• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Amateur Paranormal Investigators: Role; Motive; Ability; Value

The thing is, there's no money in it so how are you ever going to get serious scientific types to investigate something so nebulous? By it's very nature it's only 'amateurs' who have the time/inclination but lack scientific methodology who are going to do it.

Very few are likely to approach things in a way satisfactory to you.
Actually, I'd be happy if they just started by asked the question, "What, if anything, is going on here?" instead of "Let's see if we can find evidence of the paranormal". It's a simple reframing - one gets you an investigation, the other is entertainment. As I said earlier, I only get annoyed when people claim to be doing something serious and scientific, because they aren't doing anything but messing about.
 
The thing is, there's no money in it so how are you ever going to get serious scientific types to investigate something so nebulous?

Tell that to the people who are charging £60 a night to people who are hoping to have a marble chucked at them in a run down semi The site is booked up for months in advance.
 
I’d start from a position of ghosts not existing and ensure every member of a ghost hunting team goes through a thorough psychological examination first.
The mind is a strange and mysterious thing. And not always honest.
 
Let's not conflate, much less draw a categorically erroneous equivalence between, being "scientific" and being "scholarly." It's the value added in terms of new insights or demonstrable knowledge that makes either worthwhile.

Being "systematic" is important to both scholarship generally and scientific inquiry specifically, but one can be systematic from start to finish and end up adding no value.
 
You could argue Scooby Doo as being a new insight but I wouldn’t call that scholarly or scientific.
 
Sure, people will pay to have a possibly spooky experience for a night & I think we're in agreement that 'haunted' tv shows are simply 'entertainment'. Clearly they're quite popular.

They're both some way distant from a methodical open minded investigation.
 
As I said earlier, I only get annoyed when people claim to be doing something serious and scientific, because they aren't doing anything but messing about.
Quite a few folk here doing just that.
TTFN
*...hums 'The Last Post' to himself and potters off...*
 
He also needed a bigger boat.

I agree with your point as regards Nick Redfern being a knowledge bank but an expert in case cross-referencing is not the same as active scientific research. I'm not banging on about scientific method as the only valid approach as I've been on countless investigations and I'm not an expert/scientist. I was part of the problem although I always knew that something was wrong with the whole thing. Unless any of this can be measured or recorded under stricter conditions then it will always be just hearsay and fringe science. And until investigators approach this with a more serious attitude then it will always generate worthless data. We need investigators from different scientific fields to band together.

For example, how many investigations take place in the evening when everyone is fatigued after a long day? Or all night long? I know all of ours did, usually from about 18.00 - 05.00. How many investigators are hopped upp on caffeine or energy drinks? How many people know exactly how their brain waves change when they are sleep deprived and how to recognise the signs of this happening? How this can affect their eye sight, hearing or sense of smell? How many people on investigations know about thermal dynamics? How humidity effects wood from the 17th century? How many people can recognise the smells of different types of creosote/paint/leather heating up or cooling down? Or know about how boilers work and sound in concrete/wood buildings? Or how different outdoor flowers/bushes/shrubs smell at different times of the year? How ventilation works? How infrasound is actually generated? Resonant frequencies? etc etc

In order to really investigate a paranormal claim then we would need a team of experts in many different fields - not just a bunch of people who have watched Most Haunted and Ghost Adventures.


Yes but it was Brody who pointed that out not Hooper :p

I agree with a lot of what you say and I'm starting to drift away from the purely scientific approach because as you say it is unattainable when investigating paranormal phenomena as most incidents are to our knowledge unrepeatable. I'm reconnecting to my Fortean roots of valuing the subjective experience.

Some of the poorest science I see and hear are from the skeptical community that dismisses everything without applying scientific methodology they so ardently champion. Ciaran O'Keefe as a parapsychologist sees himself as an expert but recently he has made some truly outlandish claims regarding paranormal incidents without having any direct knowledge of the incident.


Exactly. Redfern doesn't do much on obtaining original knowledge, he ties a lot together. He's a good paranormal folklore collector. I like his stuff but it's usually just another means of examining an old topic. It's not scholarly.

Redfern investigates contemporary accounts from actual eyewitnesses when he can. This hardly suggests he is a folklorist. Lyle Blackburn does the same. If you dismiss these people then what is the point of showing any interest in Forteana? They can't be blamed for not filming BigFoot as they were not there, but at least they are trying to record what other people thought had happened. If that turns into folklore so be it. If it uncovers a new species then so be it.
 
Last edited:
But, ignoring everything I've said so far, it is a ton of fun to do something so out of the ordinary as Ghost Hunting. It is a little suburban adventure to add some excitement on an otherwise boring Friday night. We maybe need to see it for what it is (cheap thrills) and just ignore the actual "Investigation" label. I am however wary of places charing so much to go there. There are tons of places you could go with a bunch of friends for free.
 
Redfern investigates contemporary accounts from actual eyewitnesses when he can. This hardly suggests he is a folklorist. Lyle Blackburn does the same. If you dismiss these people then what is the point of showing any interest in Forteana? They can't be blamed for not filming BigFoot as they were not there, but at least they are trying to record what other people thought had happened. If that turns into folklore so be it. If it uncovers a new species then so be it.

Investigates? Not always. He regenerates a LOT of stuff and churns out several books per year. I get his Visible Ink books to review and I can find the accounts taken from anonymous online forums. It is what it is (which is often modern versions of folklore - alien visitors, men in black, black-eyed kids, urban monsters, etc.). (As someone has done before, I suspect my comments will be copied and delivered to Nick. Weird to do, but whatev... We've had dust-ups but he's no fraud and not a jerk. He pretty much knows what I do and that we won't usually see eye to eye - no ill will, though.) Blackburn is a cut above in writing his books. He takes more of a journalistic route and, while he gets a little sensational some times, I enjoy his books and find them to be usually the best on obscure and scarcely covered subjects he tackles.

I'm not dismissing them; I don't know where you pulled that from. Be a bit more charitable in reading between the lines, please. I enjoy the work of both authors. These subjects have a broad range of contributors from ungrammatical self-publishers to scientese-speaking academicians.

Why show any interest in Forteana? What an extremely odd question! I've researched these topics for 30 years and will continue to do so. One reason I love it is because there are mysteries out there to think about. I don't want to believe, I want to know (which is a lost cause) what people saw and experienced because it's pretty amazing. As other people have noted, if there were no critical thinkers in this forum and in the general discussion, the topics would be too ridiculous to pay any attention to.
 
You could argue Scooby Doo as being a new insight but I wouldn’t call that scholarly or scientific.

Absolutely and Shaggy and Thelma would be about 90 by now although Scooby still looks exactly the same following his visit to the taxidermist.
 
... Some of the poorest science I see and hear are from the skeptical community that dismisses everything without applying scientific methodology they so ardently champion. Ciaran O'Keefe as a parapsychologist sees himself as an expert but recently he has made some truly outlandish claims regarding paranormal incidents without having any direct knowledge of the incident.

I would say that's not science at all, but rather a knee-jerk dogmatic negativism from the socio-cultural vantage of a presumed scientific / scientistic community and orthodoxy. Such pronouncements belie / betray science just as witch hunts and the Inquisition belied / betrayed religion.

Such institutionalized shunning is one of the factors that renders an area of study or investigation as a "damned science" in the Fortean sense - i.e., damned out of hand socially rather than damned by demonstrable refutation.

Even though supported by observation and sound inference, the notion of a round earth was "damned science" for more than a millennium, and a solar-centric model of our local cosmos was similarly "damned science" until the means for better data collection arrived and the data collected carried the day.
 
Investigates? Not always. He regenerates a LOT of stuff and churns out several books per year. I get his Visible Ink books to review and I can find the accounts taken from anonymous online forums. It is what it is (which is often modern versions of folklore - alien visitors, men in black, black-eyed kids, urban monsters, etc.). (As someone has done before, I suspect my comments will be copied and delivered to Nick. Weird to do, but whatev... We've had dust-ups but he's no fraud and not a jerk. He pretty much knows what I do and that we won't usually see eye to eye - no ill will, though.) Blackburn is a cut above in writing his books. He takes more of a journalistic route and, while he gets a little sensational some times, I enjoy his books and find them to be usually the best on obscure and scarcely covered subjects he tackles.

I'm not dismissing them; I don't know where you pulled that from. Be a bit more charitable in reading between the lines, please. I enjoy the work of both authors. These subjects have a broad range of contributors from ungrammatical self-publishers to scientese-speaking academicians.

Why show any interest in Forteana? What an extremely odd question! I've researched these topics for 30 years and will continue to do so. One reason I love it is because there are mysteries out there to think about. I don't want to believe, I want to know (which is a lost cause) what people saw and experienced because it's pretty amazing. As other people have noted, if there were no critical thinkers in this forum and in the general discussion, the topics would be too ridiculous to pay any attention to.

Sorry, Sharon I honestly thought you were a Fortean rather than a Skeptic. I've just checked your Wiki page and I've been educated.

I could not care less about "dust-ups" that you've had with other people who earn their living flogging stuff about the Paranormal.

I've never met, spoken to, or bought any Nick Redfern books just heard him talk. Same with Lyle what's his face.

The majority of the trouble with people who are involved in Forteana is the bullshit slanging matches between each other which sap the energy out of something that should be fascinating and interesting., (what I'm involved in now I guess), It's not about the subject it's about whos right.

I've been interested in this stuff since I was 5 I'm close to 50 now. I bought my first edition of FT back in early 80's. Before that Unexplained and Usbourne was the thing I read.

I'm also a professional in areas that cross over onto many Fortean subjects.


It's not about something being necessarily right or wrong or being provable. it's about the event itself and the people involved.
 
Sorry, Sharon I honestly thought you were a Fortean rather than a Skeptic. I've just checked your Wiki page and I've been educated.

I could not care less about "dust-ups" that you've had with other people who earn their living flogging stuff about the Paranormal.

I've never met, spoken to, or bought any Nick Redfern books just heard him talk. Same with Lyle what's his face.

The majority of the trouble with people who are involved in Forteana is the bullshit slanging matches between each other which sap the energy out of something that should be fascinating and interesting., (what I'm involved in now I guess), It's not about the subject it's about whos right.

I've been interested in this stuff since I was 5 I'm close to 50 now. I bought my first edition of FT back in early 80's. Before that Unexplained and Usbourne was the thing I read.

I'm also a professional in areas that cross over onto many Fortean subjects.

It's not about something being necessarily right or wrong or being provable. it's about the event itself and the people involved.

So, let me get this straight... you're going to judge me by an out of date wikipedia article? Interesting. You do know I have no control over that entry, right? I've done a hell of a lot since then including write many pieces for FT and resigned from all contact with skeptical orgs. You seem to be unaware of that. Also, I guess it's OK for you to judge other things on casual evidence as well. I'm not out to sling bullshit, I'm providing an informed opinion. But if that's the attitude you are going to take, I'm not spending energy on that exchange.
 
...I could not care less about "dust-ups" that you've had with other people who earn their living flogging stuff about the Paranormal. ...

The majority of the trouble with people who are involved in Forteana is the bullshit slanging matches between each other which sap the energy out of something that should be fascinating and interesting., (what I'm involved in now I guess), It's not about the subject it's about whos right.
...

IMHO these two passages touch on key points I firmly believe:

- People who have a vested interest in promoting (or debunking) Forteana to make a buck (score social points, whatever ... ) should be taken with a grain of salt,

- The messy realm of Forteana is ill-served by being territorialized into pro forma pigeonholes defined as if we finally know all the relevant categories and their interrelationships, and ...

- Individual ego-pumping and interpersonal clashes among name-brand Forteana "experts" have played too large a role for too long, to the detriment of the subject area itself.
 
I don't think being skeptical and being fortean are necessary opposites. I consider myself 'a fortean' insofar as I'm strongly interested in fortean phenomena; however, I've become 'a skeptic' in that nowadays I tend to think that most of them have a rational explanation at the end of the day.
 
The majority of the trouble with people who are involved in Forteana is the bullshit slanging matches between each other which sap the energy out of something that should be fascinating and interesting., (what I'm involved in now I guess), It's not about the subject it's about whos right.

I've been interested in this stuff since I was 5 I'm close to 50 now. I bought my first edition of FT back in early 80's. Before that Unexplained and Usbourne was the thing I read.

I'm also a professional in areas that cross over onto many Fortean subjects.


It's not about something being necessarily right or wrong or being provable. it's about the event itself and the people involved.

See also: 'ripperology'.

A fascinating subject that has become a cess-pool of fraud, factionalism and feuds.
 
... It's not about something being necessarily right or wrong or being provable. it's about the event itself and the people involved.

This focus on the event / incident / observation itself and the people involved is all we're guaranteed to receive. This is pretty much given in accordance with Fort's own approach.

However ... IMHO this doesn't mean that a report and / or the person(s) pushing it must be treated as a "take it or leave it" proposition.

There's a certain degree of constructive critical review - and even experimental skepticism - required just to make sense of reports in the current environment of runaway exaggeration, finely detailed illusions, deliberate hoaxing, and rapid dissemination of mere hearsay.

Phrased another way ... Nowadays it's more important than ever to critically examine the story itself before going out on a limb to accept or dismiss it.
 
Back
Top