ETPRS Vice President Robert Allen ponders whether science should rethink its criteria for determining how to prove the paranormal exists
I’ve been mulling over some of the problem of paranormal research. Shows like Ghost Hunters

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and the ability to communicate over the net seems to be bringing together those who believe in the paranormal because they have experienced it. The paranormal seems to be growing the way a science should -- up from the grass roots, with lots of younger people forming organizations to investigate the paranormal, and walking about in cemeteries and haunted houses with tape records to catch EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenomena -- believed to be the voices of ghosts), cam corders to tape ghosts, etc. This has set off a growing debate on Net bulletin boards between skeptics who deny the existence of the paranormal and those who maintain its is real.

 
Seems to me the central problem is non-repeatability. Science has as a basis in its philosophy that numerous persons must be able to see the same phenomenon over and over for it to be considered real. That science ought to be the effort of many persons was a great insight of Francis Bacon, a founder of modern science. One may photograph an orb or catch a voice on a tape recorder, but the persistent and justified demand of science is "do it again."
 
Of course ghosts don’t appear on demand or with any regularity or predictability so paranormal researchers have tried to photograph phantoms, record voices and other technological ways to catch them. Even Geiger counters are now being used. However, skeptics remain unconvinced. When presented with EVPs, photographs, videos, etc., that give evidence of ghosts, they often resort to personal attacks. If there is no other way to explain evidence that can’t otherwise be explained away, they call it a hoax and say that the person who recorded the evidence is a fraud and a liar.
 
Paris Flammonde, in one of his books examining photographs of UFOs, lays down what I call Flammonde’s First Postulate: "Photo-graphs are only as reliable as the people who make them."
 
Indeed, since Flammonde wrote back in 1971, the ability to doctor photographs has only become more sophisticated. Anyone who has seen what can be done with computer generation in the movies knows how flawlessly pictures of things that aren’t really there can be produced. The only difficulty for those who would fake something is availability of the technology, and EVPs can be so easily faked that their reliability is entirely a matter of the person who holds the recorder. No amount of recordings of ghosts speaking or appearing seems likely to convince the skeptics -- at least those bitter enough to accuse strangers of falsifying evidence.
 
Obviously, then, the discussion moves from a scientific one to an ethical one, and one in which no absolutes can be found, because the best that any researcher can do is give evidence that he or she is probably honest.
 
So, then the discussion of the possible existence of the paranormal remains a "soft science" -- like sociology or psychiatry. Indeed, it seems to me that what we need is to begin to research ghosts in the way that sociologists and psychologists research living persons -- by noting repeated patterns in their behavior. Doing that, we will have to somewhat ignore the skeptics (who aren’t likely to go away, anyhow) and concentrate on the creation of large data banks of information carefully judged to be as reliable as possible and describing paranormal phenomena in as much detail as possible. In the long haul this might produce some fairly convincing evidence itself for the existence of the paranormal if it turns out that phenomena occur in solid patterns.
GHOSTLY THOUGHTS
Robert Allen, when not performing his duties as vice president and historical researcher of ETPRS, is an English professor.