Pathologies in investigating borderlands phenomena

Michael Prescott has just written a masterful essay on the pathologies that some "investigators" display when examining phenomena on the borderlands of what is known. . .

Go read it.

More dubious phenomena. . .

As someone who likes to take pictures, I've always cringed at the credulity of some people regarding "orbs" which appear in photographs, which supposedly are images of ghosts, extraterrestrial visitors, angels or the like. Shadowseekers has a nice writeup:

As you look from group to group and encounter orb photo after orb photo, you will encounter a variety of theories and defenses for the "evidence" many groups so ardently defend. Some will claim that no dust or dirt was present when they photographed a particular orb. The truth is, the only dust free environment known to man exists in outer space, and a simple breath is capable of stirring up dirt and debris in the air. Some groups will claim that an orb is a spirit because it looks different form one that they admit is dust. In fact, dust particles look vastly different from snow particles, which look different from rain particles, which look different from dirt molecules. Thus, you can have several orbs in a photo, each looking quite different from the other, yet none being anything paranormal in nature. The color of particles in the air can be altered by atmospheric conditions and moisture, thus helping to explain the varying colors of orbs. Many investigators will claim that because the orb was capture in a reportedly haunted location, it must be evidence of a ghost. By that logic, a picture taken of a man in the same location would mean that the man was also a ghost.

H/T Daily Grail

Michael Prescott investigates some dubious mediumship

Michael Prescott has written an informative series of posts on some questionable mediumship here, here and here.

He will also be appearing to discuss this topic on Marcel Cairo's Afterlife FM internet radio show next Tuesday at 7:00 PM EDT / 4:00 PDT. Marcel is a mental medium, who himself believes that most or all physical mediums are frauds.

Michael is one of the the world's foremost amateur experts on the history of the scientific investigation of mediumship, the evidential cases, and the many frauds. It should be an entertaining and interesting show.

Dubious claim (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

Michael Prescott covers the self-destruction of a dubious claim. . .

Uncovering Fraud (Repost from AMNAP 1.0)

One of the problems with psi research is sifting out the chaff. It's no secret that many people make fraudulent claims of extraordinary abilities, whether for personal profit or to garner attention.

Dr. Gary Schwartz is best known for his VERITAS program - revolutionary investigations of the abilities of mediums to obtain anomalous information - perportedly through communication with deceased individuals (AMNAP will be discussing this research in the near future). But his Human Energy Systems laboratory at the University of Arizona also conducts research into a wide range of other unusual phenomena and controversial claims. Dr. Schwartz has made it very clear that if any of his investigations uncovers evidence of fraud or trickery, he will expose it. In this case that is exactly what happened:

Abstract: The purported ability of a seventeen-year-old female, investigated for seven years in China, to perceive information without using visual and kinesthetic cues, was studied. In one experiment, five letters from A to Z and five numbers from 0 to 100 were randomly selected by computer, written on small sheets of paper and individually folded and placed in a sealed envelope. The folded stimuli were removed one by one and placed into a cloth bag that was opaque to light; the bag was tied below the participant's right elbow. The participant was accurate for all ten trials. In a second experiment, three video cameras carefully monitored the participant's hand movements; in addition, both ends of the folded papers were sealed with clear tape. Careful analysis of the clear tape and the videotapes revealed evidence of practiced deception. Data were also collected from a 25-year-old graduate student and a 7-year-old child not employing a cloth bag. Their data suggest that deception is not necessarily involved in all cases of purported anomalous perception.

Non-paranormal non-phenomena. . .

Today I saw a link that looked intriguing on one one of the "weird stuff" websites about an entire village that had disappeared.

Clicking on the link to the story on ufoarea.com, I discovered this article. Here's an excerpt:

How can an entire village with 1,200 people simply disappear without a trace? The Royal Canadian Mountain Police has been asking that question for many years. . .

This remarkable incident took place in the winter of 1930s in Canada. A trapper Armand Laurent and his two sons observed a light crossing the northern sky. According to Laurent's description, the object was cylinder-shaped and it was heading toward the[sic] Lake Anjikuni.

Some days later, Laurent was visited by a couple of Mounties who were on their way to Lake Anjikuni where they said there was "a kind of problem". Not yet knowing what had happened in the village, Laurent related the sighting he had a few days ago. At that time, the police did not the reveal what was later classified as one of the most mysterious disappearances in Canadian history. . .

Another trapper named Joe Labelle called the Royal Canadian Mountain Police to the crime scene, if we can use the term. Labelle noticed that [the] village of the[sic] Lake Anjikuni was unusually quiet. There was not a person moving in the streets, no smoke from the chimneys, boats and kayaks were still tied up at the shore, but the village was empty.

The police noticed a couple of strange things. To begin with, it seemed as if the residents had been suddenly interrupted by something. In many houses, meal was still standing at the table. Additionally, rifles were left at home, which is very usually [sic] as the men always take the rifle when they go out. The most peculiar discovery was yet to come.

At the Anjikuni burial ground, they discovered that graves were opened and bodies of the dead were gone! Someone had removed all the corpses. . .

The case remains open to this day. The village residents were never found, neither [were] the corpses stolen from the graves. How can 1,200 people simply disappear off the face of the earth without a trace and who would be interested in acquiring bodies of dead [people]?

Hmmn. Intriguing, I thought, if this is true.

So I went to Wikipedia and made a quick search for Lake Anjikuni. Wikipedia is of course not an authoritative source on any topic, however it is often a useful starting point. But not in this case. . . Wikipedia returned my query with this message:

No results found. For help on searching within Wikipedia, please see Wikipedia:Searching.

Alternatively, you may be able to use an external search engine such as WikipediaSearch to find what you are looking for and/or identify misspelled words

I clicked the link "search Google for Lake Anjikuni" and this time came back with some hits. From the search engine summaries, a bunch of the results appeared to be relaying the same story as ufoarea.com. However, the very top of the results referenced the RCMP website. That looked promising. Here is what the RCMP has to say:

Historical Notes — Anjikuni

Anjikuni

The story about the disappearance in the 1930's of an Inuit village near Lake Anjikuni is not true. An American author by the name of Frank Edwards is purported to have started this story in his book Stranger than Science. It has become a popular piece of journalism, repeatedly published and referred to in books and magazines. There is no evidence however to support such a story. A village with such a large population would not have existed in such a remote area of the Northwest Territories (62 degrees north and 100 degrees west, about 100 km west of Eskimo Point). Furthermore, the Mounted Police who patrolled the area recorded no untoward events of any kind and neither did local trappers or missionaries.

So there you have it. Unless someone can come up with convincing evidence that the RCMP is lying, and some good primary sources, this one ought to be filed in the "tall tales" folder. Apparently ufoarea.com isn't the only one media outlet to flub this story: according to the australian Skeptic, People Magazine was also taken in. . .