 Okay everyone, thank you for coming along today. Welcome to this workshop, Investigative Methods for the Skeptic. We've got a whole panel here of people, very seasoned in conducting investigations and a lot of combined experience here. So we're going to have a little bit of a discussion, I'm going to ask some questions and everyone on the panel is going to answer them. My name's Karen Stolzner, I'm one of the research fellows for the James Randi Educational Foundation. I'm also a co-host of the Monster Talk podcast. So I'll just get everyone to introduce themselves briefly and then we'll start. I guess that would be me. I'm Brian Bonner, I'm with the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society and Warning Radio. I'm Matthew Baxter, I'm a Paranormal Claims Investigator with Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society and with Warning Radio. I'm Benjamin Radford, Deputy Editor of Skeptical Inquirer Science Magazine and a research fellow with the Community of Skeptical Inquiry. I'm Blake Smith, I'm with IIG Atlanta and the Monster Talk podcast. I'm Ross Blotcher, a longtime member of the Independent Investigations Group and part of the Ono Ross and Kerry podcast. Hello, I'm Kerry Poppe, I'm the other half of the Ono Ross and Kerry podcast and I'm also the Communications Director for the James Randi Educational Foundation. Well thanks everyone. So I grew up in Australia and I feel like I've always been a skeptic but I was curious to find out if everyone on the panel is always identified as being a skeptic or whether you began out as a believer. So I'd just like to start with that question. I can't say that I've always identified as a skeptic. I've always had that mindset but actually the label isn't something that came until later on. I definitely spent a lot of time being a believer. I grew up a believer and the problem is is I actually had more than two brain cells to rub together and eventually found my way to skepticism and I really, really have to thank James Randi for that because I got to go back through his readings. And also if anyone wants to pipe up at any time we don't have to answer in a linear fashion at all. One thing I do want to bring up. We're going to try to run this workshop a little bit like a skeptic camp. If any of you have been to a skeptic camp that means that any time you want to ask a question just raise your hand. You don't have to wait until the end. We're ready all the time. There's actually a bribe here as well. There is but we won't bring it up just yet. All right I'm going to break the linear format. I was very much a believer. I was raised a Bible-believing Christian. Still kind of a chapter-inverse guy and yet I still managed to buy every ghost and alien encrypted book and believe almost everything I read in it. So definitely a believer for a long time until my college years. I'm going to cheat and say I've been both forever. I think I was a skeptic when I was a believer. Like Ross we both share a believer history which is what made us friends originally. But even when I was a believer I always cared about evidence and I think I just didn't have all the evidence yet. And that's something that I like to emphasize when talking to believers as well that we need to treat them as as thinking individuals just as we are. I think I became a full-blown skeptic after the Heaven's Gate cult. I think I'd taken things a little not very seriously and then decided to get to the bottom of stuff and then found my tribe in about 2007. So for 10 years I was investigating and just trying to find answers for myself and I'm really happy to find this sort of community where we can share information. It's nice. In my case I grew up in my early teens being sort of a dabbling believer or dabbling skeptic. I'm not sure. Depends on half empty half full type thing. But you know I would read books in magazines and I would see TV shows. You know that's incredible which dates me and others here and you know Arthur Seaclar, all of us Arthur Seaclar exchange world and I would see these shows and they were all presented very factually and authoritatively. But I noticed that there was very little actual investigation. It was just sort of like somebody said and we're just going to tell you these claims. And after a few years of that I was saying no hold on. I'm not willing to accept somebody said. I want to know. I want to investigate. And so that's that's when I turned from dabbling skeptic or dabbling believer into more of a skeptic deciding I want to decide for myself and find out you know what was behind the claims. So I got started in investigations working with an organization called the Australian Skeptics. I actually began doing work experience with them and they wanted me to to play I guess a Matahari in a sense and I went to see a number of alternative practitioners an aura reader, a homeopath, a naturopath and other practitioners and they I had a consultation with all of them and they all told me I had a thyroid condition or some kind of problem with my liver and so they all gave me diagnoses and then I went and saw a medical practitioner afterwards who disconfirmed a lot of those. So that's how I got started as an investigator after that. I guess people would approach me and say why don't you investigate this particular topic and and so it went on. So I'm curious to find out however how everyone here became an investigator to begin with. What inspired you? How did you start? Well for me I was 11 years old when I first saw The Exorcist. Needless to say it scared the crap out of me. Now I believe that she was 13 in that movie when she was possessed by the devil and I thought okay I'm 11 years old I got two years. So I started studying everything I could find and through studying you know I thought know your enemy you know try to find out everything you can about this this you know these evil entities that are out there to get us all and as I started reading I started seeing wait a minute everybody's got conflicting information that they're putting forth as facts. This didn't make sense. So pretty soon I figured out the only way I'm going to truly know about this stuff is if I get out there and investigate it myself and find out what the facts really are because I realized all I was reading was opinion. I was kind of the same way but I really wanted to dive in and investigate firsthand what's going on what are people witnessing. So I unfortunately decided I'd go out and get involved in the local research community. If anybody's done that you know exactly where I'm going with this it was a really bad experience because it was primarily a bunch of believers confirming what they were there to research which kind of forced me to start my own group and luckily enough I've had other people join me that have really helped throughout the years. Next. Hey so I really found skepticism through the skeptic society in Pasadena. Luckily that was nearby and started attending those lectures in college and then I found that CFI was also nearby so there were a lot of resources and a community in Los Angeles and there they had the independent investigations group and having kind of recently discovered that I'd been wrong about the world at least as I saw it I was really excited that I could convert all my interest in these stories in these myths and actually investigate them firsthand and so it was really through the independent investigations group that I started actively testing paranormal claims. This is where I pat James Randy on the back for the third time during this panel but I saw a homeopathy video that Randy did back when I was taking homeopathy and I was taking it for headaches chronic headaches and my boyfriend at the time said do you know what this stuff is? I just looked this up online it's crazy and sent me a link to a Randy video and from there I started thinking about all the other things that I had been trying that people had always told me didn't have evidence behind them and I had never really listened to those people and something about that video just snapped in me and I wanted to look into everything more and question on a deeper level. Let me pass this thing around. I think I'm going to probably butcher his name but when I was doing my investigations into UFOs I did a UFO road trip after the heavens gate cult tragedy and just decided to go see some of these places myself and on the way I stopped at a library in Gulf Breeze Florida and there was a book sale while I was there looking at evidence for UFO information and the book was one of, was it, Jan-Herald Brundvand if I said that right and that was my gateway doubt. That was the all these stories that I knew from my hometown were you know absolutely true it suddenly found out that they were all just urban legends and you know if those really important foundation stories weren't true what else wasn't true and that's how I got here. I sort of go ahead my my my introduction to it through more or less formalized skepticism through the the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and Skeptical Inquiry Magazine. In fact the very first skeptical piece I ever read was once again Randy's piece. I was a long long story but in a nutshell I was looking for beer in a dry county in Utah as one does and and I happened to come across a used bookstore and there in this used bookstore was a bunch of it was Mormon area so it was you know how to live in your basement for 20 years and how to juggle five wives and all that but beside that was an old copy of Skeptical Inquiry Magazine in which James Randy was doing a a beautifully eviscerating job at debunking Nostradamus. I'd never seen that before I'd heard of Nostradamus I read about him but I'd never seen anybody like take this point when I say oh my god this is this is amazing stuff and that point I went on so at that point I got more involved in and in Psycop at the time of what's now CSI and so I was fortunate enough to have predecessors like Randy and Joe Nicol, Ray Hyman, Robert Schaefer, Phil Klass, Richard Wiseman and others who I could you know sort of look at the history of of you know the the actual quasi formalized investigation and so I could sort of draw upon it from that so that's how I got into it. So I wanted to talk next about how we choose a topic or a theme and often I just come across anything that's in the local media popular news stories at the time a lot of people approach me as well and say why don't you investigate this particular topic so how do you choose a topic guys? How do you choose a place to investigate? Well it's easy for us because we have pushy Facebook fans who tell us what to investigate. We have a long list and you put it all together in there we do a podcast once a month about a new investigation and we have at least six years there's no limit to the amount of societies to join alternative medicines to try so yeah no shortage. We kind of we kind of fly under the radar I guess a little bit what we do is we fool everybody by having a name like Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society. That means that all the believers call us and say oh you've got to come confirm this for us so we get phone calls that's how we decide what we're going to investigate next. Yeah I have been doing a series I call things that scared the crap out of me as a kid that's what really drives me. It's been very satisfying as an adult to find out these things aren't true. The big challenge for me is when my kids ask me if something's true or not do I just tell them or make them work it out themselves so that's been an interesting question to deal with as a parent. In my case it's sort of half and half sometimes it's something that just piques my curiosity for example as many of you know I researched that the chupacabra vampire beast and that was just something that sort of fell in my lap it was there was a chupacabra sighting not far from my house actually in New Mexico and I'm thinking well I've written about bigfoot lake monsters I can't ignore the bloodsucking vampire beast in my backyard can I? Well of course not so sometimes they're just things where I'll see something I'm like this this hasn't really been looked at or adequately examined other times you know I if it's like for a TV show or something you're sort of thrown into the mix so it's sort of a mix of assigned things and intellectual curiosity. And I think I've visited more psychics over the years than believers and so I often write about psychics I often write about ghosts what are some topics that we can suggest to the audience for things that they can investigate what are some ideas? I would just throw out there that if it's something that's interesting to you and you can find out whether or not it's a testable claim that's the the two things you're gonna need some passion because most of these things take time to investigate and you need to know if it's something that can actually be solved because if it's not it could be a huge time sink and you'll be an expert on something with no answer. I think in a large way it can be motivated by the people around you because we all have friends and family who believe in certain things and that's a good incentive for us to begin to investigate it show them that we care enough to actually look into it and you know try to arrive at an answer and spark those conversations so I think that's how we can all be investigators. Like one of the tough things about trying to decide what you're going to investigate is you do have to look at what affects you as a skeptic what's the thing that makes you the most angry half the time when you get these stories is it about alternative medicine that maybe a family member is is involved in or is it you see that video on the news really important video of how a ghost visited a gym overnight and they caught it on the security camera otherwise known as a spider crawling across the lens you know there's all kinds of things and it's it is kind of about your own passion what really gets to you and how much time are you going to put into it I mean do you want to spend more time collecting stamps or maybe getting to the bottom of one of these mysteries. I would add that I think it's really important that if you do become an investigator and do this work find a home for it besides just blogging about it get it published submit it to skeptical choir a skeptic magazine wherever you can get it published and use it because if you get it published people can use it to update Wikipedia you can't usually use your own first-person research to fix Wikipedia but if you get it published in a magazine that can be cited then you can help make the world a smarter place so. And for my part I'll just actually echo what Matthew said you have to care about these things you have to care you have to take them seriously and that's that's one thing that I've learned over the years is that you can't dismiss these things you can't ridicule them you have to take them seriously and when you're looking for tops to investigate take something that you're willing to spend weeks or months or years researching because it may take that long you know on TV and the ghost hunters you know the mysteries are solved in 43 minutes in real life investigations I mean all those have stories that you know these things in last months and years and if you're not willing to put in the effort and if you don't if you don't care enough to see the see it through and do a thorough investigation then then you shouldn't be investigating it. So I mentioned sorry in all those suggestions no one really suggested investigating cemeteries and as we've all seen on ghost hunters and ghost adventures they always visit cemeteries it just seems to be a stereotype so should we be investigating cemeteries guys? It's a dead end. Now who didn't expect that out of him? One thing I would say about cemeteries it's it's kind of funny because well first off when we go to investigate something we try to at least investigate something that has a claim cemeteries don't have a claim the things that are often said about cemeteries is or when people die oh they'll usually haunt somewhere that they're emotionally attached to or they'll haunt somewhere where they were actually killed or if there's high emotion this and that all the reasons why a place is supposed to be haunted has nothing to do with the cemetery so that's that's one reason not to but most cemeteries don't even have a claim associated and this one differentiation is don't go just investigating willy nilly investigate the claim and if there's not a claim associated don't waste your time we certainly don't need to make new urban legends although we've tried so where to begin then what's the first step in investigating a claim yeah figuring out exactly what the claim is is really a big big step if there is a claim to begin with as well but I mean that's the thing you can't test a vague story you need to know specifically what the claim is and I guess like one example is like I personally have experienced something that before I learned all the underpinnings of it I would have easily said it was a haunting it seemed like a haunting and until I learned about sleep paralysis and what actually was causing in the phenomena I was pretty sure something was crawling in my bed and attacking me so that was the claim right okay I felt like something was attacking me that that's a very specific thing that can be tested and it turns out with a little bit of research there's an explanation but if you just you know people heard noises of somebody walking upstairs well that's a claim you know but the problem is people collect a series of little individual events and turn the whole thing into a haunting this door opens by itself I hear noises upstairs each one of these events can be tested by itself and they don't necessarily accumulatively prove anything so I think that's an important idea to keep in mind you got to break it down don't investigate a haunting investigate the underlying claims well the other big thing here is you might be investigating not necessarily a haunting in your neighborhood but maybe something that's historical something that's got some big stories behind it and everything now when you get to these kind of things or when we're talking about alternative medicine or we're talking about psychics anything with a bigger name than just in your neighborhood always make sure to find out if anyone has already investigated it that you trust and then you can go back and see what they've done and it's always much better if you can stand on the shoulders of giants that makes you look a lot better make sure you reference them if you have it published anywhere the work that they did and then talk about the work that you did but always look first to see who's investigated it before you and what kind of work that they did and often there comes claims after those the urban legends will continue to grow so you can make your focus on what's been said since they've investigated it so it's a couple of different ways to approach that yeah I would just say following up on that is that you know the to my mind the big issue is scholarship it's amazing to me even after all these years when I see someone allegedly investigating claim whether it's a ghost or something else and they've done no work at all there their their idea of investigating a haunted house is walking around in the dark with a flashlight seriously that's to them that's why we're investigating are you because it looks like you're walking around in a house with a flashlight well no we're investigating and they just don't have the faintest clue I mean in terms of what exactly the claims I see in the claims what you know what do people experience were the other people who investigated this and they're just there's just no scholarship at all and so as Dan Loxton pointed out to me and many times that oftentimes a mystery can be solved simply by doing basic research like grade school level checking original sources research and that's you know that's important to remember with a paranormal claim someone who says that they have some sort of ability in my experience with the IG oftentimes the first step is just to get a claim they'll be making a lot of very broad statements that you know kind of alluding to their abilities you know bold statements but you say that's great but what can you do what quantifiably can you do and so trying to get at a testing procedure you know something that actually tests their claim is often difficult and will take months of back and forth anyone else want to add anything but oh well moving on is there a difference between research and investigation at all in your eyes oh sure I'm sorry it's not quantifiable you're saying or verifiable they say their power is not quantifiable sure well then you say well you know this is the this is the method that we use to test and we really need something that can be shown to work and we'll try to work with them but if we can't do something we say well you may have this ability but there's no way for us to test it unless there's something that you can do as a result so going back again is there a difference between research and investigation is it the same thing is the investigation possibly more on-site and research more armchair skepticism I would I would make exactly that distinction Karen is to my mind you know if when I do investigation to my mind the first half of it is research you know what are the claims behind it because you can do you can do all the claims about something up until the point when you actually go investigate so in some cases if you're doing like field research you might go to a lake where there's a lake monster you might go to you know a haunted house but what depending what the claim is so you can do all the research in the background information or because the thing is if you don't do the background preparation then if you're on site doing an investigation you don't know what to make of it if you're if you're trying to investigate you know you know if you're in a haunted house or something and you're hearing some sort of weird sound if you haven't done the research to find out that that is one of the claims about that place then you need then you know you're not gonna you're not gonna be effective because you don't you don't know you have to you have to know the questions to ask in order to get the right answers would be how to summarize that yeah and I think to some extent that's a semantics question because you've you've got to do research to be an investigator but you don't have to be an investigator to do research so you if you look at like people who read paranormal literature to some extent they're doing research they're learning about the background and the stories that that make up the the body of paranormal lit if you want to call out that the thing is it's taking those stories and then trying to figure out whether or not they're true that's where you break off from just being a researcher to actually investigating of course that's all just talking about you know say historical research not experimental that's another avenue altogether but one of the things I've noticed is that the paranormal literature is pretty much an echo chamber and one of the easiest things you can do if you want to be an arm scare arm scare armchair skeptic I guess scare I don't know if you want to be an armchair skeptic but actually get some work done you can go back to the paranormal literature and try to track it back to the original source if you can get back to the primary sources you can usually find information that gets lost in the replication of stories that happens because as these stories grow over time they get embellished and new details are added which is not really uh well that's indicative of something's being created I would just say that so Blake you're the only person I know that can accidentally pun it was very nicely done um I really do think it's uh the difference between research and investigation can often and and this is something everybody needs to be aware of and be aware of is that it's often just in the context you know if someone says I'm a paranormal researcher well it means the same damn thing as if they're a paranormal investigator uh it's the words can be very interchangeable and I think it's probably a better idea for the most part is just to do as much as you can do throughout the process of whatever it is you want to research or investigate and not worry about the words themselves so much yes okay uh can everybody hear the question no okay she she's based okay I say it stand up again and scream it no um the uh she's asking about like the the shows like ghost hunters um why is it that they never seem to have very specific claims uh very specific reasons for why something is a ghost is that is that basically it okay right so if an emf detector suddenly shifts by several millegos that means it's a ghost why do they do that is that we're looking at how do they know in the first place this is a great question and I'm going to let Brian answer it the big answer is how do they know that it is what they're claiming it is they absolutely do not uh most people in the field that are using any type of equipment regardless of what the equipment is really don't have any idea what it was designed to do and if you're going to be out doing any type of investigation with any equipment be it a camera be it some high tech device don't assume that you know how to use it take a class on how to use it and I do not mean a ghost hunting class if if it says ghost hunting and class in the same thing save your hundred dollars and go to the bar it's a lot better but the thing is it's for as they say entertainment purposes only these people do not have a clue they wouldn't know science or research if it came out and said boo to them so unfortunately you you've pretty much got the right outlook they don't know yeah we call those investigations with scare quotes around them but you know they're using these placeholder terms that don't mean anything uh ectoplasm what does that mean you know who could even define what that would be let alone what it is it's the opposite of endoplasm I stand corrected and uh toxins you know what is what is a toxin can you define that for me there is a real meaning of the word toxin but not in the way it gets used many times but I think I think this um this habit that we all have as humans and we see particularly in believers as most obvious is that when we don't understand something we want to attribute it to agency and um that's actually kind of good news for investigators and skeptics because for a lot of these people if you provide a solid alternative hypothesis that removes the mystery and they no longer have to attribute it to an an agent they can't see we have a question how to hear I was gonna say it also don't ever forget that the point of television shows in general is to entertain and not to teach so well by means of potato chips right so but but we are getting the new thing that we like to refer to as the tv trained investigators yeah which means that they've watched a television show about how to go out and ghost hunt and now they feel that they're well trained and co out they can go out and do this type of thing and I always compare that to well you've watched a couple episodes of house let's go do some surgery it's just not something you can do I've always said we should start a new show called anomaly hunters because that's what you're doing you're going looking for anything that just seems weird or out of place and oh that confirms my presupposition that's one of the only names that's not open so get ready it'll be there the question is how is it that ghost hunters and all these shows keep getting renewed how is it that they they still retain their popularity Ben thank you Matthew I was hoping you're going to pitch that one to me I think there's a couple answers one of them is that that the ghost hunters give the illusion of success very unless you can see right through which everybody on this panel can but to many people in the audience to them success a successful ghost hunt means that you saw you know oh look at this video look there's something something a piece of light you know flashes over here and to them like there you go what more do you want there you go you see the light there you go um but seriously I mean to them that's that is to they believe they're making progress um by any any objective certainly skeptical standard they're just repeating themselves and and every now and then they'll they'll throw in new technology new gadgets they'll get like you know instead of a device that has like four lights it'll have like six lights or it'll be have a green light you know that'll flash you know and that it's it's all good fun um but but the problem is the audience are often fooled into thinking that they're actually doing something like oh yeah we solved that case and it was baffled me I mean you see these ghost hunters they go to a place and and they spend you know a couple hours overnight there and then well we solve that and they drive away I'm thinking well hold on here if you really truly believe that you found like scientific hard evidence of a haunted house you're just going to walk away it's like a real scientist would be like I'm parking here we're staying here for weeks and months and years until we solve this instead of oh okay we're done this is another episode wrapped up what's next no if they had actually truly found good scientific evidence evidence of some sort of you know ghostly anomalies they would be there you know until until it was solved so and the other thing is of course that um that you know it's just it's one of those popular shows and that they're gonna keep it on the air as long as it's making money and you know there you go well you know your comment about the equipment it's getting even worse now because the teams that you're seeing on television and many teams out in the wild are starting to make their own equipment so we're having devices made by people who don't have a clue what the equipment was supposed to do now they're making things specifically built to find ghosts and there is a huge huge market for these types of device a good example we have somebody local to us that on average is going about thirty thousand dollars a month in selling equipment specifically device to find ghosts and his website does say for entertainment purposes only yes it does he's very entertained it is it is very difficult um in some senses uh from from our standpoint knowing what we could get away with knowing that we could we could make a ton of money we really could but we just have this stupid ethical thing that gets in the way yeah we we just found out about people selling items on ebay is haunted haunted dolls haunted jewelry well there's a haunted collector has anyone seen that on television new series that's so painful yeah yeah uh you know it's interesting what ben was saying before about uh the investigation just seeming to be done when they've discovered there is a ghost and they just leave uh it does seem very strange how many people have seen this new show you have UFO chasers yeah yeah it's it's a brilliant show one of these stars on the show uh she's she calls herself the scaliver because she's a skeptical believer it's a new one yes isn't that adorable um now the thing is is she's they want to go out and catch UFOs so they're out on this hilltop at night and she gets a little bit of a lens flare and a reflection and she flips out there's all kinds of bleeping because she's you know what the minute is that you know and all that kind of stuff and screaming and uh she says the minute I filmed that this investigation was over that's just a great example of how ridiculous this is yeah I was going to say the uh your question about why this you know why are these shows still successful they're the formats themselves are now really kind of cookie cutter so you got like the uh you went from ghost chasing to finding bigfoot now there's uh what UFO chasers so uh it seems like a really simple package for a producer to put together and now they can just really it's like ghost hunters but with bigfoot it's got it's like finding bigfoot but with UFOs so you know and that the the actors because they are mostly shows are scripted get paid nothing yeah and there's there's no sets they have to pay for so it's incredibly cheap to produce reality shows so as long as they can make more money than they spend which is really easy then it's no problem uh back in the days of like er when they were paying uh George what's his face several million an episode those days are gone so now it's very cheap tv they can make a lot of money they're not going to stop yes um I yeah he wanted us to talk about some of the more bizarre and humorous claims we've investigated and I i yeah we've got so many um and I know everyone on this this panel does we might want to do we want to go through the questions first maybe address a few things if we have time um I'll take it now um oh thanks um I guess I guess I had that coming yeah okay we'll try to make this quick uh some of the interesting ones we had one um how many saw our little hijacking last year when we did the investigating the investigators okay we got a few people I'll try to bring you up to date on it very quickly we decided we were going to punk another paranormal group now that's a mean way of saying it what we actually were wanting to do was get real documentation on how these other groups operate so we had Karen pretend like she was the fiance of rich orman rich we stand up okay see now rich you'll you'll learn this about rich he is an a-hole and and you'll see that throughout tam um now the thing is is is we used rich's house one of those instances when he wasn't an a-hole he let us use this house and he was absolutely wonderful uh we we rigged it with cameras and everything obvious hanging right out in the middle of nowhere just you could tell the place was totally bugged um and we had Karen call up and say I'm really scared I live in San Francisco I want to move out here with my fiance but there's something weird about the house I don't trust it could you come investigate so Brian and I we go upstairs where we can you know stick ourselves in a room and monitor their activities they come in the house and everything is a ghost they don't even notice the cameras hanging everywhere recording them they can't find the two of us in the room upstairs in the same house now now we did a little bit of the project alpha thing where we said if they asked is this a hoax is this you know we were gonna be honest it was gonna be like project alpha we're gonna come out be completely honest as long as they didn't ask we were going full speed ahead blah blah blah fast forward these guys think they've got the most haunted house they've ever found we set nothing up there was no hoaxing of any kind but they had all these EVPs of all this you know ghostly activity and proof that a ghost was wanting to choke Karen and I think that was just rich but yeah I think it's actually she wanted to choke him that's you're right so they got so freaked out that they called in another paranormal group to help out so yeah well yeah well that was the thing is one of their pieces of equipment wasn't working so rich actually called us upstairs to ask us if we could help them fix it we did the whole time he thinks this whole thing is so stupid that we are hoaxing him and he was convinced of that the whole time well needless to say we came in and we had to write the most ridiculous ritual ever made up because we didn't want them to say you know if we just got one online you know of someone else's ritual for cleansing a house then they could say well you may not have believed it but you spoke the words and that's why it worked so we made up something completely ridiculous based on a Scottish Gaelic lesson on how to ask someone how old they are and I spoke it in a deep voice saying it was actually ancient Sumerian we had the guy the paranormal investigator placed fruit loops around the house because fruit loops had the primary colors they were circular there was all this reasoning on why this was going to work um Rich's dogs would follow him and eat the fruit loops as he put them down it was really well done so needless to say I did a little bit of uh you know like you got a guy that takes like six months of karate lessons he's probably the most dangerous guy in the world because he doesn't know what he's doing why it had some hypnosis training and should not have done it and Banecek will also confirm this um that I should not have done this but I hypnotized the guy uh into thinking he was possessed by this demon and he carried the demon with him out of the house and then I released him so unethical oh god yes funny yes very it was hilarious so that makes it okay so anyway I released the demon from him now this guy to this day still believes all of this we've published this everywhere we can think of we've given lectures uh we've done everything short of just telling him to his face the reason we can't tell him to his face is because he knows where Rich lives and we know he's spent time in prison so we're not going to release him on Rich that's just we feel very badly about that bull so he still calls me up and he calls me up two nights ago because there's a family being raped by a demon and and he wants us to come help now this isn't this isn't funny I mean the several ones we we'd exposed this man for how dangerous he is by doing this original investigation you know by by documenting how dangerous he is to families that believe that there's something in their home because he comes in he comes in and confirms it and everything else so when he got released back into the wild again he goes to another house where there's domestic violence going on and he basically makes it okay for them because there's a demon in their house that's causing them to behave this way so now the man who has a broken wrist from trying to beat his wife now can say the devil made me do it it's okay so we had to go in and and basically put a stop to that because he's like oh this is like the amityville house over there no we walked in the house was fine there was trouble in the marriage so we tried to get them counseling we tried to have them understand that there was no spiritual thing involved here it was take responsibility for your own actions and now we've got a house where they believe they're being molested by a demon on a nightly basis and spent an hour talking to this woman last night and I had nothing but nightmares last night trying to figure out how we're going to deal with this and how we're going to get this family thinking correctly again and so be aware paranormal investigation isn't as romantic as it always seems well and one thing to add to that is you would think wow this guy is kind of a an odd person in the field this is a really really far out type of group this last case that he's talking about here that we were just contacted about there have been three other groups in this home that have also confirmed this for them so it is the norm it is not anything that's an anomaly in the field so on a quick lighter note before I pass this on he's trying to send me all the EVPs he got in this house now I want everybody in this audience to be fully aware EVPs are the biggest load of crap ever invented by these people and they use it as their main source of evidence they've been debunked time and time again we don't need to do it again here but he's trying to send me all these files and finally he sends me an email says titled problems bro and he says uh he's like I can't understand it I've been trying to send you these EVPs but I got this message back that says email or demon they don't want you to have these man WTF so I have tears coming from my eyes at this point so I write him back this is serious let's try this break them up into smaller emails and title them all cute puppies that way we can get under the demon radar sure enough within the half hour I've got an email cute puppies wow and I'm not I'm not intentionally making fun of these guys these people this is it's it's accidental it just happens you were asking about entertaining investigations and for the podcast oh no Ross and Kerry will always kind of do that undercover investigation where we go and sort of as believers and just ask questions open-ended questions try to get them to talk about what it is they believe in what they do and and so just out of that experience we get a lot of really fun stories just a few months ago we were here in Vegas because we were joining the Raylian UFO cult and I don't know if you've heard of this but the idea is that we were seated on this planet by an intelligent race of the Elohim these aliens on another planet and where did they come from you ask another race and it goes on an infant item and so we got our baptisms here in the desert and it's an amazing story so that would be one of the more fun fun investigations but Kerry wants to talk about one we haven't even publicized yet yeah you're the first audience to hear about this but it's just so good so we went to get exercised a few months ago we went to I can't tell you who we went to an exercism specialist and and I told them that I was concerned that I was possessed and my evidence was only that I took a quiz they had online where you could find out exactly how possessed you are and it said that I had like like a 48% chance of being possessed and you answered it honestly and I did yeah I said everything exactly true to life and so I brought it in of course I had paid $10 to take this online quiz and I printed it out and I said you know it says I have a pretty good chance of being possessed what do you think and and so they had one of their specialists stand next to me kind of pushed me up against the wall a little bit and Ross was watching and and she she looked to me square in the eye and she said who are you and I said Kerry and she said what are you doing here and I said I I'm seeing if I'm possessed and I was just answering everything completely honestly and nothing was happening where whereas there were people all around us flailing about and falling on the floor and she said that I was the hardest case of possession she had ever seen meanwhile behind us where we're having this kind of like conversation I'm here from other people and it was in a room that looked not unlike this one actually very similar that reminds me we've got Bob Larson visiting soon in Denver we're going to go and see him and and look at his methods so I think a strange investigation that I've been doing that's kind of ongoing has anyone heard of Braco at all Braco the gazer yeah so he's touring the states he's living in Hawaii and basically he's a spiritual healer but he doesn't claim that he's a spiritual healer so he basically people make claims about him so there are lots of testimonials and anecdotal evidence that he creates miracles and brings good luck to people he can fix people's cars do all kinds of things if you go and attend one of one of his sessions where he stares at you he gazes at you so these sessions last about 10 minutes a time and he'll do sessions throughout the day he'll basically stand on a podium and just look across the room yeah you want you want to see an example of what it looks like we'll do it for free I'll do it we need the music yeah it's really really soft music is playing this goes on for 15 minutes 10 minutes it felt like a day that's enough that's enough well yeah and that's and that's a good point meanwhile there's there's literally people bursting into tears in the audience it's just low sobbing coming from everywhere I call him the the silent evangelist because he doesn't even speak uh although his voice to hear his voice it's healing so at the end of the session they play a snippet of his uh him talking but his Croatian so uh you're only hearing Croatian but people believe that they can understand what he's saying and uh all kinds of very very strange claims about this but he states or his handler state that he doesn't make any claims so this just seems to be the perfect wrought you cannot look directly into his gaze at you for more than seven seconds or your head will explode and they stated very clearly that under 18 it can be very dangerous I was pregnant women or pregnant women yes I was very foolhardy I brought my 17 year old son with me he did survive but yeah Karen and I we were standing next to each other and we had tears in our eyes as well just so you know laughter yeah so let's say and Rick what's oh he's also selling amulets uh he sells all kinds of jewelry including a pendant for $3,000 actually it's gone up to $7,000 now I would say so he's earning a we calculated about Janet Jackson but yeah he makes a lot of money that's we calculated he's earning about $35,000 a day for doing these sessions uh just real quick in terms of particularly unusual or interesting cases the the only one that jumps to my mind immediately is um anybody hearing about the the popo bawa the skeptic raping bat demon it's not funny seriously it is kind of funny um it's uh it's a it's a weird bat demon type creature that is uh seen primarily in uh in East Africa and on the island of Zanzibar and I read about it um about three or four years ago and then I ended up going on a twin on when I was on a trip to uh to Kenya in East Africa I ended up doing investigation there and I interviewed people and turns out that this this weird creature attacks primarily men at night and and rapes them um and I did a whole investigation it's actually published in 14 times magazine a couple years back if anyone's interested but that was one of the weirder ones um and I remember when I was when I was talking to my informants uh because most of the people there uh most of the people I need talked to uh spoke Kiswahili uh some spoke English but others didn't and so I had to sort of get a translator and they said well you know what rape skeptics right like yeah you're skeptical yeah it's like I think you're okay uh and I was I was I'll just say I was uh so I don't want to give give away but it was actually interesting it turned out it turned out that um that it actually derived a little bit from uh from the Quran because many of the people there are Muslim and uh and as far as I could tell in my in my research it was actually a derivation of the genies that you find the Quran so anyway uh there will be an upcoming uh monster talk podcast so Ben was that something like Queen Mab syndrome where they have a sleep disorder or yes and no I actually tied it in with the the old hag yeah the old hag syndrome you know the the succubus and you know there's there's elements well it's a long complicated story but basically there's elements of social control and also elements of sleep paralysis um monster talk dot org one other thing and it's not necessarily the investigation but a thing that we really get a lot of backlash from is once we've done an investigation the reaction from either the people that were involved or the let's say business owners of places that we've been to the combination of places that we've been kicked out of permanently and death threats that we've received we could wallpaper a house with and that is all part of being an investigator it's just you're going to make a lot of people very angry if you tell the truth one of the most horrible things that's happened to us and I know we're going to get a whole lot of aws out of this um is we've been banned from the Stanley Hotel I know I know we'll tell you that story later there was a question in the back over here Wendy so if I understood the question correctly it was basically how do you deal with people who have paranormal claims but may be mentally ill okay yeah back everybody looks at me thanks you've had a lot of experience with it yeah being mentally ill myself I'm able to speak on this um Brian and I also do some work uh helping Banna check uh with the million dollar challenge uh claimants and let's let's face it while we would love to find somebody that's got some some authentic powers I mean how cool would that be really this is the whole reason we want to investigate all this stuff there's an off chance it's so small we can't even calculate it sure but wouldn't it make the world a whole lot more interesting if uh there was some sort of uh power like this that we could actually identify and grow science from it that would be great well the problem is is if they've got a mental illness um it's it's always been interpreted you know by some you know they have some kind of power uh we often try to employ uh extra help you know on the outside we have a couple of psychiatrists that we can call and stay in contact with while we're interacting with this person I have to admit one of the things that I was really worried about you've got all these challenges out there there's quite a few of them around the globe that offer a prize if they can prove some sort of paranormal power well my concerns started to be with a particular uh claimant here recently and and if anybody's going to be here for sunday night's million dollar challenge you'll get to hear more about this um but one of my big concerns is aren't we feeding into this man's delusion and isn't that dangerous isn't that not exactly helpful for him you know isn't that hurting his mental health further by feeding into this delusion and walking along with him and the psychiatrist that we spoke to said well no any good psychiatrist isn't going to just shut him down you know if he talked to god today he's going to say well what did god say to you and he's going to give this man an opportunity to realize on his own that he's got a problem and he said the psychiatrist told us that actually all these challenges are actually pretty healthy for these people with mental illnesses because we're people that will actually listen to them will actually listen to what they have to say and give them an opportunity to prove it and when they can't prove it to us and they can't prove it to themselves anymore they'll often seek some other help so it does turn out that these things can be very helpful for these people did that answer your question at all okay thank you i'd like to speak to that too real quick i once thought that i was being haunted in my house when i was a bit younger and um and i was convinced of it i guess we had a similar situation you were the one who spoke about being haunted as well right um yeah and i i heard all these noises and i felt like a weird pressure on my chest and shoulders and all these people were reinforcing it for me by taking it too seriously by telling me okay well burn sage in your house and tell the spirit to leave and it just made me more scared and then one day someone said to me well have you ever heard about carbon monoxide poisoning and and that's what it was there was a gas leak in my house and i had been slowly being poisoned for a number of weeks so i mean the best way to get trapped in a mental illness or you know whether it's temporary or long term is to be convinced that it's not a mental illness so i think that's part of why this work is so important i guess this feeds into a question that i had an ethical question should we really be doing residential hauntings doing investigations of them i've uh really done that myself i know ben you've done one particular case in new york i think it was but should we be doing that is that a good thing to do that's a great question and sort of ties in with you know what is our role as investigators i mean we're not we're not psychotherapists um you know we're investigators and you know typically investigations at least what i found is that oftentimes there's definitely a psychological element to it where you end up being a counselor whether you want to or not in some cases um in the case that karen's talking about i did investigation in in buffalo new york and it's a it's one of the chapters in my investigations book i won't go into it now but in that particular case i was called in because there was a family who who were convinced their house was haunted and they had spoken to ghost hunters and they spoke into a psychic who both confirmed this and they were scared they were scared to sleep in their own house at night and it wasn't until they came to sycop and and me who took the time to go to their house investigated that i threw my methodical investigation i showed them that their house was not in fact haunted and that was that was the case i'm particularly proud of because it helped real people this wasn't some abstract ooh we're talking about ghosts these were concrete people who were genuinely and sincerely terrified to sleep in their own house at night and after all the bullshit of the the the the the the uh the psychics and the ghost hunters put them through to to get a skeptical point of view that that that you know in my particular case it it it reassured them so i think um you know if you can provide a a service to them and you can help calm their fears uh that's you know that can't do anything but good and that does make it really difficult when there's been previous teams that have gone in and just exacerbated the problem that really makes it rough we've had families that uh what one elderly woman was convinced that there was a bunch of children ghosts in one of the the vacant rooms in her house and she would go in and basically imagine these little children coming and sitting on her lap and uh we were now put in the position of having to explain to her that there wasn't anything there and uh there was no evidence of anything even though all the other ghost hunting groups that have been in there had confirmed it all for her that there were they had even named the ghosts for her um so it gets really difficult and uh you get into bad situations when you go into these residential places because often if you are a help to them they start to rely on you and they start to call you daily with every little worry that they have because now you're their savior and that gets really sticky and then often you get cases where suddenly they'll start accusing you uh it's a lot like these conferences they'll start accusing you of sexual harassment uh they'll start uh making all kinds of bizarre uh claims against you when you decide you're going to stop helping them and stop being for them there every day so there's a lot to think about when you're going to go into a residential place on the flip side we've got the businesses they love to be haunted because it brings them more business so we got to look at the ethics of that do we want to investigate these businesses that's a personal uh personal decision that everybody I think has to make yeah I was just going to add that a lot of people who are having these experiences some people are terrified and you you should be sympathetic and try to understand that and the other side of it is people may have an investment in those beliefs that you may not understand from a skeptical perspective so solving the mystery is great but then actually presenting that and convincing someone else that that your solution is the right one maybe harder than you would expect and maybe not even appropriate depending on the circumstances sorry just work through that out well ben is rich anyway so he can afford to do this um for the most part I think a lot of us we just do it as a very expensive and I hate to use the word but hobby it's it's a very it's a passion it really is we we love to get out there we love to solve these mysteries but we love to help people when we can um it's a really important thing for us uh but it's very expensive and yet we make nothing off of it most of the time so I've got affiliations or I've had affiliations with all of the major organizations in this country and in Australia so occasionally they'll pitch in and assist and give me some funding most often I'm out of pocket very severely and I've really been an independent investigator for two decades and so uh it is a very passionate hobby but a full-time hobby I guess in many ways I have monster talk t-shirts available across the oh no podcast.com slash donate and we've had very generous donors and and actually we have kind of a ethical issue there because we'll give money to practitioners of various alternative remedies and you know various other groups that we wouldn't normally want to help fund. Yeah and so we have this deal that we won't tip them which makes for very awkward endings of investigations. In my case I'm a bit of a hot house flower in that um because the the organization worked for the community for sceptic inquiries non-profit educational organization uh we we we promote scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal um and of course uh the famous Joe nickel who's not here but uh he's you know one of the greatest and he's he is as far as to know the world's only sort of full-time paranormal investigator I'm more of a part-time because my duties also include doing the managing editing the deputy editing of sceptic inquire magazine and then other things as well so in my particular case um I don't actually have fun like for example Joe nickel has a fund he's actually uh he's been don't he's had money donated to help him do his investigations um and whereas in my case uh the investigations that I do are primarily on my own usually on my own time in my own dime uh usually they're opportunistic opportunistic ones for example I mentioned the popo bawa uh you know I happened to be in in zanzibar and I said hey as one is and and I could go to the beach and get it drunk or I could go look at the skeptic raping bat demon and you know there you go so a lot of times it's sort of like you have to take you take advantage of it when you can and the other the other part of the question is occasionally the investigations are funded by tv shows so for example uh you know there's I was on national geographic uh the is it real series and other ones as well and so for example uh at one point we were doing investigation of ogopogo the lake monster in canada and at first they just wanted to have me as a talking head like well can you talk to us about lake monsters that yeah I can wouldn't it be more interesting if you actually flew me out there to do the investigation the guy's like yeah yeah we could do that so so again we're using I'm happy if I can do an investigation on national geographic uh you know dime that I'm happy to do so I really have to plug that how many people in here have netflix is quite a few national geographics is it real is on netflix go and watch it again uh when I was a little boy I used to watch Ben radford on there all the time so I recommend it and I watched you too I should mention on the subject of funding the independent investigations group is an all volunteer group and while the $50,000 uh prize you know for the paranormal challenge is backed by the center for inquiry the members actually pay dues and at the Los Angeles chapter we have 40 plus members and we use those funds but it's a good indicator that you can form a local group and conduct investigations just based on volunteerism and you know enthusiasm for the subject I just wanted to get back to the questions briefly I have two methodologies uh what resources do you use for your investigations well you know that that is a great question resources we're going to look at as being things like the internet which you have to be very careful because you don't know always how good your source is there the library eye witness accounts when it comes down to it we have to get back to that thing about credentials and what what kind of training do do we really have to be paranormal investigators well the truth is is you don't need to have any credentials but what you do have to have is friends that know stuff um and and we're lucky because we have several we have when we get stuck on certain things we can call up Banna check and bother him and he's been very great in terms of giving advice when it comes to us maybe needing to see things from a different perspective we've actually bothered James Randy on occasion we have several medical doctors that we call to see if there's certain conditions a psychiatrist and a big one we actually have Stuart Robbins here he's a planetary geophysicist and I love that title but he's absolutely brilliant and we're able to get so much good information from these guys you cannot uh be an island if you're going to be a paranormal investigator you have to get out there and make some good contacts with professionals because just about every field that you can imagine will have some aspect of it that will be valuable to you except well florist we haven't really figured out how that would be useful yet but most most uh uh i want to say applications but most uh wow it's a ghost i'm going to go investigate that i'll be right then a good example of that how many people that wanted to get into the paranormal field thought i'm going to go out and i'm going to go study geology how many times have we had to call on geologists i mean it's been countless uh to the point we actually called in the u.s department of agriculture wants to do a soil survey for us because it was part of our investigation and they got really excited because they got to pretend to be ghost hunters that's true but any field regardless of how obscure it is seems to have some sort of a tie-in to doing one type or another of investigation yeah we brought our own geologist to a creation museum dr donald prothrow that was fun uh but uh speaking of uh resources i mean this meeting here the amazing meeting is like the collection of all the greatest resources skeptical inquirer skeptic magazine um you know uh science based medicine blog you know there's so much that gets produced out of this group here that are fantastic resources but for our podcast we tend to go in blind not that we intentionally yeah we're if you're drawing the difference between investigation and uh research will kind of go heavy on the investigation just to get the experience of it and then later on check in with all these other great resources and kind of see what the perspective is yeah i think that's kind of where our different types of investigations differ um we try to do a sort of immersion reporting technique because we want to have this sort of layman's experience where you just go in the same way someone else would go into a chiropractor and see what that's like not knowing much about it and then um well we'll ask the practitioner exactly what the claims are and see how that stands up to science later in the game so that we have that sort of pure experience and as a result um i'd say our investigations are probably much cheaper we're just going to take a couple of questions from the audience and then move on to some case studies briefly oh my god okay we'll start over here my acupuncturist literally the most painful experience of my life yeah did everybody hear the question okay it was he was asking if we've ever showed up an investigation and and the uh the subject was such a believer and so fanatical that we felt that it may have been a danger to us um yes yeah a lot yeah uh it does happen a lot and i think when it comes to uh even when we're talking about these challenges the the like the million dollar challenge the iig challenge um a lot of the times you start to wonder will this person flip out by before the end of this if they you know because they all they all say at the end oh yeah okay i failed this time and then 20 minutes later like it was a setup the whole thing was a setup and you just never know uh what's gonna happen so it is it's almost always frightening and i can tell you the ghost believers to to us are not nearly as freaky as the ufo believers uh they're a lot like the conspiracy theorists and they have guns in their iron lined basements and uh they're they're very scary and we we thought for a while we were gonna have to start wearing bulletproof vests and stuff but uh it gets a little freaky out there yeah i'll just just following what he said that that's been my experience as well is i mean i've dealt with you know pissed off psychics ufo believers you know cryptos of all i mean take your pick but by far the the scariest folks of the ufo folks i mean i just anyway but uh just real quick the the one that comes to my mind is uh when i was living in buffalo i had a guy come to me who believed he had a ghost in his neck and he wanted me to recommend a doctor who could uh who could put certain um musical vibrations into his neck that would drive out the ghost and i asked him where he got this idea that a ghost in his neck and he said that he watched a lot of ghost hunters and uh that was a case of where i mean he was a middle-aged black guy nice guy uh but just clearly not all right and i did my best to steer him towards uh towards counseling but i mean i was i was only slightly scared for myself but i was more scared for him yeah i was i was saying when you look at the body of skeptical literature i know i get very excited about investigations and finding the solutions to mysteries but there's a big section if especially look at michael schirmers work uh why do people believe weird things figure that out because the the passion people have for their beliefs and the way they hold on to their beliefs is really going to have a big impact if you do investigations on how you interface with these people even the most casual joke about bigfoot gets me hate mail because i'm being dismissive right you know you know it's in the puns a little bit on the puns but uh it's it's if you dismiss something someone else holds to be a cherished belief even if it's outside of religion it could be taken like blasphemy so just consider that i think there are also a lot of dangers uh with investigating pseudoscientific claims i think probably more of those than with paranormal claims uh and i guess something that happened to us quite recently uh this is a written article about this for swifts uh the jref's blog and it was called surprise cupping and essentially what happened was um bathy and i went back to australia and my mother paid for him to have this is all very personal but my mother paid for him to have a nice massage and so anyway he's lying on this not that kind of massage stop thinking like that uh so she paid for him to have a massage and uh anyway he's probably about 10 minutes into this and he starts feeling these heavy weights being placed on his back and he thought is this a hot stone massage or something like that and then he feels them being moved around on his back and then suddenly he hears this popping sound so this practitioner was cupping his back and hadn't even cleared that with him hadn't asked for permission at all just decided to perform this procedure on him and that's of course extremely dangerous we basically got home afterwards and and i said well how was the massage and he said look don't tell your mum but look and he lifts up his shirt and he's covered in bruises so i think that there are a lot of dangers associated with investigating the uh the pseudoscientific claims and i think Ross would have to agree with me there with his recent colonic irrigation yes there's a reason our motto is we show up so you don't have to we do not encourage people to always undergo the things that we do um and there is a calculated risk to it for sure um and that's uh something to be aware of you know the possible side effects um ear candling was another one uh because there is a burning candle in your ear and um and it's not pulling earwax out of your ear we found out so um yeah proceed with caution or do not proceed at all with those kinds of claims well one thing about the pseudoscientific claims is there's a lot more uh possibility for lawsuits as well because usually with that you're attacking some sort of a business uh we witnessed that not too long ago with the business that had a magic box that will cure autism and cancer and all sorts of other things and the minute that we brought it up uh luckily one of the local news stations went with us but the threats of lawsuits once again come up and these people mean business because you aren't just attacking their belief you're attacking their source of income and that is a very serious thing to do to people but we're just the people to do that interestingly though the only people who have threatened legal action against Ross and myself are the ralions no pseudoscience practitioners no death threats we try to be very the day is young no no death threats yet we're not asking for any right but tam does have a survey at the end so you can write that in is that one of the options right did you just ask me how do we go and investigate a haunting legitimately well what and admittedly uh since you know when it comes to people calling us and going out and doing haunting investigations the way we do it is slightly different than the way Ben Radford does it so we're going to let him uh also say what he does here in a couple minutes and then we'll have a jello wrestling finale on that but what we tend to do is we do historical research on the address of the place we try to go back and see if there's any other claims or if there's anything that's happened to the place that may cause the claims that the people are having so we try to do as much behind the scenes research as possible we find out from the people have they ever had these kind of activities in their life before anywhere else they lived that way we can get a little bit of an idea on who we're dealing with mentally we'll go to their place of residence and in an interview them and have them show us around of you know what it was that happened and how it happened and try to get a good idea walk around and survey the area take a good look and then what we do we do what most skeptics hate we do the stake out we do go and spend the night with the people we bring emf detectors we bring temperature gauges we bring cameras video cameras we do all that stuff and it's not to catch a ghost that's the thing that differentiates us from the tv crowd we don't go there to catch a ghost we go there to catch them hoaxing we go there to catch what the actual natural problem may be and if we can catch that on video we can show it to them and say see we've had cases where there there've been let's say areas in the house that have had such a high emf reading from a defect defective compressor on a refrigerator or something like that that's what we're finding you know or bearings go out on things and it sounds like there's a conversation coming from the other room because of bearings out in the other room but so well we'll try to use these things both for documentation not to find ghosts but documentation and we like to also use the the emf detectors and stuff to show the other groups that they're not effective for finding ghosts you know when we've got all this data to say see no ghosts and yet the emf that we recorded is the same as what you recorded but you came to the conclusion of ghosts and we didn't so we use it for kind of two different reasons there um anything to add on that a key thing that's good a key thing to remember is that they are having experiences but how can we reframe this and look at those experiences you know there's often a real explanation that you can find and try to break them apart because they'll take all these little things that are happening and and meld them together for example we went to a house in west hollywood and this a young woman had been worried about all these things one was ectoplasm she had come up with that word and she said it would aggregate in the center of her kitchen and so we said okay well let's look at the slope of the kitchen let's put we could see the trail let's put some other liquid here oh look it's flowing to the same spot that's the lowest spot in your kitchen and we then traced it to the back of her fridge there was a coil that was going outside of a collection pan and it was just dripping water and that was picking up gunk on the kitchen floor and voila you have ectoplasm something a little stickier than water at the end result she'd had a light fixture fall down well that was completely unrelated we showed that the the the glass or it was plastic thankfully not glass didn't fit too well in the the wood casing for the light fixture so then she was relieved by that she talked about spelling fingernail polish and we asked her if any of her neighbors had been painting sure enough the next door neighbor had repainted there well you know might have had the same kind of bases as a fingernail polish her phone had been misfunctioning oh so it was all these things totally unrelated but she had created a narrative out of them and it had made her worried but when one by one we just kind of answered those specific claims and honored her experience she was happy and content with the result I would say yeah that's absolutely look at the claims like we talked about before also you got to consider the null hypothesis make sure there's something really going on right I mean not just in saying is this story true or not but a really common problem I think with skepticism is you you hear a story and you think oh that's probably not what's happening I bet it's this and you come up with a plausible explanation in your head and sometimes those are really great and they seem very plausible but sometimes they have nothing to do with what's really going on because nothing's going on so you really need to take that that extra step and see if anything's actually really happening I think I speak for Ben and I when our investigation styles are very similar and we'll do a lot of historical background research and write up a lot of the stories as folklore and and often you'll find I've investigated most of the major claims in this country regarding haunted houses the Winchester mystery house Alcatraz the Waverley Hills sanitarium and often you'll find that when you do good historical research you can debunk the claims and often people who are reputed to haunt a particular house never existed or never went to that place you've had a couple of stories like that too so I think that that's a good technique to take to to do your historical research but we're sort of running low on time and we wanted to look at a couple of case studies for you all so Blake if you'd like to let me just explain what's going on you know we didn't know how many people were going to be here so we wanted to give you an opportunity to kind of think through some hypothetical situations these are hypothetical but they're they're not they're not completely unlike real events that have happened okay and let's see okay yeah all right so this this is the weeping statue a news story catches your eye it seems that visitors to the gardens of st. Barry the white have reported that a statue to the venerated saint weeps every morning the report says that a child first noticed the phenomena and now visitors from the area are crowding into the gardens every morning and placing the tears on sick people some have reported feeling healed after the experience a woman says that the tears have cured her lengthy illness I've been feeling terrible for more than a year but as I prayed before the statue a friend put the tears on my forehead and I suddenly felt better the three-foot tall marble statue was placed in the gardens last winter but nobody reported the phenomenon till this spring the gardens are open Monday through Saturday Monday through Saturday no admission necessary but donations are welcome so so this is the kind of I think this kind of claim is pretty common they kind of pop up all over the country of relics or holy events that people think are miraculous and if you're if this happens in your community and you want to go do a case study this is the kind of thing you might see or experience so um this is anybody I really am a challenge to how to approach this but if anybody wants to talk about how they might want to and that includes the panel if they want to but uh how you would start this sort of a case love power love power love power it's love power well I guess we're done all right next oh yeah these exactly you're thinking on the right lines you know those are some thick tears birds with diarrhea yeah that's a good point he's talking about possibly putting another experiment having a similar statue and see if you get the same effect in the same area exactly yeah I gave her an illness that was very vague yeah so but has anyone tested that's a great question has they tested to see if they're real tears right oh these are great you guys think exactly the right way these are great questions so go forth and investigate you guys are great yeah you you're done well it's interesting because I mean I think with these you you can't necessarily know whether this is a right just from the story whether this is a a legitimate physical phenomena that just like is it due is it is it something from a sprinkler or is it a pious fraud is someone at the church actually you know helping this along to help you know the vagueness of the story that there's no names with the people I'd left that there not to hide it because I see stories like this all the time where a person said a woman said a boy said and there's no names associated with it if you dig you may discover there's no such person at all that's just a story but that is your great questions good job guys so let's move on to the next one one sorry go ahead um well you'd go in at night sure not all the lights this is actually I think religious claims like this where there's a miracle involved no matter what the this is hypothetical I don't know what this is but whoever worships very white the the the religious claims can be really challenging though because if it's in the best interest financially for the institute or place that has this phenomena going on they may not want you to come and investigate I know that although Joe niggles not here to say it he's had to do some sneaky reaching around and touching things and in order to get these kind of investigations done and statues statues so another reason he's not here this year all right so this is what I call pitching a series you hear on the radio that a ghost hunter group is filming a tv episode in your hometown apparently there's an active haunting that involves a ghost which throws things the haunting is allegedly sitting around a 13 year old boy who's a foster kid he was put into foster care after his parents were both arrested for dealing meth and a few weeks later began to break or things began to break around the house the foster parents have five kids in total but the problem only manifests when the new kids present reported activity includes silverware flying across the room furniture moving his bed shaking some versions of this story say it levitated and at least one photo which shows a tv remote control flying past his face he's not been seriously injured but at least three times the flying objects have hit him the foster parents have publicly pleaded for assistance from any paranormal investigators who can help they say they're skeptical about ghosts but are at a loss to explain the phenomena that may be a you know the the kids uh health and safety is definitely something to be considered yeah hidden camera hidden camera would be great yeah if they'll let you in yeah hidden cameras can be difficult with minors they did yeah that's true in this particular case they're going to let you investigate so uh hidden camera would be great uh any other ideas go ahead it's true it doesn't say that yeah yeah this this case is is loosely based on the tina resh poltergeist case uh and in that case randy tried to investigate i think he was prevented from doing uh the job he wanted to do but it turned out in that case uh evident seemed to suggest tina resh was throwing things herself and causing this um so in in in this particular scenario um you're you're right the best way to actually this is kind of a hot situation you would be if you could get in there with cameras and look around if you could hide cameras and not let anybody know it that would also be great um i when i wrote this secretly i i thought it would be kind of fun if the the actual cause was one of the other kids was throwing stuff at this new guy yeah so that that was yeah that was how i kind of imagined it but but yeah i think there were challenges in the resh case in particular that that um we talked about it on monster talk where the the parents didn't want uh any skeptics coming in and then the the paranormal investigator or well he was yeah william roll he's passed away now but uh yeah yeah i'm not so sure about the ethics of that case so oh good one yeah i like that so i was to talk to the parents it'd be a little tricky if they're in jail but yeah yeah probably just find out if anything had happened before yeah did the phenomena exist before he moved to the new house yeah so good example can you repeat the question sorry could you repeat the question yes exact oh really good idea yeah exactly because the inconsistencies in the story we're assuming i think that things are actually happening because i've said there was a photograph but you're right you're saying to interview the kids separately separately right exactly so stew in that type of case would you if you're familiar with it and there what was ongoing would that be a case where you should call child protection services and say look there's something going on here and they don't want people who would actually know what might be going on investigating you really need to step in here you know i i this is tricky and i don't know the answer the with with this case i mean as skeptics if we heard this story on the news i think we could call child protective services and ask the foster care system has its own you know local controls within each state um ray were you involved in that case at all the tina rash case no okay so i i read i read randy's original reports back in in skeptical inquire and i don't remember if they approached the foster care a system i don't remember that being a part of the story i think they were hampered so much that was a bigger factor was they weren't allowed to investigate and william roll uh you know really felt that tina had supernatural powers and so was trying to protect her from the dirty stinking skeptics so yeah yeah well it sounds crazy when you say it well but part of the problem is that there's lots of people who raise their kids with really weird beliefs religious beliefs whatever else and at some point you could easily be accused of religious persecution uh you know where you've got somebody who's like you know my you know because you've got holy rollers you know fundamentalists who absolutely believe that there are demons and devils at work in the world and you know there's a fine line between teaching your kids what you truly believe that again there's demons and devils and armageddon's any day now and uh and think ghosting like that so you have to be careful yeah no we don't welcome to america oh right the problem is that that's simply convincing your child that there's a ghosting house isn't abuse de facto oh sure yeah if there's if there's physical or sexual abuse then sure but i mean again it's sort of yeah yeah if they tend to not listen you can always just call rocky mountain paranormal research society we can get out of the radar and get in there and find out for sure i didn't realize having the kid actually get struck was going to be such a big factor i could edit this right now we could fix it but i i think that also brings up a good point about the sincerity of the claim if a parent says my child is being beat up in my house i think my house is possessed or haunted and instead of moving the hell out they call a paranormal investigation group i mean if i honestly thought my kid was being beat up in my house for whatever reason i would be out of there that night i think culture guys that documentary sets it right well one thing you really need to watch out for though is if they're just calling in paranormal research groups they may also be looking for people bringing tv cameras so they may have actually brought up the claim these might not be happening this could be something very minor they might not be anything at all but because they want exposure to the media they'll make up the claims and we get that a lot where we'll show up at a house and they'll say well where are the tv cameras because everybody must be a tv show and unfortunately that's really started to ramp up the claims in the back in the white shirt no you yeah why did you let that woman ask that security the question is when you go into these investigations how much do you disclose do you come in and say i'm a skeptic or do you come in and say i'm doing a podcast do you come in and say i don't really believe what you're saying i'm kind of skeptical of it but i'm going to check it out so we don't we come in and say we're here to find the truth uh we don't necessarily do the jason the grand thing we're here to help uh we're here to find the truth we're here to look at your claim look at the evidence and then we're going to tell you what we find we don't come in and say we're skeptics because skeptic is an incredibly dirty word to a believer so we don't use that word we'll do something along the lines of you know the alpha project maxim you know if they ask you's pointedly hey wait a second what are you actually doing here well then we'd be honest but in the meantime we're busy asking questions and um you know being honest with our questions but not stating our intent or our perspective hoping to be convinced you know perhaps if they have something legitimate or convincing no they're not yeah it's amazing people do not do their research at all um so there's there's times that if people had actually looked us up uh they wouldn't have called us and they never do yeah we just use the the the statement just trust us yeah we use our real names and uh and actually uh with our investigation of the Mormon church which we joined and we're baptized into um they changed their policy with new applicants where they do a background check now I was never a temple Mormon you have to faithfully tithe for a year but I still play circle ball with all the elders it's awesome and they and they offered me a special temple recommend because I was so sincere they said they would give me one early because of my sincerity well often actually this is a funny thing um you know with both the railings and the Mormons and a few other groups they'll say you know we're so happy to see the caliber of new people coming in here you guys are so smart and ask such great questions and we'll feel a little bad like oh we're not really we have a few more scenarios but we have no time so let me what we're gonna do is we're gonna put together the rest of this stuff into a pdf package along with some notes and some excerpts from ben's book um which is available for sale across the hall actually he's got more than one but there's a parental investigation book which is fantastic if you want to become an investigator you should read it um or at least buy it it has sections with with with randy and and Karen and Blake as well it's great book all right so so I want to thank everybody for coming this has been a great thing thank you for everyone on the panel oh yeah the the pdf will be on randy.org thank you very much