I am honored to be able to contribute to Beth Darlington’s work in paranormal research.
I work in what might be termed ‘normal research’ in that we review what has been published and assumed to be normal. It is an irony that multi-$1,000,000,000 lawsuits sometimes arise out of such reviews. It means that some areas assumed as normal science may be just as questionable, and usually potentially far more harmful, than even a paranormal hoax. Hollywood may have created the illusion that unexplained phenomena like ghosts and UFOs are powerful and deadly but actual reported cases rarely involve much physical harm. That is in sharp contrast to millions of medical treatments that could turn out to be regarded in the future as barbaric and outmoded, affecting millions of people.
The stakes with unexplained phenomena can be quite high, particularly regarding UFOs. During the Cold War intermediate-range ballistic missiles dramatically lowered the warning time of an attack. The shorter-ranged missiles of concern in the Cuban missile crisis had a very short warning time of a few minutes. It was around this time that British RAF bomber crews during war game exercises demonstrated that they could penetrate United States air defences even with gigantic Vulcan delta winged bombers. A few years earlier the new NORAD defence radars gave a fright when first installed as they detected high altitude solid aerial objects over Greenland ‘with 99% certainty’. There were some tense moments before they realized that the powerful new radars were actually detecting the Moon.
It was for such reasons that the Air Force had launched its Project Blue Book UFO investigations in the 1950s. As a child I read the version, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, by Edward Ruppelt and its explanations of the concept of triangulation are still employed in my work today. Triangulation will be the main subject I’ll contribute to Beth’s work.
Project Blue Book inspired many dramatizations such as TV's The X-Files and a more recent Project Blue Book mini-series. The original book by Ruppelt is available on the web. I will try and summarize its most relevant aspects regarding the concept of triangulation. There has been some attempt by statisticians to quantify triangulation in terms of the independence of measures, weighted by their sensitivity and vice-versa. In practice whether you are a paranormal investigator or medical researcher you are limited by the technology of the day.
Let's start by reviewing a composite UFO example, typical of the more enigmatic cases in Project Blue Book. A common starting point might be a pilot spotting something outside the cockpit window. An experienced pilot would be sensitive to simple mis-identifications such as reflection of the internal light on the cockpit screen, a searchlight, balloon, or the right bright planet Venus in the morning sunrise. A co-pilot viewing the same object adds slightly more information, as it would rule out some internal problem of the pilot’s vision or mentality and corroborates the sighting.
A third cockpit officer might add very little information. By contrast, an untrained passenger with no particular flying experience might add more value than further staff observations. Sitting in the back of the plane a passenger is independent and some distance away from the cockpit, so the difference in angles like might help decide an estimate for the distance of the object from the plane or even whether it is any sort of solid object, light or weather phenomenon. An on-board radar would provide a lot of additional information. Even a mere blip on a radar rules out lighting phenomena and would give some information about speed and distance of a solid object.
Ground radar taking up the same object would add considerably more value mainly because of independence from the plane and a broader perspective in tracking the plane and object over a distance. If more than one radar is involved it literally triangulates the location of the object in three dimensional space. Additional radars are likely to add little more but if the radar operators step out with binoculars and are able to see the plane and its un-identified companion it adds another level of independent observation. An object that looks ‘cigar-shaped’ from side-on might look like ‘a disc’ from below.
If dozens of airport observers see the same thing it would add very little, given the distance. But ironically an untrained civilian stepping out in their backyard looking up to hang up washing, miles away, might add more than additional radar crew simply because they are entirely independent, not having been contacted by the pilots, and being farther away from the ground radar station. But again more of these people in the same area would add little.
And what if it had been a dog that barked at the sky and alerted the person to look up? Normally a UFO sensed by a dog would carry very little weight. Yet the dog in such a case might have value for several reasons. One is that they have different sensitivities to humans and even human-made sensing equipment like radar. Some animals can sense the Earth’s magnetic fields. Dogs can hear high frequency sounds. A whole neighborhood of dogs barking would add little because they lose independence. They might merely be responding to the bark of the first dog.
As a kid I was so inspired by the sorts of examples from Project Blue Book that in my adult research career I recognised Campbell and Fiske's multi-trait, multi-method matrix as a possible way of quantifying these aspects.
We have first of all the sensitivity of the various observers and their dimensions. So for example a radar responds to reflections of the radar signal. Human eyes respond to light. After all this we wish to rule out psychological influences like groupthink, mass hysteria, hoax and fraud. In the example just given a source of fraud might be a newspaper reporter who presents this to the public. These were some of the concerns in the famous Roswell reports. The news may have made no mention for example of a flying saucer or green men but the report may hint at such terms, conjuring up the perception of alien invaders.
In practice despite decades of government monitoring of unidentified flying objects there has been very little threat posed by the sighted phenomena themselves. The biggest most dangerous hoax had been Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast. The real threat has long been the possibility of an unidentified object being identified and turning out to be a genuine nuclear attack. There have been a number of genuine close calls.
I personally got a scare from an unidentified flying object. As an amateur astronomer I often see lights and objects that are unfamiliar. That’s the whole point of the hobby. Satellites are easy to identify as they just look like a star moving against the background of stars. Comets are easy to identify. They look a lot like globular clusters and nebulae, which was what led to Charles Messier’s catalogue of astronomical objects which we use to this day. On the night I got scared for real I could immediately see that it was a comet. The question was identification – which comet? It wasn't really near sunset. I'm not a comet hunter, so it would be unusual for a guy like me to be the first to discover a comet. The potential explanation that scared me was that it might have just come from out of the Sun’s glare so that it had not been a news item, and its massive size and no visible tail might indicate that the tail was pointing our way and it was heading for us!
Even with my backyard telescope I had been able to see the kind of damage a comet could wreak on planet Jupiter, punching earth-sized holes in its clouds. Scientists commonly tell us that a comet or asteroid caused the demise of the dinosaurs. They calculate that it may have been a mass extinction on a repeat cycle of every 50,000,000 years or so - and the last one had occurred around … uh … oh … er … uh … about 50,000,000 years ago. Think about that one.
Who do you call late at night from a backyard in a rural area? I doubted the airports would be much value. So I rang a news desk. They were able to look up their press releases and rang me back to assure me that it was a known comet after all. It just seemed super-bright because I was under the dark country skies.
Another less scary but more impressive UFO sighting happened while driving through the desert area in California. A giant light appeared in the sky, turned blue, and clouds started to emanate from it, like a Biblical vision. As for independent observers, half the cars on the highway pulled over to look. Rather than it turning into the Second Coming it gradually just faded. The next bit of critical independent information we got was from our car radio. The morning newscast announced that thousands of people had witnessed a re-entering rocket launched from Vandenberg air force base. A description fit perfectly well what we had seen. So my UFO experiences used outside observers to falsify scarier hypotheses.
Let's apply what we've discussed now to normal and paranormal investigation. Technology these days has plummeted in price. We often see paranormal investigators on TV with a variety of electro-magnetic devices and we take computers (like the one you are using to read in this text!) for granted. That was not the case, even for Captain Ruppelt, in the 1950s. Computers back then were housed in air-conditioned buildings, staffed by a team in white coats. Now we have lasers, strobe lights, computers, slow motion cameras, data loggers, cloud particle generators, infrared and ultraviolet sensors, digital cameras, and acoustic recording devices all off the shelf from suburban electronics stores.
So the skill now becomes that which we saw with the UFO experience - triangulation. We saw that there are diminishing returns to any single modality. An experienced pilot would be an expensive very skilled and sensitive source of information. A second such pilot is limited in independence because they are perceiving from essentially the same spot and through the same senses. They also view through the ‘lens’ of their experience, being familiar with other planes, stars, lights and meteorological phenomena.
They may or may not be independent of groupthink or mass hysteria, depending on context. If there had been some warning to them that they were being tailed by a hostile fighter plane over some contested airspace they might all suffer from heightened arousal and a bias toward perceiving something as a solid, hence dangerous, object. Clearly the more independent sensitive dimensions which can apply, the stronger our evidence.
In terms of scientific methods in the tradition of Karl Popper our goal is not so much to identify but rather to de-identify. In Popper’s terms we are seeking to falsify a hypothesis. We usually speak of a null hypothesis, which in this case would be ‘we saw nothing unusual’. The falsification would come from the number of independent sources that falsified that null hypothesis. The strongest we could then infer would be – ‘we saw something’.
Only in a Hollywood movie has a UFO sighting confirmed that the object in question was an alien spacecraft. The thousands of reports accumulated since the 1940s have very little that could either confirm or rule out such a hypothesis. There are some motives for false interpretations. A hoaxer might seek to get some notoriety for faking a picture of a UFO or fame as the ‘first human to make contact’.
An Air Force or government might want to cover up even a well-documented sighting, claiming fear ‘of alarming the public. That explanation always sounds weak and phoney when the stronger motive might be merely that their well-funded multi-billion dollar resources don't actually protect the public. They often classified such information. It's only in recent years for example that we read that there had been a nuclear meltdown not far from my hometown and that British Air crews were able to fly gigantic delta-winged nuclear-capable bombers to major U.S. targets such as capital cities.
There are high stakes for some in the ghost-hunting sectors of paranormal investigation. Real estate vendors nowadays may have to disclose even rumors of haunted properties or that a murder had occurred there. It could affect property values, which for individuals could represent their life savings. An occult investigation could involve a diagnosis between serious mental illnesses, neurological disorders, and what concerned persons might regard as demonic possession. Ruling out the demonic possession won’t necessarily create a happy ending in such case. A demon might be exorcised, but a brain tumor might be inoperable and fatal. Which would you rather discover?
The triangulation principles would apply in such cases. The movie the Exorcist portrayed this quite well. The family took young Reagan along to psychiatrists and neurologists who performed the state of the art scanning techniques of the day, ruling out any obvious neurological disorder. The cross and the holy water familiar from vampire movies were the next detection instruments. They are at least a physical stimulus independent of mere interview talk. A mirror is used as a detection device in a vampire movie as the vampire is supposed to have no reflection. If we're trying to rule out the supernatural in these cases each of these tests, the holy water, a cross, a mirror, and preaching the rites of exorcism, would be a way of triangulating and potentially ruling out, hence falsifying, a supernatural explanation.
Can a person claim to be an ‘expert’ in a paranormal field, given that what is being investigated may not exist? How can a person be an expert in non-existence? The answer from Popper’s framework could be to become an expert at ruling out alternative explanations, particularly hoaxes and frauds. They may personally hope to find that there are supernatural beings but their expertise is that of falsification. They try everything to rule out the natural, leaving it un-natural.
A modern ghost hunter might well try to collect the full gamut of information to rule out a hoax, group think, and natural phenomena. Slow motion cameras, infra-red, ultraviolet, night vision, telephoto, full spectrum audio, cloud particle movement, magnetic fields all might corroborate that something actually happened. The null hypothesis in such cases would be either that nothing of consequence was detected or that what was detected was convincingly identified as something following natural laws, even if turning out to be a hoax.
Such investigation in real life has yet to prove much beyond ruling out the null hypothesis. In Hollywood movies the UFO might land on the White House lawn or in the middle of the World Cup and announce ‘take me to your leader’. Ghosts in the movies grab people through walls, smash things, and kill whole generations of occupants of haunted houses. These would be the sorts of things that would be needed to go beyond ruling out of the null hypothesis. In the absence of these they mercifully remain unidentified objects and paranormal phenomena.
In my realm of normal science, by which I mean investigation of activities that have been presented as normal science, often with consequences for millions of people, we end up with similar unexplained phenomena. For example, bipolar disorder and depression are regularly portrayed on television. Even characters like police and FBI agents are now portrayed as having such conditions. Yet the history shows that these diagnostic labels were rare or even non-existent before the 90s. It takes a massive amount of triangulation to rule out alternatives such as anxiety, neurological conditions, gastric influences, puberty hormones, peer pressures, stress or even this just being normal reactions to the individual’s circumstances – a true null hypothesis.
We use a range of rating scales and questionnaires but no readily-available bio-markers have been discovered. All of these correlate with each other so are not very independent or multi-modal. Commonly there is little independence from the company that is funding the clinical trial of its product. Even the academic institutions and the journal in which the trial is published are reliant on the company’s funds, weakening claims of independence.
Often the detection is weak in terms of statistics or is even reported contrary to the statistics. It can become a situation where the fake news of a ‘medical breakthrough’ never has a null hypothesis raised, let alone challenged. Questions have led to lawsuits of multi-billions of dollars and why some people have died horrifically or killed others, for example in school shootings, in the context of the presumed ‘treatment’. No sooner do we get a new ‘magic bullet’ scientistic treatment than a corresponding ‘survivor’ group arises warning others of the damage they feel it has done to them.
As for ghost-hunting, the court cases have unearthed examples of ‘ghost-writing’ that should curl our hair more than any spook in an abandoned mansion. The companies pay a professional marketing research report writing team to compile the data into a draft article. It is then circulated to prestigious professors to glance at and accept money to sign on as the ‘lead author’. Those who actually crunched the numbers and wrote the article are rarely mentioned, hence ‘ghosts’.
In such a current climate, paranormal investigation seems a downright useful and honest use of time.
