Freakin' in the Fun House Part 3

I figured that one of the best ways to "bone up" was by interviewing a variety of people who just might be considered knowledgeable in an area where knowledge was both thin and open to debate. So I compiled a list of folks, both pro and con, and began calling.

Most of the people I talked with made for pretty good, solid interviews. Peter Davenport of the National Center for UFO Reporting was kind of fun as a combination of cheer leader ("They are definitely here!") and easy conversationalist about the topic. John Timmerman of the Center for UFO Studies provided a surprisingly open ended philosophical discussion of the topic. In some kooky way, his wife also made the call endearing by her odd interruptions as she was preparing to leave on a trip. We may be getting visited by men from Mars, but the home front is never far away.

Then I finally had to make the obligatory phone call to Joe Nickell at The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Suddenly, the process got weird.

The first thing I couldn't help but notice was that The Committee used a computer switchboard and then a receptionist. Everybody else took their own calls, for crying out loud. In fact, nobody else had the money for this kind of set up. So I guess things must be pretty profitable on the nay saying venue.

Then, once I finally got to chat with Nickell, I found myself getting a little annoyed. Aside from the fact that his opening joke made no particular sense (he insisted that people confused his name with Terry Nichols of the Oklahoma City Bombing - a connection that I didn't want to waste time thinking about), I also kept getting the odd impression that since I was a reporter, I must also be an idiot. OK, sure, the two often do seem to come in tandem, but enough already.

Then he had the odd habit of trying to shift the conversation into a debunking of all conspiracy theories concerning the Kennedy Assassination. Since I wasn't interviewing him about anything that had to do with that day in Dallas, his repeated sliding into this area never made any sense. Besides, like virtually every other God fearing American alive, I am quite aware that it was a conspiracy (a pretty oblivious one, I might add). So how dumb does he think I am?

Sure, I got a couple of freaky high points out of him. Nickell went on at great length about how most Americans are scientifically misinformed and blamed it all on too much emphasis on the Humanities and not enough on Science. I was already quite aware that Mr. Nickell's own Ph.D was in English, which last I checked was in the Humanities. Likewise, his own scientific background is quite limited (mostly pertaining to issues concerning document verification - his real area of expertise).

Then he got into unloading about Stanton Friedman. This started out in response to my questions about Roswell (though I was more versed in the investigative work of Kevin Randle rather than Friedman). But for Joe, it was suddenly personal. He began a long rant about how Friedman had the nerves to call himself a scientist, to pose as some one versed in scientific matter, to even dare call himself a "Nuclear physicist." Then there was a long pause. Presumably lawyers danced through Nickell's head. "...Well, he is a nuclear physicist but he only has a Master's degree."

Before this interview, I had my doubts about CSICoP. After this interview, all doubts were removed. I don't know who is actually paying the bills for these guys, but they are not getting their monies worth. These white boys are a pack of total nimrods.

Freakin' in the Fun House Part 2

The tape that Victor was peddling was the alleged interrogation of a supposed captured extraterritorial at Areas 51. Victor's claim was that he had smuggled it out of the facility and wanted to make it public because he was appalled at the government's treatment of the ET. Due to the top secret nature of the material, he had to maintain a high level of secrecy concerning himself and the background to the tape. He also was hoping to cut a deal for world wide release via a major video distributor with lots of moola for a tape that, if real, would actually be federal property and not legally usable for commercial purposes (a point that no body, including the distributor, ever raised).

Since a super-secret security organization working for a hyper-secret wing of the utterly secret invisible government was searching for both him and the tape, Victor was unwilling to give the press his name and could only be interviewed by a phone connected to an encryption system. Due to the alleged dangerous nature of his predicament, the encryption was the finest piece of technology that was available at Radio Shack (for approximately $20). He also had a fondness for using pay phones located in Nevada.

Maybe I'm just a cynic, but I kind of suspected that these security precautions would in no way misled the NSA. Nor the CIA. Maybe, just maybe, it would stall the FBI. I have heard that some G-Men still have trouble accessing e-mails.

I did suspect that the whole smoke-and-mirror show was designed to set the stage for the press. Unfortunately, I was the only press at this point and the magazine I worked for wasn't offering money for the story. For the publicist, this wasn't a problem. But we were not so sure about the boys on the other end of the arrangements.

A strange group of people had gathered around the tape even though they appeared to have no actual contractual connections to the material. One was the host of a national late night radio show. The other was a UFO investigator who kept insisting that they had named a mountain peak after him near Area 51. Behind the scene, they were increasingly dictating terms to the pr person though no one seemed too clear about what authority they actually had in the matter.

Negotiations for the video release was going on with an established movie company. As part of the deal, they were hoping to get a special effects artist lined up to swear that the production could not have been the result of make up or FX work. It was becoming obvious why they wanted the person I was dealing with to be the publicist She had began her career as an assistant to one of the most acclaimed special effect/make up artists in the business. They wanted him to be in the program. She was their contact to woe him.

There was, perhaps, one slight problem. Neither the publicist nor the make up master were sold on the tape's authenticity. Instead, they were privately guessing that it was a puppet (an opinion that I shared).

While the negotiations for the video wore on, I began researching both the material and the people. I figured I better find out a little more about what I had just gotten myself into.

TO BE CONTINUED

Freakin' in the Fun House - Part 1

Back in the mid-1990s, I was (briefly) the exclusive European correspondent for a news story about the capture of an extraterritorial alien. More precisely, I had (very briefly) the inside track for interviews with various people who claimed to have been directly and/or indirectly connected with a videotape purportedly smuggled out of the alleged Area 51.

And if you think I just used a lot of qualifiers, just wait till you hear the rest of the story. All names have been dropped to protect both the guilty and the chumps.

At the time, I had been writing free lance film articles for a British science fiction magazine. Technicality, I was considered a foreign correspondent, even though my old trench coat was the only British item involved in the job. Everything else was an easy telecommunicate from Ohio (though keeping up with the time differential was often a bear).

At the time, the editor for the magazine's American office was routinely in contact with a woman who was the agent for an actor who had a major recurring role on a popular science fiction series (a lot of this story does indeed have a friend-of-a-friend quality). Their relationship was just chatty enough that the agent felt comfortable asking the editor for help with a problem. The agent had just agreed to help coordinate PR for the impending release of an odd videotape and did we know anyone who knew anything about UFOs?

I got nominated primarily because no one else wanted to deal with the issue. I had a passing interest in the subject but was way out of date with the information. However, the magazine was preparing for the premiere of the series Dark Skies and I was already having to do some basic research....So I accepted the nomination.

Besides, I figured that it would be good for laughs. Kind of like a carny show.

Admittedly, one of the first problems was the provenance of the video. The story was that the provider of the tape had worked at Area 51 (a claim never substantiated) who had smuggled the tape (by means never described) out of the Dreamland facility. For security reasons, the man was only known to the people preparing the tape's release by a code name and even the code name was not to be provided to me or any other member of the press.

When the agent told me all of this, I took a guess and asked her if the code name was Victor. There was a moment's silence on the phone.

"How did you know that?"

"Just an educated hunch."

Victor had been the name of a captured alien in the John Lear hoax a few years earlier. I was wondering if there might have been a connection.

At the time I only had a passing familiarity with the John Lear/Bill Cooper material, but everything was already feeling like some sort of half baked cross between that warped tale and the alien autopsy hoax a few years earlier on Fox.

Which was OK. I was definitely looking for a side show and I was pretty convinced that I just found the way to the freaks tent....

TO BE CONTINUED

Search For the Great Flying Whatsit

I saw my first flying triangle as a child. Actually, it has been my only flying triangle. I'm not even sure what I really saw. It was less a sighting and seemed more like a perceptual glitch.

This was back in the mid-1960s (probably 1964) and a wave of UFO sightings had been taking place around the country. This was back in the days when newspapers and TV stations actually reported such sightings and the news accounts were extremely inspiring to youthful imaginations. So a group of us kids in my neighborhood spent a perfectly lovely summer afternoon enjoying fresh air (we still had that back in those days too) and scanning the sky for anything that we thought was moving.

That is when I spotted a solid black triangle shape moving like a silent silhouette against the pristine blue of the day. Though it seemed to have been high up in the sky, I distinctly saw what appeared to have a single bright red light at its center. The vision lasted barely 5 seconds and then it vanished just as quickly as it had appeared. It was the first time I truly appreciated the phase “out of the blue.”

At the time, I thought maybe I had something in my eye because the whole experience certainly didn't seem exactly real. Likewise, I undoubtedly had my mind focused on seeing a UFO, and obviously my imagination did not want to be disappointed. But oddly enough, I was looking for those saucer-shaped thingies that I was use to seeing in the movies. I had never heard of flying triangles. Somehow it didn't make sense and I wouldn't know anything about this form until many years later (not until the early 1980s).

So what did I see? If I were a debunker, I could comfortably write the whole thing off as a combination of too much television and too little lemonade. What else do you expect from a bunch of dumb kids on a hot summer day who probably should be doing something more with their time than wasting it on a wild goose chase into phony land. Besides, we were kids, so our opinions don't count and it is just anecdotal data anyway, so go blow junior.

On the other hand, I know that I actually did see it. It wasn't that hot of a day. I like to think of myself as being reasonably intelligent. There really wasn't anything in my eye and I knew that at the time. Besides, I wasn't alone. Two of the other kids saw it as well.

But since it wasn't saucer shaped, we couldn't be sure what it was and were mainly left scratching our heads. It simply wasn't the shape we were seeking and it is often amazing the ease with which we forget something that doesn't fit our expectations.

EVP

What exactly is a EVP? The mystery of Electronic Voice Phenomena has long flown under the paranormal radar. Yet it does exist, which is something I can state from first hand experience.

I wish it didn't. For whatever reason, it is a phenomena that genuine spooks me. I think I was exposed to an episode of the old Twilight Zone at too impressible of an age (it was the one concerning phone calls from the dead). The thought gives me the willies and I often think twice before picking up the phone.

For those unfamiliar with EVP, they are voices (and other sounds of unknown origins) picked up on tape equipment or other forms of audio amplifiers. Sometimes they appear to be the voices of the dead and increasingly ghost hunters have used recorders as a mean of attempting to communicate with the great beyond. Other times they appear to be any number of other forms of disembodied voices, with one web site purporting to have recordings of angels singing (though one of the tapes sound more like Alvin and the Chipmunks played backwards).

Though not widely discussed, the phenomena is well known among recording engineers. Since all sort of radio waves create various forms of interference, it is usually a safe bet that the noise in the background of the tape has more to do with a local radio station rather than another dimension. But every so often, something strange occurs that is not easily explainable.

My own most impressive experience took place when I was once setting up the A/V system in an auditorium for a lecture one night. It was early and only I and the photographer were in the auditorium at the time. The event was a special presentation for a museum and it was a "high pressure" evening and everything was expected (actually, ordered was more the word) to go without a hitch.

The photographer was unloading his equipment at the back of the auditorium while I was just start to set up the PA system. Suddenly, a voice came full blast over the PA speakers, calling the photographer's name. The voice bore an uncanny resemblance to the director of the institution, who at the time was having dinner with selected guests at a restaurant on the other side of town. The director was infamous for his highly neurtic behavior patterns and extremely rough shod handling of employees. So I wasn't surprised to find that the photographer had broken out sweat.

I told the guy not to worry, that it was just a freak coincident caused by the PA system and radio interference. I didn't bother to tell him that the system wasn't on at the time and that there was no way this could have happened. I had a strange feeling that he didn't need to hear the truth at the moment.

Sometimes you just let sleeping dogs lie.

The Aliens Are Coming Part Two

A simple glance through the vendors room of any UFO convention would seemingly confirm that we are on a slippery ride to an irrational hell. Palm readers dressed in Star Trek uniforms sit demurely in a booth right next to a middle-aged housewife with a pyramid on her head. A professional Bigfoot hunter lectures on how he spends his weekend afternoons combing the woods for animal droppings while another speaker expounds upon her telepathic communications with extra-terrestrials. Through out the convention hall there are the inevitable tables filled with books and tapes devoted to the wilder ravings of the right-wing militia movement. Fliers advertise a meeting focused on the war against the New World Order, with a special treat being a video presentation of the new TV show Millennium.
The scene plays like a suburban version of Bedlam as the room fills with rumors about three black helicopters parked at a nearby airfield. Ironically, the rumors turn out to be true since the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration uses these vehicles in an effort to locate marijuana farms in the surrounding countryside.
The current state of American reality is stocked with enough weirdness to keep the X-Files department in business well into the next century. That may be one of the reasons why many people are seeking an answer for the unexplained from the world of the inexplicable. Like a religion, much of the belief in UFOs is based on faith. One either believes or disbelieves and there are few agnostics to be found.
"We have come a long way from the Sixties where God was dead and there is a lot of spiritual seeking right now," is how Paul Barrosse explains so much fascination with the topic.
Barrosse is the executive producer of Strange Universe, an internationally syndicated daily TV program on everything from UFOs to merely odd occurrences. He calls the show's venue the Millennium beat and proudly wears his press pass to any crop circle in sight.
"We think that it is probably in some way people looking at the Millennium and having to take an accounting of themselves and finding a better definition of their universe."
For Barrosse, the glass is half full and the dividing line between spiritual faith and scientific evidence is primarily an Old Age assumption quickly falling to a New Age sense of heightened enlightenment. Barrosse doesn't necessarily believe in every subject that his show covers, but he likes to keep an open mind.
"I don't know if you would call it Sixties fallout or what," he continues. "But we got introduced to a lot of alternative philosophies and a lot of barriers broke down and a lot of groovy subjects entered the mainstream."
But for others, the glass is half empty and layered with rot.
"The paranormal makes grandiose promises," asserts Nickell. "For example, if ghosts exists then obviously we live on after we die. It makes a promise of immortality...And extra-terrestrials would promise that we are not alone in the universe."
Unfortunately, there are no extra-terrestrials. Right?
Unless you happen to believe in Roswell. It has become the common touchstone of the modern debate as well as the recurring reference point for everything from The X-Files to The Rock. Whatever happened in 1947 in New Mexico (and something major did actually happen), it has snowballed into the greatest article of faith since transfiguration.
"We know that something did crash at Roswell," concedes Nickell. But he is a firm believer in the Project Mogul theory, which was a top secret military project attempting to detect possible atomic tests in the Soviet Union. According to this theory, the object that landed near Roswell was essentially a balloon and a radar reflector.
Oddly enough, there is no real evidence to support the Project Moguel theory, we only have the Air Force's word on it. Likewise, extensive first-hand eyewitness testimony present a different picture, including tape transcripts and signed affidavits from many key military personnels who were based at the Strategic Air Command post stationed at Roswell Air Base. Or at least that is the surprisngly impressive case made by Kevin Randle in his books on the incident.
This account supports the notion that a shuttle-type vehicle of presumed extra-terrestrial origin crashed for unknown reasons. Contrary to popular folklore, the ship was not a flying saucer but rather a long fuselage with bat-like wings. Likewise, the dead occupants were not the so-called greys. Instead, they were small built humanoids with slightly enlarged eyes and an unusual skin texture. Several of the eyewitnesses repeatedly described the skin as being like that of a reptile rather than a mammal.
Wait a minute. What was that about an impending invasion by man-eating nasties? You would think that somebody would want to spill the beans on an event of such magnitude.
"If I were in the government, I wouldn't fess up," says Timmerman. "I wouldn't make a public statement that there were UFOs. The world today is too preoccupied with its mutual annihilation and we are not prepared to handle such a development."
Timmerman's organization was originally created by Dr. J. Allen Hynek. Hynek was the dean of the Department of Astronomy at Northwestern University, the scientific advisor for the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book and the technical advisor for Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (whose title is taken from Hynek's own classification system for UFO reports). Though Hynek was employed by Project Blue Book in order to explain away UFO sightings, he became a strong believer in the phenomena.
Both Timmerman and his wife were close friends of Hynek. As the public information officer for the center, Timmerman has made a strong effort to solve the mystery that left his late colleague baffled.
"I have 800 to 1,000 recorded interviews from people all over who have had these experiences that are so similar in character that I am so convinced that this is real. If it isn't, we need to do serious studies on the human brain and the minds of people, because they are all thinking the same thing."
Which means that many people are asking the same questions in a desperate hope that the truth is out there...somewhere.

The Aliens Are Coming Part One

(Back in 1996, I wrote the following for a British magazine. However, my editor thought I was nuts for doing the article and was busy getting rid of all of the American writers from the staff. So the piece never saw the light of day. Though some of the information is outdated, I feel the need to present it. Call me stubborn.
-WK)

Man-eating reptiles from another planet are preparing to invade the earth. Or at least that is the hot buzz on one of the numerous computer bulletin boards devoted to UFOs. But the rude diners from the Draco star system have better get in line. By some accounts, our world is one of the busiest stops on the intergalactic superhighway. Simply everyone who is anyone is landing here these days.
"We have visitors on this planet," insists Peter B. Davenport, the executive director of the National Center for UFO Reporting in Seattle, Washington. "There is very little remaining doubt."
The center maintains a 24-hour telephone hot line for UFO reports from all corners of North America and has accumulated thousands of eye witnessed statements.
"I think we are observing," adds John Timmerman of the Center for UFO Studies, "something we cannot explain or understand coming from a place we cannot imagine for reasons that are beyond our imagination."
Which is to say: It's a mystery. But long before such movies and TV shows as Independence Day, The X-Files and Dark Skies renewed public interest in low flying things that go bump in the night, the UFO mystery was deeply entrenching itself into the global sub-conscious.
Since the end of World War II, strange lights and bizarre flying crafts have been spotted on every continent. Though often dismissed as misobservations of such natural phenomena as St. Elmo's Fire and nocturnal geese, UFOs have also resulted in a variety of well documented reports from surprisingly reliable sources. Consider:
The North American Air Defense Command have actually tracked fast-moving objects that were whizzing in and out of the upper atmosphere and that were not behaving in a manner resembling either a satellite or a meteor.
Both a pilot and his Cessna plane vanished off the coast of Australia when he encountered an object that was tracked, and then lost, on radar. The pilot's last radio message was that he was being followed by something that was not an aircraft.
In a recent interview, ex-astronaut Gordon Cooper revealed that he and several other jet pilots once encountered a mysterious saucer-shaped ship in the desert near Edwards Air Force base.
But such provable (or at least plausible) allegations pale next to the nebulous twilight realm of myth and folklore that has evolved around the UFO mystery. Legends abound, from tales about massive underground alien bases to terrifying accounts of abductions. In some stories, the government is secretly in league with the critters as they willingly surrender the planet in a fool-hardy pursuit of advance technology.
Either way, everyone agrees that the U.S. government is keeping something secret. Even the government goes along with this since they have repeatedly denied access to a large volume of material on the subject. The Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency have all spent years actively gathering information on UFOs. But the small sampling of documents which have been released are more laundered than the expletives deleted from the Watergate tapes of Richard Nixon.
"The government didn't tell the full truth," admits Joe Nickell while discussing a few of the more infamous cases in UFO mythology. Nickell is a research fellow for The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He is an expert on the subject of forgery and his work has been crucial in the debunking of the original Majestic-12 documents.
"We pretty well know," he continues, "that whenever there is secrecy, what happens is that it is a breeding ground just as damp, moist places may be a breeding ground for all kinds of horrible creatures. This type of breeding ground produces rumors, speculations, fantasies. People come out of the woodwork: pathological liars and raconteurs, the kind of people who like to sit back and spin some tall tales."
If some Ufologists are guilty of believing anything, then Nickell could be accused of disbelieving in everything. Aside from his work for CSICoP, Nickell is also a member of the Council for Media Integrity and is a vocal critic of such shows as The X-Files and Dark Skies. In the Council's viewpoint, fun is fun but the current crop of media induced paranoia may be steering people into a new Dark Age.
"We are becoming two nations," Nickell warns. "One that is scientifically literate...and another that is not educated or informed in that way."
For the Council, a program like The X-Files gives false credence to old hoaxes while using pseudo-scientific babble to confuse the viewer into accepting various conspiracy theories that flies in the face of any well-balanced, rational thinking.

First Time For Everybody

The world is a pretty straight forward place and material reality is all there is to it. Or so I tried to remind myself the first time I encountered a ghost. Unfortunately, the thought was neither convincing nor reassuring.

Instead, I knew that I was witnessing something that was not scientifically suppose to exist but which was there no matter what and it didn't appear at all interested in what science had to say one way or the other. It also didn't seem very interested in the profoundly stupid wide-eyed look on my face. I have since learned that this is a common facial expression when people are having their first "experience."

A long time ago (longer than I care to admit), I was a film student at Ohio University. Yes, the infamous Athens, the town with almost as many folk tales as bars. If half of the ghostly stories about Athens were true, you would expect to meet headless ghouls at every street corner.

In truth, many of the tales have to do with youthful imaginations and a common love for telling creepy tales. One year, I lived in a house rumored to be haunted. The proof, it was said, was the way doors mysteriously swung open by themselves. It was true that various doors did just that. However, this had more to do with the fact that there wasn't a right angle anywhere in the house and the only mystery was figuring out how to keep any of the doors shut due to the way they were all hung.

Many tales about Athens has less to do with spirits and more to do with a unique combination of high ground water, shoddy construction, bad wiring and a complete lack of housing inspectors.

Which may be why I had ignored the rumors about the haunting in the hallways of the film department. Live and learn is all I can say.

Some people claimed to have heard the sounds of footsteps and weeping in the hallway outside of the editing room. A few reported odd noises late at night on the office side of the building. A couple of braver souls had actually attempted to trace the sounds only to find nothing. Several debunkers insisted that it was simply the sound of the stream pipes in the building. I had sided with the stream pipe theory. I should state right now that I have been known to be wrong.

How wrong became apparent when I was staying late one night watching a film in the screening room. It was after midnight and no one else was on the floor except me. I had finished the movie, placed the 16mm reels back into the container and had stepped across the hall to put the print away in an office when it happened.

At the end of the hallway was a fire escape door. Like most fire escape doors, it was locked and could only be opened by pushing the crash bar. Further, it was connected to a heavy spring that actually made the door difficult to open. Once, when we had to open it, it had taken several of us to do so. This is why I was slightly surprised when the door opened and closed all by itself.

I could have sworn that I heard the sound of someone moving a few feet down the hall and then stopping. Since I knew what I had just seen couldn't have happened, I told myself that there was no need to panic. So I calmly opened the office door, calmly threw the film box onto the nearest chair in the room, then very calmly closed the door and with extreme calmness fumbled with the keys until I locked it. I was so calm that you could barely see the flop sweat rolling down my brow.

Since I was determined not to show fear, I left the building in a steady and orderly manner and immediately made my way to the nearest bar for a couple of stiff ones. However, as I went to leave, I did turn around and uttered a respectable good night. For some odd reason, that only seemed like the decent thing to do.

Over the next several months, I discovered that the other rumors were, by in large, pretty accurate. The "racket", as we came to call it, would usually start up round midnight and continue until 3 am. Footsteps and soft weeping noises would move up and down the hallway for several hours. At first, the sounds would be disturbing. But you had to choice to either get your work done in the editing room or else, and many of us developed various techniques for dealing with the situation. One student would play heavy metal music and sip from a bottle of even stronger spirits through the night to steady his nerves. Or at least that was his excuse. Most of us simply learned to ignore it. Fortunately, it never crossed the doors into the editing room.

I had already learned to ignore it when a colleague of mine had decided to put in a long night on a project that was on a tight deadline. He had never stayed this late in the editing room and since his original background was psychology, he had largely dismissed the rumors as misperceptions. We were working at editing tables positioned side by side and he had already made it clear that he was planning to be wrapped with his project by 1am.

So we were quietly working away when the magic hour came and the "racket" kicked in. By this time, I am playing no particular attention until it was nearly 1am and I just realized that my partner at the next table hadn't moved for the last 45 minutes. I turned and noticed that he had a profoundly stupid wide eyed look on his face.

In a quiet voice, he asked "Is that what I think it is?"

I nodded yes. "By the way, I thought you were planning on leaving about now?"

"That's OK," he replied. "I don't have to rush."

We spent the rest of the night getting a lot of work done. Strangely enough, neither one of us had to go to the bathroom anytime during the night. I am sure that the fact that the bathroom was out in the hallway had nothing to do with this.

"Phony perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not."

-Bela Lugosi (from the movie The Black Cat)

Leave it to ol' Bela is perfectly sum up my own attitude toward the paranormal. Sometimes I really don't know which way I feel or think about the subject. There are many claims made which sound silly and, upon closer examination, turn out to be extremely silly. Then there are the reports that are quite preposterous and, the more one looks into it, very hard to either explain or forget.

I once had some neighbors who were convinced that they had a ghost stalking their attic. They described every spooky sounding stomp, scratch and squeal of some strange entity that routinely scrambled across the attic floor. In fact, they described these ghostly hauntings so well, that I realized that they had squirrels in their attic.

Many hauntings do have such equally banal explanations. Some do not.

I once talked to a woman who had been stationed by the U.S. Army in England. She lived off base in a quaint little house that had been recently built on what had use to be a parkway in the village. The parkway had been very popular with people walking their dogs. So popular that an elderly gentleman who had been deceased for a few years still took his dog for a daily walk and routinely came in through one kitchen wall and out the other. The first couple of visitations she found disturbing, but after awhile got use to it.

Some tales are just out right ridiculous. Some are not. And quite a few are in between. It is my fondest hope that over the years I have at least learned how to tell some of the differences.

There are certainly some basic rules that I have learned and that I strongly adhere to. These are my general guidelines for studying any claim of the paranormal.

A. Most eyewitnesses are seriously trying to tell you what they believe to have seen, heard and felt. Often, the core description is reasonably reliable. It is their interruption of what they witnessed that becomes tricky. They can report the basic perceived "facts." It is mostly their attempt to explain what they have observed that gets all balled up into their own predetermined notions. This is sometimes called analytic overlay.

B. The vast majority of people involved in paranormal events are extremely sane, quite normal and rarely have been indulging in any legal or illegal substances. The kook, crackpot and weirdo theory just doesn't hold.

C. Extraordinary claims DO NOT require extraordinary proof. This favorite chant of the debunkers (which was not coined by Carl Sagan) is simply anti-scientific rubbish. The whole point of science is that it is a great leveling force. All claims, no matter what they may be, must pass the same standards of proof. There are no exceptions to this anywhere in the history of scientific theory and methodology.

D. You can indeed fool some of the people some of the time. Charlatans, con artists and those who tell tale tales depend upon this and have an amazing ability to wheedle their way with bogus claims and stories. We call them bullshit artists and you always have to be on the watch for them.

E. Likewise, you can fool all of the people some of the time. These people are called "debunkers." Many debunkers have a scientific attitude but a complete lack of scientific training. A good example was the late Philip J. Klass. He had a perfectly respectable career as a technical writer and editor, but he routinely made a pretense to levels of scientific knowledge that he simply did not possess and often invented bogus scientific claims that were even more bizrre than the UFO sightings he kept trying to disprove. Klass had a near religious belief in ball plasma and its capabilities for chasing farmers across fields in the middle of the night.

Debunkers often exhibit a blind faith in 19th century Newtonian physics and seem to be waging a long lost crusade against the post-Einstein age. In some ways, I have a slight sense of sympathy with them. I have only recently allowed myself to accept that we live in a so-called "multiverse." Personally, I don't like the idea. It strikes me as kind of messy and complicated and the whole idea gives me a headache. Unfortunately, the multiverse doesn't care if it gives me a headache.

F. Never try to explain a mystery by invoking an enigma. This is a bad habit of folks from the "New Age" persuasion. I once was part of a panel on crop circles that was largely dominated by someone explaining how the circles were formed by aliens using their superior vibrational planes to open new channels of consciousness yada yada yada. The guy didn't have a clue what he was talking about and none of it made any sense and it was all based upon papering over one unexplained event by referring to a boatload of inexplicable notions versed in the language of pseudo-mystical mumbo jumbo. Much like the multiverse, this too gives me a headache.

Finally, there is the one rule that is the most important. Don't worry about finding the right answer. Sometimes, it just isn't about finding the answer. Often, it is really about discovering the right questions. I seem to recall that the ancient Greek philosophers said the same thing, only in a much fancier form.