The word paranormal stirs thoughts of ghosts and spirits in most of us. Webster's dictionary defines the term as not scientifically explainable: Supernatural. The topic of paranormal stirs different feelings in different people, that range from complete fraud to belief in such things as contact with the afterlife. Paranormal investigators use a battery of different tools, including infrared movie and still cameras, 0 lux cameras, for seeing in almost total darkness, different types of electronic energy detectors, sophisticated thermometers and different types of recorders.

Most investigators don't inspire much confidence in the general public. There are not many degrees awarded in this field. More than likely an investigator is liable to be a full time worker in a completely different field and only a part time investigator An example of this is the paranormal investigators featured on the Scifi channel that are from TAPS, The Atlantic Paranormal Society. The two founders of TAPS who are also lead investigators are plumbers. They have a team of helpers, some of which are classified as investigators, some are demonologists, some are case workers and some are technicians. One thing that I have to give them credit for is that they always say that they have come to prove that a place isn't haunted, not that it is. With this in mind, you always seem to hear things like, "what was that, no one else is on this floor?" or "did you see that?" I have watched this show a few times for laughs and haven't been able to determine what the other people do on their full time jobs. There was one episode that took place in a supposed haunted armory. A black figure was shown materializing on a cat walk then running away. I decided to examine this film closely and found it was a man with a black blanket over him. His watch was clearly visible when the photo was blown up and you could see that he was crouching in the dark and jumping up and running. All the investigators were saying it was an apparition, but Jason, one of the two lead investigators said he wasn't sure.

Hey I have nothing against plumbers, well maybe against one certain plumber, but sending a plumber to find a ghost seems bizarre to me. Maybe it would better to use an electrician with all those electrical impulses floating around. I guess they are using plumbers to flush out the spirits. Sorry, I couldn't stop myself from using that pun. It is very hard to take the paranormal seriously. If ever there was a field of endeavor that had the most charlatans, crooks, and hoaxers, this has to be it. There are so many stories that come to my mind of people being cheated that you could fill a library with them. One of the most common is the case of the evil money. There are so many cases of people going to fortune tellers and telling them that they have bad luck. The fortune teller usually tells them it is caused by their money being cursed and if they bring it in, they will take the curse off of the people by burning the money. Yup, you guessed it, paper is switched for the money and burned, giving the fortune teller quite a profit for the day. Another scheme that is even older than this one is where you are told that for a sum of money, a deceased loved one will be summoned for you to talk to. You pay the sum and everyone sits around a table, usually in the dark and holds hands. The medium goes into a trance and begins telling you things that you feel only the deceased person could know about you. What you didn't know is that the medium has researched you before hand. Next you talk to the medium who relays your messages to the deceased. Sometimes visual effects are thrown in, like the table rising or an orb sailing over or in the extreme cases a floating cloud with what looks like the deceased on it. Of course these are all tricks. The table is being lifted, the orb is a balloon painted to glow in the dark and the cloud was created and a picture projected on it. Some of these tricksters can get quite good at fooling people.

I have to say that paranormal investigators just don't impress me. So far, I can truthfully say that no video that I have ever seen has ever convinced me of anything. There have been plenty of videos, that is for sure. It seems like every piece of evidence could have easily been doctored. Snap shots of people appearing in photos taken of other people have been around almost as long as photography. In the beginning, people were quite awed by these until they realized that they were simply double exposures. The same photographic plate would be used twice giving the appearance of people appearing in photos that were not there when the original photo was taken. These can be seen by the thousands on the internet.

What about other mediums? There are EVPs. EVPs are recordings made at a site where there is nothing, yet when the recording is played a voice is heard. You will hear many an investigator swear that they were in the room the whole time the recorder was going and heard nothing. Well how can this be, are all the paranormal investigators telling us lies? Well this is not necessarily the case. If you have ever heard a EVP you know that many of them sound like a noise, not speech. You will be told that a voice is saying such and such and then when you listen you might hear something. This can very easily be the power of suggestion. There is more to these evps than this however. Many are run through software that supposedly make it easier to hear the words being said. What is this software doing? It is taking the noise on the recorder and matching it to words that it thinks are being said, so we are listening to an interpretation of sorts. Why even waste our time with this? We could take a common sound, run it through some of this software and it would come out as speech.

Someday we may find out that what we think is a paranormal event has a simple explanation. Certain minerals might actually store images that are viewable under certain circumstances and when those events come together we might see a faint image of someone. There is a suspicion among the scientific community that pottery might contain sounds if it was carved with grooves. I have talked about this possibility before. Wouldn't that be something, hearing a voice from thousands of years ago? We might just have to figure out how to unleash these things. It may turn out that there are no voices recorded this way, but the idea is intriguing. Can you imagine someone hearing voices and it turns out to be coming from a pottery vase or some such thing?

It is just possible that some of what we think is paranormal today will turn out to be scientific tomorrow.