Classic UFO Cases Explored on The Paracast
Special Announcement: The Paracast is heard Sundays from 6:00 PM until 9:00 PM (Central Time) on the GCN radio network.
The Paracast Humbly Requests Your Donations: Although ads help cover a small part of our expenses, the income they produce is never enough, and we don't want to overwhelm the show with them, so we hope you'll be willing to help fill the gap if you can to help us cover increasing server costs and other expenses -- or perhaps provide a little extra cash for lunch. No contribution is too small (or too large
. We have a Donate link on our home page, below the logo and audio player. There's also a Donate link on our forums, right below our logo. Or just send your PayPal donation direct to sales (at) theparacast (dot) com.
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, November 7, 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 Christopher O'€™Brien presents veteran UFO researcher Ronald S. Regehr, MUFON'€™s Deputy Director of Research, who will recount over 50 years of on-site research into some of the major sightings of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Christopher O'Brien's Site: Home - Our Strange Planet
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.
Lighten Up and Use Your Brain
By Greg Bishop
A goodly portion of the audience who listen to paranormal radio shows are seemingly afflicted with a sort of self-induced cognitive dissonance. They are interested in a sort of verifiable proof that UFOs, ghosts, ESP, and other little-understood facets of our existence exist and might be cornered in a laboratory, but they will only accept a certain kind of evidence, and leave no wiggle room in an area that is as wiggly as can be.
They seem to be one step away from the fundamentalist skeptics, who rail against all of these phantoms that stubbornly refuse to go away, despite the insistence of rigid sorts of logic and 19th century concepts of scientific scrutiny that declare they should not exist.
Most fans of shows like Coast to Coast or countless similarly-themed TV shows are interested solely in paranormal porno. The weirder or more scary the story, the more interested they are. This may be exciting, but it doesn’t advance human knowledge. Simply believing in the paranormal is one-dimensional and incredibly limiting. It’s fun, but it’s also gets pretty dumb and boring after awhile.
My friend John Shirley calls himself a “skeptical believer.” Perhaps this is the label that fits the subject. We used to have spirited debates about everything from UFOs to crop circles to Uri Geller. Once in awhile, we might even admit that the other had a good point. In his opinion, if any aspect of any paranormal occurrence or account or personality was found to be false or questionable, it rendered everything connected with that case or person worthless. I don’t think that is how weirdness works, or more importantly, it may not be how we should examine the paranormal.
It seems that our brushes with the unknown are almost always defined by personal interpretations, which may not be easy to express, or put in exact language that works for others who have not had the same experience.
Maybe science can change to include the sort of variegated phenomena we are looking at. The Society For Scientific Exploration (SSE) is an organization of scientists who conduct experiments in ESP and look at evidence for such forbidden subjects as Bigfoot and cold fusion, and publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal. They will just as often find little or inconclusive evidence for the phenomena under review as they do anything that might tend to support it. If there is little convincing evidence in a particular experiment, the editorial policy is often to conclude that either more study is needed, or that another approach may work better. “Failed” experiments may be due to absence of evidence under a particular set of controls, not evidence of absence of the entire phenomenon.
The SSE publishes a quarterly review of research called “The Journal Of Scientific Exploration.” In a recent issue (Vol. 24, #1) Chinese researcher Dong Shen submitted a paper entitled “Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness.” He is part of a team conducting experiments in the apparent transportation of matter using mental power alone. Unless he is being fooled by his subjects, or lying, or both (favorite excuses of fundamentalist skeptics to dismiss paranormal research) something extraordinary may be happening in a few Chinese laboratories. Others should try the experiments with different and stricter protocols.
My very rough statement about “how weirdness works” may be refined by a comment from Shen’s article:
“The problem of repeatability may be solved if we can get enough qualified practitioners to do the experiments. We can repeat the experiments as many times as we want, but not in one day, and not on demand.”
Shen is pleading here for a new way of doing science. Just because an effect cannot be repeated by anyone at any time does not make it necessarily false. We should keep this in mind when listening to seemingly outrageous claims. Perhaps they are not being made in a way that we would like to hear. If we are interested enough in a subject, we should learn to trust our own critical thinking and take the time to do a little research, instead of waiting for someone to serve it to us piping hot on a pretty plate, and we should be prepared to be disappointed, rather than unleashing vitriol at someone or their material if it does not immediately conform to an inflexible idea of what is acceptable.
The Paracast Copyright 1999-2010 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
Special Announcement: The Paracast is heard Sundays from 6:00 PM until 9:00 PM (Central Time) on the GCN radio network.
The Paracast Humbly Requests Your Donations: Although ads help cover a small part of our expenses, the income they produce is never enough, and we don't want to overwhelm the show with them, so we hope you'll be willing to help fill the gap if you can to help us cover increasing server costs and other expenses -- or perhaps provide a little extra cash for lunch. No contribution is too small (or too large
. We have a Donate link on our home page, below the logo and audio player. There's also a Donate link on our forums, right below our logo. Or just send your PayPal donation direct to sales (at) theparacast (dot) com.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, November 7, 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 Christopher O'€™Brien presents veteran UFO researcher Ronald S. Regehr, MUFON'€™s Deputy Director of Research, who will recount over 50 years of on-site research into some of the major sightings of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Christopher O'Brien's Site: Home - Our Strange Planet
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.
Lighten Up and Use Your Brain
By Greg Bishop
A goodly portion of the audience who listen to paranormal radio shows are seemingly afflicted with a sort of self-induced cognitive dissonance. They are interested in a sort of verifiable proof that UFOs, ghosts, ESP, and other little-understood facets of our existence exist and might be cornered in a laboratory, but they will only accept a certain kind of evidence, and leave no wiggle room in an area that is as wiggly as can be.
They seem to be one step away from the fundamentalist skeptics, who rail against all of these phantoms that stubbornly refuse to go away, despite the insistence of rigid sorts of logic and 19th century concepts of scientific scrutiny that declare they should not exist.
Most fans of shows like Coast to Coast or countless similarly-themed TV shows are interested solely in paranormal porno. The weirder or more scary the story, the more interested they are. This may be exciting, but it doesn’t advance human knowledge. Simply believing in the paranormal is one-dimensional and incredibly limiting. It’s fun, but it’s also gets pretty dumb and boring after awhile.
My friend John Shirley calls himself a “skeptical believer.” Perhaps this is the label that fits the subject. We used to have spirited debates about everything from UFOs to crop circles to Uri Geller. Once in awhile, we might even admit that the other had a good point. In his opinion, if any aspect of any paranormal occurrence or account or personality was found to be false or questionable, it rendered everything connected with that case or person worthless. I don’t think that is how weirdness works, or more importantly, it may not be how we should examine the paranormal.
It seems that our brushes with the unknown are almost always defined by personal interpretations, which may not be easy to express, or put in exact language that works for others who have not had the same experience.
Maybe science can change to include the sort of variegated phenomena we are looking at. The Society For Scientific Exploration (SSE) is an organization of scientists who conduct experiments in ESP and look at evidence for such forbidden subjects as Bigfoot and cold fusion, and publish their findings in a peer-reviewed journal. They will just as often find little or inconclusive evidence for the phenomena under review as they do anything that might tend to support it. If there is little convincing evidence in a particular experiment, the editorial policy is often to conclude that either more study is needed, or that another approach may work better. “Failed” experiments may be due to absence of evidence under a particular set of controls, not evidence of absence of the entire phenomenon.
The SSE publishes a quarterly review of research called “The Journal Of Scientific Exploration.” In a recent issue (Vol. 24, #1) Chinese researcher Dong Shen submitted a paper entitled “Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness.” He is part of a team conducting experiments in the apparent transportation of matter using mental power alone. Unless he is being fooled by his subjects, or lying, or both (favorite excuses of fundamentalist skeptics to dismiss paranormal research) something extraordinary may be happening in a few Chinese laboratories. Others should try the experiments with different and stricter protocols.
My very rough statement about “how weirdness works” may be refined by a comment from Shen’s article:
“The problem of repeatability may be solved if we can get enough qualified practitioners to do the experiments. We can repeat the experiments as many times as we want, but not in one day, and not on demand.”
Shen is pleading here for a new way of doing science. Just because an effect cannot be repeated by anyone at any time does not make it necessarily false. We should keep this in mind when listening to seemingly outrageous claims. Perhaps they are not being made in a way that we would like to hear. If we are interested enough in a subject, we should learn to trust our own critical thinking and take the time to do a little research, instead of waiting for someone to serve it to us piping hot on a pretty plate, and we should be prepared to be disappointed, rather than unleashing vitriol at someone or their material if it does not immediately conform to an inflexible idea of what is acceptable.
The Paracast Copyright 1999-2010 Making The Impossible, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!