Jose Collado said:
Regardless of what people think, I am really interested in the paranormal. I believe in it...I just find 99% of it based on speculation and shows like Ghost Hunters and Most Haunted thrive whilst promoting fallacies. They claim to use scientific method...which is yet to be seen.
EVP, EMF, matrixing, thermal imaging...blah blah blah
You know what? That is so true. The thought of using unproven instruments to measure supposed levels in order to prove or disprove anything is pretty insane. All you can do is record the raw DATA and then try to prove what the data means. So, you end up with a pile of IR cam footage, a complete log of all EMF levels, locations, and times (so that correlations to other events can be attempted later), normal video and audio footage, etc. Does any of that have any hope of answering the big questions? Unlikely. The only tools that can offer anything profound are probably the video and audio footage. I mean, you could end up with deeply profound EVP that might be, say, predictive of the future in a real and useful sense (not some hokey, weak guessing) or one that knows intimate details of something (again, in a real and serious sense, not some hokey crap)...you could end up with pretty great video or real object movement like the power cord Ghost Hunters caught on tape in Tombstone....that was pretty good.
I have to say that shows like Paranormal State really give the whole field of Paranormal research a bad name. Honestly, the whole show is nothing more than a religious vehicle. I have yet to see even an ATTEMPT at anything remotely scientific in that farce. I'd love to sen that crew somewhere truly and evilly haunted and see them lose their minds.
Now, I realize that I also have to add that, yes, Ghost Hunters can get a but too religious for me at times as well, but much less so...much less so. Still, some of the newer team members are largely responsible for it. What makes a simple spirit haunting into a demonic one? Heh, probably the same thing that makes one living guy an evil jerk and the other a decent, nice guy.
In the end, I suppose there are two distinctly separate goals. On the one hand, someone ought to be simply recording data and analyzing/correlating it over time and over hundreds and hundreds of recordings/places to arrive at a large enough set of data that strong theories can be formulated and then tested. On the other, there are a large number of groups who simply want to record experiences as they occur at a personal level. Fine, might even be useful later when compared to the "real" data, but it is not and should never be spoken of as science.