Jerry Glover
Watching the Detectors
WATCHING THE DETECTORS
You’ve chosen a location to investigate paranormal activity in. What should you bring along to ensure that you won’t miss a thing? A camera would be an obvious choice; a sound recorder could also be essential. But what about the range of esoteric gadgets that have become almost de rigeur for the serious paranormal investigator? The EMF meters, infared motion sensors, gaussmeters, digital thermometers, anenoameters. It all looks very serious, scientific, and foolproof. But is any of it really going to detect anomalous phenomena?
As regular readers of PARANORMAL will know ASSAP is a research organisation promoting a scientific approach to paranormal investigation that adopts a sensibly cautious position towards these instruments, stressing there is no real proof that ghosts or strange ‘manifestations’ have any correlation to what is being detected by them. The chimes with my own belief that the materialistic fascination with this hardware (fed by tv paranormal ‘investigation’ shows) is eclipsing the most reliable and sensitive kind of paranormal detector you can use to empower your investigation.
I am talking about animals.
Let me share the experience that crystalised this for me. At around noon on December 19th 2006 my family and I went for a walk in a field at the edge of our town. The day was beautifully sunny and crisp, and as I turned a corner at the bottom of an upward slope I noticed that Ellie, my dog, was standing motionless, looking straight ahead up the hill. Looking ahead, I noticed something emerging from behind a tree, moving along the line of a path outside the field about a hundred yards ahead. Immediately, what I interpreted as two people wearing old-fashioned brown clothes felt not quite right. These ‘people’ were a constant shade from top to bottom. For ten seconds or so this vaguely human-shaped brown mass moved slowly along a wall and out of sight, possibly around a corner, it was difficult to tell. Ellie, who is as old as time and sees very poorly, continued to act totally out of character for the duration, frozen to the spot. A minute or so later a group of people walked across the same spot, allowing me to observe how they looked perfectly normal and nothing at all like the previous thing. By this time my family was alongside us, seconds too late to share this bizarre sighting with me.
My terrier’s extremely guarded and vigilant posture, alerted by some means that couldn’t have been her terrible eyesight, strikingly demonstrated the old wisdom of how animals have extra-sensory abilities. Many animals are known to have foreknowledge of earthquakes. The work of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake shows how pets can react to events beyond their immediate location, attuned to what he calls ‘morphic resonances.’ Why not paranormal phenomenon as well?
A genuinely serious investigator of the paranormal should acknowledge how the nature of anomalous phenomenon is too subtle, too elusive to be left exclusively to exotic instruments. A good dog could indeed be worth more than any ‘investigation kit.’ Ellie showed no lasting trauma from her experience, and I hope to have her by my side if anything like it ever happens again.
Published in Paranormal magazine, issue 42, December 2009
© Jazz Publishing 2009
Watching the Detectors
WATCHING THE DETECTORS
You’ve chosen a location to investigate paranormal activity in. What should you bring along to ensure that you won’t miss a thing? A camera would be an obvious choice; a sound recorder could also be essential. But what about the range of esoteric gadgets that have become almost de rigeur for the serious paranormal investigator? The EMF meters, infared motion sensors, gaussmeters, digital thermometers, anenoameters. It all looks very serious, scientific, and foolproof. But is any of it really going to detect anomalous phenomena?
As regular readers of PARANORMAL will know ASSAP is a research organisation promoting a scientific approach to paranormal investigation that adopts a sensibly cautious position towards these instruments, stressing there is no real proof that ghosts or strange ‘manifestations’ have any correlation to what is being detected by them. The chimes with my own belief that the materialistic fascination with this hardware (fed by tv paranormal ‘investigation’ shows) is eclipsing the most reliable and sensitive kind of paranormal detector you can use to empower your investigation.
I am talking about animals.
Let me share the experience that crystalised this for me. At around noon on December 19th 2006 my family and I went for a walk in a field at the edge of our town. The day was beautifully sunny and crisp, and as I turned a corner at the bottom of an upward slope I noticed that Ellie, my dog, was standing motionless, looking straight ahead up the hill. Looking ahead, I noticed something emerging from behind a tree, moving along the line of a path outside the field about a hundred yards ahead. Immediately, what I interpreted as two people wearing old-fashioned brown clothes felt not quite right. These ‘people’ were a constant shade from top to bottom. For ten seconds or so this vaguely human-shaped brown mass moved slowly along a wall and out of sight, possibly around a corner, it was difficult to tell. Ellie, who is as old as time and sees very poorly, continued to act totally out of character for the duration, frozen to the spot. A minute or so later a group of people walked across the same spot, allowing me to observe how they looked perfectly normal and nothing at all like the previous thing. By this time my family was alongside us, seconds too late to share this bizarre sighting with me.
My terrier’s extremely guarded and vigilant posture, alerted by some means that couldn’t have been her terrible eyesight, strikingly demonstrated the old wisdom of how animals have extra-sensory abilities. Many animals are known to have foreknowledge of earthquakes. The work of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake shows how pets can react to events beyond their immediate location, attuned to what he calls ‘morphic resonances.’ Why not paranormal phenomenon as well?
A genuinely serious investigator of the paranormal should acknowledge how the nature of anomalous phenomenon is too subtle, too elusive to be left exclusively to exotic instruments. A good dog could indeed be worth more than any ‘investigation kit.’ Ellie showed no lasting trauma from her experience, and I hope to have her by my side if anything like it ever happens again.
Published in Paranormal magazine, issue 42, December 2009
© Jazz Publishing 2009