Is lack of video evidence sufficient reason to dismiss a supernatural claim?

There's been a lot of media coverage of the Enfield Poltergeist lately, since a play about the case recently started, another is on the way, and a documentary series is coming out later this month. The web sites discussing these things often have a comments section, and certain skeptical objections keep getting repeated.

I won't be focusing on all of those objections here. You can go to my Enfield page linked above for a broader response to the claims skeptics have made about the case over the years. For example, we keep getting told, without documentation, that Janet and Margaret Hodgson have admitted that the case was faked. There's been no such admission. And if a web site discussing the case has one of the photos of Janet being thrown by the poltergeist, we get the usual skeptical response saying that she's just jumping off her bed and that, therefore, the whole case must be fraudulent. There's no indication that the skeptic understands the context of the photo, understands the difference between a throwing and a levitation as the skeptic is defining that term, or realizes that even if the incident in question were faked, it would be a non sequitur to conclude that the whole case must be fake. These people don't seem to understand the supplementary nature of photographic evidence or what they should be looking for in these Enfield photos, among other problems with their thinking. For an explanation of the context of these photos and what people should be looking for in them (e.g., the positioning of Janet's feet in some of them), see here and here. If you understand the context of these photos and know what to look for in them, they actually are significant evidence that something paranormal occurred. They're only supplementary evidence. Like other photographs, they aren't sufficient in isolation. They're an important part of a good cumulative case, though. Simplistic and dishonest skeptics might not want to make such distinctions, but that's their problem.

What I want to focus on in this post is the request for video evidence. It's often suggested that supernatural claims made about the Enfield case or in some other context are suspicious if there isn't video of one or more of the supernatural events.

When I've addressed that kind of objection in the past, such as here, I've cited examples of video footage of the supernatural that we do have. The post just linked includes a discussion of Stewart Lamont's video footage of the Enfield phenomena. As I explained in a post about that video several years ago, the knocking captured in the video is likely to be paranormal, and the video provides clear evidence that the case as a whole can't be dismissed as having been faked by the Hodgson girls. They were filmed sitting on a couch while the knocking was occurring elsewhere in the house. Yet, that video evidence hasn't prevented skeptics from continuing to suggest that the Hodgson girls faked everything. The first post linked in this paragraph also discusses some thermal video footage from another poltergeist case, meaning that there's not only video of a paranormal event, but also thermal evidence accompanying it. Or think of the UFO stories that have been prominent in the news in recent years. How many skeptics continue to ignore the UFO videos or dismiss them in some unreasonable way?

Still, there's some value in considering potential reasons why we don't have a higher degree of video evidence. The answers will vary from one context to another. But Enfield illustrates some of the more significant reasons.

The chief investigators, Maruice Grosse and Guy Playfair, understood the importance of video evidence from the start and made many efforts to get it. As early as September of 1977, they had a team from Pye Business Communications in the house doing filming in an attempt to capture some video footage of poltergeist activity. And that brings up some of the biggest factors we should consider here.

A 1978 documentary about Enfield featured two professional camera operators, Ron Denney of Pye Business Communications and Graham Morris, a photographer with the Daily Mirror, commenting on how their camera equipment malfunctioned in highly unusual ways while they were trying to film the poltergeist. Listen for about three minutes starting here. They describe what happened to their equipment as "impossible", "absolutely impossible", and "one chance in a million". Those are professional camera operators with years of experience. Denney has had no significant involvement in the Enfield case since then, so any suggestion that he was trying to get something like attention or money is problematic accordingly. And though Morris has been involved in Enfield events, including later coverage of the case, to a large extent, there's no reason to dismiss his testimony or even to be neutral about it. He's highly credible. In addition to what's already been mentioned, he has a long history of expressing skepticism in general and rejecting some of the Enfield events. So, when he claims to have witnessed other Enfield events and offers evidence for some of them, that's significant accordingly. He's said, repeatedly, that he wouldn't have believed in the events if he hadn't witnessed them himself, and he's said that he thinks a scientific explanation will eventually be found, though he doesn't think we have a scientific explanation yet. When somebody who's that skeptical testifies about something he witnessed in the context of his field of expertise (the operation of camera equipment), any dismissal of his testimony would have to overcome the large amount of reason we have to accept what he reported. And, as my articles linked above discuss, there are many other indications that the poltergeist in the Enfield case didn't want to be filmed.

In everyday life, if a person doesn't want to be filmed, it will be harder to find film of that person accordingly. If he keeps trying to avoid being photographed or being included in videos, you probably won't find him in photos and videos as often as you'd find the average person in those contexts. You may still film him at times. He has a body, he can only move so fast, and so on, which limit how much he can evade being filmed. But what if you're trying to film a disembodied spirit, especially one who's faster than an embodied human (high speed is a common characteristic of poltergeists) and who at least periodically has telepathic abilities, meaning that he can better anticipate your activities because of that? You may still be able to film him at times, as we occasionally do with poltergeists, but not often.

Notice that this isn't a matter of making excuses for a failure to attempt to film a poltergeist. Nor is it a matter of making excuses for failing to film a poltergeist that shows no resistance to being filmed. Rather, it's a matter of extensive efforts to film it being met by extensive resistance on the poltergeist's part, accompanied by a large amount of evidence of that resistance (e.g., evidence of camera equipment being interfered with in paranormal ways).

The lack of video evidence isn't equivalent to a lack of evidence in general. Rather, it just means that we're primarily looking to non-video sources, as we do in the large majority of contexts in life. As I've documented in a lot of depth, there's a great amount of non-video evidence supporting the Enfield case, along with the small amount of video evidence we have from Stewart Lamont's team.

I've commented before on my hypothesis that poltergeists seem to be at least primarily manifestations of a broken mind. The malfunctioning mind behind the poltergeist in a case like Enfield is unreasonable and unpredictable enough to allow for the possibility that it will permit itself to be filmed sometimes, even if it usually resists filming. So, an effort should be made to film it. And we do sometimes get good footage. We shouldn't expect that to happen often, however.

One of the ironies of the complaints about a lack of video footage is how frequently poltergeists produce phenomena that are of a largely or entirely non-visual nature. Barrie Colvin has documented that at least some of the knocking phenomena in paranormal cases, including Enfield, have an unusual acoustic property, for example. That raises the question, again, of how much skeptics even know about the subject they're commenting on. Given how irrelevant or insufficient things like video footage and photographs are in the context of so much of what happens in poltergeist cases, how is objecting to a lack of videos or a lack of photos adequate to address a poltergeist case like Enfield as a whole?

I've been focused on Enfield here and poltergeists in general to some extent, but similar principles can be applied elsewhere. My post about miracles on video that I wrote a few years ago discusses some of the potential reasons why supernatural events in general, not just in the context of poltergeists, wouldn't be captured on video on some occasions.

The reasons can vary from one set of circumstances to another, but some non-poltergeist activity seems to have a lot of overlap with poltergeist phenomena. I've written before about how UFO phenomena seem similar to poltergeist activity in some ways, for example. UFOs and the beings associated with them often seem unreasonable, inconsistent, and evasive. Leslie Kean wrote a book on UFOs that's a good introduction to the topic, titled UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010). There's a passage (along with others) in that book that made me think of poltergeists the moment I read it. It's from a chapter written by Oscar Santa Maria Huertas, a pilot with the air force of Peru who engaged in aerial combat with a UFO in 1980:

"I attempted this same attack maneuver two more times. Each time, I had the object [UFO] on target when it was stationary. And each time, the object escaped by ascending vertically seconds before I started to fire. It eluded my attack three times, each time at the very last moment." (95)

That's typical poltergeist behavior. Pilots and other people who encounter UFOs also often refer to how the UFO caused their equipment to malfunction, much as poltergeists so often do that sort of thing. There are other parallels as well. But, getting back to the tendency to evade something at the last moment, that sort of scenario frequently happened in the Enfield case. Whatever other factors are involved, I suspect that telepathy is part of the explanation. These entities have the ability to read people's minds (probably to different degrees under different circumstances, as the evidence suggests in the Enfield case), so that makes them more effective at being evasive, whether in terms of avoiding being filmed or avoiding being fired at by a plane.

I'll provide some examples from the Enfield case. I'll cite some of Grosse and Playfair's tapes in the process. "MG" will refer to tapes from Grosse's collection, and "GP" will refer to ones from Playfair's. Thus, MG22B is tape 22B in Grosse's collection, GP3B is tape 3B in Playfair's, and so on.

Rosalind Morris, a reporter covering the case for the BBC, commented on how "striking" it was that the poltergeist's activity was "connected" to the opening and shutting of a door (GP8A, 26:12). The poltergeist would stop its activities the moment a door would be opened and start up again the moment the door closed, with highly precise timing. Playfair found that the poltergeist's activities would happen with that sort of precision even when the door in question was out of the range of the senses of the other people in the house (GP11B, 12:38). In other words, if those people were faking the events, they had no normal means of knowing when the door was moving, yet the events in question happened in accordance with the door's movements. Grosse commented that in a variety of circumstances, the poltergeist's activities would be coordinated with his in such a way that the poltergeist's actions would just barely miss being observed, just barely miss having a photo taken of those activities, and so forth (GP14A, 5:40). Playfair refers to its "extraordinary sense of timing" and how "it just deliberately sets out to confuse" (GP26A, 15:11). Peggy Hodgson referred to its "immaculate timing" (GP84A, 11:30). Grosse would sometimes apparently forget to turn his tape recorder off after leaving the house, so you'd hear water splashing as he walked through the rain out to his car, the sound of his car starting, etc. On one occasion, when he apparently had forgotten to turn the recorder off, you hear a conversation he had with Playfair in the car. You can tell that both of them are angry and frustrated:

Playfair: Devious sod up there [referring to the poltergeist], isn't it, this thing? What are we going to do about it?

Grosse: I don't know. It's got me absolutely mystified, this thing, why in the hell it started operating immediately after they [the Hodgsons] got into bed.

(MG20Bi, 24:34)

When an entity is invisible and telepathic and operates so rapidly, it should largely be able to avoid being filmed if it wants to. It may occasionally be willing to be filmed, and you may occasionally film it when it doesn't want filmed, but probably not often. Regardless, objecting that there isn't more evidence doesn't adequately address the evidence we do have, whether video evidence or whatever else.