Earthlights

When Holly Stevens and I were in the United Kingdom in May, 2009, filming four episodes of Ghost Cases, we had the opportunity to work with Steve Mera, Dave Sadler and the rest of the team from the Unknown Phenomena Investigation Association, aka the UPIA. The UPIA investigators employ a skeptical and rationalist approach to the paranormal, but they also keep an open mind about the possibility that our current science might not be able to explain everything about our world. In short, they are looking for answers, not confirmation of an existing belief system. It was a distinct pleasure working with them.

In the two videos below are some outtakes from footage shot for an episode that looked into stories of paranormal activity at the Bridestones, a neolithic burial chamber located outside of Congleton, England (the UPIA website has some great photos here). In the first of these clips, Dave recounts some of the allegedly paranormal activity that has been reported at the Bridestones, including a man who reported "missing time"; in the second, Steve and I wandered out into an adjacent field to discuss the phenomenon known as "earthlights", a possible explanation for many allegedly "paranormal" incidents, from centuries-old tales of fairies and will 'o' the wisps, to modern stories of UFOs. You'll notice the time code at the bottom of the footage, which also gives you an inside look at how material like this is edited together for television.





The earthlights theory is largely attributable to Paul Devereaux - you can read more about it at his site. He writes:

First may I say that I think most UFO reports are the product of (i)misperception of mundane aerial objects whether manmade or astronomical; (ii) mirage effects; (iii) hoax; (iv) psychosocial effects ranging from mental aberration to temporary personal stress conditions affecting a witness’s perception or interpretation of a perception; (v) the occurrence (unawares) in the witness of trance conditions, such as when awaking from or falling into sleep, or when driving, especially at night. Of all these, I’d suggest simple misperception is by far the greatest cause, though I suspect the trance explanation is involved more than we might suppose, especially in the case of reported alien abductions. Having said all that -- as a result of my own experience as well as my own research -- I ALSO think there is a small rump or residue of sighting reports that DO actually relate to genuinely unexplained phenomena. In my opinion, a percentage of this small rump of sightings relates to geophysical or meteorological phenomena that I have termed ‘earth lights’.

For more information on "spooklights" and related phenomena, check out this very good article by Dr. David Clarke. He writes:

Methane exiting from the surface of the marsh would be expected to burn, if ignited, as a flickering, fixed flame, but would hardly move through the air or against a prevailing wind. The marsh gas explanation for spooklights has been superseded by others, some fanciful and others plausible. Popular at the moment is the ‘earthlights’ theory which is a convincing connection between lights and the faulted geology of the regions in which they appear. Although no clear production mechanism has yet been discovered which scientists are entirely happy with, the theory suggests the lights are the product of a build up of electrical charge in areas of geological stress. Rather than being directly caused by earthquakes or tremors, the lights are symptoms of the earth’s internal traumas, springing into life as electrons are slowly released into the air and possibly through the water table as strain waxes and wanes in zones of geological faulting.

You can also find a brief synopsis by the UPIA here.

Paul Kimball

Paul Kimball on Coast to Coast with Ian Punnett - Oct. 31, 2010

Last year I was lucky enough to be one of the guests on Coast to Coast AM's "ghost to ghost" Halloween special, which was cool. I like the cut of Ian Punnett's proverbial jib as host, and it was fun to chat about ghosts and Ghost Cases with him, and to hear some of the stories from the listeners.

Paul Kimball

Part I:



Part II:

Ghost Cases - opening title sequence

Tune into Eastlink TV on October 18, 2009, at 8 pm to see the premiere episode!

Paul Kimball

Quinan, Nova Scotia

In one of the strangest episodes of Ghost Cases, which we're editing right now, I found myself alone in the basement of an allegedly haunted farmhouse late at night, camera rolling, waiting for something to happen.

Holly and the rest of the gang were upstairs, in the kitchen, conducting what amounted to a seance.

As I review the footage, most of which consists of me talking to myself, at least until it happens (and to find out what it was, you'll have to wait until the broadcast), here are a couple of moments.

"I'm uncomfortable. This is not a comfortable experience. I don't have any funny, Paul Kimball wisecracks. This is uncomfortable. Assume for a moment that maybe there are spirits here, or whatever - upstairs, even if you do, you have that cameraderie, safety in numbers. There's something inherently completely idiotic about doing it on your own. There are places and times when I don't like being alone, and I have to admit, this is one of them. This was a completely stupid idea on my part. And yet, its like my friend Peter, who jumps out of airplanes for no good reason - he parachutes, which I would never do - but sometimes I think you just have to try it out, confront your fears, and hope that the chute pops, so... (nervous pause as I look around) - I hope the chute pops."

Then...

"As a kid, I used to sleep with the door open to my room, I couldn't sleep with the door closed. I used to go out of the room and go across the hallway, and stand outside my brother's room in the hallway. He'd keep his door mostly open too - sometimes I'd even go in his room and sleep on the floor. I didn't like being alone. It makes you wonder - as a kid, do you see things, and then as you get older, you sort of become more in tune with this world and less in tune with whatever other worlds there might be, or maybe it's just that your imagination is more active as a kid, or maybe it's both. I think maybe it's both. I feel like that kid right now, and I wish my brother's room was right over there, and I'd go stand out in front of it."

Scariest night I've ever had... coming to Eastlink TV this October.

Paul Kimball

Ghosts & The Holographic Universe

In a post at his must-read blog UFO Mystic, which he co-writes with Nick Redfern, my good pal Greg Bishop has this to say about the UFO phenomenon:

In Michael Talbot’s seminal book The Holographic Universe, we find a clue to secrets about the UFO problem which mainstream Ufology has ignored. Talbot, looking at the work of physicists like Alain Aspect and David Bohm, posits that reality, the universe, and everything is akin to an infinite hologram, in which all things contain complete information about all other things.

What physicists call the “quantum field,” is also the “collective unconscious” of Jung, where archetypes arise, and where spontaneous and simultaneous events occur, independent of distance. Western occultists are convinced that this realm is where everything we experience (both in waking and dream states) resides, but we are only seeing and sensing a small piece of what it truly “is.” This “dimension” is not bound by time, space or our attempts to understand and more importantly, to explain it. Language traps us in a conceptual web of illusions, at least as far as this symbolic realm is concerned. We may imagine that our reality could be a sort of shadow or epiphenomenon of this holographic dimension, looked at through a mental web of expectations, sensory input, and our illusory flow through time.

I would like to suggest that this is where the intelligence behind the UFO phenomenon “resides.” Perhaps this intelligence is dependent on the observer for its form and appearance. Maybe the ufonauts are implicit in this realm or hologram or idea-space, and need only other sentient intelligences to bring them into being. The interaction becomes the existence. What I am trying to get across here is that at least part of the UFO “problem” may be in our heads. Most of us, through cultural conditioning and input from our senses look at the physical universe as parts or pieces of some sort of infinite “machine.”

Greg has raised the point in a comment at my blog The Other Side of Truth that this same theory may apply to the phenomenon we call "ghosts". In some ways this ties in, as Greg noted, with my idea that ghosts may represent a form of "time travel", or at least a kind of temporal remote viewing.

If ghosts exist - and I am still far from convinced that they do - I suspect that they have far more to do with the kind of phenomenon that Greg is talking about, than the traditional idea that they represent the spirits of the dead. I am also open to the theory of residual hauntings, i.e. that an event has been recorded which at a particular place which plays itself back to people in the present day, so that an "impression" remains, but not of a person's consciousness.

Paul Kimball

Could Ghosts Be Time Travelers?

Assume for the moment that ghosts are real, in the sense that they represent an anomalous, paranormal phenomenon (or at least some of them do). As with UFOs, that begs the question: what are they?

Again, as with UFOs, there may well be myriad answers. The one that most people latch onto right off the bat is that ghosts are the spirits of deceased people who remain in touch, somehow, with our plane of existence. The other popular answer that I hear most often is that what we think of as ghosts are, in at least some cases, demons of some sort.

Perhaps. But what if ghosts are something else? Could it be possible that what we see or experience as a ghost represents a break in the continuum of time? In other words, if we view time as not a linear construct, but rather a wave, or even a loop, could we be looking backwards (or perhaps even forwards) in time when we observe a ghost, or similar phenomena? The person we see or experience, assuming that they are from the past, is in all likelihood dead (although if it's the recent past they may well still be alive, in our time), but as we observe them it is as if through a portal, fleeting though it may be, to the past - in short, they are still alive when we are looking at them, at least in their time.

This strikes me as just as plausible an answer for ghosts than the "spirits of the dead" idea (although the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive). Religious scholars have always spoken about some manifestation of an "eternal now". Scientists now openly speculate that human-initiated time travel in some form or another might be possible. But what if the "time travel" is occurring naturally, as opposed to the human-created forms we usually dream about?

Maybe, just maybe, when we see a manifestation of someone dressed as if they were in the 1890s, they really are still in the 1890s... even as they are, for a moment in time, also in 2009.

Paul Kimball

Holly and Paul on Radio Misterioso

You can listen to our interview with Greg Bishop from December, 2008 here. The second part is much better, after some technical kinks were ironed out. We chat mostly about ghosts, but also get into UFOs and other paranormal subjects.

Paul Kimball