Category: Paranormal

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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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On Alien Visitation

My favorite movie of all time is “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. On the surface, you might claim that that makes me an UFOlogist or heavily into alien visitations. Well, my eleven-year old self was, but then I grew up. “Close Encounters” is really a film about facing the scary unknowns and finding out that they are pretty amazing and magical when you find the courage and tenacity to explore them further. As an eleven-year old growing up in Kansas, I had no idea about alien visitation or what the three levels of alien encounters were. With no internet at the time and well before Mulder and Scully were on the search for the truth, I had to find books on the subject…in the library. The Roswell crash, of course, piqued the interest of those who believed that our federal government had been keeping alien encounters under wraps, but this was the cold war and they could have been keeping a Soviet plane crash quiet.

I was also alive during the first moon walk, the first space shuttle launch (and crash) and the Voyager missions. My generation got to watch astronauts and probes expand us beyond our little rock three spaces from the sun. We learned the extreme difficulties of launching people into the treacherous depths of our solar system to the point that we still haven’t sent humanned missions to Mars, Ganymede or any other suitable location forty years later. Our best and brightest, who lived for space travel, questioned whether aliens would be able, much less willing, to travel to our planet and why. They would have to be so far beyond our meager skills just to leave their own solar system and then travel for decades or centuries just to make it to our neck of the Milky Way (see Kardashev scale). Their reasons to travel here would have to be compelling and a few, just plain scary. To travel this far and not make official contact, not use our planetary resources, not try to supplant the dominant species on the Earth makes no sense. If you research further, you will find there is a progenitor claiming physical evidence of alien abductions, encounters and alien ships, the other UFOlogists are parroting his claims. The physical evidence simply isn’t there.

For a lark, I watched an episode of “New Thinking Allowed” with Joseph Burkes, an Emergency medicine physician who spent his youth as an activist and then later as a close encounter seeker. I was listening half-heartedly hearing much of what I’d heard for decades until the last ten minutes of the show when he made a claim that I hadn’t heard from xenophiles before: we aren’t being visited physically, we are being visited holographically. Dr. Burkes who had written a chapter in the book “Paths to Contact”, is now more of a proponent of psychic rather than physical alien visitation. Here are Dr. Burkes’ comments:

“…Experiencers describe over fifty different phenotypes of so-called ETs. (The term “phenotype” refers to category by appearance.) How is this possible? Where do they all come from?

Is the entire galaxy sending representative to visit us, mostly at night, in our dreams, and in our fantasies? Are there dimensional portals allowing such beings to enter into our reality from other planes of existence? Why is there such a terrible paucity of physical evidence?

We are left with narratives and the rather simple-minded formula that for many goes. “If you remember it then it physically occurred.” Back in 1990 during a series of contact experiences I believe that I was actually shown by an intelligence associated with flying saucers how they create illusion. It was a kind of “show and tell” lesson that one might use to instruct children. Thus, I came up with the Virtual Experience Model. According to this schema the “ETs” can create hologram like displays that we interpret as “craft,” a Virtual Experience of the First Kind (VE-1)

2. According to an account in Dr Karla Turner’s “Masquerade of Angels”, they can create a virtual reality experience that is technologically mediated, a VE-2.

3. And according to Dr. Andrija Pucharich’s experience with Uri Geller in the 1970s the alleged aliens can create in us virtual memories, i.e. impregnated ones that don’t correspond to any physical event, a Virtual Experience of the Third Kind, VE-3.

courtesy of https://cryptozoologycryptids.fandom.com/wiki/Alien

One might ask, “So what if some of these different types of so-called aliens are just illusions? For all we know the assortment of phenotypes are created by some form of intelligent energy. They might be confounding us by produces visual displays that we interpret as physical beings, but in reality, are a kind of “masquerade of aliens.” If this is true then a radical reassessment of the entire field of UFO studies is in order. I imagine the resistance to this iconoclastic model is quite high. With not much success I have been promoting the Virtual Experience Model for nearly 20 years against what passes as “conventional wisdom in the UFO field. Despite my having to go against the current, it is my hope that understanding the mechanisms of contact will allow us to strengthen our investigations into “This Otherness That Experiencers Now Call ET.” This is one of my alternate designation for UFO intelligences.

The use of technologically mediated illusion can explain the confusing picture of close encounters with strikingly different phenotypes. Dozens of beings with radically different appearances might not exist at all, but rather we encounter them in a series of theater of the mind productions. With an ability to create virtual reality, or the technology to implant false memories that many recall as “abductions,” UFO intelligences could make it appear as if the whole galaxy is visiting Earth.”

Since I have been spending much of my free time researching psychic ability in its many and varied forms, this became a light switch moment for me. Apparitions, aliens, discarnates, animal spirits and other forms of communication coming at us when we’re not quite awake or alert may just be from a single universal consciousness. We may be generating a comfortable or desirable visage for the entity most of us long to communicate with. I brought this up at the Rhine’s weekly meeting and there were many nodding heads save one. We have a residential Carl Jung fan who sees these sorts of visions as originating within our own psyches. We can generate a self-inflicted hallucination if we want it badly enough just like the Lost Boys could bring Tinkerbell back by clapping. There are two places where this argument falls apart. First, there are people who have made claims of alien contact who were not actively seeking it, nor were they fans of aliens. Second, shared visions or mass hallucinations if you will, have occurred during Dr. Burke’s alien encounter sessions many, many times. Airplane pilots will agree about a UFO encounter and RADAR will pick up the rapidly moving blips. Sailors on ships will describe an event with incredible agreement, yet no physical proof exists. These people do not want to see anomalous events because their careers might be at risk for making a report to that effect. I doubt that their psyches were primed to see aliens. Mass psychic telepathy seems unrealistic as well. My hypothesis is like Dr. Burkes’ holographic projection that mimics a physical object somewhat like the projections on the holodeck in “Star Trek: Next Generation”. The other encounters during meditation, hypnogogic (just before sleep) or hypnopompic (waking) states, however, may be telepathic communication. Either way, to me this seems to be the most logical hypothesis for alleged alien contact.

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Local or Nonlocal: A Chicken and Egg Question

There is an argument in Parapsychology whether psychic ability is a product of neural activity in the brain or of a non-corporeal mind. The first group are known as materialists and are able to point to some promising experiments both in neurobiology and quantum retrocausality. If all psychic ability is precognition, then perhaps the brain is getting information from the future in order to act on it in the present. As Stargate physicist Ed May puts it, the brain’s psychic retina, which has yet to be found, might be obtaining information from the future because, at the quantum level, things are time-symmetric or can go forward and backward in time. Stuart Hameroff an Anesthesiologist is looking into the structures of neurons in the brain, specifically the microtubules, which may receive information at a quantum level and which may either be the seat of consciousness, or just may be able to tap into the universal consciousness. I know, it’s hard to wrap your brain around your brain.

The group of no-local parapsychologists, such as Dean Radin, believe that the brain may perceive information psychically but it doesn’t start there. When I asked for some clarification, those in the room pointed to Near-Death experiences where the brain was supposedly non-functional at the time. “How can a dead brain perceive anything?” is their argument. Their hypothesis is that consciousness has a non-corporeal origin and utilizes the brain’s pre-frontal cortex just for interpretation. Both materialists and non-localists are pointing to quantum entanglement or retrocausality as the potential reason why psychic ability is not time-dependent.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Cern is constantly adding new knowledge about the particles that make up atoms. Other physicists are looking into something called “entanglement” and yet more are considering the waveforms of String Theory. All of these are amazingly complex mathematical constructs that even physicists struggle to comprehend completely, yet parapsychologists will argue that Entanglement must explain psi (that unknown which makes psychic ability work). Entanglement was a problem for Albert Einstein who called it “Spooky Action at a Distance” whereby two particles will share the same attributes as soon as one of them is observed regardless of how far apart they are. Quantum entanglement is used in quantum computers, ultra-precise clocks, and cryptography. It also may be why birds and other organisms may be able to orient themselves via an internal magnetic compass. The question of material or non-local can only be answered through experimental testing. Right now, the materialists are winning the argument because they have the brain and particles to test. Non-locals, though, have experiments that show immediate response effects involving people who are separated so that they have no normal means of communication.

Consciousness exists like a vibration affecting all matter in different ways rather than being a construct of neural function they say, a kind of panpsychism: every dynamic, living thing has a level of conscious intent. Max Planck, the original Quantum physicist said “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Essentially, which happened first? Brain or Mind? The jury is still out but when the scientific powers-that-be finally agree, it will be the next great leap of scientific endeavor.

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Poltergeists: Psychic or Something Else?

If you’re a fan of the so-called Ghost Hunter shows that are all over cable television, please move on. There isn’t anything for you to see here. I require a lot of evidence before I will agree there is a possible haunting. This blog article is based on information from established Parapsychologists who have researched the phenomena known as Poltergeist hauntings. Many of them would tell you that there is not a discarnate entity involved in a majority of them, the rest simply may shrug their shoulders and respond “Could be anything.” That’s the fun part of Parapsychology: it’s open to possibilities. Continue reading “Poltergeists: Psychic or Something Else?”