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Thursday, February 29, 2024

Skeptics Being Evasive About Recent Miracles

Critics of the supernatural often object to paranormal claims that occurred in the more distant past, since there's no ability to question the witnesses, consult the larger number of records that tend to be available with more recent events, etc. But they often provide poor responses to the evidence we do have for those more distant events, which raises questions like how much these skeptics actually need the larger amount of evidence they're asking for and how sincere their objections are.

Another way of addressing the line of objections I'm focused on here is to look at how these skeptics handle more recent miracle claims. How much interest do they show in asking the witnesses the relevant questions and examining the evidence involved in other ways?

A few weeks ago, a YouTube video about the Enfield Poltergeist came out. It included some comments from Melvyn Willin, an archivist for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) who's published a book on Enfield and knows a lot about the case, and Deborah Hyde, a skeptic of the paranormal who's been criticizing Enfield for more than a decade now. There have been many developments since her initial comments on Enfield, like the making public of Anita Gregory's doctoral thesis that addresses Enfield, the digitizing of the Enfield tapes and the articles I've written about them, the release of Melvyn's book, and the four-hour documentary on Enfield that aired on Apple TV+ last year. How have Deborah's thinking about the case and her arguments against it interacted with those developments?

Not enough, from what I can tell. Several years ago, I wrote an article documenting a lot of problems with her comments on Enfield during her earliest years of addressing the subject. Since then, she's repeated her earlier errors in a presentation on poltergeists. And in the YouTube video that just came out, she once again repeats her earlier sentiments, including some highly inaccurate claims that are easily proven false.

In 2012, she appeared on a television program with Janet Hodgson (one of the foremost witnesses in the case, often thought to be the center of the poltergeist) and Guy Playfair (one of the primary investigators of the case), which you can watch here. It didn't go well for Deborah. You can read about it in my initial article responding to her, linked above.

Since writing that article, I've listened to Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's tapes, which provided further information relevant to Deborah's claims. She hasn't made much of an effort to provide an alternative explanation for the Enfield events that most need to be explained, but one of the rare exceptions is her hypothesis that Janet was experiencing sleep paralysis during the December 3, 1977 incident in which the poltergeist was reported to have dragged her out of her bed and partway down the steps. The event was caught on tape, and you can read my analysis of that tape here. Deborah's sleep paralysis hypothesis was absurd without taking the audio evidence into account, and it's even more absurd in light of what's on the tape. A portion of that tape, less than half of the relevant section, is now available on YouTube, and you can listen to it here (from 4:52 to 6:40 in the video). It has much lower audio quality than the digitized version of the tape that I have, but it's better than not having the audio at all. I wrote about that YouTube clip and made some further comments about the December 3 episode here.

In the recent YouTube video Deborah appeared in, she repeats her false claim that Peggy Hodgson didn't allow any skeptical investigators into the house. You can read about where Deborah seems to have gotten that idea and how wrong she is about it in my initial article responding to her. She claims that the people allowed into the house were not only not skeptical, but even "predisposed to believe" and "a bit more gullible". Anita Gregory, the foremost skeptic of the case, visited the house seven times, including when she was known to be a skeptic. Milbourne Christopher, another skeptic, not only visited the house, but was even brought there with Guy Playfair's approval and assistance, in an attempt to see if a professional magician (Milbourne) could catch the Hodgson children playing tricks. Many other skeptics visited the house as well, and a lot of the non-investigators who went there were initially skeptical. Here's an article I wrote about what skeptics experienced at the Hodgsons' house. And some of the people who visited were agnostic, another category that shouldn't be described as consisting only of people who were "predisposed to believe" and "a bit more gullible". It's not even appropriate to describe believers in general that way. If you read the SPR's committee report on Enfield or the summary of it in Melvyn Willin's The Enfield Poltergeist Tapes (United States: White Crow Books, 2019), you'll see that a large number and diversity of researchers and other individuals visited the house. There's no justification for Deborah's characterization of the people who went there.

She objects that no "rigorous data collection" could be done in the house under the circumstances involved. In 2018, I had some discussions with David Robertson, one of the investigators of the case, about some scientific testing he did on Janet both inside the house and outside it. You can read some of his comments to me here. As he explains, he not only got instrumental evidence of paranormal metal bending, but also saw the metal bending with his own eyes. Watch a brief video clip here in which he discusses that experiment. It was also discussed in the Apple TV+ documentary last year. He and a few colleagues also ran a scientific experiment on Janet at Birkbeck College in 1982, which also produced paranormal results. In 2010, Barrie Colvin published an article documenting that the acoustic properties of the knocking phenomena in some paranormal cases, including Enfield, differed from the acoustic properties of normal knocking. You can read his article here. I can't count the number of times Maurice and Guy's tapes record incidents involving informal controls of a highly evidential nature. For example, see my article here on the paranormal dreams and trances the Hodgson children experienced. Do a Ctrl F search there for "one doctor" to read about a doctor's visit to the house on November 26, 1977. It's on tape. You hear Janet carrying on in one of her trance states for hours on end, something that would be hard to fake and unlikely to be something she'd want to fake. The doctor arrives. He examines Janet's eyes and reports that her "pupils were dilated and not reacting to light". She's given an injection of Valium. You gradually hear her screaming, groaning, and such getting weaker and weaker, as the Valium takes effect. You hear the doctor explaining what effect the Valium should have. Again, it's all on tape. About forty-five minutes after the injection, when it's highly probable that Janet was in no condition to fake what happened next, there was a loud crash, and she was found on top of a dresser across the room. Graham Morris, who was at the house when it happened, has said that you couldn't hear any of the sort of creaking of the bed or the floorboards that should have been heard if Janet had faked the incident. The event didn't happen in the context of a scientific experiment, but it did happen in a highly controlled setting in which fraud seems very unlikely. And there's example after example after example of that kind of thing on the tapes and in other contexts. What about the many events that happened when none of the children were around, sometimes when the entire family was miles away? See the examples discussed here. Watch this portion of a documentary discussing some incidents John Burcombe experienced at the house while the Hodgsons were gone. The researchers taped a triple-digit number of hours of audio recordings, they brought in multiple professional camera operators to capture hundreds of photographs and get some video footage, they brought in multiple other types of machinery to get multiple other types of instrumental evidence, they got dozens of signed witness statements, they brought in a broad range of paranormal researchers and professionals with relevant expertise, they arranged to have the Hodgson girls psychologically and medically examined by multiple experts in the relevant fields, they tried a wide range of psychological approaches with the family (giving them incentives to stop faking the case if they were faking it, sending them away on a vacation, recording them without their knowledge on some occasions, hypnotizing Janet, pretending that recording equipment wasn't working when it actually was, etc.), they spent a large amount of time in the house for years (go here to see Mary Rose Barrington of the SPR referring to the amount of time they spent at the house as "extraordinary"), and so on. You can always find fault to some degree and always ask for more, and some aspects of the case were mishandled to a significant extent, but there's far more substance to the case than people like Deborah let on. Complaining that there isn't more evidence can never be a substitute for addressing the evidence you already have. She claims that the evidence was collected under "very, very unrigorous circumstances", but she doesn't interact much with the evidence for rigor, like what I've cited above, and she ignores most of the results that rigor produced.

Her comments on the poltergeist voice are highly misleading. Like other skeptics, she doesn't even acknowledge the existence of the most significant evidence, much less offer a skeptical explanation for it. See here for a lengthy discussion of the evidence pertaining to the voice.

A recurring factor across so many of these contexts is the value of the Enfield tapes. We have a triple-digit number of hours of recordings because Maurice and Guy did apply so much rigor to the investigation, and the tapes provide evidence against Deborah's claims about matters like the incident in which Janet was dragged out of bed and the poltergeist voice. In their 2012 appearance together on a television program, which I referred to above, Guy reminded Deborah about the significance of the tapes: "My tape recorder was on practically all the time, and you can't accuse tape recorders of having false memory. Or are you suggesting all the tapes have been faked?" Deborah couldn't come up with a good response, so she went with a bad one instead. She made an apparent allusion to the incident when the girls hid one of the investigator's tape recorders and said the poltergeist had taken it. They were joking. What's the logical connection between that one incident and the large amount of audio Maurice and Guy recorded, including tapes made when none of the children were around, when there were other people in the room with the children, etc.? The moving of a tape recorder one time, in order to play a joke on one of the investigators, doesn't explain where the triple-digit number of hours of audio recordings came from. Did the children (or some other individual or group) fake all of the content on the tapes? That would be a remarkably absurd hypothesis, one with a really big number and variety of problems, but I doubt that Deborah had given much thought to what she was saying. The tapes are a major problem for skeptics' usual appeals to the unreliability of memory, legendary embellishment over time, etc. And the tapes have been backed up in digital format now, so they'll be around for many years to come.

I want to add, though, that after years of discussions with the Enfield witnesses and hearing from them in other contexts and comparing their comments to the tapes and other records, I've found the witnesses' memories to be mostly accurate. They do sometimes get things wrong, especially lesser details, but they're reliable for the most part. And since there are multiple witnesses in so many of the contexts involved, one witness' memories can be checked against another's. Often, if one witness forgets or misremembers what happened in context X, what the other witnesses forget or misremember will be in some context other than X. So, if three out of four witnesses remember X a particular way, the faulty memory of the fourth witness can be corrected. You can reconstruct much of what happened to a significant degree of probability by taking all of the witnesses' comments and the other evidence into account.

Near the end of the recent video I'm responding to in this post, Deborah says that she thinks there's a skeptical explanation for the case that's better than any paranormal alternative. But she hasn't even attempted to explain the vast majority of what needs explained. For the most part, she hasn't even offered an explanation for Enfield, and what little explanation she has offered has been demonstrably poor.

If you scroll the screen down and read the comments below the video, you see the typical uninformed and misinformed remarks from skeptics who apparently didn't make much of an effort to research the case they were commenting on. As usual, there are references to how obvious it supposedly is that the photographs of Janet levitating are just photos of her jumping from her bed. Of course, the choice of the term "levitation", how skeptics define it, and which photos the video shows them are all choices outside the control of the people who took the photos, the case's investigators, and others closely associated with the events under consideration. If the skeptics who dismiss the photos because Janet's hair can be seen in motion and her muscles appear tensed had done more research, they'd know that the type of levitation in question involves throwing, so that moving hair and tensed muscles are expected and don't offer any evidence against paranormality. When a person is thrown across a room, you expect hair to move and the possibility of tensed muscles. These skeptics are misdefining the type of levitation involved, because they haven't taken even the most basic steps to research what they're talking about. The examination of that sort of photograph has to include an examination of the context surrounding the photo. I doubt that the skeptics posting in that thread know much about the contexts involved. How much familiarity do they have with the testimony of the witnesses who reported seeing some of the levitations? How much do these skeptics know about the presence of people other than the children in the room when some of the photographed levitations occurred? Are they aware of the lack of control the children had over when photos would be taken? How easily their walking on the beds or the floor (which they would do in a scenario involving faking) could be heard elsewhere in the house? How the paranormal throwing involved more force and more resulting noise than normal jumping, which means that there was more than visual evidence to go by? Have these skeptics looked at the other relevant photos, especially the more evidential ones not included in the video they're responding to? See my article here for an overview of the Enfield levitations and the photographs of them. Since the time I wrote that article, Apple TV+ aired a documentary on the case that has a segment showing a highly significant series of photos taken by Graham Morris (beginning at 30:12 in episode 2 here). In the segment, Graham explains that there's only one-sixth of a second between a photo showing Janet lying in bed and the next photo, showing her upright in the air. That doesn't seem possible by normal means. And it lines up well with the testimony of the eyewitnesses who saw some of these levitations occur. John Burcombe referred to how Janet was thrown out of her bed "like a rocket". And the positioning of her bed covers in the photo sequence in question is also evidential and lines up well with what the eyewitnesses reported and what we see in other photos. For further details, go here and do a Ctrl F search for "30:12". This is the kind of evidence that needs to be interacted with. The skeptics in the YouTube thread under consideration and every skeptic I've encountered elsewhere has failed to address more than a small percentage of what they need to address.

It's not as though Enfield had never been brought up before or skeptics have had only a small amount of time to examine the case or formulate a response to it. They've had almost half a century now. People like Deborah Hyde have been discussing it for a double-digit number of years. Should they still be getting so many facts wrong and still not even be attempting an explanation of the large majority of the case? As I've documented in other posts, the skeptics of Enfield have been behaving in that manner from the start of the case down to this day.

Eventually, the witnesses will all be dead, and the amount of evidence available will diminish over time. When that happens, and skeptics object to those circumstances, remember how they behaved earlier, when the circumstances were better.

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