"When a man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard.” – Lakota proverb
Nature may be an important key to discovery of and connection with the alleged paranormal. Call it whatever you want... portals, thinning of the veil, other dimensions, etc.
The explanations that attempt to take a rational yet skeptical opinion on the perceived paranormal are mainly centered on events reported to be happening "inside," that is, indoors of some kind of building, usually old and abandoned, with connected stories about them containing tragic events of a sort. Why is it that nature is seldom included in the equation?
I've personally witnessed strange occurrences in numerous buildings while doing investigations, however the ones that stand out the most and really do not stand up to usual parapsychological explanations are the ones that happen outdoors. Here there are no walls to reflect sound, no humidity affecting temperature changes, no chance of electrical systems bleeding into the indoor environment, no effects of infrasound affecting our observations from low frequency vibration that affects our eyes and induces the appearance of shadow people and movement out of the corner of our eyes. Just the very idea of being inside a building acts upon our primal fears and activates a survival mode of heightened emotions and "top-down" physical reactions of a subconscious source.
The point of this is that as much as we might think we have an open mind during our investigations, deep down in our subconscious our inherent beliefs lie waiting to unknowingly affect our observational decisions. In other words, the very idea that a place is perceived as haunted depends not on objective observation but on something other than the physical characteristics of the location.
If we take our investigation outdoors, things change. Once again, I'm not referring to the typical civil war battlefield or places like that, but rather areas that have no associated stories. Yet, these are places waiting for their story to be told. The following are a few personal occurrences that I have no explanation for.
While walking a considerable distance in a huge ecological preserve in Florida, my wife and I paused for a brief rest. My wife was holding a phonetic generator device. She was being annoyed by a well-known and tenacious "yellow fly" common to the area, known for its nasty bite if given the opportunity. With both her digital audio recorder and phonetic generator running, and being experienced to know that documentation is always important in paranormal investigation, she mentioned aloud what she was thinking, stating "there are yellow flies here and they bite, and so I am going to get up." The phonetic generator which was totally silent up to this point immediately followed her statement voicing the words that sounded like "those bite!" Needless to say we were shocked. I have two thoughts about this occurrence: (1) odds are it most likely was an interesting coincidence (2) there are a total of six phonemes that were randomly put together to form the two word reply, a reply that most definitely indicated an intelligent reaction. One would think there is no rational explanation for this.
Here is the text to six phoneme breakdown:
those = ð əʊ z
bite = b aɪ t
Another time while walking in a segregated cemetery where white people were buried in a separate section from black people (a sad statement of the times), I was attempting to document names on old grave markers to do historical research to aid in a story I was hoping to write about the prejudice that led to this separation of cemetery sections, and the possibility that the current busy and traveled highway dividing the two sections may even have been laid right over existing graves that were never relocated. I began documenting aloud on my digital voice recorder my observations about not intending any disrespect by being there. There was a heavy atmosphere of sadness in this location and I felt shame for how the buried dead had been treated. Some of the people who were buried didn't even have identification on the crude stone markers. Speaking this observation aloud, the phonetic generator spoke the words, "THATS NOT FOR YOU." That is a lot of words (12 phonemes) for this device to emit at one time. It usually constructs single words having no contextual reference. It doesn't speak in sentences. Again, no rational explanation is apparent.
Here is the text to 12 phoneme breakdown:
that = ð æ t
s = e s
not = n ɒ t
for = f ɜ:
you = j u:
Now I will explain why I don't think that the above mentioned replies were paranormal in nature. This is due totally to the nature of the device itself and its operating specifications and capabilities.
Phonetic generators do not "choose words", rather they assemble words from each basic phoneme contained in the word. (Phonemes are distinct units of sound produced that when combined, form speech/words). It is important to note that the device specs state the odds of saying a contextually correct word are 1 in 71. The manufacturer of the device makes no claims as to spirit communication or results viewed as evidence of paranormal claims, so why does anyone else?
A brilliant engineer associate of mine says this of the phonetic device functionality: "Environmental conditions can be assigned to some channels but the condition itself does not cause the message, rather there is also hardware assigned to those channels which detect the environmental changes then close switch contacts (relays or opto-isolators) that actually cause the speech synthesizer to give the related message. That is what is missing from "ghost talker" devices; they lack any hardware to allow a spirit to interface with the speech synthesizer in any way."
(When I speak about what is needed to advance the field of paranormal research, it includes testing a hypothesis. This particular electrical engineer did just that, and he relayed his efforts to me). "I actually addressed this in an experiment about 3 years ago, building a sensor array using both static and EMF sensors arranged in a manner that any spirit could cause a speech synthesizer to speak phonemes assigned to each sensor. As each sensor was activated the synthesizer was setup to immediately speak the phoneme, thus any spirit could hear what was being generated so a feedback was possible. The theory was that after a brief learning curve, a spirit could learn by hearing which sensor would create which sound and thus build words. The system also recorded activations so once learned, time was not really a factor; the message generated could be played back with all phonemes assembled in order and connected together like normal speech.
The end result was failure. This array was placed in a location where supposedly communication via EVP was commonly reported. It was active 24/7 for a 30 day period (that is no typo.... 30 days). In the end, there were only a few scattered activations, likely attributed to people who came near the sensor array. Analysis further revealed no concerted effort made to create any speech, nor was any activation made following an initial random hit. One would expect that if a spirit caused a sound, curiosity if nothing else would cause it to activate other sensors.
This casts doubt on any form of electronic spirit communication. If you logically think this out, it makes sense that if a spirit was presented an opportunity to use something this user friendly to them, and they did not do so, why on Earth would they be expected to actually go into a spirit box and manipulate circuitry in a manner to make a message? Such action would require the spirit actually have an understanding of electronic theory and physics to accomplish instead of just activating a sensor. It makes no sense if they had this ability that they couldn't figure out how to manipulate a sensor which was actually designed to be manipulated...."
A final note: most of my ghost devices are for sale. Anyone interested in a good deal?
- MoonJoey
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