The Home of the ParaHunter

It's amazing to me how just questioning a claim of paranormal activity can get you screamed at. "You're a debunker!!" "You're a skeptic!!" "You won't believe it until you have it stored in a test tube in a laboratory!!"

The field of philosophy teaches us to observe and document everything regarding the world around us. Philosophy itself isnt' just ethics and how we live, but it teaches us about the world around us how we "know what we know." If that last bit sounds a lot like science, well, science branched from philosophy so, like Christianity, Islam, and Judism, science and philosophy have the same roots but split off later within the history of humanity. At the core of philosophy (which became the foundantion of science) we study our surroundings, the physical world through keen, objective observation. From these observations we make hypotheses and reasonings that lead to additional observations and tests. In a nut-shell, that's science. The term philosophy became synonomus ethics and way of life instead of the observation of surroundings, which became science.

The key word here is observation. What is being observed, and what can we determine from those observations. In the world of paranormal investigation, the key 'observation' is what is claimed by the witness. Everything that drives the paranormal investigator should be the claim. What was observed? Under what conditions? What state was the observer (or witness) in at the time? How long did the event last? These and other questions are key to the investigation. When we start to try to figure out the claim, the motivations behind what was experienced, the beings responsible, their logic and reasoning, or even, most times, what they even are, we start to get in trouble. Assumptions and speculations are okay when attempting to figure out a paranromal claim, as long as you recognize that these are just assumptions and speculations.

An example; in late spring of 2009, I had my first (and only) paranormal experience. I witnessed a 2 dimensional shadow moving across a wall. The shadow was in existence for nearly 20 seconds and I directly observed it along with other people for that time frame. The shadow had no source and when we duplicated the shadow against the light source we couldn't do so exactly, ....the shadow was much darker than the images we produced. So, the obvious questions to this claim lead to, "What was the shadow?" "Why was it there?" "What was it trying to communicate?" I have none of those answers. No one does. Oh, many psychics will come up with little answers about the shadow being the spirit of someone who used to work in the building we were investigating and such but such claims are 100% unverifiable. I may as well say it was the ghost of Elvis for all I can prove against their claim of my experience. Many people in the right-wing religious sector will say what I observed was demonic, but then again, such individuals will claim all such things are demonic, and they cannot back their claims any more than the psychic can. In the end, I saw a shadow without a source. Period. Was it paranormal? Well, of course, but without further investigation of the site I can't say anything outside of that.

In researching the paranormal, balance is the key. You must toe the line between healthy skepticism and open mindeness. You must practice balance of logic and reason when investigating such claims, and always expand your investigation outward from the claim, never investigate inward toward the claim. To do so would cause you to 'fill in the spaces' to make the claim paranormal, and that's a flaw, a mistake in logic we simply do not want to fall into.

More on the claims of many paranormal investigators stating they investigate with "scientific means" to prove the paranormal, later. Such claims are normally made by people who have no idea what 'scientific' means! Still, this post has rambled on long enough. I'll cut it off here and rant about such 'scientific means' later.

Peace.