Please Mam, just the facts

"Please mam just the facts"

In the 1950's and 60's in a show named Dragnet, Sgt Friday would implore some babbling witness of a crime to give him “just the facts mam”, as that was all he needed to hear in order to solve the crime.

The problem I've always had in my investigations was: it always seemed to boil down to whom and what to believe, as there is no lack of stories to digest. What if a person told you a story about the tooth fairy, and perhaps another about the formulation of an electron? How to proceed in these two cases? Do both stories carry the same weight?

To me it boils down this this.

-Is the reporter credible? i.e Have they lied to you before, and do they have a reason to lie now?

-Is the story reasonable? i.e. Does it align or conflict with what you believe to be true?

-Is the information consistent with other reporters regarding the same subject matter? It might be especially convincing if multiple reporters who had no common frame of reference reported the same thing, would it not?

For most, to believe a total stranger about something as unbelievable as a UFO sighting or a near death experience when lacking physical evidence is difficult or impossible. I would agree: the burden of proof lies on the reporter. So if a single witness to an extraordinary event has only their own description of the event to offer and no additional proof, they might not be widely believed.

However, imagine yourself in the position of experiencing something incredible and wanting to be believed. What would you do? What would you say? I may believe my own family member who I have known and trusted from many years and who I strongly believe has no need to desire to mislead me, but I wouldn't expect others to go along with apparently outrageous claims.

So that is the conundrum isn't it? How to prove something incredible when traditional evidence is lacking? I have come up with an alternative “proof” that I have found sufficient for my needs: corroboration. This is where different people from different places and times and who have no knowledge of each other all tell similar stories. We will cover many example of this.

There is also another important method of validation which was the basis of my belief in the elsewhere described re-incarnation story, and is the basis of many more to be covered in these pages. It involves a third party knowing the unknown.

As an illustration, consider the following which is based on an actual story written by a medium about her experiences.

Tom and Fred were brothers. They grew up together on a farm in the midwest. They had a happy life working and playing on the farm. They were normal American kids in every way.

Eventually as an adult Tom died and Fred went to a medium to try and connect with this beloved brother. In order to determine if the medium was for real, Fred related a story to her about when the two were were young boys. Fred had a favorite baseball glove and ball that one day disappeared. Fred always blamed Tom for stealing them but he would never admit to the deed. Fred didn't have any idea what may have become of the objects and hoped that the medium could both solve the mystery and prove that she was in-fact what she claimed.

When Fred met with the the medium she related all manner of things. She described the farm, and the fact that Fred had a sibling, a brother with whom he was quite close. She accurately described his brother's appearance and his personality. Up to this point one might claim that the medium was using common sense and perhaps a bit of trickery in pulling key facts out of Fred from which to create a believable story.

At some point Fred described the glove and the ball to the medium and without hesitation she informed him that in fact Thom did take the objects. And further she shared that he had placed them in a secret hiding place in a barn on the property. The medium went into great detail describing the precise hiding place behind a wall in the barn.

Let's pause a moment and take a look at this a bit closer-

First some new terms: clairvoyance is the ability of a medium to see things about the subject, clairaudiance being the ability to hear, and clairsentience the ability to feel.

There is one explanation that is sometimes used by skeptics in cases such as this. One might claim that when demonstrating clairvoyance and similar powers, the medium is somehow “reading the mind” of the subject. This, they may claim involves acquiring knowledge by somehow (through access to emitted electrical impulses from the other's brain perhaps?) sensing what the other is thinking.

I always get a chuckle out of this logical argument. I think it is amusing that a skeptic might point to a sense that they don't really believe in, to argue against a phenomenon in which they even more strongly disbelieve. Essentially what they are saying is: at least sensing an emitted signal from the subject's skull conforms with the “locality” aspect of their reality model. At least the knowledge itself was contained in a live brain, and at least the live brain was emitting actual electrical signals. In their mind, all of this conforms to a model of the universe to which they subscribe. One could run all sorts of tests to eliminate this brain transmission theory as a possibility, but the skeptic could demand more and more thorough proof which in the end would be impossible to satisfy. 

However, you see that's the beauty and the power of this particular story and others like it: the subject didn't have the knowledge in their brain in the first place. Fred didn't know where the objects were so how could the medium have read his mind to find out? Before you claim that Fred may have actually subconsciously known the location, what would you say to the many dozens of similar stories? Would you claim that each is some special case that can be argued in some special way? No,, the sheer numbers of similar stories point to a phenomenon which one must come to terms with if one is to be honestly searching for truth. In a moment I will propose a logical model of proof that might be useful in a case such as this, but one thing at a time. Back to our story....

Later Fred went to the barn and followed the instructions of the medium. He looked and right where she said it would be, and in a hidden compartment in the wall, was the ball and glove.

We have here a case where a medium is giving us information that she couldn't have known, and of which the subject was also unaware. In science research this would be called a “double blind” experiment. One where neither participant was aware of the data so they couldn't have gotten it from each other.

The most profound mystery here may not be obvious. One might think that if we could understand how a medium could access this information, we would gain a greater understanding of our world. I agree, but the bigger mystery before us is: where was this information stored for all the time since the death of Thom? If we assume that Thom's was the only brain that had knowledge of the hidden objects, and it had been dead and buried for years, exactly where was the information located between the time of Thom's death and when the medium accessed it? This is the crux of this line of thought, and once discovered, opens another door to quite unbelievable aspects of our world.

 One example like this wouldn't be sufficient for me to throw away a lifetime of belief in the certitude of science, but a series of stories like this can not be ignored. Especially not now that I had already conceded that science was clearly wrong about lucid dreams and unable to explain a re-incarnated girl (see separate post: "Cracking Open the Oyster"). The evidence was mounting in support of the heretofore explainable.