtful Guide to God: Making Sense of the World's Biggest Idea (O Books p/b 2006)

C. G. Jung, Synchronicity

John A. Keel, The Mothman Prophecies (1975; 1991; Tor p/b 2002)

Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence

Leszek Kolakowski, Religion

Richard Lazarus, Unnatural Causes

Richard Lazarus, Beyond the Impossible

David Lorimer, Whole in One: The Near-death Experience and the Ethic of Interconnectedness (Penguin/Arkana, London p/b 1990)

David Lorimer (ed.), Thinking Beyond the Brain: A Wider Science of Consciousness (Floris Books, Edinburgh p/b 2001)

Richard Milton, Forbidden Science

Carol Lynn Pearson, Embracing Coincidence: Transforming Your Life Through Synchronicity (Gibbs-Smith, Utah p/b 2008)

Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle (2002; Orion, L. h/b 2003)

James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

Peter Redgrove, The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense (1987; Paladin p/b 1989)

Jane Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality: Specific, Practical Techniques for Solving Everyday Problems and Enriching the Life You Know [A Seth Book] (1974; Amber-Allen Publishing, U.S p/b 1994)

Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life (1981; 1985; 3rd ed. Icon Books, L. p/b 5 Feb 2009)

"Starhawk", The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (HarperSanFrancisco p/b 1999)

George Steiner, Real Presences

Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (2006; Plume/Penguin, NY p/b 2007)

Kenneth Walker, A Study of Gurdjieff's Teaching

Lyall Watson, Supernature

John Anthony West, The Case for Astrology

Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger, Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977; new ed. New Falcon Publications 1986, 20th pr. p/b 2007)

Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising (1983; 2nd ed. New Falcon Publications 1997, 19th pr. p/b 2007)

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge University Press p/b 2004)

Vadim Zeland, Reality Transurfing 1: The Space of Variations (O Books p/b 2008)

These are some of the books on the subject (or allied subjects) which I have lying around. I haven't read very many of them. (I have a lot of trouble reading any books at all these days.) Some of them may be crap, for all I know. However, Brian Inglis is good.

I've only once taken careful note of unusual moving lights in the sky. This was shortly before 1 a.m. on Tuesday 1 August 1989, somewhere in England. Immediately afterwards, I carefully wrote down everything I had observed. Also, this happened when I was on holiday with a friend. (Yes, the weirdest thing about this account is that I actually had a friend!) After seeing the first light, I called him outside into the garden, and we both saw the second and third lights.

I never reported my observation (I was faintly embarrassed to have seen something spooky in the sky that I couldn't explain), and I never (until just now) even bothered to do the calculation in Newtonian mechanics which confirms the spookiness of what I saw. Also, I like science fiction, but I've never had any particular interest in UFOs (whatever they might be).

Briefly, there appeared to be two point sources of light crossing the visible sky in opposite directions, along approximately the same path, which could have been a great circle around the Earth. The hypothesis of the path being an Earth orbit was reinforced by the fact that a similar point source (just one, that I saw) had previously appeared on the same path (as one of the two), and the interval of time between the observations was roughly consistent with one of the two point sources having orbited the Earth at the same roughly constant angular speed with which it had been moving before. That is (sorry about the clumsy wording), I was seeing the same object again on a second traversal of its orbit of the Earth.

The weird thing is that these point sources of light traversed about 80 degrees of arc in about 40 seconds. If they really were material objects orbiting the Earth, this meant that they were doing so about once very 3 minutes!

Common sense suggests that such rapid orbiting of the Earth is impossible for an object accelerated only by the Earth's gravity.

I haven't studied mechanics for a long time, but I've just substituted an angular speed of pi/90 radians per second into Newton's laws, and the law of gravitation for an object in a circular orbit around the Earth, and, if I haven't miscalculated (it can happen!), such an angular speed is only possible for an object travelling at about 24 kilometres per second (about 0.008% of the speed of light), at a radius of about 689 kilometres from a point mass representing the mass of the Earth. (Obviously these figures are only very rough, because my observations were only very rough.) But that is of course impossible, because the radius of the Earth itself is over 6000 kilometres!

Therefore, common sense is right: no object can traverse 80 degrees of arc in 40 seconds in a circular orbit about the Earth unless it is experiencing acceleration from some source other than the Earth's gravity. That is, it must have been powered! Moreover, it had to be travelling at some speed in excess of 800,000 kilometres per hour!

Is there some obvious explanation which I'm missing?

(A weather balloon, you say? The planet Venus? Mm-hmm. Mental illness? A folie a deux, then.)

I enjoyed reading that.

Then you might enjoy reading the material on this list, as well:

Rowland, Ian, "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading"

Hyman, Ray, "Cold Reading"

Randi, James, "Flim-Flam!"

Richard Hönigswald, "Die Skepsis in Philosophie und Wissenschaft", 1914, new edition (ed. and introduction by Christian Benne and Thomas Schirren), Göttingen: Edition Ruprecht, 2008, ISBN 978-7675-3056-0

Keeton, Morris T., "Skepticism", pp. 277–278 in Dagobert D. Runes (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy, Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ, 1962.

Runes, D.D. (ed.), "Dictionary of Philosophy", Littlefield, Adams, and Company, Totowa, NJ, 1962.

Butchvarov, Panayot, "Skepticism About the External World" (Oxford University Press, 1998).

Daniels, M.D., D.; Price, PhD, V. (2000), "The Essential Enneagram", New York: HarperCollins

"Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism", R.G. Bury (trans.), Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY, 1990.

Richard Wilson, Don't Get Fooled Again - The Skeptic's Guide to Life, Icon Books, London, 2008. ISBN 978-184831014-8

Since we have only your word on the matter, and that what you describe would violate at least one law of physics, then it is safe to assume that you could have made it all up.

Not that I'm accusing you of having fabricated your story ... I'm just saying, that's all.

Paranormal is fascinating. I am on the fence about it. Not sure what's really going on, but I do yearn to witness something truly paranormal.

As do I. It would certainly fulfill a childhood dream to witness just one actual paranormal event, but every such alleged event has turned out to be either outright fraud or a mis-interpretation of the facts. Either way, these events have done nothing less than to bolster my steadily-growing skepticism.

I even started a challenge that I call "What's in the Box?"

I selected a location. Then I selected a container to place in that location. Then I selected three ordinary solid objects to place within that container. I also included a note inside the container that listed the object, the container, the location, and the date and time the challenge began.

At this point, I issued the challenge: Tell me what is in the container, what the container looks like, and where the container is located. You can use telepathy to read my mind, precognition to see what I what it is when I fetch it in the future, astral projection to look around my house, a spirit guide to do the looking for you, and so forth.

To sweeten the deal, I offered $1000 U.S. to any person who could do all three. In the event of a tie, the person with the most accurately detailed description gets the prize. If both descriptions are equal, then the prize is split.

In 25 years, no one has won the prize.

As an example, the first challenge involved a bottle of perfume, a brass key, and a wooden duck decoy inside a brown paper shopping bag that I left on the floor in the front hallway. It sat there for a year, and not one person out of nearly two dozen got any detail right.

The second challenge involved a class ring, a six-sided die, and a bottle cap in a Tupperware container inside my pantry. That one also lasted a year without anyone getting it right.

This year's challenge has not been met yet, and it expires at midnight on New Year's Eve, 2011.

If the pattern of past events is any indication of the future, then I do not expect anyone to get it right this time either.

All I want to do is go with the Ghost Adventures crew to witness what they do and see if I believe it. Have you noticed it's always three dudes, Nick, Zack, Aaron and no one else ever witnesses their lock downs but them. That causes fleeting skepticism in me concerning what they capture on film and their magnetic field detector readings. I also question their electronic voice phenomena. Sometimes the voices on tape sound suspiciously like theres. I have wondered if the light "orbs" they capture on film and claim are spirits are really the camera guy shining a pen with a light on the end.
If I were to go to one of their lock downs and they showed me something convincing I might become a believer, then.
That's what I mean by paranormal. Ghosts and other dimensions. You don't know what a particle can do, so how do you know ghosts cannot possibly exist?

Last edited by ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo on 19 May 2011, 10:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't claim to know the physical object but I can guarantee your ego is in it.

Those who can not meet my challenge often use similar Ad Hominem attacks.

It's a simple enough challenge to meet, if the person attempting to meet the challenge has any actual paranormal or "psychic" ability.

Their failure does nothing to support any claim of paranormal ability.

And your off-handed insult only made me laugh.

Is psychic ability paranormal? I thought ghosts and spirits are. Besides, my experience with psychic ability is that it's subtle and spontaneous, difficult to command. Perhaps it could be trained.
I do believe psychic ability exists, but not in the conventional sense you convey, Fnord. You could say savantism is a form of psychic ability.

If could any of you help me out with my other fourm i put up (autism stoping me form what i want to do) spots problem?? :/ read it and reply if you can thanks.

Paranormal events are those alleged events that exist or occur beyond the range of normal sensory experience or scientific explanation, such as telepathy, spirit channeling, precognition, divination, astral projection, telekinesis, teleportation, levitation, et cetera.

UFOs are nothing more than objects that fly and that can not be immediately and directly identified. No paranormalcy should be implied or inferred to them, since they can be seen (and sometimes heard) and science can explain them (even if people refuse to believe the scientific explanations).

Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Chupacabra, and other such alleged cryptozoologicals are not paranormal, either; and for the same reasons as I cited for UFOs.

Nowadays, paranormal implies spirits and ghosts since they are enjoying a surge in popularity at the moment.
It's the perfect opportunity to discuss shows like Ghost Adventures. Have you ever watched that show, Fnord?