Category: Is it Real or is it Magic?

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Explanations of the Mundane

This is a true story about a non-haunted house that Loyd Auerbach discusses in his Field Investigations class through the Rhine Research Foundation (which I highly recommend).  

Loyd was called in to investigate a home where the residents claimed several anomalous experiences occurred. 

“It was a family of four, and after they moved in they started seeing these shadows out of the corner of their eyes. They would get terrible headaches and feel dizzy in this one particular room. They smelled a noxious odor, and occasionally they’d see bursts of flame that actually left marks on the walls.”

Since the occupants were renting and had a long-term lease, they wanted help either to get out of the lease or to have the homeowner fix these problems. Many people might jump to conclusions of hauntings, apparitions, or even poltergeist phenomena but Loyd prefers to find the truth whether it’s due to mundane causes or not. This is what his field investigation unearthed:

  1. The house was built on a bad foundation causing the angles in the rooms of the home to be off from 90°. This can make a room feel odd and cause doors to open or close on their own.
  2. There were high tension towers very nearby causing a low-frequency hum which can cause anxiety.
  3. The type of insulation in the walls was creating static electricity in the family room where they had many electronic devices creating the ball-shaped energies.
  4. It was built on or near a solid waste dump and the chemical emanations were causing health issues and flames in the family room.

In his Field Investigation class, Loyd discusses the mundane effects that resemble the paranormal. Radios from passing vehicles or a pedestrian on a dog walk talking on a cell phone can sound like disembodied voices. Knocks and groans can be caused by temperature differentials in building materials or from water sluicing through pipes. Hallucinations can be caused, not just by low-frequency sounds, but many types of prescribed medications. Once the mundane answer is eliminated then one may question what is causing the phenomena. Unfortunately, not too many “ghost hunters” are familiar with structural or sound engineering, the electromagnetic spectrum, or the hallucinatory effects of drugs. If you take his course, there are a couple of books he recommends that have really great recommendations for what devices to use and how to use them properly in an investigation.

Because I love a mystery, I would occasionally watch “Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files” on T.V. while doing something creative with my hands. It’s a reality show with a team of very young investigators, led by an ex-FBI agent, each having experience with making special effects on film or a passing knowledge of some related skill. Think of it as “Mythbusters” for the paranormal crowd. They would come together in a living room/office environment and discuss some interesting paranormal video that had been submitted or that they had found on YouTube. The idea was to go on location where the video had been shot and determine if they could fake the effect from the video themselves. If so, they debunked the paranormal explanation as a case of mistaken identity. 

It’s frighteningly easy these days to fake a ghost in a picture — there’s even an app for it — but one of the other artifacts frequently mistaken for “ghost orbs” is caused by the relationship between light and the camera lens. Even if you are present in the room and you photograph a dark corner swearing on whatever holy book you hold dear that there was no orb of light there, the camera might just make you a liar, but it isn’t a ghost, it’s just physics. 

The most common mistaken U.F.O. sightings are the stationary formation of red orbs in a dark sky. The first question you should ask is whether you’re near a military base or a location where they perform maneuvers. If so, it’s probably flares. Helicopters and airplanes seen from a particular point of view can fool a viewer as well. Believe it or not, there really is something called swamp gas that can light up a muggy Louisiana roadway. In a “Fact or Faked” episode, it was evident that some weird meteorological phenomenon was behaving like a movie screen between the peaks of two distant mountains showing the rear lights of passing cars instead of the latest blockbuster. My main requirements for calling a U.F.O. is if it defies physics and doesn’t look like a photographic hoax or remnant on a video. 

As William of Occam put it in so many words, given a choice between two explanations of an effect, you choose the simplest, most likely one. That being said, if you eliminate the impossible, that which remains, however implausible, must be true.

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Amazing Randi, Science Progresses One Funeral at a Time

You might have seen an obituary (or dozens) lamenting the loss of a stage magician named the “Amazing Randi”. He died recently at the age of 92 with the “Randi Prize” supposedly unclaimed — I will get into that later in this blog post. Let me introduce you to the Randi world through the eyes of a psychic scientist. He was born in 1928 and had a pretty good career as a stage magician who claimed to see the future by determining the winner of sports games. He lamented that the gullibility of his audience disturbed him to the point that he gave up the future-reading gig and went into escape artistry. According to an article written about Randi, he never got over just how easily people could be duped and made it his life’s work to debunk psychic charlatans. I can wholeheartedly agree that people who scam other people out of their money giving them false hope or comfort should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But Randi did not stop there. He went after highly regarded and respected physicists Puthoff and Targ in his book “Flim Flam” stating that he had a guy on the inside watching their experiments with Ingo Swann. Randi took his scepticism to an all-or-nothing level enticing followers such as Carl Sagan and other scientific illuminaries to open his CSICOP group. He dogged famous spoon-bender Uri Geller claiming that every attempt he made at spoon bending was an illusion, not psychokinesis. This led to very expensive lawsuits that used up much of Randi’s MacArthur funding and caused his removal from CSICOP. Eventually, he offered $1000 to anyone who could prove to him that what they could do was, in fact, due to psychic ability and not some kind of prestidigitation or ledgerdomain. The money values increased to $10,000 and then $1,000,000, known as the “Randi Prize” by popular culture. You will hear skeptics say: “Psychic ability can’t exist because no one won the Randi prize.” Well, that ain’t the whole story.

Randi had been known to say that psychic ability doesn’t exist, therefore, no one could possibly prove to him that effects are due to psychic ability. He claimed that people were either self-deluded or were using illusory skills a la Penn and Teller. Given that extreme bias, he developed requirements that were above and beyond what psychics, even great psychics, were capable of achieving. For example, if a baseball player was playing a game in front of major league scouts and hit a .400 average for the game, it would be considered an amazing achievement. Statistically, that is 400 hits out of 1000 pitches, lower than a 50/50 chance. However, baseball scouts know that a higher hit rate is very, very rare and that the average hit rate hovers around .300. The same is true for psychic ability. After a century of study, a hit-rate of 60% is considered good. Randi wanted 80% or better hit rates for any psychic that attempted his challenge. Even if that psychic was on a roll, Randi was so biased that he would negate any findings. I have also looked at the “Randi Prize” contract and noted that the burden of proof and costs were on the psychic with Randi often the only judge of whether the contestant was successful or not. Regardless of the high and moving goal posts, several psychics did apply to the challenge and wrote about their experiences. Later, the contract would prevent any psychic from claiming success if they were, indeed, successful. He was allowed to lambaste any and all comers. 

Parapsychologists were put in an awful position of trying to show valid science to an increasingly skeptical and derisive crowd. Randi went so far as to insert magicians into ESP studies to show how credulous the researchers were to illusion. On the positive side, the researchers employed magicians to examine their research process to look for any possibility of cheating making their research much tighter and better controlled than other soft sciences. Some current researchers such as Lloyd Auerbach are card-carrying members of Mentalist societies so they know how cold-reading and other skills are employed by magicians. Charlatans were not new to the Psychical society at the turn of the twentieth century. Spiritualism was at an all-time high and people were easy pickings, including scientists. However, rigorous controls were placed to prevent the use of wires and mechanisms when parapsychologists studied the legitimate mediums of the day. Unfortunately, materialist and dogmatic skeptics, like Randi, decided that all of them were fakes and parapsychologists were blind. To this day, the study of anomalous phenomena is derided as a fringe study worthless to any other field. My hope is with this funeral, science progresses.

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“Real Magic” by Dean Radin

Imagine being Hermione Granger, or Harry Potter or even Merlin from King Arthur’s court, now throw all that out of the window, it isn’t like that at all. Humans really don’t have a huge effect on reality, which is good if you think about it. For instance, you wouldn’t want to be turned into a ferret because you mouthed off at the wrong magician. Doing real magic takes a great deal of effort and practice at being brainless. It turns out that our brains tend to interfere with our ‘minds’ which are the conduits to the data stream that gives us magical ability. Most of us wouldn’t be very good at it even if we spent a lot of time meditating while firmly grasping a crystal shard. Just like any other skill, it’s a combination of genes, talent, and practice. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that we do have a measurable effect on our reality, albeit a small one. Experiments done for over a century have shown that intention and attention can somehow manipulate the probabilities to our favor if we spend time dwelling on it. Our ancestors knew this quite well though it freaked out people in positions of power. Nostradamus, the famous precog, hid his ability from the Catholic church which was really quick to toss people like him into a fire or drown them for their own good. Not all psychically skilled people feared for their lives. The Oracle of Delphi was a highly regarded figure in antiquity providing useful information to seekers. Shaman or healers in small communities helped their people find food, avoid danger and healed them of their infirmities. Psychic mediums provided solace to grieving mothers and widows after the Civil War. Remote Viewers sought information about Soviet maneuvers during the Cold War. Police have found missing persons or solved crimes using information gleaned from the psychic realm.

Real magic can be classified into three different aspects: divination, force-of-will, and theurgy which have been reclassified using modern terminology. To divine information is to pull it out of the air so-to-speak which parapsychologists call Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Remote Viewing, Precognition, etcetera (please refer to my posts on each of these subjects). Anyone who reads tea leaves, Tarot cards or palms of hands are also classified as diviners. Theurgy is the utilization of spirit entities for information which includes but is not limited to spiritual mediumship and shamanism. Force-of-will can be classified as psychokinesis which is a big word for manipulating things without physically touching them. New Thought may also fall under this classification because you can manipulate your own fate. 

Much of the book “Real Magic” is filled with experiments that prove that we can manipulate reality and even see probable futures. This throws those who believe in the mechanistic dogma for a loop. According to mainstream science (e.g. classical physicists) magical ability is impossible. Ask a Quantum mechanic and they’ll say they aren’t sure what’s making this car run but they CAN see that causality and time don’t really work the same in the subatomic world as it does in the visible one. Psychologists and Neurobiologists are still holding fast to the belief that the brain creates our self-awareness but cannot find where it is happening. Materialism is hitting a wall so in comes Idealism. Where Materialism sees self-awareness as a manifestation of the brain, Idealism says that self-awareness, or Consciousness, is a fundamental part of reality that sits below physics, chemistry, biology and all that we know of reality. This subatomic realm may not just be a data field but part and parcel of who we are. 

I recommend this book as a primer for those interested in the field of parapsychology and for those whose minds just can’t quite wrap themselves around the concept of psychic ability. It is a comprehensive, comprehensible and at times comical look at supernatural abilities but also a treatise on how parapsychology has been ignored at best and demonized at worst. It argues quite eloquently for the existence of the magical but does not apologize for the century of strict laboratory experimentation on the subject. If you want to learn how to become a wizard, play an online game instead… this is not the book for you.

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Mentalism versus Telepathy

Calliope (the main character in my series) grew up among a special group of entertainers in unusual venues such as local State Fairs or Renaissance Faires. In North Carolina the State Fair can have over a million people attend during the week it’s open in October and the Carolina Ren Faire can have even more. Clair, Callie’s mother, is like the Carnival Medium in a semi-darkened tent surrounded by symbols of the mystical. She might have a small table with two or three small chairs or stools surrounding it. If she were a Tarot reader, her deck of cards would be arrayed over the surface of a tie-dyed cloth in a pattern well known to Tarot experts everywhere. There might even be the smoke of patchouli incense wafting through the close quarters as you sit in rapt attention awaiting news of your fate. The question in your mind is whether this Carnival Medium, Palmist or Tarot card reader truly has the Second Sight or if they are just really good at observing human behavior. Continue reading “Mentalism versus Telepathy”