 Welcome to How Not To Be A Paranormal Investigator. I'm Carrie Poppy, and I'm very excited about this panel because I'm a pretty rookie paranormal investigator, and I feel like these guys might have some years on me in the investigating world. So first I'm gonna let you guys introduce yourselves and tell us in what capacity you do investigations. Should we start with you, Randy? Yes. In case people don't know who you are. If you don't, you're the wrong room. You're in the wrong hotel for a second, I'm sure. So what did you require of me, young lady? If you want to introduce yourself and tell us in what capacity you've done or do investigations. How much time we got? For you all the time in the world. Well, I'm James Randy, as you might have noticed, and I'm a magician by trade, who in the year 1960 decided that it was time, though I decided in advance that I would do that, that would become an investigator of paranormal occult and supernatural claims. And I gave up my career as a performing magician and went right into the lecture circuit and I had been reasonably successful at it since then. I've also got a number of books to my credit and I guess to my credit, I'm not too sure. And I got a 10th on the way out, which I'm sure everyone here will invest in very enthusiastically as soon as it comes out. It'll be called A Magician in the Laboratory. And not that's not laboratory, that's laboratory. Just in case you're wondering. I've given up that kind of work, I don't clean those rooms anymore. But ladies and gentlemen, I guess I will be answering questions during this session and so more will develop about me and my work. Ben? I'm Benjamin Radford, I'm a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, formerly PsyCOP. And I do investigations through them and also on my own. And I've been doing it for about 12, 15 years now, depending on how you count it, into all manner of weirdness, ghost chupacabras, miracles, again, pretty much all manner of weirdness. And I got into it from reading about the exploits of James Randy primarily and also Houdini and Joe Nicol and others. So that they were sort of my introduction in many ways between Randy and Carl Sagan. They're the reason that I'm here. Okay, that's good. I'm Banna Cech and I'm actually a mentalist. And I pretty much started, well same way, reading Randy's book. It was actually the magic of Yuri Geller back then is what it was titled. And I read that book and I started to create my own methods for putting, to create sort of psychic type phenomena. And then Washington University was given half a million dollars to study PKMB, which is psychokinetic metal bending. And that was in 1979. I was studied for four years, working very closely with Randy behind the scenes there. And they validated me being a genuine psychic. And we came out and explained that during those four years it was actually all an illusion. We were using magic tricks. And that's pretty much how I got started. Now the last couple of years, not so much investigation, although there was investigation behind that. And part of that is because now I'm doing the million dollar challenge. And we can talk about that as we get into this and what the difference is. Hello everybody. My name is Matthew Baxter. I'm half of the duo of Brian and Baxter. You've probably seen the green ties around. Oh, thank you so much, one person. I've been, I think, I've been investigating for about two decades right now. One thing I think I have over these guys when it comes to books is that I've actually, I'm probably the only panelist here that has actually read all of their books, but written none of my own. So at least I've got that going. But the reason I started, I started out as a believer. And it didn't take very long just because I have a bit of a critical mind that everything all these groups were believing just didn't mesh with what I was finding. So every group I joined I got kicked out of as soon as I debunked their evidence and just started launching out on my own and then doing my own thing. And that's when I found out that skepticism was the real home for me. You say launching or launching? Well, I'd lunch quite well, I guess, as well. Great. So there are probably lots of new paranormal investigators in this room or people who would like to become paranormal investigators. What's the most common mistake a new paranormal investigator makes? Watching TV. Okay, how so? All the paranormal shows on TV. There's one exception to this that I've seen, but all of them are complete crap. They all use confirmation bias all the way through. What's the exception? The exception is National Geographic's Is It Real? And if you've got Netflix, go back and watch it. I think quite often- Seven people on that one. I think quite often they don't realize what they don't know. They go in, they say, oh, I'm a skeptic, I've read some books, you know, I've read Randy's books and now I can be an investigator. And they also don't go in with a little bit of an open mind. And basically what they're doing is they're doing exactly what the scientists did with me. They're going in with their own bias and they don't know how to step away from that bias and really do proper investigation. In my experience, the biggest problem that I ask, well, there's a handful of them, but one of the biggest ones is lack of research. They just jump into cases cold. And, you know, for example, I'll see ghost hunters or ghost investigators who will, they'll go into a supposedly haunted location and they'll immediately turn off all the lights, which is weird to me. And then they'll walk around with cameras and they'll be hunting for ghosts. And I'll try to explain, well, what is the claim? You have to establish the claim. What is supposed to be happening here? And they'll completely forget that. They'll be like, oh, there's a claim? Like, yeah, that's what you're supposed to be doing instead of wandering around the place in the dark. And so they don't do the research. They don't do the background work on it. And so then they just sort of end up with this sort of weird non-investigation investigation. Well, now, Ben has just made very evident to the thing that I so admire about his approach, that is, prepare yourself. Ask the questions in advance and determine what's going to happen and ask them to decide what the claim is that they're actually pursuing or investigating. So I congratulate you for that, Ben, as I had before. But my concern with this matter is the media itself. In general, the media doesn't give a damn whether what they present via television and books and radio in any way and in public meetings, they don't really care whether what they're presenting has any truth behind it or not, just as long as it sells sponsors goods. The bottom line is, will the sponsors be happy with it? And the sponsors will be happy if lots of people are tuned in. Lots of people are exposed to it in the magazines or newspapers or on television or radio. That's all the sponsor cares. They want their product to be named and they want a lot of people to receive that name all at the same time. The media doesn't give a damn. And you've got to remember that. They're not going to be on your side if you're not going to offer them something in that direction, something that they can use commercially. So be aware of the media. Their honesty is always to be questioned, to be doubted, not condemned and not refused if it's offered. But be very careful of Greeks bearing gifts, as they say. So if you come into an investigation and you consider yourself a skeptic, you think it's doubtful that I'm going to find something paranormal here. How much do you need to disclose to the subject of your investigation? Do you need to say I'm ban a check and I'm a skeptic or do you just go in with an open mind and let the chips fall as they may? I think that's a case by case. For instance, when I worked with the parapsychologist, it certainly wouldn't have behooved me to tell them that I, hey, I'm a magician and I'm coming in. When Randy called me years ago and he said, hey, I'm writing an article for Penthouse Magazine. Really? Yeah. It's on evangelists. I'm going to be in Houston. Would you like to come along and see Peter Popoff? And had we have told Peter Popoff during that investigation exactly what we were doing, he would have climbed up. He certainly would have been watching us. And I don't think we would have got away with half the things we were able to do to prove that he was a fraud. Certainly, Randy put somebody in there who was a male dressed up as a woman and they were healed of ovarian cancer. We wouldn't have been able to do that if when Popoff said to the man, hey, you're a woman and I'm going to heal you of ovarian cancer. He said, oh, wait a minute, I'm really not a woman. So I think you almost have to do it on a case by case basis. I think it's a case if you have to use their own weapons against them. Yeah. You can't do an undercover investigation if you're not undercover. Good logic, Brian. Notable, quotable. Yeah, I would say in my case that again, as Banshek said, it sort of depends on the case. Most often, I'm in a bit of a situation where on occasion I'm recognized because they see me on TV, they see somewhere, you know, it was in skeptic. And so they sort of had this sort of like one eye towards me like, hmm, you seem really familiar. I'm George Robb. And George just saved my ass so many times. George here, thank you. But so sometimes you recognize and Joe Nicol and Randy, God, poor Randy, I mean, you know, how they're going to see him coming a mile away. But that's the price you pay for, you know, skeptical activism and notoriety. But for the most part, when I go into it, I certainly don't try to hide who I am. I just say, my name is Benjamin Radford and I investigate weird things and I understand you have a weird thing. And that's, and I get weird puzzled looks by that, but that's, you know, I don't try and hide it. I don't come up and say, I'm with Skeptical Inquire Magazine. Is this bullshit? Okay then. It's a matter of like, you know, I'm trying to figure this out. There's something weird going on and help me help you understand what's going on. In reference to my lack of anonymity, that's not easy to say. Lack of anonymity. Yes, and being recognizable so easily, I've gone into disguise bodes on occasion as Adam Jerson. I remember him. J-E-R-S-I-N. And if you take Adam Jerson and rearrange the letter, you get James Randi with any luck at all. But no one has ever figured this out, it seems. And so as Adam Jerson, I wear a reddish brown wig and I dye my beard with a temporary dye. Of course, I wouldn't want to get permanent on this sort of thing, in the same color. And I put in a set of false teeth that are grotesque. So grotesque that I freak like this all the time. And that effectively disguises my voice and I never carry around a skull-headed cane. You see, that would give me away, I think, right away. But I've had to go into that disguise and I've had many pictures taken of me in disguise like that. I've had many videotapes as well and you can look them up on YouTube because they know everything along with Google, of course. But I've done that and I've done it rather effectively. So disguise does work. The greatest thing is in the world is when you know he's Adam Jerson and you're sitting at the same table with Randi. But yet he can't say he's Randi because he's in this disguise and then you start up a conversation with believers about Randi and how terrible Randi is. Such devilish fun. At an occasion, James, you may remember, or maybe a slightly different occasion, at a conference of the parapsychologists in Madison, Wisconsin. Yes, that's what I'm referring to, yep. There we go. Many years, many, many moons ago. And I saw Banachek and Mike Edwards, his colleague at the time, colleague in crime, so to speak. They were bending spoons and doing various things. I wandered into this group and there was a German journalist there. He was a very heavy accent and he was making notes. And I walked in and I sort of looked over their shoulders and the two guys looked up and saw me and they were saying, oh, he's going to give us away or something, he's going to make us laugh. And at one point the German journalist turned to me and he said, you know, it just, it just, I'm a Randi man. If he was here right now, he would be really astonished at this. And I looked at him and I said, I believe you're correct. And the two guys that were going, they were ready to bust. So I had to leave at that point. Baxter? Yes. Well, what's the question? No, I would have to agree with what Ben said, except for the fact that I probably wouldn't refer to their weird things the way he did. Show me your weird things. Yeah, show me your weird things. You get a wide variety of answers to that. Let me just tell you. But it is a case by case situation all the way. Now, I usually get called in by believers that think that they have something strange going on in their home. And I'm honest with them to the extent that I say, I'm here to find out what the truth is and try not to feed too much into their delusions or confirmation bias and just try to get to the bottom of things. Okay, so it sounds like there's general consensus that you don't have to disclose upfront that you're a skeptic because it might even mislead about you having drawn a conclusion beforehand. Has there ever been a time where you or someone you knew didn't disclose that information and it ended up rearing its ugly head later? Silence might be a good thing. Well, yes, I would say that you're always gonna get in trouble when you withhold information in one censor. There's always gonna be someone who thinks that what you're doing is wrong. You have to go in guns blazing from the beginning, completely honest. And unfortunately that just isn't the way it works often when you're dealing with these types of situations. So if you withhold information, somebody somewhere's gonna disagree with you. And if you don't withhold information, somebody somewhere's gonna disagree with you. So yes, there'll be problems no matter what you do. Yeah, we had that with Project Alpha, people bringing up into ethical to full scientists in the name of science. So that became a whole thing. It quite often, even you as the person going undercover, you go in thinking one thing and then all of a sudden you get yourself in a situation. You didn't quite realize you were gonna get yourself into. And how do you get out of that? And how do you get out it in a very, a way that makes you look good, but yet also leaves them looking good sometimes. It's difficult, it's really, really difficult. I know when we work with the scientists, I went in thinking that they were gonna be the enemy. It was us against them, it was us against them. And as things went along, you start to realize that they're misguided. They're very nice people, but they're misguided. And you start having a relationship with these people and you know at some point you're gonna have to come out and tell the truth and you know you're going to hurt them. So that's one type of situation you can get yourself into that you don't really realize up front you're going to when you first start stepping into it. There's other ones too, but yeah, that's, that's. And I must say with the Alpha project giving absolute approval of what the boys did, we made an agreement in advance among us, the two fellows that were pretending to be psychics at Washington University. We made an agreement in advance that if they were ever asked after they did a performance was that a trick? They would immediately answer yes and we were sent here by James Randy. So that was an agreement we made in advance. They were never asked. Sometimes the professor in charge of the thing would read letters from me saying things like what they had just done a couple of weeks before. You know if the, if the subject you're examining ever do this, that the other thing, do the following. I was giving them good advice on how to catch the cheaters. The cheaters that I knew had just done this two weeks before and I was giving them adequate advice. I don't know if the kids ever do this. And he would read the letter with great amusement. Can you imagine? He believes that we could be fooled. It just shows you cannot warn the people who already think they know the answer to these questions. And we also made an agreement in advance of Project Alpha. We said that if it ever comes to a point where they will be published in a, in some sort of a group organization or in a scientific paper or whatever, the results of what they think they've found in the laboratory, we will immediately announce it to them. Now that resulted in a rather unique situation. It came to the point where the Paracycological Association was going to have a big meeting and one of the features of the meeting was that this university and this professor who will remain nameless mercifully was going to read a paper in which he announced that he had discovered two psychics. There were young kids and that was our Alpha kids, you see. We found out about this and I immediately told the kids, okay, we have to go along with what we said we would do. And then I thought to myself, however, if we just simply go to Phillips, if I were to go to Phillips for example, who I had never met. And I had not been welcomed by him. He always sent me a letter saying, we don't need a magician to help us find any favors. Thank you, which is obviously not true. He did need such a person. However, I said, you know, if I went directly to Phillips, he might think that I'm just trying to blow up their project. So I let the intelligence about this, the facts about this leak to a fellow named Marchello Trucci who was such a, he couldn't keep a secret to himself at all. So I just let him know surreptitiously through another source that there was, the two kids were fakers and he got the news to them. And we have a copy of the original scientific paper, page for page, the way they were gonna present it, which is very positive. These kids are psychics, no question of it. And we saw the improvements they made on it by putting in modifiers like apparently and perhaps, and we suspect that all of the little things that they inserted in the thing came down to a paper which had no positive statements in it whatsoever. It was very poorly received by the Parapsychological Association, but it was a much more factual paper. So we did our duty in exposing this thing before it led to some careers being put in danger, for example. I think it's important that when you go undercover that you set up your guidelines in advance, that you take a look and you have your hypothesis, which is what we did and we had to. But you know what your exit strategy's gonna be and you stick to that as much as you possibly can because at some point as you move through this, your emotions are going to take over and you've gotta be very careful that you're not going off your emotions. So try to stick to that strategy as much as you possibly can at exit strategy, which is exactly what we did. And the other kids often said to me when Phillips was committing himself more and more, pardon me, that's the name of the professor, I slipped, I'm sorry, when he committed himself more and more to the genuine quality of these kids, they would call me afterwards saying, oh, but Phillips is in so deep now. And I don't think he could ever get out of it. And I said, we've gotta go along with our protocol because we've gotta prove that these people can be taken in by a couple of clever kids who can do tricks. But they felt very badly about this and they got to like Phillips because he was innocent of Guile, he was just not very well informed. I would just add one thing to the question of identifying yourself as a skeptic. You have to realize that to a lot of people, they don't know what that means. But they seriously don't. I mean, if you say I'm a skeptic, they're like. Do you know how many claimants I get? Do you doubt things? How many claimants that say they're gonna apply and it always starts out, I'm a skeptic but I have this power. Yeah. So the problem is that even if you go into investigation and say, I'm doing this and I'm a skeptic, that means nothing. For example, the ghost hunter guys, the plumbers, they call themselves skeptics. Make that what you will. Yeah, exactly. Well, they are. They're also frauds. They know, yeah, I said it, screw me. Because we got proof that they are. Now the thing is, they actually don't believe a damn thing they see on that show because they admit, they've admitted to us, Brian and I, the times when they have cheated. They know there's no ghosts out there but they know damn well what sells to the advertisers too or for the advertisers. So they're skeptics, sure, they're telling the truth there. Unfortunately, there you go. So Baxter, you bring up a good point. How do we deal differently with people who we suspect of trickery in the case of their claim and then the people who we think are sincere but just misled? Well, I think that, unfortunately again, is a case by case situation when, say like if I was assisting Banachek with a million dollar claimant, something along those lines and we suspected them of possibly being a trickster, we would have to treat them identically to the way we would treat someone that we thought was completely sincere until we have actual evidence to the contrary, everybody gets treated the same until we have the true facts. Once you catch them, once you have that evidence, all bets are off at that point. Yeah. Because they've broken the contract. In my mind, they've broken the contract at that point. Ben, Randy, would you agree? Yes, I agree very much with that. That's a good way to attack it, I think. Yeah, I mean just like what Matthew said, I mean, at the end of the day, it almost doesn't matter. I mean, if you're trying to find the truth of a situation, of an investigation, if the truth is that this is a hoax, then I mean, there are essentially parallel paths until such time as you have definitive evidence of hoaxing, at that point, then again, all bets are off because they've lied to you. And so I personally haven't found that many cases of hoaxing. I mean, of course, we come across them, but for the most part, in the ghost investigations, and the Bigfoot sightings and psychic things, and I don't know about the others here, but certainly the majority of them are, they're not hoaxers, they really think they can do this. I mean, you and Ross have found this as well, so. We had talked the other day in the workshop about which group we thought was the most dangerous. And this kind of relates because the ghost group, they tend to believe and they don't tend to hoax things. They might push their facts a little bit to try to get others to believe them as well, but they do tend to believe. It's the UFO crowd that tend to hoax things, and but their belief is so strong that they justify their hoaxing with it, and they will shoot you if you disagree with them. That reminds me that there was a man wandering the halls earlier who told me that he believes in UFOs, but not in aliens. And I said. I can get behind it. I agree that there are things flying that I don't know what they are, is that what you mean? So okay, how and when does paranormal investigations become unethical? From the minute you get the phone call. It's, there's always gonna be someone who disagrees with what you do, and I think ethics is a very malleable term. Everybody's ethics are slightly different. So by us answering the phone call to some people, it's like, well, you never should have even done that. To other people, it's, well, how can you not? How can you not help these people that think they're in danger of a ghost in their house or whatever? It's ethical and unethical from the get-go and all the way through. It just depends on who you talk to. There's an element in here about the magicians themselves as well. I was given a very prestigious award by the Academy of Magical Arts not long ago, and I gave a speech in which I actually threw the message in saying, ladies and gentlemen, you here in the audience who are magicians are associated closely by marriage or by a relationship to magicians. I think that you should all be joining the skeptical community in trying to get rid of the fakers out there who are using the same methods that the magicians use as entertainers, but they're using it to swindle people. And the reaction I got from that was very interesting. About half of the magicians sat there with arms firmly folded. The rest of them applauded me vociferously. About half of the magicians, professional and amateur magicians now, and they're usually advanced amateurs in most cases, half of them agree that with what the skeptics are doing is correct, and the other half say, no, no, these are professionals. Many of them admire Uri Geller. They think that he's just sort of a rascally guy who doesn't quite be honest with the audience. He sort of gives hints that maybe he's the real thing. No, he says distinctly, I don't do tricks, I'm not a magician, I don't know how to do tricks, and then he lies to people, and so he's a liar. He's not an innocent dupe of his own abilities at all. But half of the magicians, about 50%, I think it's very close, agree with us, and half of them don't, so beware. In my experience, unlike Baxter's, I think that I'd say most of the investigations that I do don't necessarily involve ethics of breach or otherwise. For example, if I'm investigating a Bigfoot sighting, assuming it's just somebody saw something weird, you do the investigation and either it is or isn't a Bigfoot or likely to be a Bigfoot or you look at the evidence of that, same thing with ghosts or whatever else. Many of my investigations, there's no inherent ethical issues involved necessarily, depending on, again, what the claim is. Usually, the times when ethics has come up for me was, as we were talking earlier, with undercover cases. There's been a handful of times when I've had to go undercover, and in those cases, again, that's when the very act of going undercover involves deception, and that's when you have to be as truthful as you can within the parameters, and as Randy was saying, if someone asks you directly, are you something other than what you're claiming to be, the answer is absolutely yes. Oh yes, you have to be ethical, even if they're not being ethical. Yeah, I mean, I think we have to hold a certain standard, even if they don't, and I try to do that as often as I can. I actually do do that, it's not that you just try, I think you have to do that, and so if they do ask you, if you're undercover, for instance, if they ask you, if you work with a Randy Foundation, I would always say yes, I wouldn't lie to them straight out like that, that's not, I wouldn't look them in the eyes and say no, I don't work for the James Randy Educational Foundation, I would tell them the truth, and I think so, as a result, I try to, I have a certain ethical line that I try to live by, and that also follows through in psychic investigations as well, I'm not gonna change that for that. But I must say that the James Randy Educational Foundation and the TAM operation that you're present at right now, if and when we investigate, as we should be doing later on today, investigate a claimant for the million dollar challenge, I assure you that everything is above board, strictly open, everything is done very, very honestly and directly, nothing is concealed whatsoever, and the tests that we may be doing later on today, again, it's a little iffy, but if it is done, it will be done with great integrity, I absolutely assure you of that. Absolutely, I mean, I'm always fully aware of how can I be fair to the claimant. It's not always being just fair to us and making sure that we're aware, I need to make sure that the claimant is comfortable with it, I need to make sure that the claimant realizes that we are not cheating them, it's not just about they possibly could be cheating us, it's about could we possibly cheating them, so I've gotta look at it from both sides. And part of the reason is because if skeptics get a reputation for cheating, then all bets are off, no one's gonna have any credibility if somebody legitimately applies to the million dollar challenge and they get cheated, I mean, at that point, then if we stoop to their level, then it's off. So some of the claims that people make, like if they say they can hear voices from other rooms or they see things that other people can't see, sometimes that might be indicative of a mental illness, I'm sure, often it's not, but sometimes it is. How should we handle the people who clearly do have those sorts of troubles? Do you handle them differently? Do you just ask them to go to a doctor? What would you do? Yeah, that's a difficult one because somebody who's mentally ill could have psychic powers, couldn't they? Well, they could. I mean, if psychic powers are real, they could have them. So do we just separate them? I think what we have to do is, and I know sometimes we also have to take those on a case-by-case basis because we certainly don't wanna add to delusions, we don't wanna hurt the person, we don't wanna seem like we're taking advantage of somebody who might be mentally ill, but at the same time, we can't just totally outright dismiss their claim. Well, of course, if they have a claim that can be tested, they can be tested by experienced people, such as we are, and it fails and then there's nothing to discuss. After that point, they simply didn't pass the test. But if it could do them some harm, it's always ethically necessary for us to think about the fact that they may be mentally disturbed and something should be done about it, and I think that we have honored that responsibility all the way through. What I have found is that the mentally, what I suspect are the mentally ill patients, the majority of them, they never get through the application process anyway because it's just pages and pages and pages of ranking and going on and things like that, and just never, and when you do that, you will never get to a point where you can even set up a protocol with them. So the majority of them eliminate themselves somewhere along the way. And just so you guys know that when we do deal with someone like that, when it comes to the million dollar challenge, I for one, if I'm dealing with them, I keep in contact with a psychiatrist and keep them in the loop on what's going on, what's being said, and how things are being done just so I can have some professional advice on what we should do. I mean, one of the things that Bannacek and I had talked about is if we get someone that's at a certain point where we're unsure but they're completely feeling sure about their own mental status, we let them know that one of the things they can do is get a mental screening as a preemptive step to keep people from accusing them of being psychologically imbalanced. And that in itself is a step towards getting them help if need be. So we try to enact what we can to get these people help if we're really concerned, but we try to keep a psychiatrist or something in the loop if possible. I mean, you can't just outright accuse somebody of being mentally ill, but it's, yeah. And that doesn't really help either. I mean, my background is in psychology, so I'm especially attuned to sort of trying to understand and empathize with the claimant. And sometimes, most of the time, it's somebody who sincerely and genuinely believes that they can predict the future or they can do this. And they're not lying, they're not crazy, they just have developed this whole world view. And so in the cases where I, when I'm dealing with somebody who I suspect is mentally ill in some capacity, I try and tease out, okay, well, again, is this wrapped up with your ability somehow? And are there ways in which I can sort of steer them towards competent mental health? I mean, I'm not a counselor, I'm not a psychologist. And so, and furthermore, that's not my job. I mean, ultimately, oftentimes, and I'm guessing everybody here on this panel and elsewhere has had a case where you begin with an investigation and you sort of end up being their counselors. And you don't want to find yourself in that position because that's not what we're doing. On the other hand, there's definitely a psychological counseling component even to people who aren't mentally ill, even to just people who are grieving. Banche could talk before about the grief vampires and Sylvia Brown and these people who prey on people whose family members are dead. And there's, that's not a mental illness, but in some ways, the way we can manifest itself is it can be very similar. So Ben, and then everybody else as well, is there a point at which you should give up on an investigation? Are there times when you felt like I need to withdraw because I may be doing more harm than good? Well, you have to have perfectly good reasons for giving it up. Otherwise, they say, oh, they know that I've got the powers and they're afraid of investigating. You've got to protect yourself in that respect. When it comes to investigating things like haunted houses or ghosts, claims, yeah, I'm sure Ben can relate to this, that people will get very attached to you. You're the person that brought them the solution, so now they will try to have you solve every one of their problems. And you do have to have a point where you just pull out and say that's it. And of course, it usually comes with a lot of anger from them. But we are, we're in there in a very sensitive situation. And that brings up a big ethical question of whether or not some of these residential investigations should be done at all. I think that they should, but it's how they get done that's the scary part. When you're the fourth paranormal investigator to be at their house, and the previous three have all confirmed the demon gateway in the closet, you're really dealing with some difficult situations. And when you're the one that solves it for them, you do kind of become their hero. They're a knight in shining armor and it can be really difficult to pull away. I'll just briefly tackle the larger question when is the case solved? How do you decide how long it goes? And it really depends on the case. I mean, there's been some cases that I've solved in an afternoon just by doing some original research. Some cases, there's a famous case of the so-called best case for psychic detectives. It took me 18 months to solve and there's the chupacabra that took me five years. And so sometimes, it depends on the scope of the investigation, depends on what you're investigating. And again, I think one of the problems that TV shows show is that people see these shows and they think that mysteries are solved in 53 minutes. And they all, if they just go overnight and wand around a scary, spooky place, you're gonna solve it. Well, no, sometimes it's like a homicide. Some homicides are solved within a couple hours. Some homicides are solved 20 years later and some are never solved. So you have to be willing to put in the time and the effort to see the investigation through. And so how long does an investigation take? It takes as long as it takes to solve the case. I have always described these paranormal shows on TV as a bunch of inexperienced people with overtuned instruments that they know very little about show up at a very old, creaky, a drafty house and they sit around in the dark until something goes thump. Then they turn on all the lights and scream and run for the doors and that's the end of the program. I think one thing that you can do also if you're dealing with people directly when you do investigations with them is try to just deal with the facts. Don't get caught up in all the emotion because the moment you start getting caught up in the emotion they feel like you're empathizing with them and now you become their friend and you get a lot of this back and forth. Just deal with the facts of the investigation. What is it that you're investigating? What is it that you're looking for? And you'll find it a lot easier to be able to step away if you have to at any point because you're just dealing with the facts. Quite often I'll get five or six pages of something from somebody and I will just reply with one line. Just dealing with the claim or the fact itself. I don't care about all this other stuff and I can't care about that because if I do I'll have so many of those people coming out of the woodwork and now I become their therapist and that's not what I'm there for. And oftentimes the claim comes with all this extra baggage. It's not just that X happened. It's that X happened and by the way my mother-in-law was in town and we went shopping and then this happened and it turned into these big, whole beautiful long narratives and I'm like, okay, just as he's like, what exactly happened? Well, let me tell you a story. No, don't tell me a story. Tell me what happened. So, Banachuk, you mentioned something at the beginning of the panel about the differences between investigations and say reports or tests or demonstrations. Yeah, I don't, I mean, although there's some crossover there, I don't really see like the MDC, the Million Dollar Challenge. I don't see that as really investigation. It becomes that afterwards. It becomes that down the line and we have to do our own investigation to make sure we're setting up proper protocol. But that's my, it's very, very different compared to if you're going into a full blown investigation. You know, we basically have a million dollars for anybody that can demonstrate a paranormal ability under observable conditions and I have to worry about protocol for those conditions. Not so much investigating the entire thing. Can they do it or can't they do it? It's not so much about how they are doing it. Now, when we are done, if they pass, then it is how are they doing it at that point? But that should already be covered with the protocol. Yes, Randy? No, yes? I agree. Yeah, okay. Validation. Okay, so one last question and then we'll open it up to questions from the audience. So, these ghost hunters that we see on TV, are they doing paranormal investigations or is it a misnomer? Briefly, no. No, mostly. No, most of those shows are scripted anyway and I can tell you right now, really easy way to see if a show is scripted, turn off the volume and just watch it and you'll be amazed how quickly you can spot that it's all just acting. You can also see a lot of them have disclaimers at the end of the show and often they are called a docu-soap, which means we read from a script. So no, they're not actually doing anything. Now, the TV trained ghost hunter that tries to go out and emulate those shows, well, we're talking about the flexibility of language. To them, what they're doing is paranormal investigation but to them, a skeptic means non-believer cynic. To us, that's not paranormal investigation and skeptic means open-minded and willing to find the truth and doesn't take things at face value. So we're almost not speaking the same language. Yeah, I would just add that they're not doing investigation. They're not starting to do any sort of investigation that I would recognize as investigation, primarily because investigation, it means to investigate. It means to try and get to the bottom of or answer a question now. Sometimes carry yourself to the point of wetting your pants as investigation. What was that? What was that? Oh my God, oh my God. It's not investigation. It's 52 minutes of mildly entertaining television, in some cases, but the purpose of the actors or participants or whatever you want to call them, the purpose of the show is not to seek the truth. These are not, this is not a documentary. This is not someone trying to solve a mystery. These are people trying to fill an hour of entertainment. That's all they're doing. And those disclaimers that scroll up and down the screen so fast at the end, if you slow it down, if you've got a TV facility in your TV, slow it down and read what they say there. They go so fast that you can't read them. The disclaimers are so comprehensive. They disclaim everything. They take no responsibility for anything whatsoever. They end up pretty well saying, none of this should be construed as being true. And that's what it sums up to when you come right down to it. Or entertainment purposes only. Yes, exactly. And there's not much entertainment as far as I can see. All right, we'll open it up to questions from the audience next. George? All right, if you've got a question, come on over here, just like last time. We got time for a bunch? Yeah, we do. We have a good 15 minutes. Yeah. Oh boy. Come on, here they come. You don't want to block sight lines. That's why we do it up this way. Question is, how do you, knowing that these are, every investigation is going to end up in BS. How do you maintain patience in dealing with these people? Well, we're required to. We're, you know, when we do the investigation, you're not talking about the paranormal TV programs, are you talking about us? Anything. Oh, okay, well, we're required to by the agreement that we've made publicly that we will investigate these things if and when asked. And particularly for the billion dollar challenge, of course we have to do it. We're constrained to doing it. And we have to terminate it at a proper point. We have to show that they did not meet the requirements of the challenge. And that's not always easily done. And of course, they never felt very seldom, I can put it that way, very seldom decide after we've shown them that they didn't have the powers, that they don't have the powers. I think Ben will probably agree with me on this one since we have the different types of investigations that we have to do, that part of it is out of education. We want to educate the public exactly what's going on here. And the thing that we have going against us is all of the TV programming, you know, that says that everything is real. Well, they're all ghosts, they're all UFOs, they're all aliens. So we have to be a little more meticulous about what we do and be patient and turn over every stone. Otherwise, we've failed in being able to educate the public the other direction. I always find I learn something from these. Every single one of them, I learn something. And to me, that's interesting. That's entertaining and it's knowledge. So it's not like I'm just going in and saying, okay, I know this is BS. And in some instances, I've got to step away from that. But many I do know that it's gonna be BS, one likely walking into it. But I also know that in every individual case, I'm dealing with a kaleidoscope of people here. That it's just, it's amazing what you walk away with. You'll either walk away with a very interesting story or you learn something in the process yourself. You may have to do some research and find some information. And now you become knowledgeable about something that you didn't before. So it's never boring. It is never boring. And the only thing I would just add to that is in terms of my investigations, I don't know that it is BS. I, you don't know that going in. And if you assume going into it that's BS, then you're not doing your job. And that brings us back to the first question really. You can't assume that. And for example, if I solve a famous ghost case that turns out to be a spider on a camera, we can say, well, that's BS. But no, actually, that's a precedent where we can go back and we can say, well, look, if there's another ghost video five years down the road, I said, well, look, you can go back and look at these solved cases going back to Randy and Joe and myself and back to everybody else, we're establishing precedent so that future investigators and future skeptics can go back and look at similar solved cases and say, hey, this is a lot like this other case. Maybe that's the answer. Obviously, the JRF has the elite of the magic world. But there's a lot of young clever magicians coming up with new techniques, new technologies. How do you guard against the fact that someone may just come up with a new technique that you haven't seen before and can pull one on you? I have to stay abreast of it. Yeah, I mean, I just had a discussion with Penn just recently. It's just there is so many new techniques in that. In some sort of way, we are a little bit protected in the aspect that we have a preliminary and a formal test. So if they pass the preliminary, I have a lot of people that I can go to. I've got a lot of young people and we've got, I mean, there's just a lot of people we can speak to and try to find out about the new technologies that are out there and find out what's out there. It is scary in this day and age of technology to really scary of how quickly things are moving forward. So yeah, it's a concern, but we try to stay abreast of it. I understand that the title of this forum was how not to conduct investigations, but I'd be interested to hear what advice you would give to somebody who says, we think that there is a haunting going on in this house. How should we conduct the investigation? And to add to that, can you imagine a scenario in which a haunting or the existence of ghosts would be confirmed? Well, you'd have to get some definitions going for you. What is a haunting? What is a ghost? And a few things like that. Every case is individual though, absolutely individual. No cases like any other, except on general principles. I think once you know what the claims are, once you know what's happening, I mean, even here you have enough resources to be able to make the right phone calls to get help and find out how you're gonna investigate that. I mean, that's such an encompassing question because ghosts come in supposedly so many different forms. I mean, is it a demon? Is it a ghost? Is it a spirit? Well, you know, what is it? Is it hiding in a box? Is it hiding in a mirror? You know, what is the mirror doing? You know, what is my door's opening and closing? It just really depends on what it is that they're claiming. I'll just add that I actually wrote a book that answered the question called Scientific Permanent Investigation, How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries, and it actually has pieces by Ray and others here. And it covers a lot there in terms of like what would be considered evidence of a ghost? The example that I think of would be if a pair of ghost investigators go to the White House and they claim that they found, they're getting an EVP, which is basically ghost voices of, say, John F. Kennedy's ghost. And if they have a recording of JFK saying something, say, come in on 9-11, okay? Well, JFK died long before 9-11. Now, in this case, we have recordings of JFK, we have his voice prints, we can compare this. And if we really have a verifiable audio recording of John F. Kennedy's voice describing some event that happened after his death, is that proof positive of ghosts? No, but it's a hell of a loss stronger than anything we've got now. So that would be a first step. One big thing that we see is that when you were talking about if there's a house that you believe is haunted, just make sure it's not your own house. One of the biggest mistakes that we see is people think that their own house is haunted and they try to start investigating it. And the problem is, is there's nothing as cool as living in a haunted house in your own mind. My house is haunted. So anything you do trying to investigate your own house is gonna be so skewed and so biased that you really do need to talk to some skeptical friends. There's skeptical organizations in every town just about. And have them over for dinner. My question is, how do you decide what you want to investigate? Because there are so many different ones out there. Like in my field of astronomy, would how would I know, or how would I make the decision or how would you recommend? You decide, say, should I investigate the latest Electric Universe claim or the latest UFO claim? Or like with what you do with Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society, how do you decide, well, do I invest this haunted house on this street or do I invest this other haunted house? How do you make those judgment calls of setting priorities? That's a difficult one. Now, we tend to get the emails and phone calls requesting our help. So for us, it's a matter of waiting through them. And a lot of the times, it'll be the people involved that make the decision for us. Because this is a very common scenario. Oh my God, we're being attacked by this ghost and it's doing all these horrible things and the walls are bleeding and there's pea soup all over the place and we need your help immediately. Well, we can be over there about four o'clock. Well, that really doesn't work for us. I've got to pick the kids up. How about, well, I'll check my calendar, get back to you. So they've got the most horrible thing going on in their house, but suddenly they don't have time because it doesn't fit their schedule. We tend to pass those ones by. If we've got someone that's genuinely scared and we'll put everything aside for us to come take a look at it, we'll jump on that first. But the problem is, is you can open up the newspaper and see the story about the psychic that's coming to visit that you can go get tickets to and try to catch her or catch him in the act. Or there's the story about the gym that overnight their security camera caught the ghost traveling across the gym. You've got all these things you can just open up the newspaper and see which one strikes a chord. Cattle mutilation, you've got to go check that out. They're all right there just waiting for you. So it's got to be about your own passion, your own interests. And there will be something that will align with your own interests somewhere. I guess that was sort of me ask, I wanted to ask you a question. Were you asking for yourself as to how you selects things or how the panel selects things? Well, I mean, specifically me because I'm going to be doing this, but I figured I could learn from how you choose to select things. What you said at the end, it's what are you passionate about? Because whatever you are passionate about is what you're going to really follow through and what you're going to be excited about doing. If you're doing a bunch of investigations that you just find boring, you're not going to keep doing it. You're going to go off and do something else. But if you find some things that you are passionate about, things that you have knowledge about, that's I think probably where you should start. Stu likes chocolate. I know that. And the only thing that I would add to that is go with what the best evidence is. Don't waste your time on some tiny little case no one's heard of. There's no good evidence for. In my investigations, I try to go with the cases that have not just sort of somebody saw something somewhere. No, we have video evidence. We have photographs. We have multiple eyewitnesses. The stronger the case, oftentimes the more interesting it is and the more useful it is. What's the point in spending lots and lots of time on my grandmother saw something in the sky in 1978? Okay, good. I mean, have fun with that. I think we have time for two more. Yeah, I wanted to go back to the TV shows for a second. Specifically, the one factor faked. If you guys could comment on their investigative techniques, because with this show, they do actually, they'll do these investigations and then we'll find a natural explanation for some of this stuff. But the other things, they'll be like, well, we have inconclusive evidence. So they'll even say, well, this seems to be a haunting, right? And what I'm curious about is, do you think that's useful, this kind of a show, in the sense that at least they're giving, they're finding some natural explanations, but they're also kind of validating that some of this stuff is genuine or there seems to be evidence even supporting it. You want some insight information on factor faked? Their scientist, Bill Murphy, has never taken a science class in his life. He's a documentary maker. And we got stuck in one of his documentaries. So we know him quite well. He is not a scientist. He's about as far as you can get. Now, the thing is, Brian and I made this little video. We were gonna kind of make it a viral video for a possible TV show we were gonna be on. And it had a planchette on a Ouija board move on its own. Well, they contacted us, factor faked. They contacted us and they said, can you make another one of those where it moves a little more dramatically? Well, we were like, we don't know what you're talking about. You know, how are we gonna do that? We don't know what the spirits are gonna do. We don't know when they're gonna decide to move this. So we went ahead, we made another one that was kind of fun. And they said, well, we wanted a little more dramatic because we need to give this to the team to Dean Reel. And they said, you know, we're like, well, we're not gonna do that. And they said, well, we'll give you $1,500. Wow. To make this video for us so we can give it to the team so they can discover that it's real. There you go, there's your answer. That show is crap. Apart from the spooky stuff, the ghosts and demons and goblins, does anybody call for, say, miracles, weeping virgins? Or I think I see the Virgin Mary in my attic. Do you get those kind of calls if you approach them any differently? I just, just for me real quickly. Yeah, I've investigated miracles and weeping statues and that sort of thing. And the answer is no, you don't investigate them. I mean, it's all a claim. I don't care what the claim is. Either there's good evidence for it or there's not. And either there's, you know, quantifiable testable claims or there's not. So I don't, to my mind, a mystery is a mystery. And I approach it the same way. The only real wrinkle in terms of something like that is if you're dealing with a religious belief or a claim that involves religious beliefs, it's good to have a sort of extra red flag realizing that you're gonna be dealing with people who's, you know, if you question the validity of a weeping statue, this also involves their religious identity. This is not just some abstract thing. You're actually, they may take this as a personal affront to them. Other than that, to me, it's the same. On that question real quick, if it becomes a huge media event, do you then go investigate it? Sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if it's, and to my mind, that's all the more reason. Cause if you can, if you can take a high profile case and you can solve it in front of the, you know, the national media, I mean, score one for skeptics. Amen. Matt Baxter, Bannon check, Ben Ratford, James Eames and Randy. Harry Poppy. Thank you. Let's hear it for him. Before we go, we had a special story from Randy. Well, I thought I would share this story with you folks, and perhaps I have told it to many of you before, so please bear with me. But I think it proves the point. You've got to be very careful in accepting and or rejecting something from, particularly from young folks who often are making mistakes. They don't understand quite how their own minds work and how their evidence gathering ability might be a little immature. I'm going to give you an example of a member of my family. Frankly, the only member of my family that I really, really got along with was my paternal grandfather, George. Oh, wonderful gentleman who had been born in Austria. His family moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, and became Danish citizens. Now, many years ago, I had the opportunity of visiting, well, I visited Copenhagen. I have worked in Copenhagen many times over the years, but I had a chance to visit there some skeptics who facilitated some things for me. I found out a great deal about old George. Now, George was very, very fond of telling a story about the fact that as a youth living in Copenhagen, he was an only child, and he lived on a street which was quite adjacent to the Royal Palace. And the Royal Palace is quite easily available. That is the grounds outside the palace are quite easily available to pedestrians and they can walk through them. And so it's a very good democracy in that respect. And little George, he had the job of delivering his lunch to his father. Now, his father, my great grandfather, obviously, he worked in the shipyards, which were on the other side of the Royal Palace, down on the shore, of course. And he didn't, he left at very, very early hour of the morning, like 5.30 in the morning or so to get to work. And he didn't have time for his wife to get up and make the lunch for him. And so it would be put in a paper wrapping and it would be left for little George. When he left for school, he had the job of delivering this to the shipyards and putting it in the hands of his father then he would proceed on to school. Now, I had the opportunity of walking along the path that little George used to take many years ago. That's quite an experience, believe me. And little George developed a phantom companion, a mysterious character that he said that he knew. You know how children invent these things, the ghost companion, the phantom friend. And so he developed this story and he would delight in telling his family, his parents when he got home, what Mr. Christian had told them. And Mr. Christian, it turned out, was a man who rode a great big black horse, a monstrous black horse, and he had people all around him with sabers and such, oh, how exciting. And dogs that were bigger than he himself, little George was. And this was a great fantasy story, a fantasy companion. And the parents would sort of listen and say, yes, George, okay, George. Great, George, I'm glad to hear that. Thank you, George, eat your dinner. That kind of thing. They didn't pay much attention to it, but it thought it was an innocent aberration of a child. And so the father sat George down one day. And by the way, I should add that Mr. Christian actually passed messages on to the family in such things as he knew Mr. Christian. Apparently he knew that George's father lived in the shipyards. And at one point he gave him some advice saying that the shipyards are going to be moved and that his father should think carefully about whether he wanted to keep his position there. And so he brought this message home. The father said, yeah, yeah, sure, George, okay, eat your supper. The same thing. And so one day his father sat him down and said, now, George, you're 13 years of age now and this is ridiculous, having a fantasy companion like this and people are beginning to talk. They think you're a little nut. And he said, oh, but it's real, daddy. You know, it is real. No, no, no, no, George. I don't want to listen to, we don't want to hear the name of Mr. Christian again, please. I don't want to hear a word about it. Okay, your mother and I are sick and tired of this. Now you've got to grow up and you've got to drop this fantasy companion. And little George glumly agreed that that was the father's command. Well, a year or so after that, his father one evening unfurled the newspaper at home and little George looked up in great surprise and pointed to the front page. And the father said, what's up? He said, that's Mr. Christian. He looked at the front page. It was the birthday of King Christian the 10th of Denmark. And the people standing around had the sword. So there were great wolf hounds standing beside him. It turned out that my grandfather had been telling the truth all the way along. That was not a fantasy companion. He was talking every morning on his way through the castle courtyard to the shipyard. He would meet the king doing his morning journey around the courtyard to visit some of the people, the citizens who had petitions to give him. You see, George had been telling the truth. He had been talking with Christian the 10th of Denmark, the king of Denmark of the whole damn country every morning of his life when he went to school. He was telling the truth and he told me that his father's attitude improved radically. I thought I would share that with you because sometimes the kids are right. They aren't having fantasy companions and they aren't making up stories. Sometimes there can be some truth at the base of it. So beware. Thank you, backstreet.