A skeptical investigator’s view
Joe Nickell, an investigative writer for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, says wishful thinking is the impetus behind the current social interest in paranormal communication.
“Most of the paranormal promises something wonderful,” he says. “Ghosts bring the happy message that we don’t really die, UFOs that we are not alone in the universe, psychic power that we can glimpse the future. These are great promises, but it’s just a false hope. I find ghosts fascinating, they are a very romantic idea, but it is not an objective reality.”
Nickell, senior research fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, who visited his first haunted house in the late 1960s, says he “used the name ‘paranormal investigator’ with pride for years, until it started becoming fashionable for every ninny, with no training and no science and no knowledge of what they’re doing to call themselves that.”
Nickell, who has investigated crimes and forgeries as well as reports of supernatural contact, is frustrated that ghost hunting, which he calls a “pseudoscience,” has become so popular.
“This is taking over television, and every little hamlet in America now has its ghost club,” he says. “How likely is it that mainstream scientists can’t find this ghost energy, and these amateurs, with Radio Shack equipment, can? The ghost hunter types are going to bring in all this glitch-prone equipment, which they have no training in how to use. They may know how to operate it, but it’s not made to detect ghosts, and in fact, as far as the best science on this planet can tell, it does not detect ghosts. What utter arrogance it is, that they know better than all of science.”
Nickell notes that the writers of“Haunted Buffalo” recommend using dowsing rods.
“Oh, it just makes you want to cry for the scientific illiteracy between the covers of that book,” he says. “It’s a fool’s errand, and I don’t say it in a mean-spirited way, but I do say it with some exasperation. They are not detecting ghosts.”
—Anne Neville
“How likely is it that mainstream scientists can’t find this ghost energy, and these amateurs, with Radio Shack equipment, can?” asks Joe Nickell, an investigative writer for Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
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