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Your Paracast Newsletter — December 21, 2014


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
December 21, 2014
www.theparacast.com


The Paracast Explores Myths and Legends of Sky People

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About The Paracast: The Paracast covers a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions across the planet.

Set Up: The Paracast is a paranormal radio show that takes you on a journey to a world beyond science, where UFOs, poltergeists and strange phenomena of all kinds have been reported by millions. The Paracast seeks to shed light on the mysteries and complexities of our Universe and the secrets that surround us in our everyday lives.

Join long-time paranormal researcher Gene Steinberg, co-host and acclaimed field investigator Christopher O'Brien, and a panel of special guest experts and experiencers, as they explore the realms of the known and unknown. Listen each week to the great stories of the history of the paranormal field in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This Week's Episode: Gene and Chris present Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke returns to the Paracast to talk about her new book, "Sky People: Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Mesoamerica." According to the publisher's notes, Ardy vowed as a teenager to follow in the footsteps of two 19th-century explorers, John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, who were among the first to bring the ancient Maya cities to the world's attention. She finally set out on her seven-year adventure in 2003 and traveled through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, collecting stories of encounters, sky gods, giants, little people, and aliens among the indigenous Maya. She drove more than 12,000 miles, visiting 89 archaeological sites and conducted nearly 100 individual interviews. We'll present some of the most fascinating tales during this episode.

Chris O’Brien’s Site: Our Strange Planet

Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums.

Accuracy in Media and Otherwise
By Gene Steinberg

The other day, I had an email debate with an old friend about what a certain political notable said on a certain subject. On the surface, the statement in question appeared to show immense disrespect to a large section of the electorate. How, my friend wondered, can that so-and-so say such a foolish thing? What’s he up to?

Well it turns out that the statement may have seemed accurate taken by itself. But it was part of a much longer statement that put the offending comment in a totally different context. It turned out that the people supposedly being attacked weren’t attacked at all. Worse, the misleading version has been widely quoted despite the corrections.

The people responsible for this deception edited a news clip in the same fashion. They just cut the segments before and after the statement, a single sentence, so as to convey a misleading impression.

This sort of behavior is all-too-common. What is worse is when it’s corrected, the falsehoods are repeated.

Now you’ll notice I’m not identifying the comment, who made it, and who was, in part, responsible for promoting this obvious deception. But it doesn’t require any expertise to cut a few sentences from a document, and any modestly skilled editor of audio and video content can easily excise the opening and closing remarks to foster a false impression any of a number of reasons.

I also think back to a controversial case involving a UFO investigator and a witness — or subject — who were recorded in a number of interview sessions. After a falling out between these two parties — and I expect some of you know the names but I won’t mention them here — one of the parties began to post segments of those recordings. They didn’t cast the other party in a particularly favorable light.

Now it may just be that what you heard accurately reflected the contents of these sessions as claimed. But that other party maintained they were taken out of context, meaning that material before or after the segment was either not recorded or deliberately removed. Of course this is hard to prove one way or the other. While snipping out a word or phrase may sometimes be detectable by analyzing the audio file for possibly careless edits, there’s no way to know whether it accurately reflects the full content of the recording session.

So imagine, for example, that someone tells another person, just for fun of course, to pretend he or she is driving a car in a torrential rain storm and the vehicle is skidding across the highway. You may hear frightened words or screaming. Or perhaps the person is told to pretend they are seeing strange silvery objects in the sky, or interacting with evil aliens during a possible abduction.

Regardless, if that segment is separated from the introduction, that it was all pretend, you may just wonder what’s going on and, if done well enough, whether the person is truly recounting a frightening experience — unless they fess up to the deception of course.

Indeed, if you knew someone was listening to everything you said in a particular location, you might carefully control your words, or perhaps fabricate a situation, to mislead the eavesdropping party. In certain well-known movies and TV shows, you’ll see people, knowing the walls had ears, turn up the music real loud so they could talk without actually being overheard. Or course nothing stops an audio expert from filtering the music to allow the human voice to come through loud and clear.

The point of this exercise is that it’s very easy to distort one’s statements or testimony. It doesn’t take a great deal of expertise to make it appear that someone said things that were never intended, totally out of context. Often, when such behavior is exposed, that disclosure rarely seems to stick. It’s as if nothing was ever refuted. It happens far too often in the mainstream media. How frustrating!

But it’s natural to interpret events in different ways.

Now when I was working as a broadcast journalist a few decades past, I covered the same beat as traditional print reporters. I took notes just as they did. My fellow reporters and I became friends, and we often talked shop. But when I read the printed version of a story that I had also reported to my listeners, there were differences. Sometimes it was a matter of emphasis. What I would consider important was not so regarded by my compatriots. And the reverse was certainly true.

I like to think we have a case of different professionals making good faith efforts to report a story as accurately as possible within the limits of human perception and our native abilities. The results would, however, always be flawed, perhaps more so if the event was unexpected.

In the recent case involving a police officer shooting an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, MO, a grand jury heard testimony from a variety of witnesses. The accounts varied all over the place, thus conveying different versions of officer’s behavior and whether he committed a crime.

Admittedly some people apparently made it all up, or just inferred details based on talking to other people, or they chose to twist their accounts towards the prevailing winds. At the end of the day, sifting through this evidence to find out what really happened must have seemed a near-impossible task.

Now imagine if the event being recalled involves a mysterious object or phenomenon that is totally beyond one’s experience. How do you convey what you saw or sensed in a way that accurately presents the details of that experience? Is it even possible?

This is one reason why the testimony of a single eyewitness may be suspect, but if you have many witnesses, you hope to hone in on composite description of what really occurred. All well and good, until you consider the possibility that our senses just aren’t equipped to understand what happened. Maybe it’s something so far beyond our experience, our culture, that there is no way to properly convey phenomenon in its true colors, or true lack of colors.

The cliche about what you see is what you get may be totally off the mark.

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It's true that humans make mistakes, and it's also true that the skeptics self-servingly exploit this. So let's remind everyone how this really works. In the absence of objective physical evidence, the only alternative to a human recollection of an experience, is a recording of some kind, and those are all done by some sort of machine. So in reality, the angle the skeptics are taking is that humans are horrible at sensing events and recalling them from memory and therefore cannot be trusted, and what is being tacitly suggested by that is the idea that machines are much better.

Yet when a machine such as a radar or video camera picks up a UFO, the same skeptics are the first to tell us all about the weaknesses of machines. They are also correct about that. Trust me. I know. I've repaired more machines of one kind or another than I care to count. Cameras fail. Memory cards fail. Film cameras malfunction. Technology is notorious for breaking down and/or giving false or poor quality reproductions.

That's not to say that when technology is used under ideal conditions, it doesn't do a great job, but under ideal conditions, the same can be said for human perception and memory. Yet notice how the skeptics always forget to mention how good we are at getting things right; that is unless they want to debunk an Ancient Aliens episode; in which case we fumbling nincompoops of a species suddenly transform into the pinnacle of intelligence and creativity. See how that works?

So what's the real situation: So far as we know, humans are still the most intelligent thing on the planet, and when that intelligence is combined with our sensory perception, it gives us an ability to perceive and analyze situations of all kinds in real time, including unfamiliar ones, with a skill unmatched by any machine made so far. So let's all try to remember that before writing off reports by firsthand witnesses so quickly. It's simply not reasonable to suggest that all UFO reports where people claim to have observed some kind of alien craft, are all due to some weakness in human perception and memory. IMO the witnesses are the best evidence. They matter.
 
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