Hunting the Paranormal "Objectively"

So here is an interesting story about clinical psychologist Thomas Rabeyron, a very diligent bloke, who really wants to get to the bottom of all this paranormal stuff.

It's a good case study for my point of view, because while his intentions are there, he's still gonna try to shoe horn alternate realities into a scientific, "objective" study.


His big complaint is that the phenomena all seems to vanish when he studies it "objectively":

"All we know is that in similar experiments, whenever the cameras were around, the occupants were more comfortable and the phenomena came to an end."

I propose that it's not the camera's that inhibit observation of the activity, but the attitude of the researchers. Note how he's already limited the possible explanations, and has discounted his own contribution in all of them:

"The only explanations for this would be that the occupants were faking it and didn't want to be caught out, that there was some kind of psychological explanation that was canceled out by the presence of the cameras, or that the phenomenon was caused by a real poltergeist that didn't want to be caught on film."

Its funny how scientists keep holding to the premise that something can be viewed objectively, even though science itself has proven that the act of observing changes the results.

Assume for a moment that its this researcher's own biases that are limiting his ability to observe the phenomena, what do you think he could do to be successful?

"Ghost" on mainstream news

CNN covered this story about an apparition that apparently appeared on the security cameras at gas station awhile back.

It's the story that inspired a persistent idea that a part of this big "awakening" is that the mass consciousness seems willing to expand their awareness to include "evidence" of something unexplainable on mainstream media.

(I believe that humans are only one of endless varieties of consciousness, and that the only reason we aren't consciously aware of everyone else is that we're choosing to limit our perceptions to the "game" we think of as life).

What catches my attention here is that the reporter and interviewees have no conceptual framework to discuss about this apparition beyond referring to it as a "ghost" or "angel" .

Something tells me this is just the beginning, (not that it's anything new to have footage of something strange, but it IS new for a large news outfit like CNN to think its valid enough to cover it.) If I'm right and things start showing up, we're gonna need a new vocabulary that extends beyond religious iconography if we ever hope to understand our relationships with extra-dimensional beings.