Yellow Journalism

Today in every state thousands of people turned out to protest high federal and state taxes and ever increasing government spending. These protests turned out far more people than any anti-war protest had in the past four years but because the message was against what the current President is trying to do and what many states are doing which is frankly popular with the legacy media it was mostly ignored and often mocked.

MSNBC, NBC and CNN and even the White House Press Secretary mocked the people who turned out to protest the way their money is being used. We cannot ignore that the bailouts began under George Bush but President Obama for all his bluster about the mistakes of the previous administration during the campaign has not changed direction and in fact has increased spending and federal intervention in private industry.

The release of a Homeland Security report suggesting the danger of increasing “right wing radical” organization activity and the dishonest media coverage of these protests in comparison to all the attention and importance they assigned significantly smaller anti-war protest activities is not a coincidence in my opinion. This is a coordinated effort to paint anyone opposing the current state and federal trends in this nation as nothing more than wing-nuts that at best are to be ignored and at worst may be “dangerous.”

This has the appearance of a coordinated attempt to silence the message by unfavorable media coverage and mockery of US Citizens by appointees of President Obama. In my view this falls far short of conspiracy but it really smells like political coordination by much of the legacy media and the White house to mock taxpaying citizens who are exercising rights guaranteed them by the constitution.

This is just another in a recent string of very troubling events by federal or state governments. If any anti-war protests during the Bush Administration had been this large and this wide spread it would have been the lead story for weeks as smaller protests usually were. A few dozen people camping in Crawford Texas was national news for weeks if you recall. It is very difficult to look at the difference in coverage and not see the bias proudly on display now. Any illusions left that we had fair media in the United States ought to be reconsidered.

Iowa Ghost Hunters and EVPs

Not long ago while listening to the radio in one of the cities I work in I tuned into a local talk show that was featuring a local “paranormal” team that morning. This of course peaked my interest but I had little time to devote to it while the show was on. The host does provide podcasts on a daily basis of his show however so I made the effort to check the show out later on when I had more time to listen. I am not going to offer counter points and suggestions to everything discussed on the show but I will comment on many of their major claims.

The guests on the show were from the Carroll Area Paranormal Team a self professed group of “experts.” On their website www.carrollareaparanormalteam.com they state their mission to be “To give a complete professional investigation to the client covering any and all bases set by those we assist. To provide this service free of charge and to never conclude an investigation until the client is 100% satisfied with the findings. To keep the client's best interests and feelings in mind and to provide proper professional conduct with the public at large.”

That sounds fair enough right? They are professional and they do this for free. It is very nice of them to provide such services at no charge. It is free of charge but they are somehow managed to become a 501(3)c tax exempt organization so they can take donations and the donor can write them off on their income taxes. How nice… Moving on from there they also state they provide quality scientific based investigation. Really? Science based eh. Now that is interesting in light of the things they said on the air.

My favorite statement from the website was, “CAPT provides a quality scientific based investigations platform in which CAPT attempts to explain claims of activity through natural means. What that means is by de-bunking the claims of activity through natural or man-made things, "After all the obvious reasons have been exhausted, whatever is left no matter how impossible must be the answer."

Oh, Really?

Well let’s compare these statements to some of the things stated on the radio show.

The main “evidence” provided by the paranormal team was a series of recordings that paranormal investigators call EVPs. EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomena but it is anything but a phenomena. This is where the claim of scientific background becomes important because the members of this team in particular demonstrate no understanding of electronic recording or the science behind it. On the CAPT website the team has listed the equipment they use. Missing from this list are any references to the kind of recording equipment a person might want to set up in a house to make sure they were able to record the sounds in the room without any interference or distortions from the room itself such as plaster walls and hardwood floors which reflect sound or by picking up hum and ambient noise off machinery or electronics in the home.

Three EVP samples were presented on the radio show none of which were in any way remarkable and one at least which had been highly over processed by someone I would suspect is a complete armature at sound editing. I found it interesting that these clips would be ones they would chose to present on the air as evidence until I listened to clips on their website and found that they were no better.

While discussing these recordings the member of the group that did the most talking also stated that their digital recorders were able to “hear” sounds that are inaudible to the human ear. This is of course utter nonsense and so clearly fallacious on many levels that a person wouldn’t even need a shred of technical knowledge to see the problems. If the sounds are not audible to the human ear how can you hear them when played back? On the surface this is just absurd but a friend of mine who has far more experience and technical knowledge of recording processes explained to me that what the paranormalist claims is not even technically possible.

I was told to look into something called the Nyquist sampling theory. Simply put the theory states that the frequency range of any recording will only be half the sample rate of the recording device. For example the early CDs were recorded at 44.1 KHz since it was believed that the human ear could not hear frequencies over 22Khz. It is now believed that depending on age and health some people may be able to hear at frequencies higher than that so higher end recordings use sample rates of 96 KHz and 192 KHz. All that is important because I looked at the list of equipment used by CAPT and found three recorders listed.

First is the Sony ICD B300 which boasts a whopping 8 KHz sample rate. Next is the Olympus VN-960PC which has three separate rates for different quality recordings 16 kHz, 10.6 kHz, 5.75 kHz. Next they have the Olympus WS-100 which is also capable of three separate sample rates 8 kHz, 12 kHz, 44.1 kHz and lastly is the RCA RP-5022B which I was unable to find exact specifications for however there is no reason to believe it is sampling at a rate higher than 44.1 KHz. All of this means that the ranges these devices are capable of picking up will result in playback well within the range of humans with very good hearing. True audiophiles believe sound at frequencies over 20-22KHz may be technically inaudible but are still somehow perceived and therefore add to the audio experience which is why digital recording is done a much higher rates for higher quality results but would not really add to anything that CAPT is trying to establish since the devices they say they use are not capable of “hearing” rages the human ear cannot hear.

Perhaps a bigger problem with their EVPs however is the purposes these small devices were designed for and how they are being used. For the most part these small devices are designed for taking audio notes or recording sound that is not intended for careful audio examination or high quality play back. They simply are not designed to do what ghost hunters use them for which is very typical of groups like this. Going on the radio and claiming these recorders “hear” at a range the human ear cannot is flat out fallacious and demonstrates the utter amateurish nature of this group on the surface and in my view totally debunks the claims of scientific backing. There is no science in this there is only nonsense.

They also spent a lot of time discussing their trained and qualified Demonologist. Sounds very impressive until you find out there is no place a person can go to study Demonology or obtain a degree in Demonology. In fact if a person wants to be a Demonologist all they need to do is read, study with someone else who claims they are a Demonologist or have a church declare that they are a demonologist or in fact, simply start using the term. That doesn’t sound very scientific to me what do you think? They did not explain where their demonologist received his training.

We can also consider the statement that after they eliminate all the obvious possibilities all that remains no matter how impossible must be the truth. I submit to you that they are excluding all obvious possibilities when it comes to the evidence. I cannot speak to things they claim to have witnessed since I was not there and therefore do not know what they did or did not see but I can speak to their EVPs that they played on the air and the ones on their websites. The obvious conclusions are that they picked up a boatload of low frequency noise and ambient sound along with distortions of voices from distances that are reflecting off several hard surfaces. And in the case of the third EVP they played it is a highly over processed disaster created by a rank armature trying to find something and applying very aggressive EQ to the recording to try and draw something out that was never there in the first place. I defy any of them to prove otherwise

Carl Sagan used to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He who makes the claim must provide that evidence the CAPT has not done this in the least. They claimed on the air that one sound they say is a female laugh repeated many times but provided a clip of it only once. They claimed one voice says OK good when it certainly seems there is more there than that and there is no evidence at all this was not someone in the room because there is no corresponding higher quality recording or video evidence of who was or was not in proximity at the time thus rendering all of this meaningless.

Another bit of bad theater was the obviously arranged call from California in to support their nonsense. This person was also a self proclaimed paranormal investigator and in familiar fashion presented unsubstantiated claims with no hard evidence to try and back up what the people on the air were saying. She claimed to have video of people who had received scratches and bruises, from ghosts presumably, but of course did not say she had video of these marks appearing from nowhere. Video of scratches that someone says are paranormal is not evidence of the paranormal. Evidence would be clear video of these sort of marks appearing with no visible means of creating them along with medical evidence that they were in fact wounds and not make up.

The problem with groups like CAPT is they use a collection of gadgets and produce results that they misinterpret as being far more significant than they really are. It is not a stretch to say that their own descriptions of what they are doing and how they think their equipment works reveals they are utterly ignorant about how to use any of it. I don't have to make wild guesses about any of this all I need to do is have some understanding of the technical capabilities of their recorders and listen to what they think they can do with them. The claims and the facts do not match up so either they are lying or they are ignorant.

They assign a great deal of importance to any result they can find and because they use real tools that can be used in science they call it scientific but it is not. There are no rigorous controls on their investigation and no serious peer review of their findings. I seriously doubt they would be at all interested in working with a team of experts who are trained to do the kind of recording they are doing or are educated in how to interpret the results shown on EMF meters or other equipment they bring on site. I doubt they would want a well designed recording set up alongside their own to create comparison video, audio and photography to pinpoint exact locations of everyone on site and we could even mic all the participants so corrisponding voice tracks could be compared to their EVPs. If they had such independent research on their investigations it might clear up a lot of questions.

It is therefore my opinion that these people find willing subjects to allow them to do the investigations because they want to believe the kinds of findings they expect the team to return. The group claims they will not end the investigation until the client is satisfied with the results. I wonder what that means? Satisfied that the truth as been found or satisfied that what they wanted to believe has been reinforced? It would take a willing subject to be convinced by this kind of evidence.

To hear the three EVPs they played on the air click the embeded video at the top of this post.