Get a Life, Loser

People believe what they want. I mean they really do, about everything. Some are just hard-wired for it. You're not going to change their minds. But that doesn't stop some people. Some people have to force their viewpoint on you. They will not accept that you have made the choice to blindly believe something you're told, or raised with, or assumed on your own. Most of those are bent on conversion and will not rest until you are on their imagined "side" or at least start questioning everything you believe. Others just like to hear themselves talk, and have the "I'm right, you're wrong" syndrome.

There are entire communities devoted to skepticism. Some in these communities are the good guys. They point out bullshit, especially harmful bullshit, in the interest of helping and saving others. Maybe they've been wronged, or know someone who has, or are crusaders against a perceived wrong. I have no quarrel with them. Others are failed stage magicians with ridiculous egos who force their name onto everything and are just as full of shit as some of the people they "investigate" "scientifically", despite not being a scientist or having any scientific credentials or training. I have a quarrel with them. You know where I'm going with this.

That's great you found a place among similar-minded people, but why on earth do you spend so much time disrupting the lives of others who are not similar-minded and don't want to be. Also, stop lumping people into generic groups; you're not a sociologist. There's probably some dick reading this right now with a BA in sociology saying, "Actually, I am," with a smirk. Fuck off. These armchair experts are not as intelligent as the people they idolize, or even the people they are rallying against, and it's proven by the fact that if they were, they'd have better things to do than to go on the offensive against a bunch of people who want to believe in a spoon-bending Israeli. You don't believe in him. Okay, move along and do something productive with your life.

Notable skeptic, James Randi.

Ghost Whisperers

My mother was the oldest of eight children, three girls, and five boys. Their house wasn't really large enough to accommodate all of them, but like all families back then, they made due. My mother always had the same bedroom, by herself for many years, until her middle sister was born seven years later, and then her youngest sister was born three years after that. From the time she was little, something in her bedroom would whisper her name every night. She always assumed it was one of her brothers in the adjacent room messing with her, since it was a male voice, but she never knew for certain.
While vacationing with her youngest sister, who is ten years younger than her, they started to discuss the house and eventually got on the subject of how creepy it was. Then my aunt brought up how every night when she was trying to fall asleep, something would whisper her name. My mother revealed the same, and both thought the other was messing with them. The difference between the two experiences is that when my aunt was hearing this, the only other sibling in the house was her brother, my uncle, who was ten years younger than her, which rules out the mischievous sibling.

The Russian Sleep Experiment

Russian researchers kept five people awake for fifteen days back in the 1940's as part of an experiment. They were kept in isolation from the researchers, who listened to them via microphone. Everything was fine for the first five days, aside from their conversations taking a darker turn. Then after nine days, they started going crazy and screaming, and a couple of them smeared their feces on paper and covered the windows. After twelve days, this story starts getting really ridiculous and unbelievable, because it is fiction.    
For whatever reason, this story made it beyond the creepy pasta stages and started popping up on paranormal websites. While I get that these sites ten to post claims and nothing else, anyone who took the time to read at least the first half of the story should have detected that it was less believable the further it went on, and even a simple internet search would yield no credible sources, aside from ones saying it is fiction. What the hell, man?

EVP Is Stupid (Or Is It?)

Maybe I’m making a sweeping generalization, but I just can’t buy it. For thousands of years, people have done everything from reading coffee grounds to taking a steaming pile of shit on ceremonial rocks and claiming they can speak with the dead or see the future. But the interpreter is the only one who can understand. Now that it’s the age of technology, you play back a recording and you hear voices? Right. I’ve had cellphone conversations with strange voices on them, but I’m pretty sure it’s T-Mobile’s crappy service.

The paranormal shows use Electronic Voice Phenomena as a go to method for contacting the dead, primarily when you don’t have an overly theatrical medium. Notice The Dead Files, where you have an investigator and a medium, doesn’t resort to fancy high tech stuff, while Ghost Adventures does. Of course, GA also has regular demonic possession, too, though, so…. Yeah. Similarly, those who contact the dead tend to make some kind of exaggerated action, like contorted faces, grinding teeth as they speak, or overly excited eye movements. They then charge a hundred dollars an hour, while dropping 30 advertisements for their services while on camera. You can buy a digital recorder for that price and use it for years, so I guess if you actually pick some strange sounds up and let the audience decide what they hear, it’s an excellent cost-cutting measure.

But no one lets the audience decide what is spoken. Whenever they break out the recordings, or even that stupid Spirit Box thing that mimics the relaxing sounds of a cattle prod being used next to your eardrum, I close my eyes and ask myself what I am hearing as the “voice” plays. The answer to that is almost always inaudible noise. It’s not until the show tells me what they heard that I actually recognize anything, i.e. I didn’t. At all. Now there have been a few that I was impressed with, but for all I know they are the result of post-production.

Anyone can shoot down a paranormal method in order to sound superior, so I won’t end this here. Instead, I’m going to dig out my old digital recorder and plan on conducting a test. In the event I actually get something, anything, I’ll upload them and ask people to submit what they think they are hearing, after I have written down what I think I am hearing. That sounds like an even better test to me. I’m putting my money where my mouth is. This week, or next week, or sometime soon, expect a response.

Elisa Lam

Elisa Lam is an interesting story to me because it deals with psychiatric disorders. In case you didn’t read my earlier blog on the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles, she was the woman who was videotaped acting strange on the elevator and was eventually found in the hotel’s water tower deceased, two weeks later. It’s a weird and creepy story that had people going crazy trying to come up with explanations and pulling the typical piece by piece analysis to try and prove whatever theory they had without looking at the entire thing.

Elisa Lam was a 21-year-old Chinese-Canadian student who was staying in the hotel. People who spoke with her prior to her disappearance thought she was acting strangely. She is then captured in the elevator footage acting as if she is playing hide-and-seek and communicating with someone who is not there. Two weeks later, after guests complained about the water, a maintenance man discovered her in one of the water towers on top of the hotel. The police investigated and ruled her death accidental. Internet detectives were quickly on the scene.

Why was she acting strangely on the video?

Because the police confirmed she either had, or probably had, bi-polar disorder and was obviously experiencing psychosis; she was not on drugs. End of that piece of evidence. No, she wasn’t possessed, and no she wasn’t talking to ghosts, demons, or any other evil spirits, she was hallucinating and delusional.

Why did the elevator stay open for three minutes?

Well, she pressed a bunch of buttons and maybe the elevator had a sensor on it, triggered by her constantly moving back and forth inside and outside of it. Her hand constantly waves between the doors at one point, so that makes sense. Also, the color of the walls doesn’t change when the elevator doors open. Well, they do, but it’s on a different floor, with different color walls. Some people also suggest that the time on the camera changes by a few seconds here and there, but maybe it’s motion activated? Also, I would think an otherworldly entity with the ability to stop a camera for one second would go ahead and make it not work at all.  

How did she get on the roof?

This one is simple. The fire escape. She walked up it to the roof. There were only two ways to get there, and that was one of them. I keep reading about how there was an alarm on the entrance that should have sounded and that’s true. It was an alarm on the door leading from the stairs, which she did not take. The fire escape could obviously be accessed with ease, like pretty much every fire escape.

Why was she naked and what happened to her clothes?

I think only internet sleuths were concerned with her clothes. She was obviously psychotic before her death and probably took her clothes off before going swimming. The roof is windy, because it’s a roof and high in the air. Her clothes could have blown away, she could have thrown them off the roof and the homeless picked them up, or one of the maintenance men could have found them, assumed it was nothing, and got rid of them.

How did she get in the water tower?

She climbed the obviously visible ladder in the pictures and jumped into it. The water towers were never said to be locked, only the entrance to the roof. Some people also claim that it is impossible for her to get inside one, because apparently there is no entrance to them, but they got her out, so I would assume there is. Maybe she climbed up, sat on the edge, took her clothes off and tossed them into the air where they went over the side, and then she dove into it. Also, people want to know how the lid closed by itself, because now there is one, but no one said it stayed open, so it probably closed on top of her.

What about the serial killers, suicides, murders, etc.?

What about them? It’s Los Angeles, one of the most populated cities in the world, and the hotel has anywhere from 300-600 rooms and over time started catering to the criminal element. The entire area around it is a slum with a large homeless population.

Why are the police secretive about the investigation?

They’re not. It wasn’t a member of your family, so it’s none of your business. Additionally, they answered all of the questions post people have put forth, but that wasn’t good enough, apparently. 

Bigfoot's Not Real (and Other Myths) (Or Not)

“I hate Indians.” -Ayn Rand

I was raised on the stories of bigfoot, or that something that makes those weird howls in the woods, breaks trees in half and all those other things bigfoot supposedly do. I’ve never seen one.

I’m divided on how I assess the Bigfoot videos though. On the one hand, pretty much every single one of them is grainy or shaky and you barely see anything except a large, hairy figure trouncing through the woods. On the other, unless you’re an experienced cameraman, what exactly should people expect? Even if we had a video of a plain as day bigfoot playing pool and smoking cigarettes, someone would still find fault with it and then say that video isn’t evidence and can easily be faked. The latter is certainly true, but so is some major scientific research. There is no strong evidence, outside of faked carcasses that get big news coverage for some odd reason.

You have those overnight primatologist who know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there cannot be a large, unknown species of nocturnal ape that primarily live in remote, mountainous areas, because the expert they sided with said so. There’s no solid proof. At all. Kind of like those big cats that didn’t exist in Kentucky until someone shot one. I know what you’re thinking, that big cats actually exist elsewhere, so it’s not that shocking they wind up that far north, and it’s not really, but everyone who claimed photos and videos were feral cats were obviously wrong and made a poor assumption. Bears shit in the woods. We actually have a little bit of evidence to support this. Or do we? For all I know, the scat samples were found in someone’s yard and placed in the woods, or just claimed to be found in the woods. I’m not saying they’re real, but I’m also not going to dismiss the possibility.

The United States isn’t over-flooded with technology and urbanization and is still a third forested, so it’s a bit ridiculous to pretend we’ve discovered every creature there. While it’s just as ridiculous to automatically believe every photo, video, or soundbyte, we find new species all the time, including large ones, like the Saola, which we didn’t even believe still alive until 2010, despite a bunch of Vietnamese rednecks claiming it was. 

Hated other non-whites as well. Died.