Yadda wrote on Jun 8^th, 2018 at 2:54pm:



Its what someone has called the residue effect.

This is another common fallacy I call the residue effect – sure, most UFO sightings (or bigfoot sightings, or spontaneous healing, or whatever) are fake or misinterpreted, but there are a few cases that cannot be explained. Those cases are real.

That logic is invalid, however. When you look at hundreds or thousands of cases, you are going to see common things commonly, and then more rare things more rarely. If you have seen a hundred cases, you have likely seen one which is a one-in-a-hundred case.

Rare, however, does not mean paranormal. Rare could mean, a cold reading that was incredibly lucky. Or perhaps the patient (let’s not forget, these are mentally ill patients), happened to hear people talking about something when they thought the patient was not paying attention, because they looked unconscious or in a trance, and then later the patient feeds back that information as if Satan himself fed it to them.

Monk is controlled by a demon.

People are going to believe (or try to) what they want to believe

Makes no difference to those who've experienced the real deal

You go through life afterwards as a different person and it makes no difference (to you) what others believe or say in the attempt to 'debunk'

We see and hear a minute fraction of all that exists.  Seems it's that way by design.  We live in a protective bubble

but, every now and then, someone experiences something which falls way outside what is regarded as 'normal'

At that point, the individual has a few options open to him.  He can tell himself he imagined or dreamt it.  He can tell himself he hallucinated or was suffering ill effects from drugs, alcohol, lack of sleep, etc

If he hadn't used drugs, nor drank alcohol, was rested and had never before been subject to hallucination, he might attend a doctor or optomestrist, for example.  Or, he might push it aside and tell himself he was mistaken about what he'd believed he'd experienced

The fact that so much effort and energy has been expended in researching anomalous experiences and experiencers suggests 'experts' suspect there's more at play than drugs, alcohol, sleeplessness, faulty house wiring, underground streams, imagination, fantasy, lust for attention, etc.

Very often, the explanations offered up by those experts are more ridiculous that the experience is said to be and serve only to confuse the issue further

Ordinary people have anomalous experiences quite out of the blue.  The experience is unsought, unwelcome, terrifying quite often.  And most often, it's denied by the experiencer

There are graphs online which illustrate the staggering extent of information to which, as humans, we are not privy.  Animals have a slightly wider perception

For whatever reason, some people, sometimes, become privy (by design, accident or spontaneous emergence) to a vastly wider than normal perception of that which pulses all around all of us, all of the time

Our nervous system is not cut out to handle many of those anomalous experiences.  And our society does not encourage such experiences or discussion of them.  We prefer our protective bubble,  despite that even within it, there are unimaginable horrors quite commonly

It's reasonable for those who haven't experienced the paranormal to disbelieve the claims of those who have.  Those who've experienced genuine paranormal events grow accustomed to scorn and ridicule and generally keep most of what they've experienced to themselves.  Children especially learn to shut up and to conform with the norm


Regardless, however, the 'paranormal' is all around us as it always has been.  We might choose to ignore it, but it suffers no such constraints.  It knows we're afraid because we've proved it.  Similar to men whistling to themselves as they cross a paddock in the dark, or the woman who clutches her mobile phone for safety as she walks through an alley shortcut on the way home.  'Leave me alone.  Please leave me alone' is humanity's plea to what we actually do know is all around us.  And if it pokes it's head out now and again, humanity says, ' I didn't see that.  You're not real.  I'm not going to look at you.  So go away'

Bobby. wrote on Jun 17^th, 2018 at 4:01pm:


Sure Bobby.  That's true.  People hallucinate due to a variety of reasons.  There are people seek to hallucinate in order to experience the paranormal and to that end, they ingest hallucinogenic substances or engage in various practices.  Some do because they're curious.  Others do it to explore what lies behind the curtain of their everyday consciousness.  Lots of reasons


I'm gathering that the professor in the OP carefully ensures his subjects are not under the influence of anything, otherwise he'd be wasting his time.  No doubt those who've used LSD and other mind-altering drugs in the past would be excluded from his research because LSD can, apparently, produce 'flashbacks' even years later


So my post concerned those who were 'clean' of drug use, psychiatric conditions, etc.  In other words, 'ordinary' people who experienced the extraordinary, spontaneously.  And such people do exist and are sufficient in number (and always were, throughout time) to warrant science's interest and study


There will never be consensus, not in our lifetimes and perhaps not for a thousand more years, if ever.  Interestingly however, the church presumes to validate certain paranormal experiences and congregations accept those


Most people pass through their life with few if any paranormal experiences.  Some people experience one or two.  And some experience a number of paranormal events.  That's what science is attempting to unravel.  What is responsible?  Location?  The individual acting as a type of magnet to such experiences?  Various stressors?  Genetics?  Multidimensional randoms having fun?

We humans see, hear and experience a minute slice of the spectrum.  It's all most of us know, so we believe our minute slice is all there is.  It shakes us to the core to discover that life as we know it is in fact just a tiny broom cupboard within a mansion covering hundreds of acres.  We feel secure in our broom cupboard, which is difficult enough for us to handle.  Most do not want to explore the rest of that massive mansion, so we deny its existence and we gang together against those who've wandered (or been pulled) into some of those other rooms.  When they tell us what they've experienced beyond the broom cupboard, we tell them they imagined it, or invented it.  We say they were dreaming or hallucinating, etc

Human life is short.  People's paranormal experiences (if they even relete them to others) are forgotten in a few decades.  New generations hear of people's experiences and they too are dismissed and forgotten swiftly.  It's been that way all through time: people describing the same or very similar experiences, most of them to suffer dismissal, ridicule and accusations of mental illness, hallucination, dreams, imagination, attention seeking, etc.  Some experiences of the past make it from one era to the next because they're enshrined in myths and legends, books, etc.  And people are fine with those ancient accounts, because they're in the past and can be dismissed as fable --ancient history which has lost its immediacy and most of all, cannot reach out and touch us in the here and now.  We're told such ancient accounts need not be believed and are simply the way ignorant people of the past understood and described such experiences

There are people in the here and now who have experienced the same things, quite a few people, actually.  Those experiences happened to them.  The experiences were unsolicited and came out of the blue, just as they did to people one or more thousand years ago.  No one need believe them and most choose not to.  And those who've had the experiences thrust upon them are usually left in no doubt that they'd better keep quiet about it or suffer loss of reputation and career, friends, even family members.  So for the most part, they shut up and spend the rest of their lives trying to gain more information about such experiences.  But they do it on the quiet.  Or they confide their experience/s anonymously

Confusing the issue of course are all those who claim to have experiences which never happened.  They do so for attention, most often, or to elevate their own importance.  Some of them exaggerate a slightly unusual event and in time come to believe their own BS.  Others relate an experience which resulted from drugs, fever or brain damage, alcohol poisoning, etc.  Add to those all the individuals who wish to believe they're psychic and will find the anomalous in a piece of toast


Nevertheless, disturbing or interesting and perplexing paranormal experiences of the genuine variety do occur.  But those who've experienced such events usually succumb to defeat and dismissal in face of majority scepticism and ridicule.  People would rather place their faith in charlatans and tv psychic shows, gurus and religious claims

.... and living in Canberra.... part time anyway while they ruin the nation for us ......

You gotta admit - the twentieth and early twenty first centuries were all Satan's...

PZ547 wrote on Jun 19^th, 2018 at 3:39pm:


The problem is that peoples paranormal experiences tend to reinforce their previously held religious beliefs. For instance, the article in the OP refers to demonic possession, priest exorcism and Satanic rituals. This is purely a Catholic phenomena which suggests that these experiences actually come from the "inside" (although they feel real to those experiencing them).

There is also cold reading and warm reading where people can deliberately or unconsciously ask leading question and let the subjects own gullibility do the rest. Derren Brown did some amazing documentaries on this which are compulsory viewing for anyone who believes in the paranormal.

There is also the fact that the human brain is far from perfect and many of it's shortcomings can be the basis for religious, spiritual and paranormal experiences.

The_Barnacle wrote on Jul 22^nd, 2018 at 11:21am:



It's far from being a 'purely Catholic (should correctly be Roman Church) phenomena'

Look it up

In fact, do some research in the topic generally