STICKY TIMES» Sticky Times

Ghost Stories And How They Are Investigated

Abbey Laine — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:09:35 +0000

When we, as ordinary citizens, go looking for evidence of ghost activity on the internet or in books, we find the trappings of science in the way the stories of hauntings are presented. Stories of ghostly comings and goings are classified into different classes of hauntings. There are certain conditions which are supposed to be present when ghosts are about.

Reading about ghosts in this way leads us to believe that because scientific-style presentation can be applied to stories of ghostly haunting, they must have been thoroughly investigated and found to be true. Let’s take a look at three classifications applied to ghosts.

There’s what psychic investigators call residual haunting which means that energy is left at a place after a particularly intense event like a rape or a murder or, on the other hand, after a period of happy experiences. In this kind of haunting, witnesses see an event reenacted by the ghosts. Hauntings have often been proved to be fraudulent and the signs of ghostly activity such as cold spots and variations in electromagnetic radiation have been proved by scientists to be due to natural causes. When you think about it, if hauntings can be explained by violent or otherwise extreme acts occurring in places, there should be ghosts on every street corner and every suburban home.

Poltergeists are manifestations of psychic energy present at a particular place. These events are associated often with the presence of teenage girls or people undergoing a time of emotional turbulence. These people are supposed to intentionally or unintentionally, move inanimate objects with psychic energy that is available to them. Of course, the skeptical point of view of these occurrences is that there is deliberate deception happening or the witnesses are deceiving themselves. Residents in houses affected by poltergeist activity have been caught by video cameras throwing objects in an attempt to fool witnesses into thinking they were seeing something supernatural.

Another supernatural manifestation is that of Satan or some other being from Hell. These are said to inhabit the bodies of living people and the unfortunate person must undergo an exorcism to rid him or her of the demon. Many skeptics believe that belief in these activities are the result of past traditions of people interpreting what we call mental illness as possession by Satan or some other demon. Some writers also believe that demonic possession has been largely replace by alien abduction as the delusion of choice for some individuals with mental or sexual problems.

How are we to regard reported ghostly activities? If we are honest, we cannot make a judgement without directly witnessing the phenomenon ourselves. We can have an opinion about stories we read or see in the movies, but this will be based on whether we have a natural tendency towards belief or skepticism. The fact that people have been telling these stories for hundreds of years does not make them true. We have all had the experience of stretching the truth a little to make a good story and there’s no reason to believe that this human failing is not the origin of stories of the supernatural.

This video is one of many on YouTube that may be genuine footage of something unexplained or a downright fraud.

Making Crop Circles

Abbey Laine — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:06:50 +0000

Crop circles are shapes of varying degrees of complexity which are found in fields of crops. The development of more interesting shapes of crop circles has occurred over the many years since they were first discovered. Many people have come forward and owned up to creating crop circles but still the general belief seems to be that they are messages from another realm. Some investigators have stated that a significant number of crop circles could not possibly have been made overnight by a team of pranksters from local farms. In fact the intricacy of some circles suggests that they could not possibly be made by humans.

A popular explanation for crop circles at first was that they were messages from somewhere else in space. That intelligent life forms from another region were trying to communicate with us. All the same, TV documentaries have been made clearly demonstrating that farmers with no artistic talent can indeed make beautiful designs in fields of crops in quite a short time with very little equipment.

People who have gone inside crop circles have often reported experiencing nausea and pains. Others have felt a lift in their mood. Dogs and sheep are also said to experience ill effects from straying inside crop circles.

Here is a video clip showing a crop circle being made.

Here is the first of six videos that give an insight into crop circles.

Here is some information on a couple of interesting crop circle events. Crop Circles And UFO’s

Predictions Not Likely To Come True – Or Maybe They Are

Abbey Laine — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:50:11 +0000

There are lots of supernatural ways to predict the future. None of them have produced convincing results, although they do give people a way to free themselves from stress and to make important life decisions. Some critics of such things would say that the important thing is that predictions don’t stand up to scrutiny while others would say that psychics, astrologers, tarot readers and others who say they can see the future have performed a service for society since the beginning of time.

Prediction is not easy even in narrow fields of expertise. The internet is full of lists of predictions that made people look silly, actors who turned down roles in classic movies, producers who could not see potential in movie stars of the future. Experts pronouncing that the phone and the computer were not worth considering. Why do we bother trying to predict the future? Why do we need to know the future? Here is a collection of articles on predicting the future.

Here is a video featuring a 1967 view of the future. They got the details of the technology wrong – how could they know that stuff? But the general prediction of a world where we get things done with a minimum of human contact is about how things have turned out. Maybe it’s wish fulfillment.

Kirlian Photography And Auras

Abbey Laine — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:55:39 +0000

In 1939 a man named Semyon Kirlian found that if an electrically charged object is left sitting on a photographic plate, an image of the small electrical discharges around the edge of the object is recorded. Kirlian connected the record of the electrical discharges around living things like plants with the theory that all living things have an aura.

If you don’t know what an aura is, according to Wikipedia, “In parapsychology and many forms of spiritual practice, an aura is a field of subtle, luminous radiation supposedly surrounding a person or object (like the halo or aureola of religious art) that some people are claimed to be capable of observing by means of their third eye. The depiction of such an aura in religious art usually connotes a person of particular power or holiness.

According to the literature of Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and Archeosophy, each color of the aura has a precise meaning, indicating a precise emotional state.” Aura (paranormal) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaSkeptics interpret the ability to see auras as the result of stress or fatigue.

Some people think that Kirlian photography shows us the life force flowing through all living things and that it could be used to diagnose illness. But it is not working out that way.

“Living things…are moist. When the electricity enters the living object, it produces an area of gas ionization around the photographed object, assuming moisture is present on the object. This moisture is transferred from the subject to the emulsion surface of the photographic film and causes an alternation of the electric charge pattern on the film. If a photograph is taken in a vacuum, where no ionized gas is present, no Kirlian image appears. If the Kirlian image were due to some paranormal fundamental living energy field, it should not disappear in a simple vacuum (Hines 2003).” The Skeptic’s Dictionary

Here is a video on auras that presents some of the evidence from both sides of the debate over auras: