Positive to see that you've picked up on the trend to wave shiney things around in the name of science, I touched upon this myself in another thread in the last couple of days. Observing many groups these days, most people appear to have forgotten the basics and even worse, don't understand at all the capabilities, or otherwise, of the so called professional toys equipment that they seem to use.

Kind Regards

Baruc.

These assumptions make me nuts, yet we use them all the time. And when we report our experiences, investigators rely on terminology that seems to confirm these assumptions. I seldom see findings presented without interpretation, either. Using the above example, in a report an investigator might say, "I saw the ghost of Great Aunt Fannie." That statement is riddled with interpretation. In fact, what you saw was a figure that appeared with the features and form of Aunt Fannie. We need to stop reporting interpretation as fact.

We assume EVPs are voices of the dead and present them as such. That's an interpretation. In fact, EVPs are merely audio anomalies we can't really explain. We do ourselves a disservice by reporting these as something we don't know they actually are. If we assume we know what they are without actually trying to figure it out, then we are exactly what critics call us - pseudoscientific.

That being said, the other thing that really bugs is the current trend moving away from personal experience. We are our own best tools. Our observations, our experiences and our feelings do matter on investigations - but we need to report them as just that - observations and not scientific fact. To do anything else obfuscates data and keeps us from making actual progress.

In it, the author, John Fraser asks several questions about contemporary investigation techniques and questions their value. Amongst the many areas he discusses, he queries the age old tradition of investigating at night, the value of investigating through to the daylight hours of the following morning and the reliance of many groups upon orbs and mists as evidence of paranormal activity.

Thinking about this, if you had your way, what would you change in contemporary investigation and why?

Kind Regards

Baruc.