confronted by the "Holy-er than thou" public

I had a previous encounter with someone that I claim as a "heckler" to the field of paranormal research. I would like to warn everyone to be very cautious and careful conducting a conversation with someone like this. As the chat begins, the person will tend to be curious about what you do and how you do things. As the talk continues, the chat will most likely turn into a chance for your skills to be put to the test. People like this have a knack for turning your words and answers to their questions against you. Be strong in what you say and make for darn sure that you speak the truth of what you do. Most of all for those of you on the GEGA team, do not, I repeat, do not say or speak anything that can and will back-lash on the team as a whole. We do our investigations soley based on scientific methods.

Please read and give me your opinion.....

The most common paranormal research is "assumption led", this means investigators start with the assumption such as ghosts are spirits or ghosts and they are haunting a location and they seek evidence to confirm the assumption. This assumption based paranormal research has been very popular by paranormal reality shows in resent years. Assumption based investigations increase the likelihood of suggestion as a factor in generating spurious evidence. If people are expecting to contact a ghost as the use of assumption technique implied, then they may include seances, mediums/physics, Ouija boards etc (this is not to suggest that these techniques aren't worth persuing, it is just they should be invesitgated under controlled conditions with protocols put in place). If in a location for elleged to be haunted this could further increase the change of suggestion. The idea that a ghost is the spirit of a dead person is basicaly a cultural believe that has been largely brought about but fiction and media coverage rather than dealing with geniune haunting cases. This is why the reality paranormal shows use the assumption led methods in their ghost hunting shows, it is what the public understands, relates too and expects. Its a rating winner.

This type of invesitgation method is not how science works. In science you collect the evidence in a neutral unbiased way ensuring it is accurate and using it to form theories that could explain the evidence collected. This method is called "evidence based method". The approach is more scientific. This method starts of with no assumptions of what causes a haunting or what ghost is. With a evidence based method you first need to eliminate all natural causes as it very clear that assumption based methods fail to do this. Many invesitgations fall short because the invesitgators are not aware of all possible mundane possible explantions for any particular incident. This could lead to many incidents being labled as "paranormal", and then later may be challenged because possible explantions were egnored or not explored at the time of the invesitgation.

The reality is that most phenomena reported on investigations are either definitely or probably explainable by natural causes because assumption led methods are used. The advantage of a evidence based techinques is that the results will be real whether it turns out to be paranormal or natural. Remember only by eliminating the natural can we detect the paranormal.