I don’t know why I bother watching The Ghost hunters on TV? I wind up getting infuriated and cursing under my breath every time I watch.

The show is based on a couple of Roto-Rooter plumbers who go around conducting paranormal investigations.

Yes. You heard me right. Plumbers by day and Ghostbusters by night!

Anyway, they go to various locations of suspected paranormal activity. Unleash their troop of highly trained (although poorly educated) paranormal experts who proceed to setup and stage multiple cameras along with an assortment of scientific whirly-gigs and technical whatchamacallits.  All in preparation for an intense four to six hours of some of the worst investigative techniques I have ever seen.  After which they analyze the tons of data they have collected (during which, we are subjected to such riveting debates like “if an orb of light on the video is a speck of dust, an insect or a ghost” or “if a noise heard on a audio tape is an ghostly answer to a question they asked or a passing truck”). Once all the data has been analyzed, the so called evidence is then presented to person who called for the investigation along with their conclusions.

I don’t know where to start.

First off, the guys that are in charge are plumbers! These are not your “highly educated, I do plumbing because I like it” type of plumbers; they are “this is all I am qualified to do and barely smart enough to do that” plumbers!

I have nothing against plumbers. Most I have met have been quite intelligent, at least intelligent enough to realize that they are not qualified to do any type of scientific investigation.

The first thing they do after setting up their various cameras is turn out the lights. Somehow the lights must interfere ghost ability to manifest. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with man’s natural fear of the dark now could it?

But wait! If one of their batteries suddenly dies it must be the ghost sucking out the power. According to them the ghost need the power to manifest. But why don’t they like lights? Plenty of power there. Maybe they can only use DC and that is why the batteries suddenly die? Nope that doesn’t work either. Turns out our Ghost Hunters know nothing about batteries.

Batteries don’t work like a big bucket holding electrical power that you can just dump out all at once (that is called a capacitor). If they did sticking your tongue to one would have some very devastating results.

Batteries store electricity via a chemical reaction. That reaction has a maximum rate and as a result a battery sucking ghost may make the batteries drain a bit faster (kind of like your cell phones talk time versus standby time) but the more likely result would be the equipment not working or working poorly with fully charged batteries (the ghost re-routing the power from the batteries to themselves, bypassing the equipment). Walk away from the ghost and the equipment should work fine again and batteries should show a charge if this is the case.

Another way they claim ghost get energy is drawing it from the surrounding atmosphere creating cold spots (Damn ghost are all over my house!) You see them walking around with Infrared thermometers and infrared cameras looking for these cold spots.

If you ask any person that has ever worked in the Heating and Air Conditioning profession they will tell you that getting heat to flow evenly through a structure is challenging. Convection, while simple in its concept can and does create frustrating temperature differentials in complex structures such as the type of buildings we live in.

Throw together a bunch of different sized rooms all made of extreme right angles and add to that the different conductivity rate of all the materials that the building is made of and it’s a wonder we can keep them at any given temperature range. Now add to all that the fact that the buildings they tend to investigate are old and poorly insulated (if at all). I would be surprised if they didn’t detect a few cold spots.

I can’t help but laugh every time I see them go from room to room with their handy dandy EMF (Electromagnetic Field) detectors. Apparently ghost put out EMF waves. Along with about everything else in the modern world! Cell phones, radios, electric wire, walkie talkies, not to mention radio, TV and any other type of broadcast communication! If it uses an electrical current to work it is creating an electromagnetic field. Yet when the needle jumps and if no obvious electrical appliances are around then it must be a ghost. Just ask any ham radio operator. They will tell you that even a very weak electromagnetic signal can be detected miles away under the right conditions and in this modern age we are being bombarded with them. Detecting an EMF isn’t an indicator of anything except the modern age we live in. If they put themselves inside a Faraday cage and detected a signal that would be something worth investigating!

Now let’s get to the way they record their so called “evidence”. They basically have various cameras set up hoping to catch some strange event while they themselves walk around with voice recorders asking questions. I guess they are hoping to catch a ghost wanting to give an interview.

This is the part that irritates me the most. They will show you a recording of something strange that has happened on a camera and you never see a second angle! The same goes with the voice recorders you only hear it on one. We never hear if the same sound was produced on separate recorders.

This is just common sense. If you catch something on one camera alone it isn’t evidence of anything paranormal! Possibly faulty equipment, faulty recording media, faulty transmission lines, bad angle of a natural occurrence or just plain fraud, but not ghost! A great scientist named Carl Sagan once said “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. In other words “Show me the money!”. Just because you can’t explain something doesn’t mean it’s a ghost.

To claim any occurrence is anything but just an abnormality you have to have more than just one recording from a single piece of equipment. If you catch it on one camera it’s just an abnormality, on two cameras at the same angle it becomes interesting. If you capture it on two of the same type of cameras from different angles, THEN you got something to brag about! If you caught it on multiple types of cameras from multiple angles, not only have you something to brag about but you also have some pretty solid scientific evidence.

The same goes for voice recorders. In order for it to mean anything the same occurrence should be caught on multiple recorders. These things only weigh a couple ounces, I’m sure they can handle carrying two.

They have a TV show, I am sure they can afford to have more than one camera trained on the area’s they are observing. I’m sure they realize having more than one recording device per area would greatly (if not completely) cut back on the amount of unexplained events.

While I have no doubt that these people do believe in ghost and also in what they are doing, I suspect fraud on both a conscious and subconscious level. There certainly is motive. You wouldn’t have a very interesting show if nothing happens.

I am not saying that they stage everything that goes on but I think that in some instances they may not have been completely honest in their evaluations.

The list of what they do wrong is endless. I wish I could point out some things they do right because they are likable people who are trying very hard but unfortunately, I cant think of a single thing.

These people do not even have a clue as to how to properly document an event, so conducting anything like a scientific investigation is way out of their league! Put together a physicist, a geologist and an electrical engineer. That would be a team of qualified investigators, not your local Roto-Rooter man.

Tags: Ghost, Scams, Science, Tv

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 29th, 2010 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Humorous, Scams, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.