35 replies to this topic

[icenine]

jimmary, on 05 June 2013 - 09:24 AM, said:

Your explanation gives me a whole other insight into that theory. Thank you for the response; the info proviced will obviously come in handy whenever that phenomena pops up.

At least you can reach your toes

I'm not sure why, but (except for the guys on TV) most folks interested in the paranormal look to be overweight. Men and women alike. Me? I'm 6'1" and weigh in at a hefty 280 lbs. I don't get it.

I very much appreciate your kind words, thanks so much.

Cheers
Rich

[Redhead]

I have the Ghost Radar Classic on my Nook. It's a fun toy, for entertainment only. I don't see how something like that could work, but I get a kick out of it. I'm very undecided about spirit boxes. I was at a conference last Sept. where they were being demonstrated. It was pretty interesting, but the couple who built and sold them that weekend turned me off. It didn't matter what you heard come from it - they heard swear words and threats. At one point during their presentation, something came out of it that was pretty clear to the audience, but the man said it was a swear word. When no one agreed with him, be began to get visibly irritated with us. Very off-putting!

[CaveRat2]

Spirit boxes belong right there on your shelf along with Ghost Radar. Sure, fun to play with but as far as research goes just a lot of pareidolia and gobblety gook. Consider, one of the claims made eary on by Frank's Box was it would make converstion easier and more defined. Instead what we got was pareidolia and just as many, if not more, irrelevant comments and sounds which can be interpreted in many different ways. These boxes have actually mimiced certain elements of human speech to make pareidolia more likely. Most switch frequencies about 8 to 10 times per second. This just happens to be the cadence of human speech patterns. How appropriate, and how likely it fits into the pareidolia scenario. And Ovilus'devices with canned words? Read down through the avilable vocabulary and note how many words just happen to apply to something paranormal. Of course by sheer dumb luck the device is going to speak something paranormal when most of its vocabulary is skewed that way.

Facts though put the devices in their true light. Fun to play with, just like the Magic 8 Ball, but not serious research devices.

[jimmary]

Right up there with you, Rich. 6 foot, 330, but I can reach my toes...and a lot of other things.
Redhead (ooo-la-la), I've seen the ghost detector for smart phones. I've always thought "You've got to be kidding...", and I didn't want to take up memory or space on my Iphone, so I never got one. The space is used for more important things, like the shotgun app, or light saber app, or fart app.
CaveRat, my opinion goes back and forth on these contraptions. I have never been in the presence of one, so no first-hand experience. I just go by the personal experiences of others plus what I see on tv. I know the shows are "entertainment", but a lot of what is found SEEMS to be authentic. Since I don't know if you watch any paranormal show, I pose to you this question: when relevant answers to questions asked are obtained, how can that be interpreted? Is it completely faked? Is it misinterpretation or over-reaction? Some truthfulness to the device? I don't know since I don't have the electronic expertise, so I defer to you guys. I always look ath evidence with common sense and skepticism, even within my own experiences, so I'm always asking questions and not trying to jump to conclusions.

[CaveRat2]

To explain how some answers are obtained one would have to look at each case individually. Consider the type of answer... A simple yes / no question only has two possible answers. So if you ask one, get a bunch of gibberish followed by a yes, does that mean the question was answered? Are we to ignore all the gibberish? One can't ignore anything if investigating something. Then there is the pareidolia problem. Originally these boxes were supposed to eliminate that issue but people have started accepting a bunch of noise and claim the question was answered in there somewhere. The difference is that since we ask the question first we condition ourselves to expect certain answers. Thus any noise which is subject to pareidolia already has the groundwork laid for a certain reponse. How objective is that?

I have yet to see a question asked and a detailed multi-phoneme answer directly related to the question received. Just like with EVP, a single word answer has very little credibility since it is easily duplicated by random chance. Long, detailed answers are much more difficult to debunk.

[jimmary]

Well-explained. The pareidolia aspect drives me nuts. I heard reponses interpreted as something that to me had no resemblance to what I heard.
Thank you.