The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [51]
That was the extent of the empirical evidence of goat killing, and as someone who has spent decades in the same fruitless pursuit of phantom goats, I conclude that the evidence for the paranormal in general doesn’t get much better than this. They shoot horses, don’t they?
Telephoning Dead Agents
In the fall of 2008, I attended a paranormal conference in Pennsylvania where I was to deliver the keynote address, an odd juxtaposition if ever there was one—a skeptic of the paranormal lecturing about the nonexistence of ESP to a room full of self-proclaimed psychics, mediums, astrologers, tarot-card readers, palm readers, and spiritual gurus of all stripes. I figured the experience of hanging out with paranormal believers was worth the transcontinental trip, if for no other reason than to collect more data on why people believe in invisible powers and agents. I wasn’t disappointed. The first session I attended was on talking to the dead. Of course, anyone can talk to the dead—it’s getting the dead to talk back that is the hard part. And yet right there at the front of the room that is what appeared to be happening—the dead were talking back, through a small box on a table.
“Is Matthew there?” asked Cheyenne, an attractive blonde who was directing her voice toward the box, clearly assuming that her brother would come through from the other side.
“Yes,” the speaker in the box squawked.
With a connection “validated,” Cheyenne shakily continued: “Was the suicide a mistake?”
A voice crackled, “My death was a mistake.”
With tears now cascading down her cheeks, Cheyenne asked to speak with her mother, and with the matrilineal connection made, Cheyenne sputtered out, “Do you see my children, your beautiful grandchildren?”
Mom replied, “Yes. I see the children.”
Cheyenne’s life-affirming messages were coming out of Thomas Edison’s “telephone to the dead,” or at least a facsimile of a rumored machine that by all accounts the great inventor never built. It was just one of many readings that day (at ninety dollars a pop) conducted by Christopher Moon, the ponytailed senior editor of Haunted Times magazine and HauntedTimes.com, a clearinghouse for all things paranormal.
I couldn’t hear Cheyenne’s brother, mother, or any other incorporeal spirits, until Moon interpreted the random noises emanating from the machine that, he explained to me, was created by a Colorado man named Frank Sumption. “Frank’s Box,” according to its inventor, “consists of a random voltage generator, which is used to tune an AM receiver module rapidly. The audio from the tuner (raw audio) is amplified and fed to an echo chamber, where the spirits manipulate it to form their voices.” (See figure 7.) Apparently this is difficult for the dead to do, so Moon employs the help of “Tyler,” a spirit “technician” on the “other side” who he calls upon to corral wayward spirits to within earshot of the receiver. What it sounds like to the untrained ear (that is to say, anyone not within earshot of Moon’s interpretative voice) is the rapid twirling of a radio dial so that only noises and word and sentence fragments are audible.
“Are the dead in that little box?” I asked Moon.
“I don’t know where the dead are. Another dimension probably,” Moon conjectured unhelpfully.
“Well, since we know how easy it is for our brains to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise,” I continued, “how can you tell the difference between a dead person’s real words and random radio noises that just sound like words?”
Surprisingly, Moon agreed with me: “You have to be very careful. We record the sessions and get consistency