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Your Paracast Newsletter — June 26, 2010


Gene Steinberg

Forum Super Hero
Staff member
The Wacky World of Gray Barker Explored on The Paracast

You Can Now Order The Official Paracast T-Shirt: You asked, and we answered. We are now taking orders for The Official Paracast T-Shirt and a collection of other specially customized merchandise. To get your T-Shirt, just pay a visit to our new online store at Welcome to The Official Paracast Store to select your size and place your order. We now also offer a lineup of other premium merchandise featuring The Paracast logo.

Sunday, June 27, 2010: 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 hosts interview long-time researchers in the field, to shed light on the mysteries and complexities of our Universe and the secrets that surround us in our everyday lives.

Join us as we explore the realms of the known and unknown, and hear great stories of the history of the paranormal field in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This Week's Episode: Co-host Greg Bishop presents filmmaker Bob Wilkinson, director of “Shades of Gray,” a documentary about the amazing life of UFO researcher and provocateur Gray Barker. Along for the ride are two of Gray’s close friends, Jim Moseley, editor of Saucer Smear and T. Allen Greenfield. And don’t miss a special cameo from co-host Paul Kimball.

Greg Bishop's blog: UFOMystic Greg Bishop

Allen Greenfield's site: Assembly of the Knowledge and Wisdom of Solomon

Shades of Gray movie site: They Knew Too Much - Home to the film Shades of Gray

Reminder: Don't forget to visit our always-active Discussion Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal (and note our new Internet address): The Paracast Community Forums. We recently completed a major redesign to make our community even easier to access, with more convenience features to boot.

The Problem of Repeatability

The members of The Paracast Community Forums are surely an outspoken lot. They debate everything from the paranormal to music with sometimes extreme levels of intensity, and don’t suffer fools gladly.

Certainly, when someone reports a paranormal experience on the show or in the forums, they will sometimes be pounced upon by skeptics of one sort or another. Where is the evidence? How can you prove you really saw that UFO, floating apparition or whatever it was? Are you sure you’re not making it all up?

But inherent in that sometimes extreme skepticism is the biggest limitation of all in trying to figure out what’s really going on. You see, many of the most compelling events involve just one or two people in situations where they were too frightened, or just not in any position to gather their wits about them and try to acquire some evidence, such as a photo.

Where photos exist, most often they betray the evidence of a witness too startled to actually make an attempt to hold the camera steady or press a zoom button to get a closer look. In the end, though, just about any picture can be easily manipulated in Adobe Photoshop by someone even without extensive training, so how can you accept that form of evidence anyway?

Unless there’s some external evidence, such as a mysterious footprint, or an indication of a heavy object having landed upon a grass field, there’s little left but one’s flawed eyewitness testimony. It would help if a few dozen people were present to confirm what you saw, but that doesn’t happen often enough.

Of course there are tried and true methods trained investigators will use to evaluate eyewitness testimony. Internal consistency, the percipient’s reputation for honesty and reliability. similarity (not too much mind you) in the descriptions in multiple witness encounters help a lot. Some even attempt lie detector tests, but such methods are excluded in courts simply because they are imperfect, and sometimes the most devout liar can be declared truthful.

In many cases, it’s not just a single incident but the collection of many similar reports that indicate something strange is going on. Why would people in different places, having no communication with one another and not having been influenced by press accounts, describe essentially the very same things? Therein lies the core of many paranormal mysteries, and that’s why these things remain so intriguing to many of you.

Unfortunately, the random nature of these occurrences makes it difficult for most scientists to take them seriously. They want something that is always there, or recurs predictably, and you certainly can’t take a ghost and submit it to laboratory analysis.

UFOs, by their usually solid nature, would seem more suitable to scientific analysis. Beyond the eyewitness reports, there are, on occasion, anomalous photos that clearly depict something strange yet do not betray evidence of fakery. Add to that the legendary simultaneous radar and visual sightings and those frustrating bits of trace evidence, and it’s clear there’s a compelling mystery that demands a solution.

But the one thing that science demands is rarely present, and that’s repeatability. Even in places where UFO sightings and other strange occurrences happen fairly often, you cannot always predict any singular event. So scientists can gather their instruments, spend days and nights eagerly waiting for something to occur, and it just won’t happen.

Or maybe, in the end, the forces behind those strange events don’t want us to discover the final answers. The solution is meant to be eternally out of reach, forever elusive, but tantalizing enough for us to continue the search anyway.

Gene Steinberg
Host/Executive Producer
"The Paracast"

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