Open Minded Paranormal Investigations – Things To Consider

Digging into paranormal requires not only time and effort, but also somehow skeptical approach – to be more specific, open minded skepticism is needed. A lot of people explore paranormal topics but they end up confused – there is so much data, and so many different points of views that you might get lost.

The Knowledge Online

I think you know what I’m talking about – you’re reading over books and Web forums, where people discuss their weird paranormal experiences, present different theories and one theory rule out other theories. Some experiences are so weird that they’re hard to believe in, but many people consider them real, updating their point of view to fix the experience someone had. But guess what. It’s not the theory that need to be fixed. Have you ever considered someone might be making up the whole thing?

People online can lie of come up with many, many things – that you will be never able to confirm or deny. Well, even book authors can write about things that never actually happened. This is where your bullshit detector should come to play. While gathering knowledge, never try to update your point of view to fix someone’s story.

• Think, can the story be real according to your current knowledge?
• Do you know any other sources of theory and knowledge, that can proved the story to be real?

If you can’t find any confirmation of the story, by exploring books and sources of information about paranormal, the story might be faked. But, instead of proving it’s faked, it’s wise just to ignore it totally, and move on. Always be careful with the stories that:

• Sounds too impossible, even for paranormal phenomena.
• Are posted without any photos or other form of physical proofs.
• Are posted by people who don’t like to allow others to investigate the case further, or who refuse to give out more details because “they don’t remember everything, it was so long time ago…”

In the Internet you can stumble upon a lot of articles like “in 1992 a group of people took photo of some weird entity” – and guess what, you can read about it, but no one is eager to post photo. Is this article worth reading? Possible… Is it worth believing? Not at all. I know a case of Olesno hospital here in Poland, where many people were mentioning journals of nurses, that included notes of weird paranormal activity. But I never seen photos of these journals, not even a single letter photographed.

I also know a lot of so called “paranormal cases” that were sent to Anomalium team, but when we told people we were interested in investigating the case in the field (meaning: go there, check the house), people  did not even care to answer us. I guess they thought we will post an article online, call the TV and make them famous. Heck, that ain’t gonna happen .

Seek Logical Explanation, Mr. Spock

This leads me to another important thing. No matter if you’re investigating occult, psychic phenomena or some kind of haunting, you need to keep an open, yet skeptical mind, and you need to seek logical explanation. There are many “problems” you might face:

• Natural Causes – Are you aware that the building might settle in the ground, making different noises? Do you know that wooden floor might cause noises? Do you know that most elements of the building are subjects to laws of physics, and make noises? There are hundreds different natural causes for paranormal activity.
• Fraud – People like to fake things because they either want to make stupid joke, or they want to get famous. There are many paranormal cases in history when people were faking things just to get exposure. Faking things is also connected to occult books for example. You might encounter faked documents, for example some people believe that whole Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was created based on faked letter.
• Witnesses – People who witness paranormal might not really see things as they are. People see what they want to see, I remember trivial experience I had: I’ve seen a spider on a wall when I woke up in the middle of the night. But within seconds I realized it’s not spider, but darker area on the wall – I saw spider only because I’m afraid of spiders. You see, witnesses might think they saw things, but in reality – it was their brain who interpreted something quite normal as something extraordinary and paranormal.

Those are only few examples of things you should pay attention to. To deal with them and many other, I have few tips for you:

• Do your research – look for outside proofs for reality of the claims (no matter if you’re trying to find out if someone’s telling the truth, or if the book in question is real). Learn as much as you can
• Don’t trust “I don’t remember” type of people. And don’t trust articles that say “someone made a photo of this” but in the end, there is no photo available anywhere.
• Think if something could happen according to your knowledge – if someone reports weird noises and you know poltergeist can do this, you might consider this possibility. But if someone talks about creating fireballs and throwing them, then I guess this is something that should be consider as bullshit .

Have you ever encountered any extraordinary claims that were too weird, even for you? Have you ever investigated paranormal activities that turned to be faked? Share your stories, please .

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Read the original story at A State of Mind