Fans of Ghost Hunters and Real Housewives of Atlanta will come together next week for a special “crossover show”. The Real Housewives will become “special guest investigators” with TAPS, on Wednesday, December 1st.

Sure, it’s a bit baffling that Bravo and SyFy chose these two shows to merge into a special episode. I didn’t understand why until I saw the preview. You’ll understand once you see it, too.

As an aside, I used to watch Ghost Hunters semi-regularly. My husband only became interested in the show after Kris Williams joined the team. My husband noticed something that I hadn’t. The lighting and camera work in those earlier episodes made Williams’ attire nearly transparent. Every episode after that included constant queries from my husband: “Where’s Kris?”

So, male viewers were gained. When the gratuitous views ceased, my husband ceased viewing. My semi-regular viewing schedule ceased not long after that.

Funny that the preview of the upcoming episode inspired my husband to want to watch on Wednesday, although he watches neither show. Viewership mission accomplished.

If you are looking for entertainment, chances are high you’ll get what you hope for on Wednesday.  I’ve seen several comments on the web, from fans of Ghost Hunters who are seeking the drama that has been absent from the show since Brian Harnois left. Brian’s antics were part of the reason I watched the show, to be honest. Grant Wilson’s attractiveness was another.

We’ll see if there’s any drama to entertain us next week. I think that the show will bring something else: gratuitous camera shots.

Check out this screen shot from the preview. The camera’s focus on the blond woman as she walks up the stairs…much of the shot does not contain her head.

Watch the video preview here.

Screen shot from Ghost Hunters preview

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Copyright © 2010 Cherlyn Gardner Strong

Read more of Cherlyn’s posts as a contributor for Paranormal Utopia, or at Cherlyn’s Paranormal Old Pueblo website

I’m often asked to give recommendations of paranormal investigation teams. These requests are not from claimants experiencing paranormal activity, but instead from people who want to join a team. There are many teams to choose from that contain individuals with different personality types and backgrounds. It’s difficult to make that match between people, so I rarely give recommendations. On top of this, more often than not, a person will participate for a brief stint with a team, and then branch off to start their own group. This generally occurs due to personality conflicts or differences in preferred investigation methodologies.

So, the next most popular question I receive has to do with these ghost hunting methodologies. I happily give my opinion on those, but most people won’t take the advice. They want to do something “different” than other groups do.

The current issue of Skeptical Inquirer contains an article called, “Ghost Hunting Mistakes: Science and Pseudoscience in Ghost Investigations”, by Benjamin Radford. Radford is the managing editor of the publication. There are several things that he mentions that should be done differently. Many of those things aren’t done in the real world, by some investigators. Radford speaks mainly about investigators on television. In the real world, Radford would be pleased to know that some groups adhere to many of his suggestions already, including the avoidance one common “mistake” of “lights out”.

On this subject, I wrote a short article on Paranormal Utopia a couple weeks ago called,”Doing it in the dark: Is lights out really beneficial to ghost hunters?“. The answer to that question, if you don’t click through, is:”No, it’s  not always beneficial”. There are only a couple of instances where I believe that lights out would be beneficial. It’s my personal choice to forgo lights out, and it is also my personal choice to participate with a team that doesn’t go lights out. This is troubling, however, because there shouldn’t be a choice to make. Investigation methodologies should be uniform across the board and should not make their number one rule to “go lights out”.

Most claims of activity are based on experiences that took place for the claimant while the lights were on, even at night. If a claim of activity took place at 2:00 pm, the team should be at the location and observing at 2:00 pm. The same circumstances cannot be re-created at 2:00 am. The way things look in the sunlight versus the moonlight just isn’t the same, no matter what.

A team should also not take a case where all of the activity occurs as the claimant is falling asleep or wakes them up from a sleep. For these types of cases, I would recommend that the claimant undergoes a sleep study.

Most investigations that take place at night are done for a couple of choice reasons. Ghost hunting is usually done free of charge to the client, so team members usually have the responsibility of day jobs to finance their personal time and equipment. Secondly, some investigators prefer the quiet atmosphere that the middle of the night investigations offer. Then, there are the groups who simply enjoy the thrill of the darkness. These are the types of investigations that are seen on TV. They do not re-create the atmosphere in which paranormal activity was experienced. The goal would be to re-create the atmosphere to re-create the witnessed anomaly. If the anomaly is witnessed, the next step would be to attempt to replicate it as many times as possible.

The team that I am affiliated with does not handle investigations “as seen on TV”. Instead, the group adheres to specific methodologies. Others follow the methodologies of Ghost Hunters. Because of this, they think that they are qualified to enter peoples’ homes and deem a location “haunted” or not.  At this point, no one is qualified to draw those conclusions, not even teams like mine.

On the topic of “qualifications”, there are teams that have decades of experience in ghost hunting. These teams have established their own methodologies, have selected tools and equipment of choice to work with (or constantly add the newest gadgets to their tool kits), and also have some manner of training that they offer to new members. Methodologies, equipment and training are not uniform, but they should be.

Contrary to popular belief, conclusions of unexplained activity cannot be drawn from one overnight investigation. A good investigation will include returning to the location for several months. There should be effort by the team to find proof to explain the activity as normal, rather than paranormal. Unfortunately, most claimants won’t stand for that and demand immediate answers – specifically the answer they want. Many teams out there want to prove the case as “paranormal”, so the claimant and the investigators are both biased toward the cause of everything being paranormal in nature.

There are a couple things that Radford did not mention in his article. The first has to do with the evaluation of cases prior to accepting an investigation. My team requires mental and physical evaluations of our clients prior to the investigation. This is for obvious reasons.  Despite this, some claimants will still not believe the explanation that the activity they experienced as simply normal. Those claimants always end up disappointed. They will call in teams until they receive the answer they want. This should be a red flag to teams. The screening process should include asking about other teams that have already investigated. There is an exception to this in my mind. I would advocate for more than one group separately investigating the same location in an identical manner. That would be intriguing, as long as the teams are willing to put aside competitiveness, investigate in an identical manner, and compare the resulting information.

One show that I haven’t seen on TV, would involve three different teams investigating the same location, separately, in the exact same manner. Wouldn’t it be great if all three teams experienced the exact same things? We won’t see that show, however, because the viewer would want to move on to something else when the first team finishes their investigation. Viewers have panned some shows for being “too much like Ghost Hunters“. However, I am not talking TV right now, I am talking “reality”.

Another thing that Radford didn’t mention was the use of “blind investigators”. By blind, I mean that a couple of investigators on the team should enter into the investigation blindly and know nothing about the specifics  of the activity. Some people see what they expect to see, or they see what they want to see. This is either by expecting to see what the claimant reported, or letting what they already know about the history of the location badly warp their perspective.

Radford does mention investigators becoming too “wrapped up” in the history and specifics of a location, in a sole quest to”identify” the ghost. Radford says that by focusing on who the ghost is, creates distractions from finding the source of gathered visual and audio evidence. Radford’s observations do ring true. Researching this information is important, but the research should be completed independently from the investigation and should not drive it.

As someone who participates in investigations, I was not offended at all by Radford’s article. I agree with it. I recommend it to all paranormal investigators. Personally, it left me hoping that paranormal investigators might someday unite and operate uniformly: from screening clients and team members, to training and certifying members, to embracing common investigation methodologies.

The technologies, or tools, may or may not prove the existence of ghosts. From Ghost Hunters, I’m sure you’ve heard the team members say: “The presence of ghosts is thought to cause a spike in EMF readings”.  The tools used, at this point, are simply a matter of preference of individual teams.

Radford states: “The problem is that there is no body of research showing that anything these devices measure has anything to do with ghosts. Until someone can reliably demonstrate that ghosts have certain measurable characteristics, devices that measure those characteristics are irrelevant.”

That, to me, is a chicken-egg statement, but I do see what he’s getting at. However, I do also know that scientists go through some level of trial and error. To do this, they sometimes use equipment meant for other uses, until they are able to replicate results enough to “prove” something. They replicate their experiments over and over again, exactly. That’s not happening in most paranormal investigations.

I didn’t cover all of Radford’s article, but paranormal investigators are welcome to chime in to state why they think that the mentioned “mistakes”, aren’t. There is no “right or wrong” answer here, just a few observations that, in my mind, show that there is a need for overhauling some of those popular methodologies.

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Copyright © 2010 Cherlyn Gardner Strong

Read more of Cherlyn’s posts as a contributor for Paranormal Utopia, or at Cherlyn’s Paranormal Old Pueblo website

After Disclosure Book Cover, Keyhole Press

Until recently, I never thought about what life would be like if the government ever disclosed the “secrets” about UFOs they are said to be hiding. I have a hard time envisioning that future. Although my gift is creative writing, my specialty (and university major) fell into the non-fiction concentration. Most of all, I lack the patience to come up with all of the “what-ifs” that come with topics like UFO disclosure.

Other people have that gift of imagination, coupled with the patience, that is necessary to paint that picture of what life might be like if it did happen.

Bryce Zabel is one of those people.

Zabel started out working in broadcast journalism after earning his B.A. in the same, at the University of Oregon. He worked for KVOA News 4 here in Tucson for a year in 1979. He was a CNN correspondent after that, before he started flexing his creative muscles as a television producer, director and writer. His television credits include creating/developing, writing and producing the UFO-conspiracy series, Dark Skies and M.A.N.T.I.S., and others, in the mid and late 90′s.

He was elected and served for two years as the chairman/CEO of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 2001. Many will recall that Zabel rescheduled the Emmy Award show twice after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Zabel left office in 2003 due to his eventful tenure in office “feeling like two”. Since then, he scripted The Poseidon Adventure (2005, NBC), Blackbeard (2006, Hallmark), and Pandemic (2007, Hallmark), among many others.

Zabel and Dolan, co-authors of "AD: After Disclosure"

A different project

Last year, Zabel added a different project to his already full plate, and co-authored a book about UFO disclosure with historian Richard Dolan.

Richard Dolan’s work includes UFOs and the National Security State, which presents a chronological history of UFOs and Extraterrestrials starting from 1947.

The collaboration between Zabel’s futuristic imagination and Dolan’s in-depth knowledge of the past has produced a thought-provoking book called:

A.D. After Disclosure: The People’s Guide to Life After Contact.

Director Stan Lee said of the book:

“I’ve imagined this future many times, but these guys actually wrote the book on it! Zabel and Dolan have brilliantly created a compelling blend of history and informed speculation that makes their exciting world seem like tomorrow’s news today. Don’t dare miss it! ‘Nuff said.” – Stan Lee, Creator, Spiderman, X-Men, Avengers

I had the pleasure of talking to Bryce Zabel last week about the book. Like myself, Zabel has never seen a UFO and has never made the acquaintance with an extraterrestrial. His delving into the topic with Dolan was related to his years of Hollywood writing experience.

He shared: “I am just a recovering journalist who got a few jobs in Hollywood and was lucky enough to be paid to write some material that dealt with the UFO issue. I delved deeply into the research, because I wanted to do a reasonable and quality job on the projects that I was writing. The more I read, the more I realized this was the real deal.” He added: “There are physical objects of some kind that are flying around in our skies that aren’t ours. Beyond that, it turns into a point of speculation.”

The book comes just months after Leslie Kean’s New York Times Bestseller: UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Official Go On the Record was released. Kean’s book presents only the facts of noteworthy UFO incidents. Official documents and interviews with officials is all you will read in her book, not speculation. There is no supposition about where UFOs come from. Kean’s book ignites questions within the mind of the reader. It inspires the reader to think for themselves about the “what ifs”, based on the facts presented.

Zabel said of Kean’s book: “Thank god Leslie Kean wrote that book. It’s a fantastic book. I would like to think that Leslie Kean’s book is the predicate for our book. Because people have read her book, which basically establishes the validity of UFO reality, we don’t have to embrace that standard in ‘After Disclosure’. We can instead just look forward.”

I agree that ‘After Disclosure’ does offer a natural extension of the speculation that Kean’s book inspires from just the facts she presents. This segue into the speculation of what could happen after disclosure doesn’t cover just one possibility. Just about very possibility one could imagine is offered and examined. The authors speculate how disclosure (Full, Partial or False) might occur from day one, then they move on to examine how all other aspects of life could change.

It also delves into who or what the entities behind UFOs are, whether they are earth-based or from the the depths of space. It speculates what they might want, or if they want nothing. I could go on, but this book covers everything. The possibilities give the brain quite a work-out through each possibility offered, if and when the proverbial cat is out of bag. The most interesting is the examination is how our lives could change from day one. Everything is examined from the economy to media coverage.

Today’s UFO coverage in the mainstream media

In the weeks prior to discussing the book last week with Zabel, he and I had touched base about the media coverage of a press conference in September. Few journalists attended that press conference, which brought together retired military men alleging that UFOs had interfered with nuclear facilities – a matter of national security. John Kelly of The Washington Post attended that conference, but said that he only attended for the yummy cookies and pastries that the National Press Club serves to guests. His resulting article was simply bizarre. In addition to my post on the subject, Zabel posted an open letter to The Washington Post.

Zabel did receive a response from John Kelly, who said that the assignment desk wasn’t interested about the story and that he went on a lark at the last minute.

Whether other members of the media were embarrassed about being seen at the conference, or simply deemed it to be unimportant, is open for speculation. Many members of the media did ultimately view and write about the press conference, because it was broadcast via streaming online video. The barrier that kept me home was financial, as I am unpaid for my writing, but I did watch from home.

My personal “what if” in this whole disclosure scenario is that if there ever is disclosure, what would the mainstream media do? There’s no doubt that they already cover the subject, for the page views it generates, and for entertainment value. The book examines mainstream media coverage, in-depth, and offers a prediction of media coverage after disclosure.

Zabel’s journalistic background gives him the authority to foretell what would happen, in one of my favorite passages from the book:

“Almost instantly, the media will switch from its historic joke-and-skepticism relationship with the UFO story to exploiting it – as if they had been on top of it all along. Journalists will be brazen enough to create background reports laying out their own complicity, the media covering itself yet again.”

‘After Disclosure’: To read or not to read

I think that this book is worth a read. As I mentioned before, just about every aspect related to the possibility of disclosure, and after disclosure, is brilliantly examined. There is no other book like it out there, and it does complement Leslie Kean’s book very nicely. It would find a nice home on bookshelves next to hers.

The book was published by Keyhole Publishing, in hardcover. The book retails at $24.95. Assorted eBook editions are available, and yes, for Kindle, too.

Related websites:

http://afterdisclosure.com
http://keyholepublishing.com

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Copyright © 2010 Cherlyn Gardner Strong

Read more of Cherlyn’s posts at her Paranormal Old Pueblo website