That’s right sports fans, you heard it here first (unless you spend as much time as I do on all the Hollywood celebrity gossip web sites). Word is that Gaga is so worried about ghosts that she spent $60,000 on EMF meters to equip a small team of ghost hunters, evidently modeled after those whom we know and love so well from the telly. Whenever she stays at a hotel, her team first sweeps it with the EMF meters to be sure there are no spooks waiting for an autograph.

Presumably, she’s just a moron; but there may be more to it than that. Assuming she’s doing her level best to interpret the information fed her by pop culture and wants to protect her own safety, one could say that her course is not an unreasonable one. It does highlight how alarming it is that almost anyone can take ghost hunting television shows seriously enough to regard them as sound, science-based documentaries. That scares me a lot more than a ghost would.

I’m not what you’d call a huge music industry insider, but my suspicion is that the careers of moneymakers like Lady Gaga are managed by people with a little more than her 24 years of experience on this planet. People who have some vague clue about the world. So maybe they’re going for some kind of Michael Jackson style weird public image campaign, and if so, fine, I understand that. But I’d bet that this story is indeed exactly as reported. I have friends twice her age who uncritically accept ghost hunting TV shows as scientific fact.

So I’m not surprised that Lady Gaga’s handlers have not advised her that ghost attacks are probably not something she needs to worry herself too much about. If buying EMF meters is what keeps her happy, fine, I’m sure the tour can spare sixty grand.

But I really would like to know how they established that ghosts show up on EMF meters.

The Ghost of La Purisima

I’ve been corresponding with a gentleman, Kevin, who visits allegedly haunted sites in southern California. As evidence of his paranormal experiences, he sent me this photograph, taken inside the La Purisima mission in Lompoc, CA.

Mision La Purisima Concepcion de Maria Santisima is one of the famous network of Spanish Franciscan missions stretching the length of California, established in the 18th century. Today it’s something of a living history museum. Unlike many of the California missions, La Purisima is no longer used for actual regular worship services.

Like so many “ghost” photographs, Kevin’s is of astonishingly poor quality. It’s not even close to being in focus, for one thing, and clearly should have been taken with a flash. I always marvel at such pictures, because in reality, it’s not even possible to buy a camera that automatically takes such bad quality. The world’s worst camera phone would have done a better job. You have to deliberately jack the settings, or blur it out in Photoshop.

But, be that as it may, it’s still easy to identify what’s in the picture. He also included several completely black jpegs, which he said the camera also took in the mission. In response to Kevin asking me what I thought, I told him “Well, you’ve shown me a picture of two people and a black jpeg. I don’t think anyone would earn your respect if they considered either of those to be evidence of the supernatural.”

He replied:

Two people you say. I showed the picture to a National Geographic photographer and he said it was the background. He did something on photo shop and said whatever it is, it is not human.  I am the subject of the pic he said and the “person” is the background. Grey hair, skin, black clothes. It confuses me because he is a skeptic also.

This response is what I wanted to talk about today. Do you really have to be a National Geographic photographer to be qualified to tell whether a person in a picture is a person or a ghost? Does National Geographic offer some specific training in that area? And, especially, when the original photo is so far beyond the threshold of acceptable quality, is there even any point in trying to assert such a claim?

To my way of thinking, being a human being who lives and breathes is the only qualification one needs to know whether one is looking at a picture of a person or not. Having experience as a photographer (which I have as much as many people) does not confer one’s brain with any special human-identifying superpowers. If there were a skill that were helpful in such a case as this, I’d say Photoshop experience, not photography; but again, the picture’s so bad that any meaningful analysis is worthless.

Kevin was merely using the “argument from authority” to claim “my friend is right because he’s a National Geographic photographer” and because “he is a skeptic also.”  Even if we assume that to be true, it doesn’t make the friend right at all. Indeed, it suggests the friend is oddly predisposed to see ghosts in commonplace photos. This weakens his testimony, it does not strengthen it.

Bottom line, it’s a picture of two people, remarkable only for its poor quality. But it’s also so blurry that you could tell me the living history priest guy is a coat rack and I wouldn’t be surprised. Evidence of the supernatural? We need to do better than this.

Am I preaching to the choir? Am I wasting my breath? Am I repeating old information to an audience that’s already tired of hearing about it? If I were, that would probably be a waste of time. Maybe skeptical outreach should avoid the old subjects.

I also do a lot of speaking at schools. When I do, I try to ask a couple of questions. Do you ever listen to podcasts? Few do. Have you ever heard of James Randi? Rarely has anyone heard of him. Do you know anything about the Loch Ness Monster? A few hands go up. Have you heard of Sylvia Browne? No one ever has.

You see, what to you & I is an old subject, is brand new to nearly all young people, and to most people outside of the tiny critical thinking community.

Why do you think Discovery Channel, History Channel, and all the other paranormal TV channels keep giving us shows about Bigfoot? Isn’t Bigfoot over? Isn’t it a tired enough topic yet? It may be, to some people; but not to the masses. Discovery Channel needs a hook, they need a subject that will catch their viewer’s ear when they see a commercial; so they go for a subject (like Bigfoot) that most people have heard only enough about to be curious. You and I may groan and say “Oh no, not another Bigfoot show,” but we’re not the meat of the bell curve.

When a religious missionary comes to your door, do they open with a question about Michael Behe and irreducible complexity? No, they don’t, because nobody’s ever heard of that. They open with some generic question about how you think you’re getting to heaven when you die, or some other such subject that everyone knows. They understand what the Discovery Channel understands. You need the familiar subjects to gain a toehold with your audience.

If you are a speaker at The Amazing Meeting, you will indeed be uselessly preaching to the choir if you give a talk about how there’s this thing called Bigfoot and we think it’s bogus. But if you’re doing outreach to the general population, Bigfoot is a perfect topic.  Such topics are perfect because they are familiar enough to command attention, and once you have their attention you can employ these topics to educate about the scientific method and the critical thinking process. Engage your audience first.

Preaching to the choir has no value, but skeptical outreach has huge value. Effective outreach requires the approachability offered by familiar topics. So the next time I appear to be preaching to the choir, know that it is by design, and also know that there’s a good chance it might be really valuable to someone with less experience than you.