Skepticism

Many people question how skepticism can have a place in paranormal research. Well, it’s quite simple because you have to remember that skepticism isn’t a belief system – it’s a process of thinking, it’s a way to process information that you are presented with and deciding whether or not it is realistic. It’s also healthy to doubt and healthy to ask questions – it’s how we learn things throughout our lives on this planet.

As rational researchers our aim is to look for the logical causes for the strange experiences that people report to us. We know that not everything that seems strange is strange and occurences that people cannot explain are easy to label as paranormal when this may not be the case. It is more likely that the person experiencing the strange occurence just doesn’t have the knowledge about what caused their experience.

If this is the case the phenomena that they witnessed is called as Xenonormal – roughly translated this means ‘Foreign normal’ and is basically something that is a normal occurence yet the person experiencing it doesn’t have the necessary experience/knowledge to rationalise what they have witnessed.

This doesn’t mean that they’re stupid – far from it, it simply means that they don’t currently have the information required to get to the bottom of what they have witnessed. Sadly, this is how many occurences are labelled as paranormal when they are not simply because certain people don’t question what it is they have witnessed.

This is why rational thinking and skepticism are great tools for any paranormal researcher to use, without them everything would be paranormal in nature! It’s a huge leap of logic to claim that because we don’t understand something it is paranormal (unexplainable using the known rules of science.)

It could also been seen as slightly arrogant to assume that one knows everything that there is to know.

With this mind set and investigation approach it means that there isn’t anything that we, as a team, can label as paranormal. However, this isn’t what we initially set out to do. The members of the WPR team have experienced some very odd things, but that’s all that we call them – odd experiences. We're not out to prove ourselvs right, we're out to learn things about what we deal with.

Just by looking at the multitude of websites out there about ghosts, paranormal investigation, hauntings etc. it’s clear to see that there are a whole range of ideas and theories about ghosts, what they are, how to detect them etc.

Much of what is presented to the general public is misinformation that hasn’t been properly researched. Either that, or fact is misrepresented by individuals who hold certain beliefs and slightly twist the facts to make them fit into their belief systems.

imply because of the swirl of misinformation that travels around from person to person it is important to be skeptical of anything presented to you as fact, especially when it refers to the paranormal – a topic for which there are no proven facts.