Rethinking Poltergeist Phenomena: The AECKO Approach Explained
The focal point of our roundtable discussion today revolves around a recent critique of our research on a unique case of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), commonly referred to as the Silicon Valley case. We delve into the complexities of this case, examining the interplay between psychological factors and anomalous phenomena, while also addressing the methodological shortcomings of the critique presented by the o' Keeffe team.
Our esteemed panel, comprising experts in parapsychology and clinical psychology, shares insights into the ethical implications of labeling such experiences as disorders and the necessity for a nuanced understanding of the phenomena at hand. Through this dialogue, we aspire to foster a more cohesive discourse between the various disciplines involved in the study of the paranormal. Join us as we navigate these intricate themes and seek to illuminate the underlying dynamics of human experience in the context of the extraordinary.
The Deadly Departed podcast invites listeners to traverse the nebulous realms between the corporeal and the ethereal, engaging with preeminent scholars in the domains of parapsychology and the supernatural. In a riveting roundtable discussion, the panel addresses a recently released research paper that critiques the foundational principles of the AECKO case, an anomalous phenomenon characterized by communal witnessing and spontaneous psychokinetic occurrences. Esteemed guests such as Professor Lloyd Auerbach, Dr. Beth Hedva, Dr. Gerald F. Sullivan, and Brian J. Williams contribute their diverse insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced the manifestations of paranormal events, particularly within the confines of family dynamics.
The conversation delves into the ethical implications surrounding the interpretation of these phenomena, highlighting the necessity for a comprehensive understanding that transcends mere anecdotal evidence and embraces a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the paranormal.
Takeaways:
- The Deadly Departed podcast explores the intricate relationship between the living and the dead, delving into the mysteries of the paranormal with esteemed experts in the field.
- Our roundtable discussion centers around a pivotal research paper that critiques the phenomenon of poltergeist activity, specifically focusing on the Echo case and its implications for understanding anomalous experiences.
- Participants in the discussion highlight the necessity of ethical considerations and the importance of establishing a respectful and competent framework when conducting research on sensitive paranormal cases.
- The Echo approach offers a novel perspective on poltergeist phenomena, suggesting that such experiences may stem from communal emotional energies rather than being attributed solely to individual agents or psychological disorders.
- Our exploration emphasizes the significance of interdisciplinary collaboration in parapsychology, advocating for a synthesis of clinical psychology, parapsychology, and anomalistic psychology to enhance our understanding of anomalous phenomena.
- The podcast concludes with a call to action for viewers to engage in discussions about the complexities of parapsychological research, inviting them to consider the implications of the Echo approach on their understanding of paranormal experiences.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Paranormal Daily News
- Rhine Research Center
- Forever Family Foundation
- Psychical Research Foundation
- Parawize Journal
- Society of Scientific Exploration
To get involved in the discussion or to watch the roundtable, then join our online community at https://paranews.network
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
Welcome to the Deadly Departed podcast, where the veil between the living and the dead is just a whisper away.
Speaker A:I'm Jock and along with my colleagues in Paranormal Daily News, we will be your guides through the shadowy realms of the paranormal and the unexplained.
Speaker A:In each episode, we will dive into the eerie and the enigmatic with the help of today's leading experts in parapsychology, science and the supernatural.
Speaker A:Prepare to uncover the secrets that lurk in the dark and explore the mysteries that defy explanation.
Speaker A:Let's embark on this journey now.
Speaker A:Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker A:This is Jock and this is Deadly Departed.
Speaker A:Today I have got a fantastic roundtable discussion that we're going to have.
Speaker A:This is regarding a research paper that was, that was released and we're going to get into that a bit in a moment.
Speaker A:We've had to jump onto another recording platform because we had a problem earlier on, but now we have sorted that out.
Speaker A:So welcome.
Speaker A:Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker A:I have some esteemed guests that have been some that you'll know, couple that you'll know have been on Deadly Departed before and a couple that you don't know.
Speaker A:So they will introduce themselves and what they do.
Speaker A:But I would like to welcome Professor Paranormal Lloyd our back, who's been with us ever since the beginning of our starting out.
Speaker A:Lloyd, welcome back to Deadly Departed.
Speaker A:Good to have you.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker A:And we also have Dr. Beth Hedva, who you'll know has been a guest with me again on a number of occasions as well.
Speaker A:So welcome back Dr. Beth Hedvar and Dr. Gerald F. Sullivan, who you don't know is also is joining us today for this roundtable discussion.
Speaker A:And also we have Brian J. Williams, who is a parapsychologist, a researcher and well, I should say gentleman and lady, welcome to Deadly Departed.
Speaker A:I'm really excited about having everybody here of what we're going to actually dive into before I actually give everybody a kind of overview of everything and also kind of discuss a little bit of the abbreviations, things that we may talk about.
Speaker A:For those of you that are not academic, that are listening to this, this is a very, very interesting case.
Speaker A:It's a very interesting paper which obviously we're going to have the details in the show notes, but also you're going to be able to follow us because I'm going to give you an explanation on what we're going to talk about an abbreviation.
Speaker A:But before I do that, Lloyd, if you want to start us off, just introduce yourself and then we'll go to Beth and then we'll go to Gerald and then Brian.
Speaker B:Okay, sure.
Speaker B:So I'm Lloyd Auerbach.
Speaker B:I am director of a loose network called the Office of Paranormal Investigations.
Speaker B:I'm president of the Rhine Research Board of Directors or Ryan Research Center's Board of Directors and one of their principal instructors for the Ryan Education center and president of the Forever Family foundation as well as being involved in the mentalism magic world as too.
Speaker B:And a chocolatier.
Speaker A:Beth.
Speaker A:Thank you, Lloyd.
Speaker A:Yeah, you've got many, many hats.
Speaker A:I keep forgetting about your chocolate experience as well.
Speaker A:Beth, over to you.
Speaker C:So thank you, Jacques.
Speaker C:It's great to be here with you again.
Speaker C:I call myself a clinical parapsychologist and I am licensed or registered in Canada as a psychologist, also licensed in Californ as a marriage and family therapist.
Speaker C: aranormal investigation since: Speaker C:And I have background in working psychically and spiritually with a master's in transpersonal psychology as well as clinical psychology and of course that old PhD in health psychology.
Speaker C:And it is a pleasure to be here to talk, talk about this particular case.
Speaker C:Thank you, John.
Speaker A:Thank you very much, Beth.
Speaker A:Gerald.
Speaker A:Dr. Gerald Sullivan.
Speaker A:Over to you, my friend.
Speaker D:Yes, well, hello and so nice to be here with you all.
Speaker D:My name's Gerald or Jerry Sullivan and I got involved with parapsychology many, many years ago.
Speaker D:And I was trained in mathematics originally and then switched to psychology when I became interested in parapsychology.
Speaker D:And so I hold a PhD in Social Science from the University of Utrecht in Holland.
Speaker D:And I've been teaching and doing research and consulting as a methodologist on research methods and statistical methods particularly.
Speaker D:And I have a strong interest in spontaneous cases and particularly of the RSPK or so called poltergeist type of case, which I'm sure we'll talk about today.
Speaker A:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker A:Welcome, Gerald.
Speaker A:It's great to have you on Deadly Departed.
Speaker A:I'm really excited to have you here, Brian.
Speaker A:You seem to be a bit muted, so yeah, it's over to you.
Speaker E:Thank you, Jack.
Speaker E:My name is Brian Williams and I am currently the research director of the Psychical Research Foundation, a position I have inherited from my late mentor, Dr. William Roll.
Speaker E:And so I continue on efforts and.
Speaker E:And also Dr.
Speaker E:Roll has also worked with Jerry Softman who is here.
Speaker E:And he and I have been working Together now for several years on these cases of the RSPK type.
Speaker E:And so that's where I fit into this.
Speaker A:Welcome Brian, thank you for being here.
Speaker A:And you certainly have a good pedigree behind you, that's for sure.
Speaker A:So ladies and gentlemen, you have met our esteemed guests or panel and for those of you that don't know me, my name is Joel Brocus.
Speaker A:I am a medium, a parapsychological researcher, the found of Paranormal Daily News which is a parapsychology and paranormal magazine online which is involved in education of the paranormal and parapsychological phenomena and also the founder now along with Lloyd Auerbach of the Parowise Journal and our esteemed editorial board there which is soon to be published peer reviewed journal.
Speaker A:So welcome, welcome guys.
Speaker A:I'm excited to get into this.
Speaker A:I'm just going to read a little bit of what we're going to discuss.
Speaker A:I don't normally have notes, ladies and gentlemen, but now I have because this is.
Speaker A:There's so much involved in this that I've had to actually break everything down.
Speaker A:This is going to be a great conversation but it could go on way over what we would normally do on Deadly Departed.
Speaker A:So I'm really excited about this.
Speaker A:So Lloyd will give us a bit of background into the case.
Speaker A:But as we are going through this, what I want to do is to give you people out there that are not academic.
Speaker A:We may talk in abbreviations, we may use the word echo or I don't even know if I'm saying that right, svcase, the OK paper HPS model and it may confuse you.
Speaker A:So I've got a little document that you're going to get at the end that's going to be underneath in the show notes and I'm just going to read out what these abbreviations mean so that you understand them.
Speaker A:So when we talk about the Echo case, correct me Lloyd, if I'm saying that wrong but that breaks down to anomalous episodic communal kinetic occurrences and I'm really glad that I actually had to take a note of that to read it because I could never remember it.
Speaker A:Then the next thing that we're going to talk about you hear about the SV case, which is very simply the Silicon Valley case.
Speaker A:This is a well known anomalous case investigated by this original research team involving reported paranormal phenomena experienced by a family in Silicon Valley.
Speaker A:When we talk about the OK paper, this is the paper that o' Keefe et al his colleagues, for want of a better explanation, misinterpreted the Original research, which we'll get into.
Speaker A:This is the reinterpretation or as I would say the misinterpretation of the SV case by o' Keefe et al.
Speaker A:And his colleagues where they applied the HPS model.
Speaker A:I'm going to explain that in a moment to reinterpret the anomalistic events that were experienced within this, within this framework or within this actual case, not the framework.
Speaker A:This is what they claimed.
Speaker A:The HPS model is the haunting phenomena simplified model.
Speaker A:So when we talk about hps, that's what we are discussing.
Speaker A:This is a framework that was proposed by o' Keefe and his colleagues that attempts to explain hauntings or anomalous experiences through what they call anomalistic psychology, looking at a scoring based system.
Speaker A:And we'll explain that a little bit more as we get on.
Speaker A:And then of course anomalistic psychology, which is different to parapsychology and transpersonal psychology, which this is a branch of psychology that attempts to explain paranormal experiences through the psychological processes such as misperception, many errors, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker A:And we'll, we'll go through, you'll get.
Speaker A:When we talk about an anomalistic psychology, this is what we're talking about, HPS model, this is what we're talking about.
Speaker A:So if we use any abbreviations, you'll get to understand that.
Speaker A:And then the abbreviation psi, which a lot of you would hear is a general term used in parapsychology.
Speaker A:And even that's up for debate.
Speaker A:Actually there's a lot of people saying it should be called something different.
Speaker A:But really this is a general term used in parapsychology to explain phenomena such as clairvoyance, telepathy and various other psychokinesis and other experiences.
Speaker A:And then when we talk about the sse, that is the Society of Scientific Exploration and then Complexity Science is, I believe, something that Gerald goes into in more depth.
Speaker A:An interdisciplinary framework used to study systems with interacting variables where the simple linear explanation are insufficient, often applied in fields such as biology, ecology and social systems.
Speaker A:So that's it, ladies and gentlemen, that is the breakdown of the abbreviations that you might hear us discuss.
Speaker A:And so this document will go underneath in the show notes that you can actually download and you can follow on with everything.
Speaker A:Guys, let's kick off.
Speaker A:Lloyd, if you would like to give everybody a big background information into the SV case and the echo case and then we can move on to discuss the various aspects of the.
Speaker B:And first I want to mention that the HPS also, it really does stand for Haunted Person syndrome.
Speaker B:So they've named it a syndrome, which is one of the things that we have an issue with in some respects.
Speaker A:An issue that I have actually.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B: was probably in early May of: Speaker B:So this is after the lockdown.
Speaker B: down happened in mid March of: Speaker B:Everybody's pretty much locked in their homes.
Speaker B:Doesn't go out very much at all because of the of COVID I got the initial inquiry from this one local ghost hunter and then by the time we, we set up a thing with the family, it was in May.
Speaker B:They were reporting since shortly after the lockdown they were reporting physical object movement and some physic, unusual physical effects in the home.
Speaker B:This was a situation where I could not go to their house.
Speaker B:We could really not investigate on site because of all that was going on during the pandemic at that point.
Speaker B:So we set up a couple of zoom meetings with them.
Speaker B:I did a couple of zoom meetings and as it happens I was also working with Brian and Jerry.
Speaker B:They had been working together for quite a while, but Jerry had an approach, the echo approach, not a model as some people call it, to particular form of these poltergeist cases involving families, communal witnessing of these events.
Speaker B:So I brought in Jerry and I brought in Brian and we started really kind of talking about this case.
Speaker B:And then Brian and Jerry had communication with the family.
Speaker B:There are clearly clinical issues going on in this family, which is why I suggested bringing in Beth Hedva, who I worked with, as she mentioned, for many, many years and known for many years.
Speaker B:And so this is really kind of a team effort on this case and going forward into how we were going to develop, approaching them, helping them out.
Speaker B:And then eventually, right, we wrote a paper that was published in the Journal of Parapsychology which by the way is available on the Parapsychology Press site for free.
Speaker B:It's an open access journal now, so you can actually download that paper as well.
Speaker A:Yeah, we'll have links to that.
Speaker A:We'll have links to that as well in the show notes.
Speaker B:Yeah, so just to kind of follow through real quickly on why we're here is that the Journal of Scientific Exploration published a critique of our paper of the case, essentially.
Speaker B:So based on our paper in the journal, they published this approach critique using their approach to Haunted person syndrome and applying that to what we had written in our paper and specifically applying it to the clients whose full data.
Speaker B:There was not a lot of data about the personality of the clients and all of that that was in our paper.
Speaker B:So there was some really.
Speaker B:Let's just say our reaction to this was a little bit, you know, a little bit difficult.
Speaker B:We.
Speaker B:We didn't really like what they were saying.
Speaker B:I. I have.
Speaker B:Have no problem with critiques of papers at all.
Speaker B:But it seemed to me, at least, that the purpose of the critique was not so much to analyze what had gone on in the case, but more to use whatever they.
Speaker B:However they wanted to analyze it to support the haunted person syndrome model.
Speaker B:And there was a.
Speaker B:There were a lot of things in their critique that were assumptions that they made which didn't fit the actual case at all.
Speaker B:And, you know, frankly, there was enough evidence that there was actual activity as well that had gone on, and to.
Speaker B:To ignore that as a part of it is a big mistake in some respects.
Speaker A:Now, I noticed actually, when I was studying and reading the paper, and their assumptions had some generalities that obviously never.
Speaker A:They never really read.
Speaker A:They never really studied any much of the paper.
Speaker A:It seemed to me exactly as you were saying, Lloyd, they were trying to make something fit what they thought was their model, if I could.
Speaker A:Because the biggest problem I had was, is my.
Speaker A:You know, my.
Speaker A:My personal.
Speaker A:I think my approach is more of like, you know, Beheadba's approach is a clinical parapsychological approach.
Speaker A:I could see their assumptions, and I could also see the problems that were actually arising from their assumption as well, particularly when, you know, talking about the mental health of particular patients or anything of the family as well.
Speaker A:So, Beth, this was a particular assumption in the paper that really think they misinterpreted everything rather than even reinterpreting what they had saw.
Speaker A:Where did you see the biggest issue you, Beth, in regards to their assumptions and what they were claiming based on the haunted person syndrome, their model.
Speaker C:Okay, so I want to backstep up for a moment.
Speaker C:The ethics involved in how we work with clients from a clinical perspective and from a research perspective is something that has yet to be fully developed within the field of parapsychology.
Speaker C:I have been invited to be part of an ethics committee for the journal of parapsychology.
Speaker C: y, who invited me way back in: Speaker C:And one of the most important things when we're working clinically is to help the clients distinguish between something that is a haunting, a ghost or a poltergeist or some other normal phenomena that we can explain in terms of physical activity or responses.
Speaker C:You know, like the sounds where it's the water heater wrapping and tapping and not necessarily a ghost, you know, that kind of a thing.
Speaker C:Now what happened in this particular case is, I just really want to clarify.
Speaker C:The family did at first think they had a ghost.
Speaker C:And one of the first things that was required was to explore if it was a ghost or a poltergeist.
Speaker C:And that was something that Lloyd and Jerry and Brian were able to evaluate based on their extensive experience with these kinds of cases.
Speaker C:And then for those of you who are listening, a poltergeist is not a ghost.
Speaker C:It is often the unexpressed, oftentimes conflictual emotional energy of a person or the collective energy of a group and the echo which is the anomalous episodic communal AEC kinetic episodes of the energy that's collecting in this case the family within the context of being locked down in a small three bedroom townhouse in California during the COVID escalating deaths that were happening in the Bay Area.
Speaker C:And so that created a lot of stress.
Speaker C:One of the other things to really keep in mind is that oftentimes while poltergeist, what's called poltergeist or recurrent spontaneous psychokinetic experiences are often focused around teenagers.
Speaker C:And this family happened to have a 14 year old and a 16 year old.
Speaker C:And the 14 year old also had a history of generalized anxiety.
Speaker C:With that as part of the clinical background, and I do want to mention also another piece about that.
Speaker C:Generalized anxiety is one of those blanket kind of psychological symptoms or diagnoses that's often labeled on individuals who are highly sensitive.
Speaker C:And so the work of errands on highly sensitive persons identifies lots of kinds of confusion.
Speaker C:We have to do a differential diagnosis between, just like we do between poltergeist and hauntings.
Speaker C:We have to really evaluate whether perhaps there's something else going on here rather than just a clinical assessment that says this person is suffering from anxiety.
Speaker C:Now this girl who we called Emma at 14 years old, had been on anti anxiety medication, Zoloft for example.
Speaker C:So we needed to include that in our understanding of what was going on.
Speaker C:But what was also true is that in filling out the highly sensitive person's self assessment, both her mother, who we called Eileen and Emma, scored in a positive way on that particular self assessment.
Speaker C:Now what happened with the o' Keeffe team was they took that data and we Weren't using it to assess them and clinically diagnose them as much as within the context of being locked down, to understand how their heightened sensitivity might be adding to the stress that they were experiencing.
Speaker C:That could be related to some of these psychokinetic occurrences, that the stress that they were experiencing was being acted out like this mug flying across the table, or hearing wrappings and tappings, or suddenly experiencing, you might remember, all of the antiseptic gels, antiseptic gel all over the place.
Speaker C:They had a lot, you know, a number of different kinds of experiences.
Speaker C:Now, what o' Keeffe and their group did was they interpreted those actually as taking particularly the highly sensitive person data, as though we had assessed them.
Speaker C:And they couldn't understand why we had only used that with two people.
Speaker C:So already they were kind of misinterpreting that rather than it being something to help the family and particularly these two individuals become more aware of their sensitivity, kind of like through mindfulness meditation, so that they could notice when they're getting activated and then begin to soothe and calm themselves instead of recognizing.
Speaker C:This was actually a clinical interpretation and a clinical.
Speaker C:Not interpretation, clinical intervention.
Speaker C:That was one of the misrepresentations of our data.
Speaker C:There were other misrepresentations as well, and particularly on the level of ethics.
Speaker C:They never received permission from the family to assess them.
Speaker C:That's a really big one in psychology and in research.
Speaker C:And I think, Jerry, you can speak to that as well about how in research we really need to do a cost, benefits kind of evaluation of is our intervention going to injure or is it going to help?
Speaker C:You know, it's pretty basic stuff.
Speaker C:I want to pass this on because I could probably fill the whole.
Speaker A:I wanted.
Speaker A:I want to just throw it there because what was important that I read, that I recognized in the paper is also their choice of structure of the sentences, the words using the word disease, and almost labeling that.
Speaker A:And then I also want to kind of confirm that your history, your knowledge, your background in clinical.
Speaker A:Part of psychology and clinical psychology was.
Speaker C:And family therapy especially.
Speaker C:So this was the other piece that I took issue with their team that was re evaluating and in my opinion, misrepresenting and perhaps misinterpreting our data.
Speaker C:They had one clinician on their team who was a clinical counselor from Ohio.
Speaker C:Clinical counselors in Ohio are, in fact, trained to work with individuals and groups who are dealing with psychological stress and evaluate and assess and diagnose.
Speaker C:They are not trained in family therapy or family systems.
Speaker C:And when we're dealing with A family in a family system.
Speaker C:The data has to be reviewed within the context of the system.
Speaker C:And Jerry also specializes in system sciences, so that system science is a whole field within the context of research.
Speaker C:Family systems is another dimension of understanding how if you work even with one person in the system and that one person makes changes, they actually change the whole system.
Speaker C:And so in our work with the family, there were questions about how could the therapy work?
Speaker C:If Emma, the daughter, who was 14, who refused to come to any of the sessions, how could the therapy work?
Speaker C:And the answer is pretty easy if the parents can learn how to respond and communicate with Emma and with the son, Nathan, and if Nathan could learn how to respond and communicate with his parents and his sister.
Speaker C:And Nathan only showed up for about 15 minutes per session.
Speaker C:We had 18 sessions over the course of from.
Speaker C:I had one with them in the beginning of August, and then they thought that they had it all under control.
Speaker C:And then there were the fires in California and a lot of stress, being locked down again, not even being able to go outside because of the smoke.
Speaker C:And there was an increase, not surprisingly, of the kinetic psychokinetic events.
Speaker C:So between September and February, with the added support of the clinical parapsychology working with three of family members, there was a continual decrease in the number of phenomena.
Speaker C:Now, Brian can probably speak to how, you know, sometimes that happens automatically and naturally in these kinds of cases.
Speaker C:So, you know, there's a lot we don't really know about the phenomena itself, and it really is important to be able to explore.
Speaker C:But that was one of my issues on the clinical level is that they were trying to pathologize, yes, this family, when in reality, in my clinical assessment, it wasn't about a pathological circumstance.
Speaker C:It was really, you know, what I would call a standard kind of family dynamics with two teenage kids locked down in the middle of a pandemic and stress increasing and needing to find ways to respond to those added stressors.
Speaker A:We'll come back.
Speaker A:I'll come back.
Speaker B:I just want to say that what got me when I read the response, their critique was they were making assumptions as they were developing, based on limited data in our paper.
Speaker B:So they didn't contact us.
Speaker B:They did not find if there was any additional data about the family that could have been used to support their position.
Speaker B:They just made assumptions based on the limited data that was in the paper, which was not intended as a clinical paper to begin with, per se.
Speaker A:So I want to jump on to Brian and gel.
Speaker A:I think people out there will be interested in and What I noticed as well is something you say, Lloyd, is that you have an approach.
Speaker A:The echo was an approach to things.
Speaker A:Now people will understand.
Speaker A:And I think Brian can talk to this from the parapsychology side of things.
Speaker A:In regards to RSPK or poltergeist phenomena.
Speaker A:It seems like to me, we should be thinking, and this might change the whole direction.
Speaker A:We should be thinking about changing the poltergeist label to perhaps something more like the echo approach.
Speaker A:Brian, let's talk a little bit about that so people can understand maybe the difference in between this echo approach and what people really think about poltergeist phenomena.
Speaker E:Well, the terminology is mainly one of the issues.
Speaker E:And actually, Gerald wouldn't be able to speak to that better than I would, as that has been one of his focuses lately.
Speaker A:Okay, Gerald, if you want to.
Speaker A:You want to take that over then.
Speaker D:Yeah.
Speaker D:Yeah, I see.
Speaker D:That's my cue.
Speaker D:Yes, well, yes, well, yes.
Speaker D:As we talk about this case, I would like to interject kind of an overview that I think is important, and that is that what happened, the play out of the case with the four of us working as a team, and we really, really worked as a team.
Speaker D:And that's unusual in going off to study a haunting or a poltergeist or an RSPK or echo type case.
Speaker D:Dennis, that is, there may be, you know, a couple of people, and they both have the same notion in mind about what it is.
Speaker D:And.
Speaker D:Okay.
Speaker D:And they go in and they look for the.
Speaker D:They look for the agent.
Speaker D:Who's the agent in this?
Speaker D:You know, they say, this.
Speaker D:This might be rspk.
Speaker D:This is a poltergeist.
Speaker D:So let's.
Speaker D:Let's find the agent and we'll focus in on.
Speaker D:And then we take the agent out of the circumstance, and we look at that agent with our cameras, with our.
Speaker D:With our scientific tools.
Speaker D:We give all sorts of questionnaires and so forth like that, and say, yeah, this.
Speaker D:This guy is doing it.
Speaker D:This person is doing it.
Speaker D:Okay.
Speaker D:So the echo approach is to kind of back off from that big word assumption.
Speaker D:Assumption.
Speaker D:We bring our assumptions with us, and those assumptions come from a lot of places, but originally from folklore.
Speaker D:And a lot of folklore is carried into our investigations because we all have it in us.
Speaker D:We've all.
Speaker D:Yeah, so the echo approach is an attempt to kind of have a team approach to investigating.
Speaker D:The echo approach is kind of a reframe of how we're going to make progress in understanding this really fascinating phenomena that's going on here, as opposed to bringing assumptions in and Trying to confirm them or disconfirm them, et cetera, which is a different process.
Speaker D:So can we just go and look?
Speaker D:Can we have a really open mind, drop the assumptions, if we can, as much as we can, and go in and see what's going on?
Speaker D:So the echo approach is that it's a reframe of.
Speaker D:It's a methodological thing, it's not a theory, echo is not a theory.
Speaker D:It's a methodological approach to see if we can work towards a theory.
Speaker D:Theory might come later.
Speaker D:You know, that's something.
Speaker D:But we want to kind of move in here in a positive way and look at what's going on and try to look at some patterns, match it up with patterns from other cases, match it up with patterns from other aspects, what other sciences, from chemistry, from quantum physics, from physics and from social science, et cetera, match those and find if those patterns can start to make sense and to look at it.
Speaker D:Now, one of the big patterns that in parapsychology we're missing is complexity.
Speaker D:So long time ago, Bob Morris, Robert L. Morris from the Edinburgh University, he was the inaugural Kessler Chair of Parapsychology.
Speaker D:And he was a friend and mentor of mine.
Speaker D:He was on my PhD committee, for example, when I completed my PhD work at Utrecht.
Speaker D: nd Bob said long ago, back in: Speaker D:And he said that complexity is complex systems particularly.
Speaker D:And he said that we need to see what we do and what we're trying to investigate as complex systems.
Speaker D:A system is a thing of many parts that work together.
Speaker D:A complex system is one where you cannot see the actual cause and effect because it is too complicated, it's too complex.
Speaker D:That is, you can't see who's doing it because there is no who's doing it.
Speaker D:The whole system is doing it.
Speaker D:And that's where this RFPK echo type concept comes in.
Speaker D:So the first thing is to take Bob Morris at his word and to say, well, what do you mean by that?
Speaker D:Let's explore that.
Speaker D:One of the things that you do is you take a systems perspective.
Speaker D:And a systems perspective means that when you go in, you're not looking for the agent.
Speaker D:You are, of course, you're looking for the agent, but you're not looking for the agent to find it as a cause effect.
Speaker D:A simplistic, linear, reductionistic cause effect.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker D:Jacob's doing it.
Speaker D:No, no, no, no.
Speaker D:You see the agent the way that family systems Therapy sees a troubled child not as the child is troubled.
Speaker D:Let's find some pills, you know, let's find a therapy.
Speaker D:No, no, no.
Speaker D:The whole family is responsible for and the child is acting out the family system.
Speaker D:And so from that perspective, taking that same sort of perspective for going into these family disturbances, as we often call them, it makes much more sense in so many ways.
Speaker D:So in order to do that, you need a team.
Speaker D:And that's what we naturally fell into here.
Speaker D:And so this case turned out to be.
Speaker D:We didn't plan it this way, by the way.
Speaker D:It kind of came together spontaneously, but it came together as a really ideal notion of how to move the echo idea into the investigation of a echo case.
Speaker D:That is so beautifully.
Speaker D:Dr. Beth Hedler explained a moment ago, so many things from the psychological point of view and from the family therapy point of view.
Speaker D:And every case that you investigate, that is investigated should have a clinical person, psychiatrist, psychologist, social scientist.
Speaker D:A clinically trained person could be medical, but a clinically trained person should be on part of the team and play a special role, as Dr. Beth Hedvig did in this case.
Speaker D:We all play our different roles and we did that kind of in a natural way.
Speaker D:And I'm very proud of this case.
Speaker D:This case was really, I've done many cases, by the way, over the past years, but I'm very proud of this one, this way, that, that how it came together and how it, it played out.
Speaker D:And it's still playing out.
Speaker A:It certainly seems to be a breakout case from, from this point of view.
Speaker A:One of the things as you noticed, as you're saying from your.
Speaker A:The echo being a method.
Speaker A:A method, a methodological standpoint.
Speaker A:One of the things I noticed in their critique is they talk about the HPS scoring system and they make sure that system has multiple layers of subjectivity.
Speaker A:How significant is that from the methodological approach, from what they're claiming in their scoring system?
Speaker D:Yeah, well, one of the things I already mentioned, you bring in assumptions into the case.
Speaker D:If you do that in these cases with complex systems phenomena, okay?
Speaker D:Now if you do it with linear stable state non dynamic phenomena of the sort that you find in physics and chemistry and even lots of areas of psychology and social science, et cetera, no problem.
Speaker D:You can bring in your assumption and you can test it, but not in these cases because they're complex systems and complex systems really will mislead you.
Speaker D:If you bring your assumptions in, you will find what you're looking for, but it won't be the truth.
Speaker C:And can I piggyback for a second on what you said, Jerry.
Speaker C:In psychology they talk about when you're working with families.
Speaker C:And as family therapy evolved into family systems therapy, at first there was the identified patient, which in parapsychology we call that the poltergeist agent.
Speaker C:But when we recognize that that poltergeist agent is, if we want to use the current language in the world right now, they're like a channel, if you will, for the stress of the family and they happen to be the one expressing it.
Speaker C:And the problem with the old model is that we blame the person who happens to be the one who seems to be acting out as though it's about them instead of about the energy of the system.
Speaker C:And unfortunately o' Keeffe et al continued that perspective by looking at an agent here, in this case the 14 year old daughter, as the problem.
Speaker C:Primarily that created a contagion in the family that then became this, how did they put it?
Speaker C:Haunted person's syndrome that affected everybody in the family.
Speaker C:But it's still blaming the quote, poltergeist agent.
Speaker C:Whereas what you're identifying when you began to have like an assessment of echo.
Speaker C:Is there something anomalous going on?
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:Is it episodic?
Speaker C:Whatever this phenomena is?
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:Is it communal?
Speaker C:Is it within the context of a group?
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:Is there something kinetic going on?
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:You know, it's like each of the categories and then are there occurrences that we can identify and evaluate?
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker C:So it becomes an assessment tool as about the phenomena as opposed to the old models of looking at who's to blame for the problem.
Speaker C:I just wanted to kind of clarify that.
Speaker D:Absolutely.
Speaker A:Let me throw that out to anybody.
Speaker A:Let me throw this out to anybody.
Speaker A:Do you think then that o' Keeffe et al's their approach was shown systematic bias towards their model because they didn't seem to test anything.
Speaker A:Just from what I can see is their approach had, as well as being assumptive, it had a systematic bias in their model.
Speaker A:So they would try and fit anything into it.
Speaker D:Yes, good point.
Speaker D:Yes.
Speaker C:I think Brian actually really did a great job in your rebuttal, Brian, when you were identifying piece by piece.
Speaker C:So I'd love to hear from you so that our listening audience, I think.
Speaker D:Brian really has more to say on that point than than any of the others of us.
Speaker E: ies that they did back in the: Speaker E:And these were studies that were done kind of surveying with an early version of their case survey.
Speaker E:And some of the items, as Jerry pointed out in a later letter to the editor that he did, he pointed out there are items in that survey that are kind of loaded in the sense that they introduce some cultural folklore or popular horror media type influenced items.
Speaker E:So they might say, well, I had an experience that totally scared me to death.
Speaker E:It, you know, it was bone chillingly frightening.
Speaker E:And.
Speaker E:Or they might say, oh well, did you ever see fairies or elves or other types of little people that you hear about in folklore?
Speaker E:And these things don't fit very well with some of the RSPK cases that we've seen, but it seems to be fit very well with what you see in a lot of, as I said, folklore, but also in the popular TV media on the paranormal.
Speaker E:A lot of the shows which are based in fiction, they contain a lot of these things that they talk about and they don't seem to fit very well with what you actually see in the parapsychological literature.
Speaker E:So that was a concern for me.
Speaker E: surveys go back to about the: Speaker E:Horan and Lange basically said, they wrote, in fact, they said, well, based on our research, these hauntings and poltergeists seem to be delusional, by which they mean kind of these are phenomena which kind of people adopt a mistaken belief in based on.
Speaker E:And that influences their perceptions based on certain preconceived notions that they have themselves about spirits and other kinds of related phenomena that are.
Speaker E:And so that also kind of when you adopt a preconceived notion like that, you kind of limit the viewpoint that you have.
Speaker E:It kind of narrows the range of possibilities that you can examine here.
Speaker E:And that was my concern as well, because that seemed to carry into all the way into hbs, because their survey that they use currently also contains those same items with that same type of thing.
Speaker E:And, and so I kind of wondered, well, when I compared it to what we find with the Silicon Valley case, with what the family reported there, it was actually quite a bit at odds with what is on their, their surveys and the other cases that they've looked at that they claim are HPS related.
Speaker E:And so there was a noticeable difference when I compared them statistically that suggests that there are unique differences here between the Silicon Valley case and these other cases here.
Speaker E:So that.
Speaker E:That also draws upon another issue too.
Speaker E:Well, kind of the HPS model is kind of formed in a way that it seems to be almost like a one theory fits all type of approach.
Speaker E:They take all these different types of phenomena, these unusual phenomena, including ghosts and, and hauntings and all the name.
Speaker E:And they kind of combine it with a bunch of other type of phenomena too.
Speaker A:It's objective in layers.
Speaker A:Everything is.
Speaker A:And they try to make it fit.
Speaker A:And Brian, let me ask you this because there'll be people out there that are listening to this and they're, they're probably wondering, you know, what type of phenomena were they experiencing perhaps in the SV case as opposed to maybe what other type of phenomena that we know about in other cases.
Speaker A:Can you explain a little bit of that?
Speaker E:Yeah, what we saw actually that kind of conforms pretty well with other types of poltergeist or RSPK type cases is the patterns that we saw.
Speaker E:For example, there was a lot of object focusing involved.
Speaker E:One of the most common things we see is that in these cases is that certain objects or type of objects get affected repeatedly in multiple instances.
Speaker E:And in the Silicon Valley case, one of them was cellular phones.
Speaker E:The families, each members of the family cellular phone would go off repeatedly and sometimes it would automatically dial 911 spontaneously.
Speaker E:It seems one interesting pattern related to that too has to do with kind of a symbolic pattern.
Speaker E:Sometimes these RSPK type phenomena seem to almost symbolically reflect the situation of the communal group involved.
Speaker E:And in this case it was a family kind of in turmoil while in lockdown during the pandemic.
Speaker E:So if you look at the.
Speaker E:The symbol comes in.
Speaker E:When you look at the number that was dialed, it was 91 1, which is the call for help emergency number.
Speaker D:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker E:And so it's almost like a cry for help.
Speaker E:You can almost view it that way.
Speaker E:And so there, there's almost, almost suggests some type of symbol.
Speaker C:And that would happen even when the phone was turned off.
Speaker C:Somehow the phone would turn on and dial 911.
Speaker C:And the family, you know, the father was an engineer.
Speaker C:He checked the phones and did everything he could from the very concrete physical perspective.
Speaker C:O' Keeffe et al.
Speaker C:Didn't have any of that kind of background information on how the family tried to work with the phenomena unsuccessfully, which only created an escalation in their anxiety and feeling powerless and helpless.
Speaker C:And originally thinking it was a Ghost until I think they spoke with the three of you and got a different perspective.
Speaker D:I'd like to point out that Brian's written contribution in the paper.
Speaker D:The sections are separated by different authors and Brian's section is absolutely brilliant, no question.
Speaker A:Yeah, I've got no question about that actually.
Speaker A:It's brilliant.
Speaker A:And for those of you haven't read the paper, it actually is coming out in our inaugural edition of Paraguay's journal which is imminent, imminent, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker A:It'll be out there so you'll be able to enjoy it, you'll be able to get involved and the discussions that no doubt will be coming from this.
Speaker A:Guys, I want to throw this out as well because there seems to be a disparity between parapsychology, clinical parapsychology and anomalistic psychology.
Speaker A:And it seems to be that, you know, Okife Al's focus is very hard lined with on anomalous psychology.
Speaker A:Let's talk a little bit about that because obviously there's a clear distinction and they tried to, they've tried to fit this case into an anomalistic field if you like, and they're trying to just make it fit.
Speaker A:Almost like forcing the round ball in the square in this place.
Speaker A:It's not supposed to be, but they're trying to force it in there.
Speaker A:Let's talk a little bit about an anomalous psychology and where it fits.
Speaker B:Well, in some respects anomalous psychology is the psychology of anomalous experience, but not necessarily considering the anomalous experience is a real experience as any objective reality or has anything to do with psychic phenomena or anything else for that matter.
Speaker B:So from that perspective that's, I mean psychologists been doing that for a long time.
Speaker B:Somebody says they are, you know, picking up something psychically, they may have been diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Speaker B:So it's, it's not allowing, you know, for potential of actual experiences.
Speaker B:I also think that, that in some respects it's not allowing for people just having mistaken conclusions in their perceptions without having a psychological disease or syndrome or anything else.
Speaker B:There was a survey by a real estate company a few years ago because they've been getting a lot of reports from realtors that during the lockdowns people were reporting to realtors, they knew that their house was haunted, they wanted to sell.
Speaker B:And it turned out the realtors, yeah, the realtors talking to them about it, figured out that these people had never been locked in their homes for weeks on end and they were noticing things that they had never noticed before and misinterpreting them as paranormal.
Speaker B:They had normal explanations.
Speaker B:That is not a syndrome.
Speaker B:That is not.
Speaker B:I mean, that is a perceptual thing and an expectation thing based on pop culture because of what they see on television stuff.
Speaker B:So you can take it as you guys made mistakes in your perceptions.
Speaker B:Let's learn from that.
Speaker B:Or there's something psychologically wrong with you that, I mean, putting it, even if you call it, you know, even if it's not a wrong with you kind of diagnosis or label, calling it a syndrome or a disease makes it seem that way.
Speaker B:So labeling that, if they have a different label, it might have been fine, but that label is a problem for people in general with their experiences.
Speaker A:That brings up very nicely, actually, Lloyd, this whole ethical question that I know Beth, is really focused on as well, because the way they label it or the way that they're putting out that, and I noticed that in their paper, that there is a great.
Speaker A:There's a big divide and it brings the ethics into question, especially if they're labeling something a disease or they're utilizing anomalous phenomena, anomalous psychology, to label it.
Speaker A:This causes a big ethics problem.
Speaker A:Beth, you want to speak to that about that a little bit?
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:So first of all, I really want to highlight that we are an international team.
Speaker C:So we have researchers on our team across the United States.
Speaker C:You know, Jerry, you're in Massachusetts.
Speaker C:Lloyd, you're in California.
Speaker C:Brian, you're in New Mexico.
Speaker C:I'm north in Canada.
Speaker C:And so we in the field, when we're collaborating with research, we have certain guidelines, but we don't really have a guideline around how to respond ethically.
Speaker C: Now, it so happens, in: Speaker C:So there was an adoption, a declaration of universal ethical principles in psychology that was adopted by 116 different psychology organizations internationally, including the American Psychology association, the British Society for Psychology, and also Canadian Psych Association.
Speaker C:Those four principles are to guide our capacity to evaluate and assess how do we respond to phenomena both in research and in our clinical work.
Speaker C:And there are four really simple principles.
Speaker C:The first one is respect for the dignity of persons and peoples.
Speaker C:Because different people have different ways of approaching things based on their culture, based on their spiritual or religious background.
Speaker C:And we need to respect that, especially when we're working internationally.
Speaker C:Now, I want to mention the o' Keeffe team was also international, particularly British and the United States.
Speaker C:The second principle, ethical standard, is about competent caring.
Speaker C:And that competent caring is having an active concern for the well being of individuals, families, groups and communities.
Speaker C:And that includes in research, you know, we do that.
Speaker C:And in psychology, the benefits and working with the family within our capacity, within our license, within our training, background, experience, are we offering competent care to them in a way that the benefits outweigh the possible difficulties that the family might face in the interventions that we're bringing through?
Speaker C:And then the third principle that's really important as well, beyond competent caring, has to do with the experience of integrity.
Speaker C:So that integrity, and we've talked a lot about this already, has to do with minimizing our biases.
Speaker C:We need to recognize when we are making assumptions and it's biasing our ability to be present and work with the family.
Speaker C:And also conflicts of interest which seem that they might be present in this case too.
Speaker C:The o' Keeffe team had an interest in validating their particular model, and that might have been in conflict with being able to see the data in a clear objective form or framework.
Speaker C:And then the fourth final principle has to do with responsibility to the profession and to science and to promote the highest level of ethical ideals within the scientific community.
Speaker C:Sometimes it will.
Speaker C:What happens is we can put science ahead of respect for people and persons, but the guidelines for the ethical principles that have been accepted by 116 different psychology associations is these are rank ordered.
Speaker C:First and foremost is respect for people and persons, persons and people.
Speaker C:That never comes at the end with science being more important than the people you're working with.
Speaker C:And I think that o', Keeffe, perhaps unwittingly, and they might not be aware of these universal ethical principles in psychology, but I think they put science first instead of the people first.
Speaker C:So that's my perspective on that.
Speaker A:Do you think it was a case of them being overly excited about them trying to prove their model, that they overlooked the ethics side of it?
Speaker A:Because clearly there's an ethics problem within how they approach their paper or their rebuttal.
Speaker A:What would you say to that?
Speaker C:Well, I think we need to be careful about calling each other ethical or unethical.
Speaker C:If they are not even familiar with these universal principles, that would be us.
Speaker B:Making assumptions about their awareness of these things.
Speaker B:And we don't want to do that.
Speaker C:Exactly.
Speaker C:And you know, the problem is the British Society had its own ethical standards.
Speaker C:Canadian Psychology had its own standards.
Speaker C:The APA had its own standards until these universal ethical principles were adopted.
Speaker C:And while they are adopted by the organizations, I don't know how many members of those organizations are familiar with them.
Speaker C:So That's a bit of a challenge just in the field of psychology, if you will.
Speaker D:If I might add something to that, just a minor note really, but I feel very good about it.
Speaker D:It's something that we did in this study and that is in doing research.
Speaker D:For example, I'm at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and I'm from.
Speaker D:That's.
Speaker D:That's my affiliation still, even though I'm retired.
Speaker D:But if I'm running an experiment in a laboratory, then I submit my protocol to the ethics committee, the human subjects committee, and they look it over and they say, okay, it's all right, or no, you can.
Speaker D:You have to change this or that.
Speaker D:You know, you have to do this X, Y and Z.
Speaker D:And interestingly, when people do field research, as in echo cases, RSPK type cases, or other kinds where you come into somebody's home and you actually interview them, you collect data from them, we don't do that.
Speaker D:Why?
Speaker D:Well, there's no reason why, except we just forgot to do it and it's kind of an awkward thing.
Speaker D:Well, we did that in this case, which is like, really unusual to have a case that we do.
Speaker D:And so we supplied the family with a set of ethics.
Speaker D:Here's what we'll do for you, here's what we won't do for you.
Speaker D:Here's what our interests are, and here's what we think your interests are.
Speaker D:And then we signed it and sent it to them and said, what do you think?
Speaker D:And so they took it and they were grateful for it.
Speaker D:And it gave us a contract about how we're going to interact, what we're going to do with their data.
Speaker D:And we made agreements to them about that we would not reveal and how we would prevent revealing information about their identity, et cetera, things like that.
Speaker D:This is not standard, but it should be.
Speaker B:There are standard.
Speaker B:I mean, there are release forms that I've used for confidentiality and things like that.
Speaker B:One of the issues of submitting a field investigation to a review board is that it's timing very often.
Speaker B:And this is a situation where we have plenty of time to do things.
Speaker B:I co teach a course on ethics for the Ryan Education center with John Cru, and he approaches this from the research perspective, which I've done, you know, tell students to, if possible, submit your plan for an investigation to an IRB and, you know, internal review board.
Speaker B:The problem is institutional review board problem is that timing doesn't allow for that.
Speaker B:Because if the board is going to take three weeks to get back to you on your plan for A case the people might be in worse situation than they were when you first got that call.
Speaker B:The key is for investigators to follow the ethical guidelines, whether or not they have, you know, sent them on to someone else to review them in advance.
Speaker B:These are standard ethical guidelines we have.
Speaker B:And then to communicate that, as we did to the family, to let them know what's going on, to let them know this should be confidential, something we see not happening all the time with the amateur ghost hunters out there who often post people's home pictures.
Speaker B:Pictures of the home, which is funny.
Speaker A:God, I know, It's a nightmare.
Speaker A:Actually, this brings up a bigger question in regards to research because as you mentioned, Ghostbusters go in there, paranormal teams go in there.
Speaker A:They obviously then confidentiality goes out the window because they're posting stuff on the Internet.
Speaker A:But what's interesting about this case, guys, is that this was research that was done remotely.
Speaker A:You didn't have to be there.
Speaker A:Does this change the whole paradigm of how we approach parapsychological research?
Speaker A:Because you're proven.
Speaker A:I don't see you're proven, but you're.
Speaker A:Your approach is almost breaking boundaries into something that's potentially new, which, which means that we don't have to be on.
Speaker A:On location.
Speaker A:And therefore, in terms of this, the whole ethical thing, Lloyd, is we don't have to wait on the IRB review board because this.
Speaker A:Or we have the time to wait for it because this is.
Speaker A:This is remote.
Speaker A:So are we moving into a new parallel?
Speaker A:Are we moving into a new era of parapsychological investigation?
Speaker B:I think it certainly opens up a new avenue for us.
Speaker B:I don't know that every case is ever going to fit into that because there are some cases that you do.
Speaker B:I mean, fact is that going to a location when there's reported phenomena also gives the investigators the ability to see where there might be normal explanations for some things that people have reported.
Speaker B:So that is an important factor in many, many cases, not necessarily in all of them.
Speaker B:And in this instance, you know, the well being of the family was at the.
Speaker B:You know, that was the top thing for us, which is always.
Speaker B:Should be the top thing for folks.
Speaker B:So if that's the goal in any investigation, then a lot of it can be handled remotely.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:I think it's taking.
Speaker A:Is bringing a new dimension into research.
Speaker C:But I want to add that we need.
Speaker C:If you're going to have a team, you need somebody like Brian on that team.
Speaker C:Brian has a breadth of understanding of the history of the phenomena, past research on the phenomena, being able to statistically evaluate whether what's being reported fits in and the picture or pattern of past research.
Speaker C:You know, we really had, I think, a unique team.
Speaker C:You know, we had a clinician who also integrates intuitive embodied awareness to be able to help the family understand the phenomena and deal with it differently, as well as, you know, all the communication issues that, you know, family therapists deal with.
Speaker C:We had somebody who is completely.
Speaker C:Two people who are completely expert in working with families with poltergeist, helping them evaluate whether it was a ghost, a haunting or poltergeist case, having both Jerry and Lloyd and being able to compare their evaluations with each other.
Speaker C:So it wasn't just based on one person's evaluation and then taking the data that I supplied from family sessions and what Lloyd and Jerry evaluated and ascertained, giving it all to Brian, who then kind of looked at the patterns and how does it fit in with what we already know historically about these kinds of cases?
Speaker D:Indeed, indeed.
Speaker D:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:What does this mean, guys, for the field moving forward?
Speaker A:I mean.
Speaker A:Well, actually, before we go into that, let me.
Speaker A:Because obviously I don't want to be disparaging of a key fat Al in their paper too much, you know, but is there anything that you would see as positive in their approach in terms of their haunted person syndrome?
Speaker A:Or do you think that they've just kind of came up with this without actually having really an investigatory or evidential approach to it?
Speaker A:Because it seems to be very subjective.
Speaker B:Well, I think there might be something, you know, they're certainly saying that it doesn't fit this case.
Speaker B:Doesn't mean that it doesn't fit other cases.
Speaker A:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:I mean, I think that that's.
Speaker B:It is one approach and we need to have a toolbox approach to individuals who report this and also to families that report this phenomena.
Speaker B:It's just, you know, what we object to in this particular situation is that they didn't have the data.
Speaker B:They made assumptions about things about our.
Speaker B:About the case.
Speaker B:I mean, they weren't criticizing the write up of the original paper on methodological issues.
Speaker B:They weren't criticizing.
Speaker B:They were criticizing it in that they were reevaluating based on incomplete data because we didn't put everything in there, especially about the personality and the behavior and the beliefs of the family members.
Speaker B:So they're making an overlay based on their model when there is missing data for them to use for an overlay.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker D:No.
Speaker D:In addition, if I might say, in addition, I, as a methodologist, encountered the Haran group in an earlier time also concerning so called Poltergeist that, that really troubled me.
Speaker D:I returned.
Speaker D:I was many years away from the field of parapsychology.
Speaker D:I still kept my connections with people, but I wasn't active.
Speaker D:But then I got active again and when I did so I started getting back into the literature.
Speaker D:And one of the first things I came across, I thought, well, this is an interesting article.
Speaker D:And I read it and I was appalled.
Speaker D:And I was appalled because I thought it had some methodological, shall we call them, shadows, penumbras.
Speaker D:So I felt very poorly.
Speaker D:I didn't feel good about the methodology that they were, the track that they were doing, which seemed almost certain to go awry.
Speaker D:I mean, I almost thought these guys are trying to ditch the field.
Speaker D:They're trying to field in a direction that's going to crash into the wall.
Speaker D:And so I wrote a review.
Speaker D:I reviewed their article in the Journal of Parapsychology and wrote a review.
Speaker D:And that's when our interaction started because they wrote back a horrible thing saying, this guy is terrible.
Speaker D:This guy doesn't know anything.
Speaker D:You know, this guy, this guy.
Speaker D:And they were trying to defend themselves and that's all they were doing.
Speaker D:But they had no real arguments against what I was saying.
Speaker D:And that's when I linked up with Brian and Brian joined me in that and we wrote a second series of kind of, you know, kind of back and forth with the Horan group.
Speaker D:But so the point is that I do have methodological issues with how they approach the phenomena.
Speaker D: The number one going back to: Speaker D:What a great book.
Speaker D:What a great resource of many essays, all except theirs.
Speaker D:Their contribution in that book.
Speaker D:Yeah, is kind of lays it out, as Brian mentioned earlier.
Speaker D:They say they bundle them all together with a number of other phenomena.
Speaker D:They say it's all the same and we call them poltergeists.
Speaker D:So in the original paper that kind of triggered my concerns by Haran and his group on an early version that's kind of pre HPS that was leading up to HPS.
Speaker D:They used the word poltergeist 28 times in one article.
Speaker D:Never defined it, never defined, no definitions, but they used it 28 times without defining what they mean by poltergeist.
Speaker D: go back in their work back to: Speaker A:Interesting, because that brings up the whole argument or the whole problem with labeling something.
Speaker A:And actually, if I can ask Brian, there'll be a lot of people out there as we're listening to this will think, poltergeist, noisy spirit, it's a ghost.
Speaker A:And they don't understand it from a whole aspect of maybe a system or rspk.
Speaker A:Brian, can you explain for people that are listening out there, you try and identify what is a poltergeist and the differentiation between the respective phenomena?
Speaker E:Well, when it comes to poltergeist, I can't really define it very well because we don't really have a good definition.
Speaker E:And that's what Jerry has spoken to.
Speaker E:And that's the whole issue about the terminology that we use.
Speaker E:The only thing that we can do at the moment is identify certain characteristics or features and then use that as a form of differentiation through inference.
Speaker E:And in the case of poltergeists and haunts, for example, you know, one of the key differences in features between them is poltergeist.
Speaker E:RHPK type phenomena tend to be purely physical, whereas in haunt phenomena they tend to be more subjective, more perceptual.
Speaker E:They don't really necessarily have a physical component per se.
Speaker E:And so, you know, that's one of the things that we can use to form a distinction between them.
Speaker E:And there are several others that parapsychologists have identified over the years.
Speaker E:And it didn't seem to me that the o' Keeffe et al.
Speaker E:Group had really taken that into account.
Speaker E:They kind of overlooked that and instead said, well, it's all one and the same.
Speaker A:As Jerry pointed, it's one thing, one unit.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker E:And that's problematic because then that really limits, for one thing, kind of your viewpoint, but it also kind of tries to really take a lot of data that parapsychologists have gathered.
Speaker E:You don't take into account that way.
Speaker E:And so again, that kind of really, that's an issue with when you have a kind of a predisposed viewpoint, you know, a preconceived idea about these phenomena without really looking to see if that idea fits well with the existing data or not.
Speaker B:Well, and pop culture has done that consistently.
Speaker B:I mean, that.
Speaker B:That's the thing is that it's.
Speaker B:You have a cool word like poltergeist, which, you know, goes back at least as far as the 16th century in Germany.
Speaker B:And at a time when people, if stuff moved around, there's only a couple possible explanations that people at that time could have come up with and they were all supernatural.
Speaker B:So, yeah, it really.
Speaker B:We learn more and we have patterns of these experiences.
Speaker B:And there are significant differences, as Brian mentioned being a haunting and a poltergeist case, even more and significant ones with apparitions.
Speaker B:It's just that it becomes a catch all term that if you have some activity.
Speaker B:And there's a lot of other catch all terms we see in the media and from the new age movement too.
Speaker B:You know, people talk about, oh, it's an elemental spirit.
Speaker B:It's like, what is that?
Speaker A:You know, I know, I don't.
Speaker A:That's another episode.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Or religious terminology, which of course the demon word is something that TV loves because that's what gets ratings when it comes right down.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So it's always important to differentiate, you know, when you are talking about poltergeist phenomena.
Speaker B:What do you mean?
Speaker B:What is, what is it we're talking about here?
Speaker B:What is your definition for that?
Speaker B:What is my definition for an apparition here?
Speaker B:When I talk about this through this, this lecture or this particular podcast that I'm doing, here's what I mean by that.
Speaker B:Because other people might have different terms.
Speaker B:I mean, the word ghost itself is highly loaded.
Speaker B:So you have to really be clear about what, what you mean by that.
Speaker B:And that's not something we saw.
Speaker B:I mean, this is all one, one size fits all.
Speaker B:And I'd say that a person who's having an experience or a family in a poltergeist situation, in an RSPK situation.
Speaker B:Cause it is purely physical, that they're not haunted.
Speaker B:They're upset, they're traumatized, possibly they are making mistakes because some things might have normal explanation, but they're not haunted.
Speaker D:Yeah, good point, good point.
Speaker D:If I may take a little side trip on that, when I get back into parapsychology, maybe what, eight years ago or so, one of the first things I noticed was parapsychology has terminological dysfunction going all the way back to the spr.
Speaker D:That is, we don't really know what is it we're studying.
Speaker D:In other words, you say, well, telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, okay, and precognition.
Speaker D:And so, well, that's something, right?
Speaker D:But everybody has a different definition of it.
Speaker D:In other words, you don't have a group definition.
Speaker D:We don't have something that we all agree on is telepathy.
Speaker D:And so that's kind of an interesting sideline, but it seems to me from a methodological point of view that that has deeper significance.
Speaker D:The fact that we don't have that taxonomy.
Speaker D:We don't have a taxonomy of the science.
Speaker D:We don't have definitions.
Speaker D:And that led me to start to look at complex systems because this was coming up in biology and in other areas and kind of a new thing in science that is interdisciplinary has tremendous impact on social science, for example, but also archeology and anthropology.
Speaker D:Anthropology, yeah, yeah, et cetera, as well as the other sciences.
Speaker D:We didn't have this notion of complex systems, but Bob Morris pointed out, and others did too, Dean Radin, you know, von Lucadow, others have pointed out about complexity, complex systems, and have mentioned it and have kind of given it a place in parapsychology, but we haven't as a group embraced it.
Speaker D:And it seems to me that that's connected with our terminological problem.
Speaker D:That is, fundamentally, we're dealing with a complex phenomena.
Speaker D:Complexity.
Speaker D:And complexity is not easy to define.
Speaker D:So that plays into our inability to agree on a definition.
Speaker D:So to me, what that means from a methodological point of view is say, well, let's take a step back here.
Speaker D:Let's first embrace complexity as a group.
Speaker D:All right?
Speaker D:Can we all say.
Speaker D:Can we all agree on that?
Speaker D:What we're looking at, we don't know what it is exactly.
Speaker D:Okay, but it's complex, it's a com.
Speaker D:It's complexity.
Speaker D:It's a complex system, okay?
Speaker D:So once we do that, it turns out that just simply, if we all agree on that, that simple thing, nothing more, there are a variety of logical sequela that come out of that embracing of complexity.
Speaker D:If we embrace complexity, we first have to say, well, how do you deal with complexity systems?
Speaker D:You have to flip.
Speaker D:You have to reframe to systems thinking.
Speaker D:You have to think about everything as a system, not as individuals, not as linear, not as.
Speaker D:You can't do that.
Speaker D:That's why simple experimental, usual falsification techniques, Paparian ideas of falsification, they simply don't work, at least not the same way for complexity.
Speaker D:And so complexity really changes the way you have to think about your science.
Speaker D:So that's number one.
Speaker D:The second thing for parapsychology is really important, and yet I haven't yet seen anybody who's really embraced this.
Speaker D:And that is, if we embrace complexity, our best chance for making progress is to look at spontaneous cases, not experiments.
Speaker D:To move, to become involved with spontaneous case research, to go back to the basics, look at what's happening in the real world, making observations, observational studies.
Speaker D:And I can think of no better one than this echo RSPK type Cases that although they're fairly rare, they're hard to find or catch while they're still hot, so to speak.
Speaker D:But that's a better choice from the point of view.
Speaker D:If we embrace that the phenomena we're looking at is complex, is complex system phenomena, then we're better off methodologically looking at the spontaneous aspects of it, looking at how it plays out in real life, such as these household disturbances, so called, that involve two complex systems that are together.
Speaker D:One complex system is the family system.
Speaker D:And that is if we think of the poltergeist RSPK type echo case, okay, as restricted.
Speaker D:If we restrict it just initially to family situations, residential family situations.
Speaker D:I know there have been RSPK cases in offices and schools, et cetera, but they're rare.
Speaker D:They're much rarer.
Speaker D:The usual situation is in a family residential home situation.
Speaker D:And there you have a classic complex system, a family system.
Speaker D:That's an example.
Speaker D:Perfect.
Speaker D:And so you have that playing out.
Speaker D:The complex system itself that you're looking at, the RSPK type activities going on, presumably, is a complex system and somehow they're both co.
Speaker D:Present.
Speaker D:Well, that should suggest something to you right away.
Speaker D:So that would be a better approach from a methodological point of view.
Speaker D:There are some other sequelae of embracing complexity.
Speaker D:But I don't want to kind of go off too far from where we are.
Speaker A:Before we get.
Speaker A:We're coming to kind of to the end of things.
Speaker A:And before I get to kind of final thoughts and stuff like that, I think, you know, there's clearly a division that exists at the moment between the various respective fields.
Speaker A:And I would put it to you that perhaps the echo case is a, perhaps a foundational approach for parapsychologists and anomalistic psychologists and clinical parapsychologists to, or even transpersonal to begin to come together, because at the moment there seems to be different distance.
Speaker A:And I think what you're saying as well, Gerald, is that with these complex systems and looking at it from that side of you, do you think then, guys, that the echo approach could possibly bring some cohesion in the field?
Speaker A:Now, in the various respective fields, it.
Speaker B:Could certainly be a starting point, I think, for that.
Speaker A:Yeah,.
Speaker B:I mean, I.
Speaker B:And what Jerry's talking about for spontaneous cases, and I mean, not just these types of cases, but, you know, laboratory experiments often start with some, with a bunch of reports and somebody could take a look at reports and coming up with a hypothesis to test in the lab.
Speaker B:You know, one of the things that I'm, I'm.
Speaker B:I've been suggesting and pushing for.
Speaker B:And I think we're going to be getting to a point where we can do it cheaply is being able to take spontaneous reports, even going back decades, and having an AI look for patterns and common factors and differences between the cases, the recorded cases, and using that data to see where we can actually go further, where we can kind of take them further, where they.
Speaker B:They really fit in.
Speaker B:And that includes the complex systems piece, too.
Speaker B:If it's a family situation, there's additional pieces that an AI can pull out.
Speaker B:And I've seen that, you know, there's plenty of articles out there about medical groups or researchers that are actually taking small sets of data versus the entire web and they're applying AI, a model of large language model and getting enormous amount of information parsed through in a very short amount of time.
Speaker B:Loisa Rhine took 33,000 letters and knocked them down to 15,000.
Speaker B:And then she went through the 15,000 and created categories and such that took her a long time.
Speaker B:That would take less than a week if we had that, probably only a couple days at this point.
Speaker B:So we are getting to a point where outside technology, outside the field will give us tools to better assess certain things, to look for patterns that.
Speaker B:That we would otherwise take a lot more thought and other people to get involved with.
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker A:Guys, thank you.
Speaker A:I want to thank you all for being with me today.
Speaker C:Can I make one comment before we close?
Speaker C:It's important to recognize that not all RSPK cases, recurrent spontaneous psychokinetic events are echo.
Speaker C:For example, people who are healers are perhaps asserting psychokinetic energy that impacts another person.
Speaker C:That is healing.
Speaker C:I know for me, my watch continued when I.
Speaker C:Especially during a certain phase of my life when I was anxious.
Speaker C:My watch would either speed up when I was anxious or stop entirely.
Speaker C:That's a psychokinetic event.
Speaker C:There are, you know, one time I was giving a lecture on parapsychology, and I was really worked up and I kind of went psychokinesis.
Speaker C:And when I did that, the light bulb went out.
Speaker C:You know, it's like it was, you know, and we could say that's just, you know, circumstance, but.
Speaker C:And it could have been, you know, I'm not saying that I'm, you know, able to do that on command, but we need to recognize that, as Jerry was saying, we don't really know a lot about the phenomena, but we do recognize when there's a system at work, the phenomena seems to be amplified.
Speaker C:Maybe we can put it that way.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:I mean, I'VE had cases, RSPK cases involving an single individual living alone.
Speaker B:So now that doesn't mean there wasn't some other alpha.
Speaker B:You know, they go to work, and that's what the system was.
Speaker B:But you do have to look at.
Speaker B:I've worked with people who have done psychokinesis on their own.
Speaker B:They.
Speaker B:It's not in any.
Speaker B:It's their system.
Speaker B:That's what it is in many respects.
Speaker B:But the echo approach in those kinds of cases does give us this complex system which gives us a better starting point for understanding interactions between people and potential pk.
Speaker A:So let me leave you guys with a final question.
Speaker A:Have everybody.
Speaker A:I want to thank you guys for being with us today.
Speaker A:It's been phenomenal.
Speaker A:It's been great discussion, and I'm looking forward to having a lot more discussions like this as we move forward in the field.
Speaker A:If you had every one of you, if you had one thing that.
Speaker A:That you would want people to take away from this, how to interpret anomalous human experience or anomalous phenomena in their world or how we should study it, what would you say?
Speaker A:What would be the one thing that you would want someone to take away from this today, from your paper from the echo case, from understanding anomalous approach.
Speaker A:Anomalous approach to phenomena.
Speaker A:Lloyd, we'll start with you.
Speaker B:I'd say first, I don't consider any of this stuff paranormal enough.
Speaker B:People have these experiences that they're in the normal range of human experience.
Speaker B:Consequently, if you have an experience, start asking questions.
Speaker B:Don't make an assumption based on pop culture.
Speaker B:You know, start asking questions for yourself, asking how other people are reacting to it, if they're even aware of it.
Speaker B:You know, don't keep it to yourself.
Speaker B:Try to ask a lot of questions about what may be going on, and don't be afraid to be wrong.
Speaker B:That's thing too.
Speaker A:Excellent, Beth.
Speaker C:From a clinical perspective, people often react with anxiety, fear, not knowing how to handle something unknown that's happening.
Speaker C:And I would say what's really important to recognize is there is help available if you're finding yourself getting activated.
Speaker C:And there are methods that you can use to begin to soothe and calm yourself and work with whatever is happening that is in your experience, feeding the phenomena versus soothing and quieting the phenomena.
Speaker C:So that would be one of the things that I would say we can learn how to work with the energy in a positive way.
Speaker D:And I would want to kind of take a leap forward and maybe backwards.
Speaker D:But yeah, parapsychology has adopted the parent of psychology.
Speaker D:And I'm increasingly thinking that might not be the best choice.
Speaker D:It's an okay choice.
Speaker D:It's not a bad choice.
Speaker D:It's an okay church.
Speaker D:There are reasons that that would be the case, but another choice would be biology.
Speaker D:Biology includes psychology.
Speaker D:That is, we are living systems too.
Speaker D:Biology looks at a wide variety of living systems.
Speaker D:And thinking of parapsychological phenomena, psi phenomena in a larger sense, as a product or emergent phenomena of living systems might be, and I believe can be a very useful perspective, a reframe that would be.
Speaker D:That would benefit us in terms of research and how we research it and how we think about it and how we think about life.
Speaker D:Is a complex system.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker E:Well, I think there, from looking at all the perspectives that we've given here, I think there really isn't one way that we can kind of come down to just one thing.
Speaker E:But what's important is to consider all of the points that my fellow team members here have pointed to.
Speaker E:They each come from a different perspective and also different areas of experience that when you bring them together, they actually do kind of coalesce into a much broader perspective.
Speaker E:And that's where I especially value Gerald's viewpoint of complexity.
Speaker E:When you look at the way things work dynamically like that, they begin to broaden the perspective.
Speaker E:And so when it comes to the way we should look at what the families are experiencing, how we should approach it, and how we should maybe think about it in the broader perspective for each, each of these approaches here from my team members for Beth and Lloyd and Gerald here, each of them comes into that, and I couldn't put it any better than that in terms of the way they did.
Speaker E:That's the way I would look at it.
Speaker A:Excellent, guys.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for being with me on Deadly Departed.
Speaker A:And anybody else who's listening out there,.
Speaker D:Joe, what would you say?
Speaker A:Well, see, I never thought about this from a complex system point of view.
Speaker A:And for me today, this has been an experience.
Speaker A:For me, reading the paper and understanding that.
Speaker A:I look at it from a clinical parapsychology point of view, coming from Beth's side, I'm now more fundamentally moving towards this complex system idea.
Speaker A:I do see the problems that we have in terms of how we label things and how we understand it.
Speaker A:But what I did get excited about was this echo approach, not a model as it was tried to be forced into this idea of the haunted person syndrome, the way they tried to force it.
Speaker A:I see this is a potential breakthrough in understanding anomalous phenomena from an anomalous psychology point of view, transpersonal and parapsychology point of view.
Speaker A:Because, and here's the thing which I love what you're saying, Gerald, is that I know, looking at parapsychology, clinical parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, anomalous psychology as a complex system.
Speaker D:Yes, yes.
Speaker A:That to me is exciting because there's potentially new breakthroughs that could come from this.
Speaker A:So that's where I am.
Speaker A:I look at things differently now.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:So guys, this has been phenomenal.
Speaker A:I really, really enjoyed this.
Speaker A:Anybody who's listening out there, listening on the podcast, you'll be able to get all the details below.
Speaker A:But I would push you to come into our community, the Power News Network community, where the actual video will be here, because we could put this up on YouTube, we could do all that stuff.
Speaker A:But we want to get discussions going because this is a, a broader implication in all of these fields that we just mentioned.
Speaker A:So come and join us.
Speaker A:Come and get involved in the conversation.
Speaker A:Everybody will be, hopefully will be in there as well.
Speaker A:This is just the beginning, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker A:If you're listening to this now, think about this.
Speaker A:Just think about the implications of what this Echo approach is.
Speaker A:And also I don't want to take anything away from their approach either because.
Speaker A:And guys, o', Keefe, when you're listening to this, because no doubt you will and the whole team will and we're expecting some feedback.
Speaker A:You're welcome to come on Deadly Departed and everybody to have a conversation over this because this is where we build bridges that don't exist.
Speaker A:And this is the problem.
Speaker A:We need to bring these bridges, we need to create these complex systems together to build these bridges, to try, start to collaborate rather than separate everything.
Speaker A:And there's a potential here.
Speaker A:And so I don't want to take anything away from them.
Speaker A:They've got their approach, we've got our approach.
Speaker A:And maybe there's something in there for us all.
Speaker A:And that's something that we need to take away from this.
Speaker A:And anybody who's listening out there, who's not academic doesn't really understand the implications of this.
Speaker A:This is why we want you to get involved, so you can learn.
Speaker A:Because even the way I look at it now, the echo case, this approach could also be a foundation for maybe self assessment.
Speaker A:This probably from what we've learned from the increased phenomena because people were stuck in their homes, they weren't out and about.
Speaker A:They were starting to maybe misinterpret phenomena, misinterpret experiences.
Speaker A:Maybe this is a foundation for self expression.
Speaker A:Maybe this is a foundation for self assessment and understanding phenomena.
Speaker A:So we've got a long way to go.
Speaker A:But there's a potential bridge here and if anybody wants to see anything else before we finish, then please do so.
Speaker A:But I've absolutely loved this.
Speaker A:This has been phenomenal and I can't wait to do it again.
Speaker A:Guys, thank you.
Speaker A:Lloyd, thank you for stepping up and then fixing out our technological issues.
Speaker A:Got a lot to answer to after this one.
Speaker A:Just a reminder, guys, the Paragise journal, Paraguise Peer Review Journal is imminent.
Speaker A:Please go on to paragisejournal.com you can register there as a reader, you can register even as a reviewer.
Speaker A:We've got some excellent articles coming up.
Speaker A:The paper, the echo paper, will be in there in full.
Speaker A:Everybody's essay is going to be there.
Speaker A:It's going to be.
Speaker A:We're really excited about it.
Speaker A:And then hopefully this will start discussions that will continue and start to change people's viewpoints on parapsychology and clinical parapsychology and transpersonal psychology.
Speaker A:Guys, thank you for being with me today.
Speaker A:It's been a pleasure having you.
Speaker B:Thank you, Jack.
Speaker C:Thank you.
Speaker D:Thank you.
Speaker D:Thank you, everyone.
Speaker A:Thanks for tuning in to Deadly Departed.
Speaker A:I hope you enjoyed our exploration into the strange and the mysterious.
Speaker A:If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe, rate and leave a review.
Speaker A:Join us next time as we continue to unravel the unexplained and bring you the latest from the world of the paranormal and parapsychology.
Speaker A:Until then, keep questioning, stay curious and never stop seeking the truth.
