by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground e-Magazine

I am the first person to debunk the heck out of paranormal evidence. Especially the stuff that seems outright fake – and there is a lot of stuff out there that seems outright fake. Recently, I came across an EVP recording that cracked me up.

I made Cheryl and JD both listen to it, and I said, “Good Lord! How stupid do they think we are? That’s a man talking in a falsetto and nothing else.”

I think my skepticism about a lot of so-called evidence comes from an overreaction to the fact that I used to be hugely gullible. Insanely so. I was the most easily duped person on the face of the earth because I just couldn’t understand why someone would make stuff up. To what end?

Naturally that naive view of the world didn’t serve me very well, and I quickly learned the hard way that there are, indeed, dishonest people in this world who make stuff up. Who knew?

So it is understandable that in my rapidly advancing years, I am wiser and far more suspicious of human nature than the 22 year old ingenue that I once was.

Add to that the fact that I want to believe in the paranormal, and I am aware that I want to believe, and you get the perfect storm of what may perhaps be over skepticism or downright cynicism. Every piece of evidence I come across I pick apart down to the minutiae.

Cheryl asked me last night, “What would convince you? What do you consider indisputable evidence?”

This is a fair question. The best I could come up with is that if a full-bodied apparition appeared before my eyes and before my camera, along with a few other pairs of eyes and a few other cameras at the exact same time, that, to me, would be indisputable. Although to anyone who wasn’t there, it wouldn’t be. They’d pick it apart and think it was faked.

If aliens landed on my front lawn as I was having a BBQ with 50 of my closest friends, we all went on a tour of the UFO, got autographs and all of us were filming the event, THAT would be indisputable. To the 50 that were there. Would we convince the rest of the world? Probably not.

And so, at some point, it all comes back around to faith, don’t you think? As Cheryl pointed out, I have had experiences. None so clear as above, but experiences nonetheless. I freely share them with people. But, at the same time, each of those experiences has a zillion explanations other than the paranormal. Well – maybe a zillion is an exaggeration, but there are other explanations.

I’ve captured EVPs (look here and here for a few of my EVPs). They are totally cool. But, in my mind, they are disputable. Who knows what that whispering is – maybe the wind. Who knows what that grunt was – maybe somebody’s stomach growled. My EVPs ultimately leave me with more questions than answers.

Which brings me to Boppy. If I was an outsider listening to that stupid “boppy” clip, I would totally dismiss it. TOTALLY. I would think it was silly and probably faked, because it sounds like a dude speaking in falsetto. I would listen to it once or twice and laugh it off, just like I did with the aforementioned EVP. But I am not an outsider who has stumbled upon Boppy. I was sitting in the podcast. I was recording. No one said “Boppy.” Cheryl (who is our most likely Boppy suspect) and I have tried to recreate it. And, like everything else, I am stymied. We didn’t fake it. No one said it.

Are there logical explanations? Yep. Are there paranormal explanations? Possibly. But here is what Boppy has done for me. It has removed some of the veneer of cynicism that I’ve cultivated to combat my gullibility. It has reminded me that, while debunking is an essential part of the investigatory process, that doesn’t mean that people are making stuff up just to have evidence to show. And it has reminded me that when looking at a piece of paranormal evidence - no matter how silly it seems – it is important to look around every corner and turn over every rock in search of an explanation.

No matter what Boppy actually is – and at this point I have no frickin’ clue – it has been a good reminder that critical thinking involves more than debunking. It involves looking at every explanation in pursuit of the truth – whether that truth supports my unspoken agendas or not.