The Home of the ParaHunter

So when a paranormal investigation group says they use scientific means to prove or disprove the paranormal, what, exactly, are they talking about? I've heard a lot of groups make this claim, and seen it posted on websites for pretty much every ghost hunting team out there, but it always raises a yellow flag, for me. The questions that come to mind include; are these individuals actually, scientifically trained? Do they know, understand, and practice the scientific method in their investigations? Do they truly understand what science it is they're trying to employ when investigating a claim of paranormal activity?

When I jumped into ghost hunting I was impressed with what I believed was scientific thought and practice. People waved around meters and took measurements of their surroundings where a haunting was supposed to take place. We used fancy terms like electromagnetism and scientific theories. We believed that physics in the form of temperature displacement was occuring when you felt a cold spot, but when I started really looking into the physics behind these claims I started to seriously question. For instances, there are two forms of electromagnetism, and it's measured on frequency and wavelength. If a ghost manifests, does it manifest in a particular wavelength, along a particular band of the electromagnetic scale? Are there 'free floating' clouds of electromagnetism that ride the Earths surface that would give us false positive? No one could answer these questions for me, any of which could very well invalidate the EM factor in trying to determine if a haunting was actually occuring. It was then I understood that, though a lot of untrained paranormal investigators were waving EMF detectors around and claiming they were doing science, they had no true understanding of what they were measuring or how.

The scientific method, in it's most rudimentary form, consists of these simple steps: Observation, Hypothesis, Experimentation, Conclusion. I noticed early on that this method was skimped on, at best. For instance, experimentation includes a control group and that was rarely done within a paranormal investigation. If you don't know what's normal for an environment, how do you know what's paranormal? I noticed that most individuals simply were not trained even in the most basic form of the scientific method and, if not employed, how could they make the claim they were using scientific process in their investigations?!

With that in mind I started delving a bit more into science myself. Going to school for a General Studies degree allowed me to pick-and-choose my courses, catering them to hypotheses used in paranormal research and investigations. I took philosophy and psychology classes to help me identify behaviors in clients and to address people who were either too skeptical or too believing in the paranormal. A geosystems class allowed me to understand more about how the Earth worked as a massive system, including weather patterns and geological processes. A special effects film class taught me about such techniques used so I can identify them in terms of fraudulent paranormal film footage. Even these classes, and many more coming, I have a LOT to learn. I still won't be a trained scientist, nor a trained invesigator, (experienced and educated criminal investigators are also excellent paranormal investigators themselves,) but I'll be that much closer as an individual researcher.

A few paranormal groups out there understand this point. One of which is S.P.I.R.I.T., a group devoted to true scientific research of the paranormal. They are, perhaps the best I have ever found, and I'm tracking their progress to learn more, myself. One other point; a lot of paranormal investigators, ghost hunters, and psychics hate science as a field, stating that it's "sciences job to debunk the paranormal."  This absolutely not the case. What these people are confusing is the fact that scientists are the ones that tend to be overly critical when it comes to claims fo the paranormal, but a scientist is different than the field of science. A scientist is a human who practices science, and that human will have their own prejudices, biases, and filters each and every paranormal claim will be filtered through. Science is simply the tool, or method used to study our environment.  Don't blame science for the close-mindedness of individual scientists. I emphasize 'individual' because, believe it or not, some scientists honestly believe that the paranormal, in any of it's disciplines, could exist.

With that in mind, to all paranormal investigators out there, please becareful when you make claims of a "scientific" nature. Ask yourself if you really know what 'scientific' means or if you're just going through motions with fancy meters. Never stop learning about what we're studying nor how we're studying it, and don't turn your back on the field of science, nor it's techniques, just because you come across a few skeptical and closed-minded practitioners of science out there.

Peace.